Max "Bunny" Sparber

IT'S THE END OF THE YEAR, and a good time to start this blog, as I am feeling both nostalgia and future shock, both of which I am attempting to suppress with alcohol. But now seems like a good time to look back on my picayune accomplishments and spectacular failures of the past year, and to look forward to 2008, and map out what I hope to accomplish and fail at in the next year.

Top 10 accomplishments in 2007
1. I started work as the editor of MnSpeak.com, as well as making a series of short semi-documentary films for The Rake.
2. I wrote two screenplays, a semi-autobiographical account of my experiences with homelessness in Hollywood and a genre horror script.
3. I lost some weight. I gained some of it back, and am now trying to lose it again. I hope to continue yo-yoing like this for the rest of my life, losing some, gaining some back, and then losing some more. Because weight loss should be filled with ups and downs. And, also, I like to eat.
4. I started a lot of new blogs, and have done a pretty good job maintaining them. Some of them I can't talk about, as they are top-secret, but a blog that Eda Cherry and I did on monster make-up netted us a feature story in Make Magazine. Just yesterday, we started a new blog based around cooking recipes from mid-20th century children's cookbooks.
5. I have managed to make my bed almost every day for a year. Believe it or not, this is an extraordinary accomplishment. Also, I flossed a lot.
6. I traveled around Minnesota quite a lot, which is a broadening experiences, especially since they serve you a lot of pie and pastries in rural Minnesota.
7. I wrote the dialogue for a local play. Oh, yeah, and another of my plays was given rave reviews in both Variety and the New York Times. That seems like it should be up at the top, or at least above bed-making, doesn't it? I'm writing them as I remember them, and I don't know what it says about my sense of accomplishment that flossing pops into my head before a Times review does.
8. I did some additional writing that I am pleased with, including a few pieces for How Was the Show, Reveille, and City Pages (not yet published). I'm doing less freelance writing and more Web work lately, but I like to keep my hand in and write about something when the subject moves me.
9. The variety of cocktails I make and drink continues to expand.
10. I managed to learn to count to 10.

10 hoped-for accomplishments for 2008
1. Revisit my wardrobe. I will document this here. I have come to the conclusion that most men dress as though they are still being dressed by their mothers, they just fell off a turnip truck, or they just got out of prison, and all three looks should embarrass them. I myself have tended toward the clichés of hipsterism, including Hawaiian and bowling shirts. Well, no more. 2008 shall be a year of sartorial extravagance. I won't go into too much detail now, but I will offer this tantalizing hint: Polyester.
2. Eda Cherry bought me a book of Galliano recipes for Christmas. I plan to make and drink as many of these cocktails as I can, and will document that experiment here, or in a drunk tank, depending on how it goes.
3. I plan to shoot my own feature-length movie this spring, as mentioned above.
4. I hope to visit Los Angeles with Eda Cherry. She's never been, and I'd like to visit it again. How I miss the town of my youth! Ah, Hollywood in 1991, when the streets were paved with what looked like gold, but, when you looked closer, proved to be cakes of crystallized methamphetamine colored citrine by the smog.
5. I must get more of my art framed and hung. I simply must.
6. I plan to throw more parties. We had several this past year, one to play the board game The Redneck Game of Life, which went very well, and a few smaller get-togethers to watch Shatner films. Our apartment is smallish, so some of these get-togethers consisted of only four or so people. If you were not invited, it was merely because of space considerations. You are still on our minds, and will be at one of our future parties.
7. I did some essentially organizational tasks last year, and then slid back to chaos and confusion. I plan to repeat this sequence events several more times this coming year.
8. Given the opportunity, I will eat human flesh.
9. I can already tell that Blaxploitation is going to be coming back into my life in a big way. Also, if things go well, kung fu movies.
10. Expect to see me dancing a lot. Mostly 60s fad dances. In fact, as I learn them, I think I shall demonstrate them on this blog.

IT IS MY FEELING that a house or apartment that is filled with lavish furniture, a wide-screen television, a loving family, and many generations of happy memories will always seem incomplete and unsatisfying without art on the walls. In the meanwhile, a hobo, sleeping in the gutter, clothes flecked with his own spittle and sick, will nonetheless seem like a lordly master of a palatial domicile if he has managed to tack a photocopy of a Playboy cartoon to the asphalt near his head. Art is just that important to me.

And so I'd like to introduce you to my collection, which grows by a piece or two, every month or so, as I find work that appeals to my rarefied tastes. I grew up surrounded by art, you see. My father is a great collector, and his tastes tended toward the modern and the primitive. As an example of the former, he owns a rather large canvas that consists of nothing more than a pink line drawn across a salmon background. This he holds up as a rather fine example of minimalist art.

He also had a terrific piece of African tribal art, the figure of a man, carved from wood, dressed in indigenous regalia. When I was a boy, everybody in my family was obsessed with the piece, primarily because if you pushed aside its grassy loincover, you revealed a whang of terrifying proportions. Ah art! Ah culture!

When I got old enough, I began collecting art of my own. Some of my earlier collection is lost, which grieves me. For example, I once sent a photograph of myself off to cartoonist Jim Woodring, who claimed he would use it to create a drawing of my soul. What he returned to me looked as though a turnip had been illustrated by Dr. Seuss and then costumed by Liberace. In recent years, I have come to realize that this is a shockingly accurate look at my soul, but the image is long lost, alas. I thanked him by sending him back a picture of the Cat in the Hat, saying I thought this is what his soul might look like.

Above, at the start of this post, you will see a work of art I do own, and hope not to lose. It hangs above my desk, and was a gift from my girlfriend, Eda Cherry. It is a limited-run print of a ray gun by local artist Sean Tubridy, who may be best known for his illustrations of Harvey the Robot, a boxy and hapless chap who has ended up on stickers throughout the Twin Cities.

This ray gun has a particularly unique feature. It has three settings. The first is for Human and the second is for Alien. The third, farthest to the right, is for Really Big Alien. I am tickled by the idea of a universe in which such a gun would be necessary, although I would be afraid to live there.

More from The Sparber Gallery.

ONE OF THE FUNCTIONS OF THIS BLOG will be to review the films of William Shatner, particularly those he made in the 1970s, when he was apparently struggling and living in a truck bed camper in the San Fernando Valley. I've recently become obsessed with him, perhaps in part because I am a fan of his work on the original Star Trek, a show I consider one of the high points of 60s television, and an example of how nerds ruin everything.

Now, I'm not among those who thinks Shatner is an overactor. Instead, I think the rest of the world underacts. Sometimes, when I watch regular movies, I become convinced that I am watching a zombie film, because nobody seems to be doing much of anything. And it certainly doesn't help that half of Hollywood has had their foreheads Botoxed, which means they cannot move the upper half of their face. It seems a strange decision for an actor to make, as that happens to be an especially expressive part of the body; it seems to me like a singer deciding to paralyze some of their vocal chords. I remember watching a Nicole Kidman film in which the actress valiantly attempted to produce a simulacrum of human emotion without the use of part of her face, like a stroke victim. So, when she needed to appear surprised, instead of widening her eyes and raising her eyebrows, like most of us do, she simply opened her mouth wide, as a muppet might.

You'll never get that from Shatner. No, you can always count on him to throw himself into a role. He'll sob like an infant, he'll shake his fist at the sky, he'll indulge in an actorly technique called the psychological gesture, in which a physical mannerism is used to reveal a character's internal state. In Impulse, as an example, he represents his character's permanent infantalism by sucking on his little finger, as he did when he was a boy, which makes him look quite a lot like Dr. Evil. He also tends to point in a menacing way. Believe you me, you don't want to be on the receiving end of a jabbing Shatner finger.

I'll go into his films in detail when I am moved to do so, but, for now, here are one-sentence reviews of a few of my favorites:

Impulse (1974): When Shatner is going muderously mad, he pops balloons and squeezes goldfish to death; also, it is possible to run through a car wash, sans car, and then trip the moment you get out. That is the moment Shatner will kill you.

The Devil's Rain (1975): Shatner actually looks pretty good without eyes. He doesn't look nearly as good when he is melting.

Kingdom of the Spiders (1977): Shatner flirts by being sexist; also, he is able to survive enough spider venom to kill an adult bull.

More films of William Shatner.

I HAVE A LOT OF BLOGS. More than a lot. There are about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day. I'm responsible for about half of those. All detail one project or another, because I have a lot of projects. It's just who I am, and I refuse to change for anyone. However, if I decide to change, you can be sure I'll blog about the fact.

I realized something was missing in my life. Something important. Oh, sure, I have money. I have so much cash on hand at any one moment that I bathe in the stuff, which, honestly, doesn't do much to make me cleaner, and makes the money dirtier and smell worse, but we millionaires must be given our indulgences. At least I don't collect urine and feces in earthenware pots, so that puts me one up on Howard Hughes.

And I've had women. I can't even count the number, but mostly because I never learned to count higher than five. If I had to guess how many women there have been, I would have to guess "more than five," although, honestly, I lost count at three, and two of those three was the same woman on two different occasions. But there I am boasting again.

I'm an intellectual and a bon vivant, and this keeps me happy, or, if not happy, at least it keeps me unpopular, as people consider me snooty, so screw them. I didn't want their company anyway.

So I have a lot going for me. But there has always been something missing, and, tonight, I realized what that was. I didn't have a blog where I can just be me, just let down my hair and write down my thoughts. I didn't have a blog that could be a sort of clubhouse for me, with its own secret password and pile of comic books and slingshot collection and, oh, so very, very much porn.

And so here it is, at last, another blog. Welcome to it. The secret password is Paso Doble, although I would accept duple meter march, as one can't be too particular about such things. Come in and look at my etchings, I'll pout you a glass of brandy, and, later tonight, we'll make sweet love. Then, later, I will jot your name down in my little black book, along with descriptions of your physiognomy and whatever I cried out when I climaxed (probably my own name; it usually is). Then I will give you some smelly money, whisper to you in broken Latin, and you can go home, wondering what the hell just happened.