The other day I posted an email that’s been making the rounds that endorses giving all the Federal bailout money to, well, us (rather than banks, insurance companies, real-estate conglomerates, failed car companies, and that asshole from A.I.G. who thinks he’s being treated shabbily).  Someone has  now taken a stab at the math and his results are in:  Your personal bailout would amount to all of about $5100. Which makes sense when you think about it this way:  $18 billion to the folks who during escalating foreign-oil dependency came up with the Hummer, and just enough for each of us to buy a right quarter section of one of their vehicles.

Brian Eno and David Byrne on their multi-decade collaboration, and why, for Eno, Frank Zappa provides an example of precisely what not to do in music.

I’ll never forget the first time I started to read Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” in my late teens. Or the second time. Or the third time. Without finishing it. There had to be something to this book, its advocates were so legion, but whatever it was, I wasn’t finding it. Each time, I experienced the first 100 pages  as a cascade of names and items I couldn’t place or keep straight:  the Kwisatz Haderach, the Bene Gesserit, Feyd Rautha, various Atreides and Harkonnens, stillsuits, weirding modules, heighliners, and on and on. Now there’s a Wikipedia page covering just the technology. At the time, there was no such resource. There was just the lonely labor of trying again and again until something started to make sense. Three times, I bailed on this book, until finally one night, pruning in the tub, I made it past page 100 and actually got interested.

The other night my wife saw me hunkered down in front of the bookcase on my side of the bed, looking for the next novel to read. In general, I read two or three books (and multiple magazines) at the same time. I’m looking forward to finishing the history of Germany  under the Nazis (especially delightful because I know how it ends) and then returning to the account of Roman Empires, as well as finishing Julian Barnes’ meditation on death and that account of how censorship ended so many comic artists’ careers. But in the meantime, I was looking for a novel, having recently finished T.C. Boyle’s “A Friend of the Earth,” as noted here previously. My eye landed upon Cormac McCarthy’s border trilogy:  a one-volume compendium of “All the Pretty Horses,” “The Crossing,” and “Cities of the Plain.”

However overstylized his writing may be (or perhaps because of its trickery) I find McCarthy to be a wonderful writer. No matter his overuse of polysyndeton, he has a grasp of vocabulary and flow and scenic description that at times beggars belief. I get caught up and keep reading. In addition to “All the Pretty Horses,” I’ve read “No Country for Old Men” and “The Road,” and enjoyed them all immensely. But I got stopped cold about 160 pages into “The Crossing” by an endless monologue given by an old man unmoored from this life. This old man goes on about… something… for so long I felt trapped in purgatory with him. And finally freed myself by putting the book down. A quick check-in with my son revealed that, unprompted, he had stopped at precisely the same waystation. Neither of us knew what the old man was talking about, endlessly and with seemingly no purpose, and both of us had ditched.

But now I picked it back up and climbed into bed. Even if the plot didn’t advance — and clearly, that’s what I was missing, some action, some sense of forward movement, something that would pick me up and carry me along in the way that made “No Country for Old Men” utterly unputdownable — I figured I would find myself entranced again by some of the prose before quietly slipping off to sleep. Without the aid of a bookmark, I found where I had left off probably six months ago, near the terminus of the old man’s interminable monologue, and started up again. And then found myself reading for hours. Here’s what happens:  The existential treatise ends a mere page or so after I had quit, with the old man bidding our protagonist, 17-year-old Billy Parham, farewell. Billy rather speedily crosses the border from Mexico back into the U.S. (New Mexico; nice touch) and returns to his family’s ranch to discover that the ranch has been cleaned out and his parents murdered. He heads into town and gleans what information he can from the sheriff, then picks up his younger brother, who somehow escaped the onslaught, and returns with him to Mexico, where they seek their horses and, no doubt, the men responsible for the murders.

In other words, now the book is a page turner.

I related this to my son, getting up to the point of Billy’s return and what he finds, when my son called out, “Stop. Maybe now I want to finish reading it.” He’ll have to wait for me to finish it first.

Is all this a very long way of saying that story is important? Perhaps. Is it the most important element? Maybe not. I loved “The Incredibles” because I got so caught up in Mr. Incredible’s personal crisis (a hero forced to reject his heroism, and so subject to the predations of bureaucracy and the 9 to 5); by contrast I in no way care about Ginormica’s problem in “Monsters vs. Aliens” (a young woman supported in marrying the wrong man by her friends and family discovers her true family when she is imprisoned with friendly monsters, of which she now is one). (More about this later.) The key difference is not in the story elements, but in the thematic and character elements. But story is important, and it seems oddly irritating in 2009 to have to say this. It is especially irritating to have to say this with regard to the theatre, where somehow it has become laughable to suggest that we should care what happens, and that actions should have consequences, but here is Theresa Rebeck, in today’s LA Times, having to defend these notions for us. I have stood in her shoes too many times. It’s especially galling to have cut one’s teeth on Ionesco and Beckett and to have one’s view of theatre derided as “nostalgic.”

Audiences aren’t stupid and they don’t lie. With drama we can more easily fool ourselves, but comedy is the truest form because it exposes all falsehoods:  Either it is funny or it isn’t, and either the audience laughed or it didn’t.  It’s that simple. No, not all experiences are universal.  There were many who loved “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” but if I never see another newish Neil Simon play it will be far too soon. (Seeing “The Dinner Party” was for me a singular event; it was the very evening in which I swore I would forever after more cautiously guard my time. This after two hours of feeling my life drain away.)  Every play is not for every body; but many new plays are for nobody — nobody except the people who make them. If the language poets killed poetry, I’m afraid their ilk have now turned their sights onto the stage. Twenty-five years ago, an undergrad professor told me that if poetry lost the educated, the enlightened, the readers, the people it already had and should have, then the fault lay with the poets. I think about that every time I come across a new poem utterly inflated with its own word play and cleverness but resolutely impregnable of meaning. But where I feel worst about this is in the theatre, when audiences are left cold by something obtuse that the playwright and the director are so unjustly proud of. The underlying purpose of all theatre must remain catharsis — that frisson of fellow-feeling, when the emotional brutality of the event whether comic or dramatic is brought upon us. When language is made pre-eminent over feeling, all we’re left with is puns.

Ten years ago, an episode of “The Simpsons” had Bart sarcastically dissing Mad magazine, saying something like,  “Wow, that’s so funny.” The 10-year-old was too advanced for Mad‘s lame juvenile antics. I hadn’t looked at the magazine since the late 1970’s, and remembered feeling that way about it then. Any hint of the subversive was long gone.

But the last several years have brought about a Renaissance (even as the magazine’s circulation has dwindled, and its publication schedule reduced to quarterly). Whenever I’ve seen a new issue in the comics store, I’ve picked it up and gotten a few actual chuckles. (Without, I should note, buying it — hence the reduced publication frequency.) At last year’s San Diego Comic Con, DC inserted into attendees a convention-only special “Watchmen” issue of Mad. It was flat-out wonderful. Now that the magazines going to come out only four times a year, I’m wondering if I shouldn’t have been supporting it all along, even if only for my kids. (And isn’t that really why we do everything? “For the children?” Political campaigns, tirades about deficits and taxes, worker-safety laws, empty populism — it’s all always “for the children.” Because, I guess, the rest of us don’t matter.)

In any event, here’s something I just Stumbled across that shows again why recent Mad is so much fun.

Something I noted about the film version of “Watchmen” was that it was mostly faithful to the comic book — to its detriment. “Watchmen,” let’s remember, was not a “graphic novel” — it was a comic book, delivered in 12 serialized installments. As such, it made much of classic comic-book storytelling construction. Each issue had a strong set piece (Rorschach escaping prison; Nite Owl and Silk Spectre rescuing people from a fire; Dr. Manhattan and Silk Spectre debating mankind’s future) and a cliffhanger. By transliterating what worked so well in separate chapters released 30 days apart in a literary format, the film is saddled with a start-and-stop structure antithetical to action-adventure movies, which rely upon the classic Aristotleian structure of rising action and catharsis.

So: the comic book was great. The movie has some wonderful things in it (several of the performances, many of the special effects), and one major improvement: the ending. The ending in the comic book was an unintentional swipe from “The Outer Limits,” was utterly unconvincing in uniting humankind, and seemed only tangentially related to most of the comic’s main themes. The movie’s ending, by contrast, is far more plausible because everyone on Earth has already seen Dr. Manhattan’s power, and works better because it ties in with many other plot elements and themes (the ethical responsibilities of heroes; the moral ambivalence of vigilantism; the unintended side effects of employing great power, however well-intentioned). Ironically, against a backdrop the fanboy legion insisting upon apostolic faith to the source material, it is the element of greatest change that succeeds the most.

So then I wondered, what if they had really changed the comic book? Really done a different take on the material? Then I came across this, below, and was reminded of reading the Denny O’Neil issues-oriented era of “Justice League of America” comics, while seeing the antimatter universe version called “Super Friends” on my TV set on Saturdays.

(Thanks to Rich Roesberg for sending this in.)

This was an article from the St. Petersburg Times Newspaper on Sunday. The Business Section asked readers for ideas on “How Would You Fix the Economy?” I thought this was the BEST idea….. I think this guy nailed it…

Dear Mr. President,

Patriotic retirement: There’s about 40 million people over 50 in the work force, pay them $1 million apiece severance with the following stipulations:

1. They leave their jobs. Forty million job openings – Unemployment fixed.
2. They buy NEW American cars. Forty million cars ordered – Auto Industry fixed.
3. They either buy a house/pay off their mortgage – Housing Crisis fixed.

Can’t get any easier than that!”

The Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell says that quote unquote president George W. Bush was “sort of a millstone around our necks.”

In the wide-ranging interview, he also says that he and the GOP are looking into allegations that the world is not flat and that there is this thing called “grabbity” that holds us all down.

If you guessed, “Because Lee had more dental work today,” you win. When will it end? Well, when is the apocalypse? Because I think I’m scheduled through the week after.

While we wait for me to re-gather my thoughts — tomorrow, or who knows when? — I did want to post something here before trundling off to bed with another glass of wine and a revolver. So here are a few topics I might have written about otherwise:

• I was able to get tickets for TV On the Radio on April 14th at the Glass House in Pomona. It doesn’t make up for the toothaches or teethache or whatever. But it’s definitely something to live for. Last time I saw the band they were the worst live act I’ve seen since an overweight elderly “model” performed her special magic at a bachelor party in 1987. The recorded music of TV On the Radio is terrific, and I’m hoping they’ve improved on stage. (And that I never again see said “model.”)
• Yesterday I went to a ceremony where 2,000 people were freshly minted as Americans. That I will be writing about. And supplying photographs of many people waving flags. I got choked up. A woman near me cried.
• My wife got five roundtrip tickets from Burbank to New York so cheap I’m sure we’ll find out we have to serve drinks on the flight. (So yes, if you’re in New York, New Jersey, or Philadelphia, we’re coming to visit in June.)
• I was asked to return as emcee for the 2nd (un)Annual BLLOTY Awards in the fall. Last time the honoree was Stephanie Miller and her cohorts. More to come.
• Every time I go to the Magic Castle in Hollywood, I see someone notable in the audience. One time, shortly before a lion tried to “help Roy off the stage,” Siegfried and Roy sat down in the seats next to my wife and me (and she didn’t know who they were). This time, it was Lord British, recently returned from his trip to outer space aboard a Russian spacecraft, which cost him about $30 million more than my wife paid for those tickets. In the seeming eternity he stood behind me while we awaited entry to the Close-Up Gallery, seating 22, he recounted the entirety of gaming action to be found in Ultima I, Ultima II, Ultima III, Ultima IV, Ultima V, and all the other role-playing Ultima games that by their very name reduce the meaning of English language. (Although not so much as “Final Fantasy 13,” about which I said to my son, “When will we every truly reach the final fantasy, and how will we know? Will they call it Final Final Fantasy?”) British was loud and obnoxious and utterly oblivious to the narrow confines of the hallway in which he was bloviating. The moment the door to the show room opened, people scrambled for the furthest seat from him. In a room seating three rows totaling 22 people, there is no furthest seat. I am sorry that as a long-ago player of some of his games, I am partly responsible for engendering his self-entitlement. And that the Russians have perfected the return flight.

All for now. Off to get the wine and the gun.

Surely we can all agree that Christopher Walken bears watching. Even if we’re not always sure why. Walken is a wonderful dancer, and a magnetic actor, but he’s not always good. Walken’s oddly parsed delivery of even the most straightforward of lines is more affected than effective. Which puts him in company with… William Shatner.

(For a professional analysis of Shatner’s vocal rhythms, watch the video below. Note especially the next-to-last lesson therein: that Shatner, unlike almost any other humanoid, ends his sentences with a quick intake. Most of us do that first.)

The other night I watched “The Anderson Tapes” for the first time in 37 years. The last and only other time I saw it, I was nine years old and the guest of my parents. Yes, this was the first “adult” movie I saw, and it left an indelible impression. Perhaps partly because it featured Christopher Walken in his very first film role.

In “The Anderson Tapes,” Sean Connery puts together a group of fellow thieves and ex-cons to rob the entire contents of a luxury hotel. Watching this from the remove of adulthood, I have to wonder what misgivings my parents were having back in 1971 as we watched this together. The movie is filled with extreme violence (for the time), but more troubling for my mother, it’s rife with sexual situations and double entendres. Dyan Cannon bounces between the recently released Connery (who notes that with 10 years in prison he is desperately in need of release) and the wealthy slimeball who has been keeping her on the side. Martin Balsam is a flaming antiques dealer, complete with pompadour and cravat, who gets lucky when he discovers a designer of a similar persuasion upstairs in the hotel.

And then there’s Walken, who plays “The Kid.” He doesn’t have many lines, and he wears an odd hold-up mask for probably half of them. But everything he does in the movie bears watching. One scene in particular never left me. Late in the movie, he drives a panel van out from inside a Mayflower moving truck and away from the police, in an attempted getaway. He careens into a police car, his van twisting in midair and slamming onto its side. We get a shot of Walken’s dead body wrenched the wrong way inside, a gush of blood smeared down his face. This scene, viewed once, had stayed with me for nearly four decades. I remembered it as a much larger set piece; now I see that it is at most 10 seconds of footage. Is it the violence of the crash, so startling for its time but so quaint now, that stuck with me? Or is it that this was the culmination of Walken’s role, and I’d followed him throughout? Whichever (or both), he remains memorable.

Who played the suicidal brother of Annie Hall? Walken, in one of the most remembered scenes in a movie filled with them.

Walken is the star of the flat-out worst scene in “Pulp Fiction,” the rectum/watch scene, horribly over-written and badly paced and too long by half, but he almost makes it work nonetheless.

Who better — who other — than Walken would have been suited to play the deviant cosmopolitan who ensnares the unwitting tourists in “The Comfort of Strangers“? I saw this film in 1990 in the middle of the day in a cinema across from the Fox lot unfortunately in the same small audience as the actress perfectly cast as the stupid sister on “Family Ties.” Her obnoxious giggles and self-entitled post-adolescence abruptly halted when the themes of the film and especially the slippery disturbed portrayal by Walken swam into view. Only two other times has a movie so thoroughly worked me over that I left a theatre with such dread (“The French Lieutenant’s Woman” and, of course, “Eraserhead,” seen late at night deep in the woods at the Little Art Theatre in Port Republic, NJ).

Or look, don’t take my word for it. Here’s Henry Rollins on the genius of Christopher Walken:

Imagine my delight, then, unmitigated delight, in discovering Christopher Walken earlier tonight on Twitter. Even removed from any script or camera, he’s eminently watchable. Take these sample tweets:

“I do my best thinking in a barber’s chair. Sadly I do my worst remembering there too. Sure, I could take some notes but who does that?”

“A neighbor kid shows up from time to time dressed as Superman. I think it’s him anyway. Very difficult to say for sure without the glasses.”

“I am now invited to a dog wedding. I don’t have the words to make that stupider than it already sounds. They’re registered at Whiskers.”

“You know that Andy Dick and how he seemed funny until we noticed that he wasn’t? You’ll tell me when it’s time to stop, right?”

Each of these bears the ineffable wisdom of a zen koan. (I’m also relieved to see that someone of Walken’s odd taste and high bearing is also onto Andy Dick. Phew.)

If you aren’t Following Walken, you should. Yes, life is short, but Twitter is even shorter. So you do have the time.

 Another friend has let me know that his newspaper has let him go. I’m trying to think of what friends are still employed by newspapers, and no one is coming to mind. Will the last one out please turn off the printing presses?
The newspaper companies will tell you they’re getting slammed by technology — which is true — but it doesn’t answer two big questions:  1) where’s all the money from the 50+ years when their annual profits were double or quadruple almost any other industry; and 2) how is it that they’ve lost their companies to a guy named Craig working out of his house in San Francisco? I know I’ve already blogged about this, but these questions merit repeating. Newspaper owners (and publishers) have been remarkably old-fashioned, short-sighted, blinkered, greedy, and rapacious. The truly sad thing is that we count on newspapers for almost all the real reporting, but then again, look how well they handled that little thing in Iraq, and whatever that was that happened with economic, um, shifts. Good reporting. Thanks for the heads-up there.

My anger toward these people is clearly the anger of a wounded romantic:  someone who loves newspapers whose heart sinks further day by day while his blood pressure rises.

And no, I still haven’t been able to bring myself to cancel the Los Angeles Times. I know, I know, I promised. And no, I don’t want to help Sam Zell make his mortgage payments. My inaction is not about the Times; it’s about me. After 30+ years of reading newspapers (or writing for them), it’s a difficult relationship to end. Cue the song: “Never Can Say Goodbye.”