Good friend and longtime finder of cool things in pop culture Rich Roesberg tells me I have to read this strip. It seems to concatenate several of my interests: comic books, literary revisionism, and that pesky God fella.

Now you can read it, too.

I don’t know what my kids have against Mr. Bean, but it’s got to stop.

Tomorrow I want to take the kids to the movies. Ordinarily we do something outside on Sundays: miniature golf, hiking, or shuttling comic books from storage locations in the garage to storage locations in my home office. But the past two days we’ve had rains of Biblical proportions, weather far too inclement for the safe transport of comic books. Hence, the movies.

On all 30 screens in Burbank, there is a grand total of one family friendly movie. Luckily for me, it’s “Mr. Bean’s Holiday.” Imagine my delight! To me, Mr. Bean is the cure for whatever ails you. Rowan Atkinson is a gifted clown who with this character has staked out his own territory somewhere between Stan Laurel, Harry Langdon, and Jacques Tati. So I showed the trailer to my two younger kids, a boy aged 5 and and a girl of 9, in an effort to whip up excitement about tomorrow morning’s excursion. Here it is:

My little boy grew belligerent and defiant, swearing that he would not be seeing Mr. Bean and I couldn’t make him. My daughter grew tearful at the prospect, then started to shake with convulsive crying. The last time I saw these same reactions from them was when I told them zombies were outside.

This reaction mystifies me. We enjoy Laurel & Hardy, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton together; are those acts more preferable because they’re in black and white (and sometimes silent)? Is Mr. Bean too threatening in some way? Or is he so utterly uncool that the kids think that by suggesting this movie I’m talking down to them?

This reminds me of my experience seeing the wonderful Jerry Lewis movie “Hardly Working” in 1981; when I told friends and co-workers how insanely funny it was, they just shook their heads and walked away. The difference here is that I hold all the keys — to the house, to the cars, to things like food and allowance. If I wanted, I could just stuff them into the car tomorrow and take them to see this movie no matter their wishes, except for two things:

1. they’d probably ruin my enjoyment of the movie; and
2. I can’t get out of my head my daughter’s final words, said in a small sad voice before I packed both her and her little brother off to bed: “Please… don’t make us see Mr. Bean….”

—————-
Now playing: Bryan Ferry – What Goes On
via FoxyTunes

Three unrelated stories about our justice system, all of them updated today, none of them saying anything good about our system.

1. OJ Simpson, still apparently seeking the true culprit behind his wife’s murder, has made bail and is now out searching for other trouble to get into in his never-ending experiment to prove that he can, indeed, get away with anything;

2. The jury in the Phil Spector trial is deadlocked 7-5. This leads me to think that at least 5 people truly do believe either that Lana Clarkson chose that particular night and moment — in the home of a famous millionaire producer she’d just met — to kill herself, or that there is some other way Phil Spector doesn’t deserve the to be found guilty as defined;

and 3. The drycleaners who got sued for $54 million for having misplaced a pair of pants , and who incurred $100,000 in legal bills, are going out of business.

So thankfully, the system has levied a harsh punishment on one of these culprits.

There’s a movement here in LA to save Charles Bukowski’s bungalow from redevelopment by naming it a cultural landmark. This should strike anyone who has read his books as deliciously ironic: Bukowski was always tearing down cultural landmarks of one form or another, as when he said that writers like Camus always wrote as though they were sipping fine wine. (While Bukowski was guzzling rotgut, which I suppose was somehow better.)

If you’re of a mind to get involved in preserving said bungalow, the necessary information follows. You’ll also note the poem below, which is so bad that it works against the main argument.

For those who can’t be there, you can send your letter and/or email of support before September 20 to:
Attn. Mary Martin, 200 N. Spring St., Rm. 620, Los Angeles, CA 90012
(or edgar.garcia@lacity.org)

In a poem dedicated to his publisher John Martin, Bukowski wrote: “and thank you/ for locating me there at/ 5124 De Longpre Avenue/ somewhere between/ alcoholism and/ madness./ together we/ laid down the gauntlet/ and there are takers/ even at this late date/ still to be/ found/ as the fire sings/ through the/ trees.”

—

Bukowski fans–there’s a meeting to try and save the Hollywood Bungalow where the dirty old man lived and wrote for many years:
Thursday, Sept. 20th, 10 AM, LA City Hall

Lend your voice to preserve the cultural heritage of literary LA. More details and article links are below.

May the Muse be with you,

Nicole

Explosive PR wrote:

Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2007 20:18:51 -0700
From: Explosive PR
To: “esotouricbustours@esotouric.com”
Subject: [Esotouric] Charles Bukowski’s Bungalow in Time;
Preservation hearing on Thursday

Gentle reader,

Matt Kettmann of Time Magazine has covered Lauren Everett’s campaign to save
Charles Bukowski’s bungalow apartment, saying “The little bungalow at 5124
De Longpre Avenue in East Hollywood was the epicenter of a cultural
earthquake that continues to rock Los Angeles’s literary landscape. It is
the house where Charles Bukowski went from blue-collar postman to full-time
writer, eventually becoming world famous for his bawdy tales of lust,
liquor, and love.” Richard has some nice quotes, too.

On Thursday morning, the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission will decide the
building’s fate, and we’d like to invite any interested people who can get
there to join us for the hearing, and to speak if they feel moved. Hearing
details are below.

The Cultural Heritage Commission has agreed to put 5124 De Longpre Ave. on
the agenda for their September 20th meeting. They will hear a presentation
on the property, and will decide whether to proceed with the landmarking
process.

Members of the public may attend the hearing, and following the formal
presentation that Lauren Everett will be making, can speak up in favor of
the preservation of this building. If you wish to speak, please contact
Lauren so that all interested parties can meet on the morning of the hearing
and plan the best possible presentation to our friends at the CHC. Reminder:
this Commission has nothing to do with boarding up De Longpre, can help us
enormously, and should be treated with respect and appreciation.

Hearing information: Thursday Sept. 20, Room 1010 of Los Angeles City Hall,
200 N. Spring St., 90012. Meeting starts at 10:00 am.

Contact link

Time Magazine article

yrs,
Kim
Esotouric

In the 20 years I’ve been in LA, there have been about 20 self-help fads. To my knowledge, not one yet has embraced the handbook of the stoics, which involves actual self-discipline, which is hard. Rather, they are based upon fuzzy feel-good philosophy ungrounded in logic, science, or rigorous thinking. (Which always brings to mind Mr. David Bowie’s retort, from “Fashion”: “I’m okay, you’re so-so.”)

The most recent of these fads is The Secret. This book, with accompanying cult, purports that all human success is linked by one phenomenon — which turns out to be the Power of Positive Thinking. Why anyone would think this “secret” eludes me; hasn’t this been practically canonical for 75 years?

I could go on about the cult of The Secret, which is claiming friends and colleagues left and right, but I think media theorist Douglas Rushkoff has already done an excellent job. Below is a posting he sent via his newsgroup. (And thank you, Doug, for saving me the time in writing something similar.)

Before I get to that, let me float one more idea: That we should never discount the Power of Negative Thinking. By that I mean good old skepticism, the sort that keeps most of us from buying swampland in Florida or bridges owned by the government. Positive Thinking has its obvious benefits, but it’s skepticism that keeps us alive and well and not falling for the lure of snake charmers.

New Pseudoscience Patina, Same Snake Oil
The Secret’s self-help message is just common knowledge.
by Douglas Rushkoff

As the saying goes, opposites attract, as when an electron races to a positively charged ion, or the north pole of a magnet pulls the south pole of another. But try telling that to proponents of The Secret, the latest in a long line of spiritual systems aimed at selling
personal prosperity through faulty scientific reasoning.

In case you’ve missed it on Oprah or Larry King Live, The Secret is a self-help DVD and companion book synthesizing the pitches of a few dozen of today’s most prominent self-help gurus. Its creator, an Australian named Rhonda Byrne, claims there’s a single truth
underlying all these systems. It’s more ancient than the Bible and has been intentionally hidden from human beings for just as long. The great secret? Positive thinking. Abundance is a state of mind: Think healthy, and you’ll be healthy. Or more to the point, think rich, and you’ll get rich. Most of the spiritual teachers in The Secret are wealth-seminar leaders who display the book’s logo on their Web sites. The Secret has certainly worked wonders for its marketers: More than 1.5 million DVDs have been sold, and the book hit number one on The New York Times best-seller list of hardcover advice books.

While positive thinking no doubt has its benefits—from the placebo effect to good old self-confidence—The Secret tries to justify itself
not only in the language of pop psychology but in that of modern physics. According to the book, happy thoughts will do more than
affect behavior. It claims the interrelatedness of matter and energy (a principle proven by Einstein) allows people to change reality to
their liking by changing the way they think about it. (Thought is presumably energy in this schema, and reality is matter.) For most,
however, this potential for cosmic transmutation is limited to attracting more money into their personal bank accounts.

To be sure, it’s entertaining to marvel at Masaru Emoto, a Japanese alternative healer who claims that crystals grow more symmetrically inside bottles labeled with positive messages than in those with negative messages attached. But such “results” can be explained by the observer’s tendency to notice the crystals he is looking for rather than the ones that don’t fit his expectations. That’s why people basing psychiatric therapies on pseudoscientific research will get mixed results at best. Stick a Post-it note with a positive
message on a schizophrenic’s forehead and see how far you get changing the water molecules in his brain into happy ones.

Meanwhile, a growing arsenal of healing machines based loosely on tenuous nonlocality theories from the fringes of quantum physics have become an increasingly popular alternative to the discomfort of scientifically verifiable chemotherapy. With names like SCIO and
Rife, these machines don’t even need to be in the same room or city as the patient they’re treating—since, as their proponents reason, quantum mechanics doesn’t recognize physical distance. Sure, if this “energetic medicine” makes a person feel better or more optimistic— and doesn’t delay or replace therapies that might actually work— there’s no harm except to the wallet.

So why bother condemning all this wishful thinking? After all, who of us hasn’t ever experienced a bit of The Secret’s real power? Wearing an expensive suit to an interview or flying first class, as one of The Secret’s featured instructors suggests on his Web site, can make you feel and act differently. Sometimes spending more money does seem to bring more money in, and speaking positively often leads to better results than whining about how tough life is.

But such techniques are hardly new, let alone secret. Like mastering the will through self-hypnosis or better negotiating through body
language, the “power of positive thinking” has nearly a century-old track record among car dealers, admen, and others for whom attitude means as much as, if not more than, attributes. It’s from this universe of phantom values and socially constructed truths that The Secret derives its ultimate power. Try sharing The Secret with some refugees from Darfur; you’ll probably find the results are not
terribly impressive.

No, The Secret is best applied in the same foggy arenas from which it emerged. It’s great for self-help gurus, spiritual evangelists,
salespeople, and multilevel marketers because it’s based in the same kinds of mythology on which they’ve always relied: There’s a timeless principle, a preexisting law of nature only now becoming understood by science but completely easy for you to use to make your life better.

Just pay me, and I’ll share it with you.

On October 13th, I’m emceeing the BLLOTY Awards, which honors syndicated radio host Stephanie Miller and her team. BLOTTY stands for Best Liberal Laugh of The Year award.

Details are here.

You’ll note that also speaking is Democratic candidate for Congress Elliot S! Maggin — the former writer of Superman comics. He’s eager to explain how Republicans — and his district’s congressman in particular — are subverting Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

Please join us. We need more comic-book people in Congress.

Today I hiked a large section of Griffith Park behind the observatory with my kids, aged 16, 9, and 5, and the family dog. It’s about a 3-hour hike and, at times, pretty steep. Lex, the 16-year-old, insisted on wearing his new weight vest, which adds 45 lbs to your torso. (Something that Newcastle beer and Slim Jims would also do, but more enjoyably.) He is seriously into weight lifting and said his new fitness goal was to run the seven-minute mile.

“That’s nothing,” I said. “Batman ran the mile in two minutes. So did Robin.”

“He’s fictional!” Lex said, his face running with sweat. We were now over two hours into the hike.

Although I couldn’t remember the precise episode, I remember Batman turning to Robin and telling him they’d have to do that mile in two minutes or some bomb would go off. Commissioner Gordon looked concerned and Chief O’Hara was plainly aghast because Batman and Robin had just come back from running a three-minute mile in the same episode.

“Don’t tell me,” I told Lex. “I saw it. And he was about 40 years old with a paunch. And he had that heavy cape and cowl.”

These kids just don’t believe how much tougher the previous generations were. It’s up to us to keep reminding them.

After the hike, on which I also wore the vest for half an hour just to give the kid a break, I came home and bathed the dog. Then I fell asleep for an hour on the couch.

Because according to a new book, it is an evolutionary warning that you are about to get eaten alive.

Recently I wrote here that I’d noticed that most of my back catalog of plays have become period pieces. (That doesn’t mean they can’t be produced — dear producing gods: That doesn’t mean they can’t be produced! — that just means that some of them need to be set in recently passed time periods in order for what I hope is their trenchant wonderfulness to work.)

I’m also discovering that I’m becoming a period piece.

Last night during the welcoming ceremony for the University of Southern California MPW graduate writing program where I teach, I got a look at the incoming masters candidates. As one line that teachers share goes, “I keep getting older but my students stay the same age.” As a faculty member in our program, I’m rather young; as a member of my theatre company I have definitely become a graybeard. But what really caught me by surprise was a man roughly my age, a professor in the Marshall School of Business at USC, who came up to me and said, “Lee, I don’t know if you remember me, but my wife was in one of your plays 20 years ago.”

It took a few minutes of digging through the dusty filing cabinet of my mind, but I did remember him. And his wife.

He said, “My wife and I still really love that play. We have it on videotape and we watch it once in a while. It’s the play about the wires.”

Videotape! When was the last time I watched something on videotape! When was the last time I listened to something on cassette tape? My wife’s next preferred project for me is to digitize all our CDs and get rid of them — so who will need the CD player, either?

“The play about the wires” is my play “Guest for Dinner,” begun when I was an undergrad circa 1984. Among other things, it’s about a shrewdly intelligent man who is so consumed by his hatred of a Springsteen-like rock star with pretensions to being Joe Average that he lures said rock star to his apartment to humiliate and abuse him. “The wires,” the section that everyone who has seen this play in its various productions seems to recall with the greatest clarity, is a speech by our protagonist, “Rick” (rhymes with prick), who assembles electronic components in his day job and laments the way that the wires on the top keep pressing down on the wires on the bottom. It’s a thin metaphor for social inequality, and is just one of the things in the play that the me of almost 25 years later regrets.

When the play was done in LA, a former writing teacher of mine — ironically, from the very same program I now teach in — came to see it. I asked him what he thought, and he said blandly kind words. I then asked him what he really thought. He proceeded to tell me, taking the play apart bit by bit. (Afterward, his wife said to me, “Well, I liked it.” She was being nice; it didn’t matter.) Even at the time, his arguments were hard to refute, and over the course of 20 years I’ve grown more and more toward his opinion.

But as my dean said last night when I told her that the spouse of someone who had once starred in one of my plays came up to me to say hello, “There really is no hiding.” Certainly true, especially in an internet age (and only one reason among many that I’m sure we and our allies know exactly where Osama bin Laden is).

There’s no hiding, and there’s also no changing who you once were. We should honor the work of our younger writer selves, flaws and all, as individual steps on a long journey. Some of my old plays don’t work the way they would if I were to write them now, but most of those plays wouldn’t be written by the writer I am now. The bad science fiction stories and detective stories I started writing and sending off at age 11 haven’t improved with age either. But every one of those failed attempts carried some lesson for the future.

Tonight I spent about 40 minutes trying to adjust these sprinklers. No matter how I set them, the head wouldn’t fully rotate. And yes, I tried “lifting the lever” as specified. Then I settled for letting it water an area, then picking it up and sticking it in the ground in a new position. I did this twice before it settled upon me how truly stupid doing that made me feel. Then I said, “Fuck it,” lit a cigar and took the dog for a walk.

Then I came back and did it all over again.

Then I turned it off and went inside and had a drink and told myself I’d fix this in the morning when at least it would be light outside. I refuse to be defeated.

It’s daily tribulations like this that keep me modest. That, and about a hundred other things.

—————-
Now playing: The Beach Boys – With Me Tonight
via FoxyTunes