Kinda what it looks like right now:

What would better suit your little cutie than this adorable Charles Bukowski onesie? Available in 6 colors, including “Asphalt,” and just right for that upcoming baby shower, this snap-shut one-piece for your little bundle includes a lovingly rendered image of the great man, as well this memorable quote:  “Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.” All yours, for just 21 Buks.

Because a TSA agent assigned to avert crime might be stealing stuff out of it. (And by the way, this particular agent was working out of an airport I flew into three times last year. Glad I stick to carryons.)

Y’know, I’m second to no one in my admiration for Brian Eno’s artistic talents, both musical and visual, but to imply in some way that on his new album he’s created a new form is, well, too much. He’s not the first to approach spoken word as though it’s musical, or to match it with music.

Eno says in the liner notes to “Drums Between the Bells”: “I hope this record will signal the beginning of a new way for poets to think about their work, and for audiences to think about poetry.”

I can’t imagine what this “new way” might mean, given:  Steve Reich’s Come Out (1966), Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not be Televised (1971), or, well, my own stuff, which I recorded six years ago or so and will one day get around to putting up on iTunes. These are all examples of spoken word (poetry) set against music. Eno’s new album is spoken word (poetry) set against music. How revolutionary.

Yes, dear friends and family and readers of this blog who have emailed to ask if I’m aware that the 405 freeway will be closed for at least two days this month, I am aware. At this point, if there are any Japanese soldiers left anywhere hiding in wait because they haven’t heard that World War II has ended, I’m nevertheless confident that they’ve heard that the 405 will be closed. Here is my plan for what is widely being billed as “Carmageddon,” a traffic jam so epic that it will likely dwarf even the time I saw Children of Men: Don’t go near it. I’ll just stay in Burbank and surrounding environs, a safe distance from the blast site, for both days. And if the freeway project takes longer? Then I’ll stay away for longer. This, by the way, is not an especially clever plan:  Someone I know who lives directly adjacent to the 405 told me that her plan is just not to go outside for two days (or longer).

Who will this create monumental problems for? Delivery people (and you can forget getting a delivery if you’re anywhere in the impacted area, no matter what Fedex or UPS or anyone else promises). People with no choice but to drive that north-south corridor. Anyone interested in going to the Getty Center. And, of course, anyone who needs to get into or out of LAX.

Which brings me to this:  I’ve noted before (here and here) my fascination with the many variations of the famed “Hitler” clip from Downfall, in which enterprising people have changed the subtitles to our villain’s deranged attack on his own generals. Here’s the latest one, the subject of which, of course, is Carmageddon. It’s one of the better ones. It’s also one I can relate to.

Today was the birthday of the nation, which 235 years after its founding still feels rather new, and the final day for legendary Cleveland rock critic  Jane Scott, who died this morning at age 92.

Her importance as a major cultural voice cannot be overstated. She created careers, promoting Bruce Springsteen and other luminaries long before more mainstream news organs discovered them. And if you love the Ohio music scene the way some of us do, you owe a debt of gratitude to Jane Scott for spreading the word. Without her, would the rest of us have learned of The Dead Boys, Devo, and Pere Ubu? Perhaps not. If you watch any of the several good documentaries about Cleveland rock, she’s mentioned or featured in all of them. She was an inveterate champion of the new and the different, and that’s what all of the good music of the mid-70’s and 80’s was.

Most of all, as this very good obit in the LA Times notes, she was an ardent fan. In the piece, she’s quoted as saying, “What I like about rock music is that you can’t sit around, feeling sorry for yourself… the blues perpetuates your feeling of despondency. Rock gets you up on your feet, dancing, and you forget about it. The beat gets you going.”

And, if you let it, it’ll keep you going for a long time.

“Learning not to dislike Hemingway.”

That was the title an editor gave to a piece in today’s LA Times by book critic David Ulin. (Here it is; points go to the print edition’s copy editor — online it’s tagged “Under the influence of Hemingway,” a headline so weak that it seems a subtle jab at Hemingway’s manly writing style.) I read this piece with great interest because I’ve always read all of Hemingway with great interest since first coming across his short stories in high school, when one of those stories taught me the word “milt,” as Nick Adams strips clean a fish he’s caught. Almost 35 years later, this word has stayed with me. Indeed, I used it in my play “He Said She Said,” written two years ago and produced in LA and, recently, Omaha at the Great Plains Theatre Conference. The play concerns a vacationing PTA mom reading bad erotic poetry she’s written, and that setup flashed me back to the oddly sensual description of Nick Adams cleaning that fish. Here’s the comically bad poem from my play:

                        AMANDA

This is called Deep Sea Diving. Except the “Sea” is spelled “s-e-e.”

Deep see diving.

I can see you down here with me.

The shellfish scuttle out of the way

Forming a cloud of ocean dust around you.

There you are.

Don’t hide.

I can see you.

Peering at me from beneath your coral

Thinking that you’re safe and protected

I reach for you and pull you out

And take you above and slit you open

And run my tongue down the length

Of your milty flesh

Careful not to get your bones

Stuck in my throat.

Hemingway finds the right sensual word — “milt,” the sperm-containing secretion of the testes of fishes — and then in my play Amanda adulterates it into “milty.” Even as a teenage writer, I could see that Hemingway had the knack of finding the right word, something I struggled then and now with.

I picked up other tricks from Hemingway, purposely or accidentally. Here Ulin quotes Hemingway in “Death in the Afternoon”: “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things strongly as though the writer had stated them.” Note the circular reductionism, as Hemingway returns again and again to the baseline words:  writer/writing; about; enough. There’s a rhythm to this that just pulls you into it; it’s practically Biblical. This element of style infected my writing early on, and that’s fine; I got it from Hemingway, and Hemingway got it from Gertrude Stein, just as Shakespeare got Troilus and Cressida from Chaucer, and Chaucer got it from Boccaccio. All of which means that whether or not I admire Hemingway’s work (and I do), I certainly have been influenced by it.

(Who else was I influenced by? My friend Joe Stafford likes to point out that many of my plays contain what Joe calls “a laundry list” monologue in which someone complains about a host of items or events. In retrospect, the inspiration for this is obvious:  Harold Pinter,  and The Caretaker specifically.)

So here I am, filled with admiration for Hemingway, and somewhat put out by the Times’ book critic writing a piece bearing the headline “Learning not to dislike Hemingway.” To add insult to injury, Ulin goes on to say:

“The one who most spoke to me was Faulkner, with his flowing sea of language, his sense of of the past, of history, as a living thing. Next to him, Hemingway seemed flat, two-dimensional.”

Oh, William Faulkner. You  mean the famous writer I cannot read. The irony here is that, much as Ulin doesn’t care for Hemingway, I can’t abide Faulkner at all. Ever since I posted Doug’s Reading List six years ago, I’ve received many emails and personal comments that the entire list should be held suspect because Faulkner isn’t on it. But I can’t imagine a reason to put him on; I remain unclear what his impact is (on writers in general, or certainly on me). And oh, I have tried reading him, most notably Absalom, Absalom! (three attempts) and, just recently, Light in August again, this time getting to page 152 before bailing out. Here’s an excerpt prototypical paragraph:

He was standing still now, breathing quite hard, glaring this way and that. About him the cabins were shaped blackly out of blackness by the faint, sultry glow of kerosene lamps. On all sides, even within him, the bodiless fecundmellow voices of Negro women murmured. It was as though he and all other manshaped life about him had been returned to the lightless hot wet primogenitive Female….

What are “fecundmellow” voices? Like “milt,” the word aims to be erotic, but Faulkner’s neologism subtracts more than it adds, as do “manshaped” and “primogenitive.” To Ulin, Hemingway may seem “flat” by comparison, but I would respond that he doesn’t yank you out of the milieu with awkward showiness.

While I disagree with the Times’ book critic, I respect him for coming out with his opinion about Hemingway. I’ve been out about my dislike for Faulkner for six years, and I’ve suffered the slings and arrows of lit-snob derision — and I’m not the book critic of a major newspaper. I’m sure Ulin is in for a pasting from readers (and I’m betting he’ll be delighted to get a reminder that people are reading him). Ulin notes Hemingway’s influence — on Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, Russell Banks, Tobias Wolff, Albert Camus, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S. Thompson (I would add Charles Bukowski) — but he doesn’t care for what Faulkner would call the primogenitive Writer.

All of this reminds me of something that happened last night, after the latest round of readings from my “Words That Speak” playwriting workshop. A couple of weeks ago, some of us in the workshop had plays performed in Moving Arts’ “The Car Plays,” and another playwright and I spent a few minutes last night discussing some of the plays we’d seen (of 26 different car plays, I’d seen 10). We came to the subject of one that neither of us particularly liked;  “It just doesn’t go anywhere,” I said, and my friend agreed. Then he said, “But I saw some people come out of that car wiping tears away.” We think it’s a bad play; others were emotionally swept away; and neither one of us could figure it out.  Just as I still can’t figure out the appeal of William Faulkner.

I just got back in town from another trip east (this time for a memorial service, unfortunately; more about that this weekend, I hope, because I have things I want to say about it), and now we’ve just moved the Counterintuity offices. So I’m looking forward to catching up on some things this weekend.

In the meantime, I thought I’d alert you to this,  yet another threat posed by global warming. According to scientists at Stanford (one of California’s private universities, and therefore able to afford scientists), global warming could hurt California’s wine industry. If in 30 years, we find that our favorite bottle is now called Four-Buck Chuck, we’ll know why.

I grew up watching Peter Falk, shaking my head at the murderers underestimating him on “Columbo” and feeling him light up the screen whenever he turned up in a terrific ensemble comedy, of which there were many (for example: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World; The Princess Bride; Murder by Death; The Great Race). He was a cagey performer, good at playing comically outraged, or seeming more dimwitted than, of course, he was. His everyman edge came from the comic exasperation all of us feel at some point during the week; it’s what made him so relevant.

Truly good comic actors transition well into drama. As Buster Keaton said, comedy is serious business. That’s because it’s harder. This is by way of saying that Falk gave powerful dramatic performances as well, most notably in Mikey and Nicky, in which he plays a man who has snitched to the mob about his lifelong friend who is in hiding from them. Late in the film when the moment has come when the mob is about to catch and kill his friend (played by John Cassavetes), Falk’s desperate conflicted anguish is palpable. It’s a great moment in a very good film filled with them. Even when I didn’t like the films Cassavetes himself wrote and directed — and, by and large, I didn’t — I always liked Falk in them.

It was exactly four years ago today that I had the great good luck to meet Peter Falk. He was the mystery guest on my friend J. Keith van Straaten’s show “What’s My Line? Live on Stage” in Hollywood. Falk was loose and funny and charming and hung around a very long time afterward to meet anyone who wanted to meet him and to take pictures and sign autographs. I’m glad I got to meet him, and I’m glad that somewhere on this hard drive I have a photo with him, a photo taken by the wife of Len Wein, Mr. Wein being someone else I “grew up with” who was also in attendance. These are the benefits of being in Hollywood:  getting to touch the hem of artists you admire.