A museum in Orange County is exhibiting what it believes is the worst 100 album covers.

Except they think Trout Mask Replica is one of them.

So there goes their credibility.

In which I see a side of my friend Sam Kuglen I’ve never seen before.

Merce Cunningham died a few days ago, and if I hadn’t felt then as though I were dying myself, I would have noted the event here.

I just spent 20 minutes crawling all over the internet for information about the Cunningham show I saw in, I think, 2003, but I can’t find it, so I’m relying on memory. In any event, it was at UCLA Live, with Cunningham and assorted UCLA students performing against music by Eric Satie. I love Satie’s music, and was interested in Cunningham because I was just beginning to grasp the allure of dance, and there was a third great name associated with all this that I now can’t recall. (And can’t find.) Was it John Adams? William S. Burroughs? Robert Wilson? I can’t remember. In any event, I remember that the dance seemed to consist largely of standing or sitting, understandable for the then-84 Cunningham, but perhaps less so for the 20ish collaborators.

Cunningham was the house guest of someone I knew, so a small party of us went back to the house.  The hosts had spared no expense in putting on a suitable event for their honored guest. I remember at one point the host looked over and saw Cunningham sitting alone on the couch and gasped, “Why isn’t anyone talking to Merce?!?!?!” I had already been over talking to Merce, sitting alone beside him for 20 minutes during which I discovered two things: that I had nothing much to say, and neither apparently did he. Perhaps everyone else had had the same experience. Maybe it’s difficult to strike up a conversation with a minimalist.

I wish that I had met him a year or two later. Because in 2004, for a variety of reasons, I had what I’ve since called “The Year of Dance.” My background is theatre, and mostly the literary end. By that point in my life I was feeling a little burned out on theatre, but was saved by some students with an interest in dance. Over the course of that year, I worked with a dance choreographer on a play I was directing, wound up going to two hip-hop conventions, got involved with a dance-film festival, joined the advisory board of a fledgling dance company, attended the American Choreography Awards, fell in with a multi-Tony-winning dance legend, went to amazing launch events at places like the Music Box and the Key Club, and cheered up Toni Basil over drinks when she was feeling forgotten and unrecognized because I remembered both her music and all her choreography with Devo and Talking Heads and David Bowie, and so much more. The dance people and the dance shows and the dance parties were great, great fun. I came out of that year with a deep appreciation and gratitude for an artform I’d known little about. And a deep respect for dancers, who are a talented, disciplined, driven breed.

I wish it had been after that year that I’d had 20 minutes alone with Merce Cunningham. Because then I’m sure I would have had something to talk about.

That’s the theory shared by half a dozen people as to why I’ve been shivering and shaking and coughing since early yesterday: that I expended every iota of energy I had at this year’s comic con, and my body is now calling in a rest break.

(Which is a shame, because I have so much I want to put on this blog right now, except I can barely think straight.)

My own theory: My system has realized that it’s going to be a full YEAR ’til the next Con and is going into the pangs of withdrawal.

Inany event, I’ll be back here tomorrow — and preferably not tapping this blog entry via iPhone. (Which especially sucks when you can type 86 wpm on a keyboard.)

My friend Paul just flew out this morning from a week here (for the Comic Con, of course!).

Here’s what’s been going on near his house while he’s been away. It really stinks.

Just like every other man on the Internet, Peter Smith was besieged with ads promising that “Hot Singles are waiting for you!” This particular ad was on his Facebook page.

The difference:  The woman in the ad was his wife — and the image was ripped from his or her account with no permission. She had no intent to offer to procure other women for her husband.

Today as the shuttle bus from our hotel was pulling up to the convention center, our driver suddenly slammed the brakes, cursing out what someone in a seat near me called a fat old man on foot who cut right across the designated roadway, in the process almost getting hit by said shuttle. Under his breath the driver said, “Who’s this guy think he is?”

“He’s Terry Gilliam,” I said. And, from the looks of it, he was utterly oblivious to the chaos in his wake. (Which gave me a new insight into the wreckage of his attempted version of “Don Quixote.”)

Later in the day I got in to see the screening of clips from Gilliam’s forthcoming film, “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.” These may be, to use Gilliam’s words, “the boring parts,” but they looked pretty amazing to me. The dream world scenes look like live-action (and, of course, CGI) counterparts to his old Monty Python animations. Someone asked Gilliam what was his inspiration for those Monty Python animations and he was gentlemanly enough to once again pay tribute to his mentor Harvey Kurtzman, the genius who taught him all about going to the library and swiping from the greats of art. (Unfortunately, he learned nothing about jaywalking.) I’m looking forward to seeing “Parnassus” — and given the visual feel of those scenes, I’m going to see it on a big screen somewhere.

Last Friday I went down to the lobby of the hotel near San Francisco airport where I was staying and told the girl at the front desk that the key card to my room wasn’t working. She asked, “What room?” I told her and she reset the card and handed it back to me. I said, “That’s it? You don’t want any ID? Give me a card for room 250, too. I wonder what they’ve got in there.” Someone else in town for the same meeting told me later that when he needed his card reset, the first thing she did was ask to see ID.

Now I’m at the San Diego Comic Con.  (More about that later, plus a photo of me standing next to a gentleman with a large flaming head.) There are six of us sharing a suite (everyone gets at least one night on the floor) and four key cards. This morning my friend who is this galaxy’s foremost Star Trek expert told me that “it’s okay, I got a room key.” “How’d  you do that?” I asked, assuming he’d traded with one of our roommates. “Oh, I went down to the front desk and told them the room I’m staying in and told them I lost the key. They gave me a new one.”

Given these two incidents within the same week, I’m now planning a crime spree of upscale but clueless hotels. If you hear that I’m coming to a hotel near you, you might consider using the front desk safe while I’m in town.

Here in November in California the voters accidentally turned married gay couples in the state into an  elite group — by passing a proposition that outlawed gay marriage (thereby restricting marriage to those gay people who were already wed). As a (married) lesbian attorney friend of mine explained, voters, and the state Supreme Court whose previous ruling created the window of time in which same-sex couples were allowed to marry, have in essence created two classes of gay citizen:  those who are (or were) allowed to get married, and those who aren’t. This is not the sort of society that courts have endorsed since the end of segregation, and it’s not the sort that will stand. Or, as some of us put it, if same-sex couples can get married in Iowa, how long can this prohibition stand in California?

What got me thinking about this again today is a story about one of our zoos in California, where a formerly “homosexual” penguin named Harry has thrown over his male lover, the penguin Pepper, for a female. (The zoo where these sexually ambivalent penguins live is, of course, in San Francisco. None of the penguins appear to wear leather.)   This has kicked up an inevitable hoohah:  if in the animal kingdom a gay penguin can switch teams, then perhaps homosexuality is indeed a “lifestyle choice” and not genetically preordained. (Expect to see this argument on the ranting evangelical show of your choice this Sunday.) This is a notion that probably doesn’t sit well with homosexuals.  Click here to read the full story.

My perspective is different. It’s this:  Who cares? Who cares if the penguin is gay or straight or even bi? I can’t imagine a productive way to keep penguins from mating with whatever other penguins they want to. It’s up to them what circles they waddle in; we really have no say. I can’t find any evidence that we’re tampering with homosexual preference anywhere in the animal kingdom — nobody’s segregating the male seahorses that like to sidle up with each other — so why start with the penguins? I don’t care if it’s their genetic implication or if they learned gay behavior from Tennessee Tuxedo. If they want to be gay, by all means, go ahead. And if they want to be straight, more power to them for that, too. In fact, I’m willing to bet these penguins don’t even put gender preference into the mix that way. It’s just a matter of who looks better at the fishing hole that day.

Now, if we can’t patrol gay behavior in animals, and if we aren’t restricting their behavior, why are we doing it with people? If there’s going to be any disparity between people and animals, so long as they do no physical harm to others, shouldn’t people have more freedom than animals?

Where were all these “judicial restraint” Republican Senators when the last guy nominated Roberts and Alito? Because basically undoing the last 50 years doesn’t seem so restrained.