NOIR OBGYN: FINGERS OF FURY

I’m a big fan of Adult Swim, Cartoon Network’s late night batch of idiocy for the insomniac in all of us. Why go to bed after the Colbert Report when such eye-catching gems as Assy McGee; Aqua Teen Hunger Force; Frisky Dingo; Robot Chicken; Venture Brothers; Superjail; Lucy, Daughter of the Devil; and dozens of like-minded shows can prevent dysfunctional males from dialing Escorts-R-Us or walking into a local bar sober and volunteering to be pummeled with pool cues?

I’ve wanted to develop a show for Adult Swim since its inception in the fall of 2001. Had I gone soft though? Had swimming in the glorified pond of children’s programming for the last several decades withered my cretin-grinning George Bush frat boy, pants down to the ankles, vomit hurling, tongue-licking frozen street poles male credibility somewhat?

Look at my résumé of shows I've worked on: Doe-eyed creatures dripping goodness and light; comic book superheroes dripping goodness and light; little girls and smiling ghosts dripping goodness and light. I've produced more light than Con Ed and more goodness than Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.

Adult Swim executives would laugh their boney asses off at my very presence. What would I, a purveyor of soft talking, smiley-faced animals and loopy "let's now all drink our milk together" programs know from being adult. I would not be read. I would be forcefully thrown out of their offices by way of their plate glass windows; or sneered at as a pseudo-hip kind of guy. What children's programming executive could create anything of merit for that portion of the population legally allowed to pilot cars over cliffs? What would the concept need to be to prove I still had male jackass qualities?

As I’ve matured, I’ve become shorter and more crinkly. I now wear my polyester pants up around my goiter, just the same way I did in high school; my liver spots have grandchildren of their own. Had I matured to the point of no return?

A wag once described Adult Swim as proof positive that males 17+ will watch anything if they're drunk. While I’m a male and my fuzzy vision is now due more to cataracts than carafes filled with alcoholic beverages, my mind still wallows in tumescence jokes, flatulence gags, and the proud ability to act my age as long as it’s twelve. Women flock to men like this...not! In fact, I’m so beyond 17+ that I now need a baby strainer for my Seven and Seven.

Much like a raging yeast infection, my Adult Swim concept germinated from a hot spot I’d prefer not discussing in mixed company; but I must do so -- otherwise this post ends here. Several years ago, I was searching for former classmates to inveigle them to attend our high school reunion, and through the Internet re-established contact with L. Now living in New England, L had become a successful doctor, specializing in what my dad used to call “vomen problems.” You know like “Vhat’s the matter mit you? You have vomen problems?” I remember in high school that L, unlike other girls, gave me the time of day. Why it was Mountain Standard Time I don't know as Madison, Wisconsin is in the Central Time Zone.

I grew up in a household with an English mother who never spoke about anything other than the weather and how large a disappointment I was vis-à-vis the other kids in the neighborhood. The mere mention of the word “sex” to my dad had him asking me what cut of meat I wanted for dinner. He was a butcher, so he knew from brisket and flanken, but preferred taking me out to dairy farms for an afternoon to observe animals at work and play.


Cow With An Awesome Talent - Watch more Funny Videos

One of the farmers said that watching animals was the best education in learning about the birds and bees. I had no idea what pigs, goats, horses and cows had to do with the birds and the bees. I got pooped on and stung a lot trying to find out. I eventually learned everything I needed to know about sex from reading the Farmer’s Almanac, Mad Magazine, and going to see Japanese monster movies at the Capitol and Orpheum theatres. To this day, I can’t watch a Godzilla or Mothra movie without becoming flushed with embarrassment. But I digress.

I remember in second grade a teacher telling me her husband was an OBGYN, which was weird because I had always called her Mrs. Murphy. Several years later, I learned the name of that wacky free-swinging organ that consumes the thoughts of 50% of the world’s population who don’t have one. With that second word, I was almost halfway to learning the 20 plus letters in the English alphabet. It might not have been the best way to learn the ABC’s, but it beat all the picture books given to me in high school.

At about the same time I was re-connecting with L, I was informed by A, a young lady who makes her living as a cartoon voice actor in Toronto, that the Canadian Broadcaster, Teletoons, was searching for ideas to fill its Detour slot. Detour is Canada’s post 9 p.m. time period, where more adult-themed animation is broadcast. Apparently Teletoons was tired of buying retreads from American suppliers like Adult Swim and were seeking more original content for their audience.

I’ve known A for decades. She’s gorgeous, talented, and has a mouth on her like a stevedore. Whether her Teletoons source was actually a drunk peeing behind Massey Hall or some graffiti on the interior walls of the Brass Rail, I don’t know; but she asked me whether I had any perverse cartoon ideas not involving her and her Neapolitan mastiff. Not at the moment, I told her, but I promised I would get back to her.

Why was I asked to come up with a concept? I glanced downward and saw that I was still flying the flag of the United States of America. That alone would make this exercise futile, because, like any other Yankee without landed status, that formidable beast, Canadian Content Rules would come into play. It would not merely be an exercise in writing. What I came up with for Detour could work as well for Adult Swim.

Canada is a smart country. It protects its own against the American artistic juggernaut, whereas we only protect Caribbean tax havens. For a Canadian company to get full government tax credits on any production, whether television series or film, it must employ as much Canadian talent, both in front of and behind the camera, as is humanly possible. Only within the last decade or so have a number of States such as Louisiana, Wisconsin, and New Mexico, to name but three, wised up to give our production companies tax breaks as well.

Read up on these Canadian rules at your leisure, for the graphs are fascinating and the accounting verbiage grammatically exciting; and with an ending as favorable to Americans as Pearl White being tied to the tracks of the Burlington Northern with a sizzling stick of dynamite in her ear and no rescue in sight.

I decided to try and come up with a concept knowing that if anyone did like it, I would have to give up 100% of the rights and any creative control if it were to go any further. I might be thrown a cruller or two and given a coupon to a Second Cup location, but that would be about it.

A % of something is better than 100% of nothing goes the saying. At least someone in Canada would read the idea, which is more than I could hope for here at the time.

Adult Swim cartoons are full of gratuitous sexual innuendoes and I wanted in on them (no pun intended). L had told me a bunch of OBGYN stories which creeped me out, but no ideas were really forthcoming. When I need writer inspiration I sit cross-legged in front of the television with some Hiram Walker in one hand, Triple Sec in the other, and a case of Bols strapped around my ankles. I open up a pack of Gitanes Brunes. Sometimes I even turn the set on. This dog was in for a long evening of solitary drunken debauchery.



If it weren’t for Turner Classic Movies, I would have one less reason to pickle my liver or burn out my lungs. That channel has saved me creatively more often than sandbags and sweat save Grand Forks from the Red River. TCM was offering old style Film Noir night. If nothing else, I could drink along with the actors in the movies.

Gun Crazy, Nightmare Alley, Kiss Me Deadly, and Out of the Past. By the end of this little marathon of gem classics, I knew what my concept would be. But first I had to remember where I left my apartment. I stood up; I fell down; I swore I saw Hoagy Carmichael sitting at a piano with a full orchestra behind him.



I suddenly felt "noir". I threw my shot glass against the wall; I desaturated all the color from my cheeks; then in a clipped staccato fashion, I commenced my very own voice over flashback.

That evening began the birth canal process for NOIR OBGYN: FINGERS OF FURY. Perhaps I might have gone overboard in combining “Noir” with the world of the “OBGYN.” When this idea was finally submitted to the folks up in Toronto, they were so aghast, they bodily threw A out of the office. I’m not sure whether it had anything to do with the material or the fact that the male executives wanted to see her bounce slowly, methodically, and deliberately down the stairs.

NOIR OBGYN is a speculum-swinging doctor by day, a stripper by night, and a vigilante packing more heat than two dozen microwaves all the rest of the time. The town she strumpets around in, Turpitude, is several levels of inhabitability below that of Chernobyl and Bhopal. It's population is corrupt; the music is sultry; the streets are so dangerous, the only parts of speech allowed out after dark are subject, verb and predicate.

Have I gone a tad too suggestive? Perhaps. I re-reviewed all the episodes of Assy McGee again. At least my main character doesn't expel gas like a Ford Pinto every time she speaks.



As for NOIR OBGYN, the series idea itself will be posted here in its entirety within several days.

The Squish Heard Underfoot Might Be Marco Polo: Adventures On Marrs

Ever since I was a kid and some old Greenbush sage told me cockroaches survived atomic explosions, I've had a fascination with insects of the order Blattaria. Of course, living in the Greenbush area afforded me many opportunities to see cockroaches up close and personal. There was the time one almost fell down my throat while I lay on the floor of an abandoned house, staring up at a ceiling full of them. As I grew older, the enthrallment to let them split the rent, eat at the same table, or even share my bed (no matter how drunk either I or the cockroaches were) dissipated to zero. Cockroaches as animated characters, now that's a whole other phylum.

Cockroaches have appeared as subordinates in such films as A Bug's Life, Twilight of the Cockroaches, An American Tale, Monsters and Aliens, WALL-E, and Men in Black, as well as dozens of television series, including one of my favorites, Oggie and the Cockroaches.

People sometimes ask me, "Greenbush Boy, where do you come up with your twisted concepts and are you featured on the Homeland Security Watch list because of them?"

"Beats me," I tell them; but my creative journey, much like removing oneself from the TSA Watch List, is circuitous and about as difficult to follow as footprints in water. I need a GPS system most of the time just to locate my shadow.



Take, for instance, Irwin, the cockroach star of Adventures on Marrs...Landfill. Around 1970, I first heard a song titled "Tennessee Bird Walk" performed by country western stars Jack Blanchard and Misty Morgan. I was still living at home on Mills Street, next to the James Bowen House, in the family basement by the broken water heater and the old chicken coop. I had three possessions in life, none linked to my dignity: a broken hot plate, a pre-war sofa bed, and a rabbit-eared black and white TV that broadcast only farm reports, tele-evangelists, and country music programming. I liked "Tennessee Bird Walk." It was the kind of twangy, down home music I could really get high listening to without feeling too guilty about leaving the haze of Deep Purple and Black Sabbath for a few minutes. Amazingly, these two heavy metal giants are still out there flailing away in the 2009 cardiac arrhythmia tours. But I digress.

Several years after "Tennessee Bird Walk", Blanchard and Morgan came out with a song that fit perfectly into the singalong world of Doctor Demento. The lyrics of "The Cockroach Stomp" were so perverse that they made my other favorite song on death, Jim Carroll's "People Who Die," sound like a nursery rhyme. Country western music had immortalized cockroach destruction.

Several years ago I ran across this nonsense:



This video reminded me of the afternoon I sat in Brittingham Park watching a homeless man try to fish what looked to be parts of a broken terrarium out of Lake Monona. The man refused to go anywhere near the water and was using, not to successfully, an iron bar to coax his obsession to the shore. I was about eight at the time and I had just come from a hard day at Longfellow Grade School.

I'm 25 years away from being in this picture.

Without any hesitation I jumped into the nutrient-filled, algae-clogged lake water, teeming with bloated fish skins. Only when the water circled my throat did I remember that I had yet to learn how to swim (never did) and I was wearing my Sunday go to meeting clothes from school. Thankfully I had just seen Lassie basically do the same thing with Little Timmy, so I dog paddled this piece of broken flotsam ashore .

As soon as the westerlies blew me ashore, the old man grabbed the terrarium. A bunch of slimy bugs fell from their watery hiding places and scattered in all directions. Picking it up high over his head, he yelled something that sounded like, "Get thee back into the water, demon witch,"and flung the terrarium back out into the lake. He then began the poking process all over again with his iron pole.

I sat there soaked, with a dead fish in my back pocket, while the homeless guy banged away at the water, wondering what excuse I would give my parents this time for my appearance. The guy suddenly stopped walloping the water and strode towards me, snarling that I had poisonous water beetles climbing all over me. I looked down. There was one struggling to climb out of my pant cuff. That was enough. I ran screaming out of the park almost becoming roadkill on West Washington Avenue. I spent the next day and a half submerged in a bathtub, ignoring that fact that I had abandoned my school books and the next day's assignments in the park. I guess the homeless guy tossed them into the lake. They washed ashore in Hannibal , Missouri several months later.

Then, about the same time as the above video, I read an article about a grade school science terrarium mistakenly carted off to the city dump during the summer recess. The kids, the school board, parents, the mayor went nuts at this costly mistake. The article mentioned how the kids had lovingly taken care of the plants and the water filtration system and the bugs, slugs, grubs and other creepy crawlies for years, and now had no reason to live or at least attend class. One precocious child was quoted as saying she felt very worried for the safety of her "friends" because, like her house pet "Fluffy," none of the "glass house" occupants had ever had to survive on their own.

"Terrarium." "Glass house." "Pampered insects." That night I began working on Adventures on Marrs...Landfill.

This story is a simple tale of a daydreamer: A cockroach named Irwin, who has lived a pampered existence in a science terrarium in Ms. Goff's sixth-grade class. While all his friends frolic, doing bug and insect party things, Irwin sits attentively listening to all of Ms. Goff's lectures on science and outer space travel -- especially about those unmanned explorations on the planet Mars.

Irwin watches all the educational movies shown in class, and every night he studies all the forgotten homework left on top of his glass home. He hopes one day to be called by a Mr. Houston to rocket off into space and do some exploring of his own. He keeps a diary of his life in the glass house, which all the inhabitants call affectionately Casa a Pupae. Like every visionary, he doodles faces in his book.

One day Irwin and his friends wake up and discover they are no longer in Ms. Goff's class, but some place called Marrs which, as Irwin notes, was always spelled incorrectly on the blackboard. Unfortunately, the "Landfill" part of the sign had long since disintegrated; but to Irwin, his wish had come true. Obviously, Mr. Houston wanted his and his friends to explore the planet really badly because no advance warning had been given and certainly there were no NASA training sessions. He didn't even have to spin around in circles.

What Irwin and his crew are about to explore on Marrs

Irwin observes in his diary of the similarities between the Marrtian landscape and Ms. Goff's classroom floor. Perhaps being an astronaut will not be as challenging as it is made out to be. Perhaps Marrs and Earth are not that dissimilar after all.

Irwin's diary begins here.

The Blog's the Thing

Today is not the birthday of Laurence Olivier ,but it is possibly the birthday of the guy who created the skull he's holding. Scholars argue whether April 23, 1564 is William Shakespeare's real birth date (there is a record of his baptismal on April 26th), but the world is quite sure that Earth's greatest author left this brave new world on this date in 1616. So if it's not his birthday, it's his death day. Votive candles should still be lit.

My first recollection of Shakespeare was in sixth grade, when Miss Waugh became so exasperated with my classroom whispering she reared back and threw a paperback copy of The Bard's shortest play, "Comedy of Errors," straight at my head. Corporal punishment was still the law of the landscape back then in Wisconsin, which no doubt was the reason why Ed Gein left school early. That got me thinking, how amazing old age is that a sixty-five year-old woman could still throw a three fingered splitter. I was to learn that had she hit me with Shakespeare's longest play, "Hamlet," I would today be Yorick himself, rather than an emaciated wannabe lookalike.

A friend asked me once whether there was a way of using animation to teach children at an early age the beauty of Shakespeare. He thought because I was in kids programming, everything I touched was educational in content. I must have looked like Big Bird that day or had sesame seeds caught in my teeth. The closest I came to anything educational was spelling X-Men with a capital X.

But the question haunted me, because at that moment I didn't have any girlfriends that did. Google Shakespeare with animation and you get dozens of sites where three hour plus plays are squeezed into 24-minute loopy truncations. While much of the animation is steps above the 70's Saturday morning cliche, the largest obstacle remained: Some of the world's greatest tales were so watered down that Classic Illustrated Comics read like St Augustine.

The Master's works were filleted to such a blistering degree that the Hamlet soliloquy, for instance, "To be or not to be, that is the question..." became "To be" and we're out of here. Things were so crudely edited that Romeo was left talking to himself under the balcony, the "Taming of the Shrew" morphed into a pigmy mouse, Falstaff resembled a spokesperson for Jenny Craig, and the trio of MacBeth witches became one Weird Sister with a multiple personality disorder. The Bard deserved better. A new method to introduce kids to the man who invented being human was required.

Nine years and hundreds of thousands of words later, scores of broken ideas, busted concepts, burnt out laptops, and too much taste testing of Absolut, Popov, Ketel One, Smirnoff, and Vox, I'd come up with one clean possibility of using animation without hopefully the crack of doom or the dogs of war crashing down upon me.

Over time, I will lay out the ideas that didn't make it, concepts too limiting, not clever enough, too stupid, or really really too stupid. Eventually I will post the one I think works the best. Some have already read my proposal, their facial expressions forcing me to wonder whether I've given them the Piers Plowman Middle English version. I'll take that as a positive sign.

I would post one short idea now, except I am already late to see Oliver Sacks at UCLA.

To Forget is Golden: The Ludlow Effect

We live in a society where history is re-versioned in real time and memory is as malleable as blown confetti. I was an American history major, so at an early age I became aware of this country's tendency to collectively forget its thirty-car pile-ups and focus instead on the clear stretch of highway ahead. Why waste the energy filling out messy police reports? In fact, why bother sticking around at all? Promise like some drunk lurching from one roadhouse to the next to never ever take that curve again at such a high speed; when appropriate, genuflect to God several times; and then move forward. This way we could forever maintain that vision of America as that shining house on a hill and not a ramshackle lean-to in need of an Orkin pest man.

We exalt the Alamo, but we breath the air of Levittown. We love sameness: Same political mistakes; same justifications and mumbling 1984 doublespeak obfuscations; same obtuse reasons given to slide into illegal wars; same maligning and marginalizing critics; same illegal behaviors to safeguard the nation; same apologists contorting historical documents for their own narrow ends. Same, same, same and same.

Take torture, for instance. The greatness of 24/7 "news" is the magical ability of network bookers to find someone who can justify any political position no matter how heinous. Many torture defenders, for instance, apparently changed their majors from sanity to attend Washington D.C's newest campus: the Torquemada Chiropractic College of Ouch.

I thought we had a War Crimes Act; I thought we signed the Geneva Convention; I thought we hung a bunch of monsters after WWII to set legal precedents about a nation's conduct during wartime. We even jailed German jurists who helped to codify the actions of the Nazis. Weren't these now the rules of the game?

The memos are fairly depraved and show a total contempt for the U.S. Constitution and rule of law, but it's cool lawyer-speak providing the CIA with legal cover to engage in torture. No doubt Bernhard Losener and Franz Albrecht Medicus were kind men, loved their wives and did not beat their dogs but these two government jurists helped to legislate the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. You think Hitler (born on April 20th as well) wanted to skim law books himself? He was too busy burning them.

I hope John Yoo and Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury and all the rest of the S & M crowd at Justice are disbarred and or impeached, so they can go off and write their books...in jail. If President Obama believes this issue is a tempest in a teapot and we should move forward, then I would advise him to remember what he was doing during those years he presumably was teaching something called Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago.

The Ludlow Massacre took place on April 20th 1914 in Ludlow Colorado. Other than academics and socially aware individuals, few people today know of the existence of this event. In a way it set a precedent for 20th Century American forgetfulness. A number of books catalogue the sequence leading up to the deaths of the 66 men, women and children who were cut to pieces by machine gun fire or burned to death by the Colorado National Guard and private security forces during the coal miner strikes of that year. The cost of such adventurism was financed by the Rockefeller family which owned the mines at the time. After some government hearings and some bad press coverage for the Rockefeller clan, the incident disappeared, soon to be replaced by Europe's attempt to wipe itself out.

Sixty-six people died and America moved on. No one was ever charged. Four students fell dead at Kent State. No one was convicted of their killings. In My Lai, 300-500 unarmed Vietnamese were slaughtered. William Calley spent about four months in jail; but by then much of the nation had already moved onwards. I bring up Wounded Knee (although it was 14 years before Ludlow), where some 300 unarmed men, women and children of the Lakota Nation were shot dead by the 7th Cavalry, but that's so far back in our history we might as well be talking about the Middle Ages. Anyway, the Army had to redress the Custer mistake 1875 and it did. At least the Army makes a habit of not forgetting.

A cancer never packs its bags, doff its hats, and heads off down the road by itself. Left untreated, it sticks around until dying along with the host. It's like that malignant brother-in-law who comes to visit with a cheap bag of groceries promising to only stay in the basement until he's back on his feet. The problem is not with the brother-in-law, who acts as expected, but the mistake of letting him settle in in the first place.

John Dean called Watergate "A cancer on the Presidency". The torture memos and the philosophy spawned from them are far "worse than Watergate." The office of the Presidency needs several high colonics after the last eight years of swaggering Bush crap. A normal cleansing will no longer do. The precedence of torture by the American government is a particular bit of fecal matter that has metastasized beyond the intestinal walls of the body politic. It now rests squarely around our very heart, a stench not soon to go away.

In The End It's Not The Years In Your Life That Count. It's The Life In Your Years.

Lincoln's Deathbed in the Petersen House

"A little before seven I went into the room where the dying President was rapidly drawing near the closing moments. His wife soon after made her last visit to him. The death struggle had begun. Robert, his son, stood with several others at the head of the bed. He, bore himself well but on two occasions gave way to overpowering grief and sobbed aloud, turning his head and leaning on the shoulder of Senator Sumner. The respiration of the President became suspended at intervals and at last entirely ceased at twenty-two minutes past seven"
Morse, John T. (editor), The Diary of Gideon Welles (1911)

Gideon Welles served Lincoln as Secretary of the Navy. Upon hearing the news that the President had been shot earlier in the evening of April 14th, he and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton rushed to the side of the stricken Lincoln. Aides had moved the dying President across the street from the Ford Theatre to the Petersen House.

"Die when I may, I want it said by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow."
— Abraham Lincoln

Disney Has Found Its Eighth Dwarf

Once upon a time there were some miners named Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Bashful, and Doc, and, of course, Dopey. They were the Seven Dwarfs that helped to create the Disney Empire. They were short. They were industrious. They were male.

Today, Disney uses a new group of dwarfs to help fashion their empire. They don't have funny iconic names, but they do have eyes that see the obvious and ears that hear the sound of checks being written out to them.

Disney was one of the few animation studios that missed my talented demeanor and droopy-eyed approach to programming, especially boy-centric programming. Now it appears that that boat hasn't so much left me at the dock as sunk in the harbor. Us old diggers who rooted out transcendent ideas as if they were subterranean fungi are now as current as, let me see, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride or the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Submarine Voyage. A new breed of creative development executives now gallops across the company's TV landscape: the raging anthropologist and the wily psychologist. Their job: to find out where Disney's lost boys have gone.

The Toon Disney into Disney XD transformation is too complicated and messy to explain in a family friendly blog. I try to remain upbeat and entertaining throughout my writings here. Some news items simply set me down into my own inner space adventures. I'll let this article and this article act as an E ticket ride to bring the reader up to snuff.

I produced more methane reading this particular New York Times article than half the dairy herds in Wisconsin emit in a week. Maybe that's the reason I don't bring newspapers to social events. Apparently Disney TV can't attract boys to its live action and animation programming because… well that's what these new hunters and gathers have been called in to find out. Disney XD has lost its XY.

Disney owned the boys TV market at one time, with Davy Crockett and Zorro and Spin and Marty and The Hardy Boys; but that was so long ago most of America's Interstate Highways were still being numbered odd or even. Those programs were all action-packed, and adventure-oriented, with great characters, plenty of bonehead humor and storylines that made you wish you were part of the proceedings. I wonder if Walt Disney ever asked any of his subordinates to gather themselves up some focus groups to see how long a raccoon tail Davy Crockett's hat should have?

I was part of the Fox Kids team in the '90s that reinvented Saturday morning, developing programming that attracted both genders quite easily. We blew away the competition with Batman, X-Men, Spiderman, Goosebumps, and a re-versioned Beatlejuice. We created the fabled 6-17 demographic, the first time ever that a salesman could sell advertising to such a vast kid market skew. None of us were professional academics, brand consultants, marketing mavens, or long term strategic thinkers. We were rank and file executives who knew story, understood our audience, and most importantly, worked around equally talented writers, storyboard artists, directors, and voice talent. The only time I ever heard the word "focus" was at my ophthalmologist.

Yet now the Rosetta Stone for attracting boys is a ratty Black Sabbath tee shirt. Black Sabbath has been around longer than Stonehenge. I'm not following how Ozzy Osbourne biting off the head of a bat helps configure a show for Disney, but then I don't have a degree in marketing.

If Aaron Stone succeeds, it is not because he is a mediocre hoop player, but rather because he's a normal kid thrust into the role of a superhero – an example of wish fulfillment attractive to both genders. I'm still dreaming of being bitten by a radioactive spider, though lately the only things biting me are villainous creditors.

Forgive me, Lord, for I am about to sin, but I don't know any man who would ever utter something as blatantly moronic as this line: “Winning isn’t nearly as important to boys as Hollywood thinks.”

Really!!!!!Get back to me with various examples because my testosterone-fueled mind can't conjure up one.

Oh, and one other item from this insipid article merits some commentary:

You, the executive VP of Research at MTV: Don't rewrite history! What were you, two years-old when Fox Kids was handing the competition its lunch on barbed wire doilies? We wrote the history on revamping a day-part that was by that time deader than heaven on a Saturday night. You guys just added additional chapters to the logic already established.

People Thought Wright was Wrong at the time of his Death

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the death of America's second greatest architect, his work surpassed only by God's handiwork along the Colorado River.

I know nothing about Frank Lloyd Wright, except that he went to my high school when it was called Madison High, and, like me, stank academically especially in algebra, botany and physics. There is no record that he ever graduated from high school, possibly because the building that housed it looked somewhat like this and he had no hand in its architectural demeanor. In the early 20th century, that building was torn down and replaced by one designed by Cass Gilbert, the architect who designed the Woolworth Building in New York City. That's the one where I roamed the halls and visited the principal's office for six years.

There is a record of me graduating from this high school. But look at what Frank Lloyd Wright did with his life without a high school diploma. Obviously this was a delinquent who didn't care if he was left behind. Is life fair? As fair as the odds in winning the Power Ball. I'll blog about those percentages some other time.

If you want to know more about this iconic Wisconsin native, try the Brenden Gill biography. It's probably one of the best overall view of this genius currently on the market. However, if you are like me and desire the Spark Notes version of FLW's life, Marcus Field of The Independent has done an admirable job -- especially encapsulating the murder, mayhem, adultery, political, and artistic controversy that made up much of Lloyd Wright's 91 years.

Also check out the superb Ken Burns documentary, from which this is a short excerpt:



Now the first time I remember hearing the name Frank Lloyd Wright was in 1956, during What's My Line, a program that introduced me to what it means to watch high society people act with all the panache and charm of Noel Coward-created characters.



Note on this particular episode panelists Peter Lawford and Paul Winchell. I met Winchell a quarter of a century later as the master voice of both Gargamel of the Smurfs and Tigger of Winnie the Pooh.

Shortly after the end of the program, I decided to become a world famous architect. I took out my Lincoln Logs and created my own version of Fallingwater.



Unfortunately, my version ended up looking like this:


At least I didn't flood out my high school. Instead, it was torn down in 1986, about 60 years after the first FLW-designed building in Madison saw the wrecking ball close up and personal.

Palm Sunday Video

BeamerFilms.com

The images within this video could actually be expanded many times over without coming close to the true number of Medieval and High Renaissance depictions of Christ.

Go Figure: Moses is Departing Egypt and Taking His Facebook Friends with Him

You've heard of finger popping time? Well within a couple of days comes Chametz tossing time. Like everything else, it's all about tradition.

This Wednesday evening begins the Jewish holiday of Passover. Some believe that passover is what happens when you're not called for jury duty; but in actuality it is a major religious holiday commemorating not only the passage of the ancient Hebrews out of Egypt, but also the forty years spent constipated eating matzo while roaming around the desert waiting for Moses to ask directions to the Holy Land. Guys asking for directions is like a country road without dirt. If his sister Miriam had been in charge, the sojourn would have ended after a fortnight at best.

The main staple of food during Passover is matzo. Plain matzo can stop a tank in its tracks. Had they used matzo instead of simple Pennsylvania earth to shore up the dam, not only would Johnstown have remained flood free, but the dam itself would now be harder than uncut diamonds. This biblical food is so indigestible that gravel has an easier time flowing through the human digestive tract. Advanced Imodium is like gobbling down a carton of prunes and washing it down with EX-Lax compared to a box of matzo. I think Kevlar jackets have a matzo lining. But matzo is the traditional food. The days following the end of Passover are the busiest times of the year for proctologists. Go figure.

Like all Jewish holidays, Passover revolves around prayer, self-contemplation and food. Most non-religious Jews passover the first two principles rather guiltily, but make up for their sectarian lapses by pigging out (perhaps a bad choice of words) under the third category. Hundreds of years ago, some wise sage summed up all of Jewish history with this pithy remark: "Somebody wants to kill the Jews; the Jews survive; let's eat."

Passover is a holiday so old it takes up Chapters 1-15 in Exodus and is then recapped again in Leviticus 23. On the first and second nights of this eight day holiday a 150 course meal, featuring lamb, soups, briskets, Kugel, cakes, candies (no leavening please) and other cardiologists' nightmares, is served. This is to commemorate the fact that the slaves had scant time to sit around eating sand and dung beetle sandwiches when Moses gave the word to roll on out of Egypt. Grab what you can and leave the rest for Goodwill. This heart-stopping meal is called the Seder.

Girding oneself for these two nights takes weeks of stomach expansion exercises and calorie destroying calisthenics. A new liver is advised, for drinking at this meal is as mandatory as knowing that the serving of food will only end when all arteries are clogged and the paramedics arrive with crash carts.

The Passover wine is so sweet that pure cane sugar could develop diabetes from it. So arduous is the preparation for the Seder that no sooner are the dishes washed and the crowds dispersed than planning begins for the following year. It takes that long just to make sure those who hate each other are seated right next to each other again.

Now Seder in Hebrew means order. People just doesn't get together and begin scarfing down food. That would then make it a wedding or a wake. Tradition demands an order to the serving of the meal. That's where the Haggadah comes in. This ancient text sets down the rabbinical codification of when to serve which dish, how to relax while eating it, what questions children should ask, and what answers no one pays any attention to.

The Haggadah also lays out when to drink the wine, sing songs about goats and, in more modern versions, when to leave your seat to disrupt the ongoing service by talking loudly to others about how poorly your children are turning out. Fun and guilt are had by all.

Various beautifully illustrated Haggadah editions from all over the world have survived through the centuries and now safely reside in various university special collections. One of the most magnificent examples of extraordinary artistry is that created by Arthur Syzk. His Haggadah is possibly the most widely distributed version of the Twentieth Century. The illustration on the left depicts Pharaoh's men drowning in the Red Sea. Remember, the Bible isn't a series of Comedy Central one-liners.

While the Haggadah is an important book, it is not writ sacred. Any participant can add personal and relevant passages to his or her own Haggadah ,as long as the basic line of the ceremony is kept intact. Feminist, gay and lesbian tracts, blessings for our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and various and sundry political statements have crept into current texts. What never seems to change, regardless of the author, is the amount of food and drink that inherently must be consumed.

Thanks to friends, I stumbled upon this latest version of the Haggadah . I doubt it will end up in any hermetically sealed cabinets, but it certainly does have that feel to it: Moses is Departing Egypt: A Facebook Haggadah.

Hundreds of Haggadah variations are now circulating on the Internet. No doubt there is even an Al Qaeda Haggadah someplace out there with some verse about "Death to the Jews" and "Next Year in Jerusalem or Else." If they drink as much wine during their Seder as is required by Haggadah bylaws, I doubt if any of them will remember their chants the next day, let alone their way back through the Khyber Pass.

Two Short Films Shot Where All Men Fear to Tread

Short film: Out of Order from Flabber TV


Short film: Love Hurts

I love the internets. Was too lazy to go out tonight to rent horror films (or really blog extensively) so went online instead and found these. Short films and tall leggy women from the Netherlands. Winning combination for me regardless of genre. I must admit I didn't get either ending, but then again I might have missed something in the wordless translations.

The French Make the Best Commercials

This clip is not from the movie Madagascar: Escape to Africa. This is an actual French commercial produced several years ago that I stumbled upon last night while reading a post about Dan Ackroyd signing crystal skulls (filled with vodka) in Madison, Wisconsin. I can't make stuff like this up. If I could, I'd be working at this very moment as a paid writer and not as the itinerant cleaner of cat boxes I list myself as on Craig's List.

I have no idea what's being sold here other than it is a beverage of sorts, but I'll take a year's supply of it.



For those who really care about how a commercial like this is made, here are the behind the scenes tricks. The technique is called performance capture, used spectacularly in both Robert Zemeckis' film adaptations of Polar Express and Beowulf.


Addendum: Could Henri Rousseau be the inspiration for the animal design of the commercial? I'm not sure but at least I can end this post on an intellectual note far less provocative than images of God's creatures pole dancing for refreshment.

Oh Canada, Let Me Explain

Darkblack is a Canadian blog of infinite visual stimuli, as well as one of my favorite sites not affiliated with the XXX-Nation. If I could Photoshop this well, I would be employed at The Daily Show or be creating graphics for the New Adventures of the Trailer Park Boys. Darkblack's stuff is that good.

So imagine my consternation when I checked out a recent post and came across this:



Before you Canadians who make the darkblack blog so entertaining go ballistic and threaten to cut off cheap supplies of pharmaceuticals to health-starved Americans, halt the supplies of Edmonton shale oil you export to us, or deny us access to Whistler during ski season, let me "do some splainin" about Red Eye. Drum roll, please!

Fox News -- a comedic organization of shiny-teethed teleprompter readers, a network so rife with factual inaccuracies that it would make Joseph Goebbels cringe -- produces a late, late night comedy of errors called Red Eye. This show actually should be called "one eye," since most of the humor on it is based on the only male muscle with its own brain. Red Eye means to be the Fox News answer to The John Stewart Show. It has most of us muttering, "Who asked the question?"

How dumb is Red Eye? It's so dumb that the Indian Head Test Card pattern scored higher in its SATs. Rimshot!

This show is so boring death row prisoners would rather watch their own sentencing. Bada Bing!

This show is so bad Khalid Sheikh Mohammad preferred waterboarding to watching Red Eye when offered a choice of torture methods. Canned laughter, anyone?

Program executives filled the airwaves with this Romper Room of the Wretched because the ab-roller or ShamWow infotainment spots were too cerebral for the normal Fox late night viewer. "I'm here all week. Try the brisket!"

Red and Eye are monosyllabic, much like the typical Fox News report, thus making this seamless programming in the parlance of the business. "Wanna buy a duck?"

The show's premise has always been as simple as the mis-reading of the Second Amendment. Round up guys so insufferable that Quakers would enjoy beating them up, surround them with giggling, bone-dense sorority chicks whose cup sizes match their IQ's, and then drool out knuckle dragging, dirt eating nonsense to an audience simultaneously producing its own red eyes with shots of Jagermeister and Red Bull.

Red Eye specializes in right wing humor, which means the weak, the poor and the infirm deserve the same kind of "light belittling" the barbarians inflicted upon Rome. Like all other programs on Fox News, a dress code of tin foil hats and wife-beater shirts is mandatory. The jokes shoot out with all the ferocity of a clogged sphincter and tend towards the same hipness as eight tracks and pet rocks. Punch lines sink faster than the moral reputations of revelers Larry Craig and David Vitters. The writers are all graduates of the All Children Left Behind for Good Cause School of schlock and yawn. They work in crayon, because pencils and felt tip pens have points far too sharp for their dull minds. The show's graphics are meant to reassure the viewer that there are other reasons to learn to read besides following the directions on home pregnancy tests and signing domestic disturbance police reports.

Don't take Red Eye seriously. None of the comedy clubs in this country do -- otherwise you would see its participants working the rooms rather than busing the tables. You have the pretty currency, so let us have our loonies.

Anyway, get off of our backs. You Canadians had the opportunity to arrest Bush in Calgary (in an earlier posting I said Ottawa by mistake--me bad, especially in geography) when he gave his first post-1600 Pennsylvania Avenue speech. Perhaps you were hoping he'd take Harper back to the States with him. Up there, Bush was quoted as saying he was writing an authoritarian book on his 12 toughest decisions. Obviously, working his act on foreign soil made him even dumber. I didn't know our ex-president could count to double digits.

This Bushism is not Red Eye humor, unlike their tasteless jokes about Canadian deaths in Afghanistan. The word "authoritarian" has far too many syllables for anyone on the show to pronounce correctly. Secondly, malapropism sounds like a disease that can only be cured through faith-based intervention, and that's far too sacred a subject to joke about. Finally, what's so hilarious about the truth? Eight years of authoritarian rule could only produce an authoritarian book.

Watching Red Eye tends to produce in foreign viewers who are not familiar with our Athenian-like culture, a tendency to pee directly onto the television screen or take a claw hammer to the boob tube. Don't fall into that trap of hating all of us because Fox News produces more crap than an army on laxatives. The cretins on Red Eye are just that. They laugh at their own half-liners, ending each show with a rousing rendition of erectile dysfunction jokes. Even in the smallest bit of witless humor, signs of autobiography exists. Cue the drum roll and the rimshot please!

I Listen to John McCormack & I'm Not Even Irish

Most of my neighbors in the Greenbush area were old immigrants and spent their time either cooking Old World foods, starring tearfully out of windows, screaming at each other, or listening to long playing records loud enough to shatter windows half a block away. Walking around the neighborhood as a seven year old, I became quite an opera fan, familiar with the tenor voices of Robert Merrill, Jan Peerce, Richard Tucker, Enrico Caruso, Mario Lanza and Lauritz Melchior.

I would knock on doors and invite myself into these airless homes to listen to old scratchy RCA opera recordings; just as the soprano was about to sing a stock number about dying, I would feign hunger pangs and ask for any old dessert that their ungrateful grandchildren had mistakenly left behind during their last hurried visit. Okay the Yiddish word for the day is schnorrer which translates as 'beggar' but I was a kid in a candy store and the grandkids never once missed an extra biscotti, tiramisu, tortoni, cannoli, zeppole, or zabaglione. I paid for my behavior years later with enough cavities to purchase 300 acres of beach front property in Maui for a dental co-op. I was also keeping the old people company, so that has to count for something in heaven.

I heard recordings of Paul Robeson in the "Bush" as well, and I was told he was the world's greatest basso profondo. I thought that meant 'anarchist' since only the most sinister moustache twirlers listened to him. None of these women seemed to ever have men around them. I never came over much to listen to Robeson, since his followers offered me nothing more filling than copies of Emma Goldman speeches to chew on.

But today is St. Patrick's Day so we'll put the Jewish, Italian and Danish tenors back in their sleeve jackets. When I think of classic Irish tenors, the name of John McCormack stands above all others. His voice was heard in the "Bush" as well, but usually in taverns on West Washington Avenue. Beer joints were off limits to a seven-year old, but that was okay with me. Based on what I found in the dumpsters behind these places, most tavern desserts were served with half-smoked cigarette butts stuck in them.

I only began to appreciate John McCormack's voice in college, when an Emmigrant's Daughter with Endearing Young Charms named Colette took this Croppy Boy to The Hills of Connemara and All Through the Night made my Non Irish Eyes Smile. Alright, that line stretches Irish songs way over the edge, but several shots of single malt Glenlivet will do that to a non-drinker like myself. Thank goodness blogging this in a speeding car is still legal on St. Patty's Day.

This excerpt highlighting the stunning voice of John McCormack is from a forgettable 1937 movie (it's mislabeled 1934) entitled Wings of the Morning, starring a very very young Henry Fonda with a very very bad English accent. The beauty he's courting is Annabella, future wife of Tyrone Powers. For all you film buffs out there, Wings of the Morning was the first Technicolor move shot in England. It's still unwatchable.

Happy St. Patty's Day

Fatty Foods and Neighborly Love

Norman McLaren, Canada's greatest animator, won an Oscar for his 1952 study of neighborly love. Spend a leisurely afternoon in between looking for that now elusive job, eh? Kick back a last nourishing LeBatt's before repossession of hearth and home, eh? And enjoy his wonderfully quirky and totally original short pieces, found on any video download site where X does not mark the spot. You need not have the art house maven gene to appreciate McLaren.

I am reminded of his classic pixilation short, "Neighbors," because at this very moment two men in adjoining apartments below me are once again going at it hammer and tong.



I wish my specialty were sitcom writing, but, alas, it is not: It is bad check writing. Throughout my entire life I have been told my sense of humor is no funnier than a burst anal fissure (remind me one day to tell you about my colonoscopy visit), so I am passing along the makings of this idea into the hands of smarter, funnier, and more devious purveyors of the human spirit than myself. Remember me on stage during the Emmy acceptance speech. I'll try not to sue.

My new neighbors are Calab and Cleon. Both moved out here from the Midwest, not to change their names, but with that same wild-eyed crazy kid dream of one day opening up Michelin-rated French restaurants back in their home states. Their first choice, Paris, was financially out of the question for them; however, for people not living out here, the City of Angels is no flash in the frying pan when it comes to eats. LA has some top-tier culinary schools: Otherwise why would we have so many fast food joints with exotic sounding names featuring chicken, lamb, and schnitzel? I told these guys about the cooking schools in Paris, Texas, but they looked at me glaringly and knew right away I was from Wisconsin.

I like both men, for they are completely neurotic about and borderline pathological towards the preparation of food. Even more intriguing, neither future Auguste Escoffier apparently likes the other, although both attend the same food classes. Irony and adjacent apartments brought these two strangers together. As all the cooking shows on cable networks detail, future master chefs are petty, whiney, immature monsters in the making -- more territorial than bull elephants during prom season. Caleb and Cleon dance around each other the way two rival chefs might do when battling for the same floor space at an upscale strip mall. They cook and cook and cook and begrudgingly share recipes with each other. I think it's because their wives demand it.

These early morning sounds are not connected with the construction of the building next door: cutlery crashing on the floor, dishes breaking, and the mournful screams of disgust spoken in French (though one guy is from Nebraska and the other from Kansas). When children fail to do their homework the night before, the rush to prepare for school has a universal language all its own.

This is Los Angeles, where apartments are mandated to have paper-thin walls and faulty window sealant. The distinctive love noises of men in broil, bake or sauté mode are now as recognizable to me as my own more common non-connubial sounds of grunting, groaning and grimacing. The smells wafting upwards from their respective apartments are far more exotic than those found on Hester Street at the turn of the last century. Those fragrances, whenever I smell them, whisk me immediately back to the good old days of Greenbush where all immigrant cooked and spouses fought pitched battles with each other.

Those two lovely wives of Caleb and Cleon – their respective partners, both majoring in online hospitality degrees – make it abundantly clear, in their own passive-aggressive fashion, that each finds the other man's cooking better. I guess this is a motivational technique learned from years of watching telenovelas, though neither women understands Spanish. Did I not say somewhere that this had all the ingredients for a sitcom? Throw in some car chases, fist fights, earthly annihilation and loud music and you have a Bruckheimer comedy. These women apparently love living on the edge. I wonder if there is a dish called "homicide au gratin?"

I'm a sadistic "ho" with no conscience, who eats both ends against the middle – and lately, since the battling chefs have moved into the apartment complex, my middle has expanded exponentially. Several times a week, I'll put on sackcloth and ashes and waddle on downstairs, first to one and then to the other, asking for handouts. Strumming my lute, I make clear to them in my best Oliver Twist, doe-eyed lamentation: "my own gruel be cruel, eight days a week." They never laugh at anything I say, but they do welcome me and my stomach in.



I never have any idea what I'm being served. I just know it's French because half-way through each meal I stand and sing Le Marseillaise, and then reflexively kiss someone on both cheeks. Baeckeoffe, Quiche Lorraine, Magrets de Canard aux cerises, Baked Apricots, Boeuf Bourguignon, Tarte Flambée. My palette is from Wisconsin, so its sophistication level is two floors below mulch. My mom would tell me as a kid when putting food down in front of me, "If it don't make you heave or rush to relieve, then remember bucko, it's free."

Lately after these gluttonous visits, I spend long hours at the computer looking up the recipes to see whether I've broken not only any ancient dietary laws but those federal laws about eating endangered species. If I could only find a woman who could cook like this and humiliate me in front of others, I would be in Crème Patisserie heaven. Then all I would need is a job.

"My Home, My Citizenship, My Burden"

Bill Holm (1943-2009)

Minnesota lost its poet laureate on February 25th. Bill Holm was a literary institution in his home state, as well as in those circles that understand and appreciate a unique subset of American regional poetry: the hardscrabble social radical who takes nourishment from the soil without over-romanticizing those who plow its fields. An imposing figure from Icelandic stock, standing some 6'8", Holm more closely resembled a conquering Viking than a carver of words. While he strode the earth from China to Iceland, he spent most of his writing life sequestered in that part of southwestern Minnesota where Spring fears for its life and Summer waves goodbye from a fast-moving freight train.

Like most great regional writers (a winner of the McKnight Distinguished Artist Award), Holm's thoughts speak a truth far beyond a state's borders. His essay on failure, Uncle Sam-style, should be required reading in every high school classroom that continues to spread saccharin over American studies like a heavy tarp. He who dies with the most toys still dies, and is not any richer for the experience. Holm's poem on the death of Senator Paul Wellstone is a lament for that peace voice cut short while the more sanguinary songstresses continued to bleat out a war beat. For those who have never lived beyond the leaf blower sounds of the urban landscape, his words will feel both foreign and unpretentiously quiet. For those of us who grew up in the cold, flat lands of the Midwest and have drifted away from our roots, his poems and essays are a comforting reminder that those who do go back home again will not find the world so alien after all.