Max "Bunny" Sparber

The video for Sailor Martin's first Christmas song. Distressed by reports that people find him "creepy," Sailor Martin edits together a variety of public domain cartoons, including Ub Iwerks' "Fiddlesticks," the first Little Audrey short, "Santa's Surprise," as well as her cartoon "Tarts and Flowers".

Original footage shot in Minneapolis in December 2006 on a Kodak z730 and edited using Apple's iMovie software.

More Sailor Martin.

YOU THOUGHT IT COULDN'T BE WORSE. Then you flipped the album over and saw the back side:



More Vinyl Oddities.

HERE WE HAVE the first Galliano cocktail I have made that uses sweet and sour mix, which is a mixture of lemon juice and simple sugar and is one of the staples of the bartender's toolbelt, but one that simply doesn't show up that often in Galliano cocktails. I presume this is because Galliano is already a fairly sweet liqueur, and doesn't really require any additional sweetening. It is used in this cocktail primarily because this is a variation of the whiskey or bourbon sour, but with a lot of Galliano cocktail thrown in. In fact the recipe is 1 oz. lemon juice, 3/4 oz. Liquore Galliano, 3/4 oz. wiskey (blend, scotch, or or bourbon), and 3/4 teaspoon sugar. Shake well with ice and strain into a frosted sour glass.

This recipe is actually very close to that of the Golden Stingray, especially when made with bourbon. This is a cocktail I enjoyed when I first had it and have enjoyed several times since, so I made the Galliano Sour with bourbon. The resulting drink is very nice -- the lemon flavor really dominates the drink, but the cocktail benefits from both the bourbon and the Galliano. The bourbon imparts an almost buttery quality to the drink, while the Galliano provides just a hint of anise. The cocktail is very much in the tradition of mixed drinks that use just a teaspoon of Galliano to add flavor and depth to existing drinks -- it tastes very much like a bourbon sour, but with additional invigorating flavors. I would suppose that the sweet and sour might simply bury the Galliano's flavor if the liqueur were added in any smaller quantities. As it is, the taste of Galliano is very subtle in this drink, but nonetheless enjoyable.

More Galliano cocktails.

I GO TO AN ALIEN ABDUCTION SUPPORT GROUP. I try to be polite, but, frankly, I think these people are full of shit. Every single one of them seems to have some sort of personality defect, and their tales of kidnappings at the hands of almond-eyed extraterrestrials feel fashioned to perfectly fill whatever is missing in their pathetic lives. Every single one of them considers themselves special because they've been probed by space men. They talk about it, and dab their wet eyes, and speak of their dreams of a better place than this one, where a beautiful and advanced people send silvern ships through the cosmos to study us. And why? The consensus is that they are here to help us, and that this is why they abduct and experiment. Every single member of my support group smile sickly smiles and discuss how wonderful it is to be able contribute, in their own small way, to the Utopian future of humanity at the hands of exquisite, sensitive alien overlords.

This is when I struggle not to let out derisive snorts. None of these idiots were ever abducted. Some are ex-alcoholics, filling in their blackouts with imagined stories of white lights that pull them into the sky. Most are simply crazy, and their madness doesn't end with their manufactured tales of looking out their windows at night to see small, oval-headed men staring back at them. No -- that's just the start of it. One woman claims to be able to move clouds with her mind. Another talks in great detail about Atlantean artifacts. All claim past lives -- one woman, in fact, has been repeatedly kicked out of Native American tribal gatherings, which she insists she has a right to attend because she was an Indian princess in her last incarnation.

It's all nonsense, and yet I continue to go, because there is no support group for what I have experienced.

I was kidnapped by Mole Men.

I suppose it helps me to listen to the horseshit stories of the alien abductees because it reminds me that my abduction was real. Sometimes I doubt it. I doubt it despite the strange ideograph the Mole Men branded on my shoulder, an ideograph that means they will one day return for me. I doubt it despite the fact that I still see them, now and again, staring up at me through sewer grates, clicking their crablike claws together menacingly. I doubt it despite the fact that my rescue from the Mole Men at the hands of the police department was documented by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, who won two Pulitzers as a result, one for the story, one for a series of photographs showing three policemen firing revolvers into a crowd of Mole Men gathered at the mouth of one of caves that dot the Mississippi River. In one photograph, I am dressed in torn garments, bleeding badly from a wound to my forehead, as a SWAT team pulls me out of the clutches of Betrotha, Queen of the Mole Men, who by now must have given birth to our mutant child.

I do not know why Betrotha picked me. Although she seemed to understand English, she was capable only of speaking in a series of whistles. But she seemed to love me, at least for the two weeks I lived underground. After all, she rescued me from being torn to pieces by the Mole Men's witch doctor, who, from what I gather, planned to use my brain to power an army of humanoid robots, which he would use to conquer the overworlders.

Gosh, just saying it out loud makes it seem so unreal.

I decided to attend a support group because it has been hard to adjust to life after the kidnapping. I floundered at my job as a greeting card writer for the Pocket Wishes Card company. I would try and write humorous birthday cards, but without much success. I remember my boss bringing me into his office to discuss my work. He pointed out that everything I had written involved Mole Men in one way or another. He showed me the card I had written just that morning, which read "There's no place like home," on the cover, and then, when you opened the card, read "Unless home is a pitch black hole in the ground, wet and filled with strange echoes, where every afternoon you hear the whistles and the clicking of your captors devouring their prey of surface animals, such as deer and stray dogs." He suggested I see a psychiatrist. I was diagnosed with depression and post traumatic stress disorder, and have been collecting social security ever since.

I have been irritable and disinterested lately. Nothing seems especially exciting or meaningful. On the bus to my support group, I will hear strangers discussing the petty annoyances of their everyday life: paying taxes, or small illnesses, or car trouble. And I will feel the urge to shout at them, to tell them that they have nothing to complain about. The world is a much more terrible place than they can imagine, and they are wasting their time worrying about nonsense. It becomes very hard to have sympathy for someone who has a flat tire when you once fled a burning underground laboratory filled with strange and magnificent weapons designed to blot out the sun. I want to remind people that the Mole Men still live, and may yet succeed in their schemes to turn the world dark.

But why worry people over things they cannot control? Let them concern themselves with childcare and bills and flat tires; those are problems they can actually do something about. My psychiatrist tells me that the source of my depression is that I know what the Mole Men are capable of, and, in knowing, I feel somehow responsible, even though I am helpless to do anything about it. He points out that I probably have an additional feeling of responsibility, in that I fathered the mutant heir to the Mole Man throne, and so, if humans ever need to go to war with the Mole Men, it will be a war against my child. He tells me that this is a lot for one man to worry about. He also suggests that living with the knowledge that one day the Mole Men will come for me again is a little like living with a terminal illness. He is the one who suggested joining a support group. At first, he suggested an online forum for people who had encountered Cthulhu, but those people were simply too shell-shocked, too frightened, and too insane as a result of their experience. He also found me the alien abductee support group, and I grudgingly continue to go, although I feel certain it isn't helping. Anyway, if I am to stay on social security, I must demonstrate that I am taking steps to look after my mental health, and this seems to take care of that requirement.

Last night I awoke to clicking noises, and thought I saw a small creature peering at me from the opposite side of my bed. It was wrinkled and filthy and had tiny eyes, and we stared at each other for a long moment in the darkness. Then I reached to turn my night table lamp on, and as light flooded the room, the thing was gone. Perhaps it was never there.

This morning there was a father's day card in my mail box, even though it is not father's day. The card was unsigned. I recognized it: It was Pocket Wishes Card, one I had created. I'm trying not to make too much of it. It could have been sent by anybody, and it could mean a thousand things. But during my support group meeting today, listening to one woman discussing the great love and warmth she felt from her alien abductors, I burst into tears. I excused myself and fled to the bathroom, and I sat there sobbing for almost an hour.

The sun set this evening, and I found myself startled by it. I looked up into the darkening skies with an unexpected feeling, expecting to see some underworldly machine moving up into the atmosphere to dim the sun. But, of course, it was simply dusk, and the sun was merely setting, as is did every day. And I sat staring at the horizon, puzzling about my feelings as I watched the sun go down.

For a moment there, for the first time in years, I had felt something like hope.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

EVERYBODY'S FAVORITE pierced and tattooed sailor puppet has been shoplifting gold necklaces with the words "Homie Flava 4-Ever" written on them, and the New Orleans Police Department is not happy. Remixed from Booked for Safekeeping.

Original footage shot in Minneapolis in December 2006 on a Kodak z730 and edited using Apple's iMovie software.

More Sailor Martin.

EDDIE LAWRENCE'S SINGLE "THE OLD PHILOSOPHER" shot to the top of the charts in 1956, and the comedian kicked around from one project to another for the remainder of his life, releasing occasional albums, costarring with Judy Holiday on Broadway, and penning forgettable film projects with titles such as Hip Hip Ole and Highway Slobbery. I'm sure he headlined in the Catskills when I was a kid. There were always comedians like him rotating around the Borscht Belt, really wild cats with mad comedy routines they had been humping across the country for decades, and you'd think, where the hell did this guy come from? Then you'd see his bio, and think, my God, he's been on Carson 35 times! After the act, you buy them a scotch, and the entire night is nothing but stories of carousing with Phil Silvers, playing the ponies with Meyer Lansky, and shtupping some forgotten blond bombshell in the bathroom of the El Capitan.

The stories are great, but while he's talking, all you can think is, Jesus Christ, look at that mug! It's twice the size of a normal human head, and with his squinty eyes and pursed mouth, it's like someone drew a caricature of a Chinese laundry man on a bowling ball. And is that his nose, or is his head giving birth to another elbow? There's a quaint little beret perched at the top of his head and he wears a foppish scarf around his neck, and what is the look he's going for, some sort of cartoon beatnik? He looks more like those 60-year-old Jewish homosexuals you sometimes see malingering around bars in the East Village, furtively reading Genet while sipping a Brandy Alexander.

And, just then, he stops talking. "Did you hear me, kid?" he asks. You didn't. "I was telling you about the time I set fire to Slappy White's limousine. Did you miss it?"

You confess you did.

"Jeez, kid. I thought you looked lost in thought. What the hell were you thinking about?"

You don't dare tell him.

More Vinyl Oddities.

THIS WAS MY FIRST JET PACK TRIP, and, obviously, I hadn't quite mastered the device yet. Here I am jetting past the giant Dala Horse in Mora, Minnesota. The dala horse is a traditional piece of Swedish folk art -- this one was hand-carved in 1971. It also happens to be the world's largest Dala Horse. It is 22' tall and weighs about 3,000 pounds.

MORE FROM THE JET PACK TOUR!

HERE IS A matte photo print by Monocol, for sale on their Etsy site. It's a style of art they call Woodgills, created by finding an inexpensive work of art at Goodwill and then painting something new and surprising on top of it. This is part of a series of two paintings they have done that show large robots in pastoral settings holding birdhouses. Coco was the one who discovered these prints, and instantly fell in love with them, so we both decided to purchase one. I will post the other one later this week.

More from The Sparber Gallery.

THIS 1972 TELEVISION MOVIE has a pretty impressive pedigree -- it was produced by Francis Ford Coppola in the same year that Coppola directed The Godfather and a year after Coppola produced George Lucas's first major release, THX 1138. Additionally, it was directed by John Korty, a filmmaker and documentarian who would win an Academy Award in 1978 for a film titled Who Are the DeBolts? (And Where Did They Get 19 Kids?). The script was based on a story by Zenna Henderson, one of the first female science fiction writers, and the film, based on her story "Pottage," was just one tale from a series of stories about a group of refugee aliens who live in cloistered, rural communities on earth.

This is not really Shatner's film. Henderson's stories often featured female protagonists, and this one tells of a young and somewhat hippyish teacher who moves to a tiny California desert town to teach a half-dozen children, only to discover they have unworldly powers. The teacher is played by Kim Darby, who had recently costarred in The Strawberry Statement, a film about student revolts on campus during the 60s that was based on the Columbia University protests of 1968, so Darby was an actress with well-established hippie credentials. She had also appeared in an episode of Star Trek that prefigured her role in The People, playing the titular character in the 1967 episode "Miri," in which the crew of the Enterprise find a planet inhabited only by children with an unexpected, alien secret.

Shatner appears in the film, relatively briefly, as a regional doctor and part-time veterinarian with an interest in ethnopharmacology. Shatner appears throughout the film dressed in a cowboy hat and jeans, a costume he would wear in films throughout the 70s, which were frequently set the deserts of the American west and southwest, for some reason. He's an amiable fellow in The People, wandering by every so often to check in the film's rural farmers, which is a fairly useless undertaking. They never seem to get ill; neither do their cattle, even when disease kills the cattle in nearby farming towns. Shatner regards the rugged health of the townspeople with cheerful puzzlement, scooping water out of their wells for chemical analysis in the hopes of discovering some explanation for this one town's lack of illness. The townsfolk, in the meanwhile, treat Shatner with a sort of patient amusement, letting him go about his business and plying him with home cooking whenver he wanders by.

It's not so easy for the schoolteacher. She sees the town as a tiny bastion of small-minded religious fanatics. Everybody wears the modest and colorless clothes of the Amish or Menonites, and the townspeople keep one adult in the classroom, to watch for infractions of the town's strict code of behavior. The children are not allowed to make music, or play, or pretend, and are made to walk in a distinctive shuffle. Darby's countercultural teacher finds these restrictions upsetting, and uses her classtime to push the children into rejecting their strict upbringings. The teacher's behavior is tolerated, to a point, because if the town does not have a full-time schoolteacher, the children will have to go to another town for school; the townspeople treat this as an ominous option.

Darby approaches one kid, a lanky and shy boy named Francher, and gives him a harmonica as a gift. Almost instantly, he disappears into the nearby woods and starts playing a haunting melody, composed by Carmine Coppola, Francis's father and creator of the Academy Award-winning score for The Godfather: Part II. As other children join him in the woods, they discuss strange memories they have of a place they have never lived, a beautiful and disturbing world they call "The Home." As they experiment with walking without shuffling their feet, they start to rise into the air, flying above the treetops. All this is witnessed by Darby, who, naturally, starts to wonder if there might not be more to this town than just a group of backwards religious fanatics.

The People is not a great film, even for a television movie. It looks flat and often drags in its storytelling, and, while many of the children who are in it are quite naturalistic, most of the adults affect a sort of vague deadpan, never seeming especially interested in the events of the story. I am sure this decision is meant to give a sense of their alieness, but it is at odds with the script, in which the adults are written as strange but caring and engaged. Nonetheless, The People is an unusual and fascinating science fiction film, thanks to Zenna Henderson's original stories. The aliens in The People are quite different from those found in most other films of this sort -- they are neither marauding invaders or godlike mentors, helping earthlings built pyramids. Instead, they are a small and frightened group, hiding themselves from humanity by masquerading as a rural religious community -- an identity that is not entirely a pretense, as they do have their own history and culture, and they are able to preserve it by forming the sort of cloistered farm community that is typical of communal Christian movements. These aliens have a long history of bad experiences with humanity, having been identified as witches in the Middle Ages, and they have decided to try and get by on their own as best they can.

This is a sad and pessimistic view of humanity, but not an unfair one. Even the teacher, who blunderingly tries to help the children, puts them in terrible danger; it does not seem possible for humans to coexist with these ancient aliens without destroying them, even when we mean well. The movie tries to end on a high note, with Shatner offering to act as an intermediary between the aliens and the humans, sharing their great gifts with humanity without exposing them, but it is hard not to watch that scene with mounting skepticism. The aliens have managed to survive despite humanity; it is hard to imagine how the will survive with any additional contact with such a destructive species.

More films of William Shatner.

THE ALARMS GO OFF, the bombs start to fall, and Sailor Martin must choose what to do in his remaining moments on earth in his first music video. Remixed from Survival Under Atomic Attack and Duck and Cover, among others.

Original footage shot in Minneapolis in May 2006 on a Kodak z730 and edited using Apple's iMovie software.

More Sailor Martin.

THE CRUISE DID NOT END WELL. The Polka Pals were caught in an unexpected squall and washed ashore on an unmapped sliver of a Pacific island. The smashed hull of their touring boat was found six years later, with bleached skeletons and multicolored plastic leis half-buried in the surrounding white sands. Several of the bones showed signs of being gnawed on. The rusted frame of an accordion hung from a nearby tree, and, further inland, a tuba lay with a bite taken out of it.

More Vinyl Oddities.

JUST AS WITH THE Galliano Manhattan, here is a cocktail that borrows the name of another, better cocktail. In this case, it also uses the same essential recipe of the classic tequila cocktail, but swaps out Cointreau for Galliano. So the drink is made as follows: 1 oz. Liquore Galliano, 1 oz. Tequila, 1/2 oz. lime juice. Shake with ice and pour into a champagne glass that has been rimmed with salt.

Although the Discover Gold book names the inventor of the drink, one Bob Reggiani of Los Angeles, this cocktail has the feel of a filler, as though the book was a little light on content and had to throw in a few extra mixed drinks for padding. Now, I'm not going to complain about the act of substituting one ingredient in a drink for another. It's a tried and true way to invent a new cocktail, and I'd be loathe to discourage mixological experimentation. But, in this instance, the substitution just isn't a very good one. For whatever reason, the Galliano brings out some of the more bitter undertones in the tequila, and the mix of tequila and Galliano is unbalanced -- in the classic Margarita, there is almost twice as much tequila as there is Cointreau, but here the ingredients are evenly split. Sometimes, the half and half mixture is a good one, if the two ingredients mix especially well, but they do not in this drink. It's hard to tell whether it is a tequila drink or a Galliano drink, and, in the end, it just tastes like a bitter, weirdly herbal tequila. And again, as with the Galliano Manhattan, here we have a drink that has taken the name of one of the definitively great cocktails, but is much worse than its namesake. The Margarita is a perfect showcase for a really excellent tequila; this drink just wastes it.

More Galliano cocktails.

AFTER SIX DAYS AND NIGHTS, the high induced by booze and drugs had crested. I was floating without feeling. The present reality of the dingy dive in north Minneapolis was dimly passing before me. Distantly, I heard sharp voices, somehow sounding as though they were coming from another room. As these voices argued and cursed, my high became a bad dream -- a nightmare.

The haze of the high cleared briefly. My hand felt the cold steel in my pocket and clenched around it. As if in a sequence from some slow motion film, I felt myself rise to my feet.

"No -- no, Ted. Don't." someone was shouting.

More of the Sparber Guide to the Twin Cities!

THERE IS A MOVIE called Bat Pussy. It is a porn film that was made back in 1973, but it was made pretty far outside the developing porn industry in Los Angeles and the brief porn filmmaking explosion of downtown New York. As far as I can tell, this film was made in the deep south, but I can't get ant more specific than that. In fact, it seems to have been made in an imaginary south, the place that Northerns dream frightening dreams about, dreams filled with mentally disabled and bucktooth children picking banjos while their portly fathers root around their trailer home for their Klan uniform and a shotgun that is only ever used for killing possums and northern liberals. I've been through the south, and my experience of it has been overwhelmingly excellent -- I found the people to be friendly and charming, and I have never met anyone who fit the northern stereotype of the southern redneck.

This film found three of them, though. A pompadoured good old boy, his chubby and freckled girlfriend (who boasts a sky high beehvive hairdo), and a rail thin and rather tomboyish young woman with long, greasy hair. For some reason, the uncredited filmmakers decided that this would be the perfect cast for a porn parody of Batman. The film itself consists almost entirely of the aging rockabilly and his updo-clad girlfriend ineptly rolling around on each other, making weak attempts at oral sex, and otherwise braying bizarre and sexualized threats at each other. The thin woman, in the meanwhile, dresses in a sad approximation of the Batman costume and rushes to join them, traveling the entire way on a hippety hop. I can't really accurately describe how strange this is, so I'm going to have to show it:



I don't recall precisely where I first heard about this film, but I knew I would have to have it. A month ago, I discovered that Something Weird video sells it, and so, naturally, I ordered it and began making plans for a party.

The theme of the party, naturally, was 70s porn. Our guests were invited to dress in a manner appropriate to the theme, and we set about creating an appropriate environment. First, we made coke spoons as a party gift. Of course, actual coke spoons were small, long and slender, but we were working with a dollar store budget, so we simply bought regular spoons and affixed them to neck chains with rubber bands. We left these in a huge pile of powdered sugar for people to take, and all our guests seemed delighted by them.

Powdered sugar was to be the theme of the evening, as we purchased little mirrors and placed them throughout the apartment, covering them with lines of powdered sugar. We also bought a bottle of oregano and put in in a baggie, then put some out on a record album with a credit card.

Now the apartment was suitable druggy for the evening, but it needed to be pornier. I placed old girlie magazines and pulp erotic novels on the coffee table for reading material. Then we set up studio lights and a super-8 camera in the bedroom, aiming at our large circular bed. We would actually be watching Bat Pussy in the bedroom, on a large flatscreen television on loan from one of our guests, with as many people on the bed as we could get. As it turns out, our bed is so large that it fit nearly everybody, which was a thrill.

Then we turned out attention to food. I made a delicious cheese fondue and a ginger ale and sherbert punch, and also acted as bartender, making tequila sunrises and 7&7s for everybody -- we also had Colt 45 on hand for beer drinkers. I bought Spanish Fly at a local sex shop, which I suspect was just drops of sugar, but I added it to all the drinks anyway. It's hard to tell if it worked or not, as any amorous feelings the Spanish Fly might have generated was certainly ruined by the spectacle that is Bat Pussy.

Our guests also brought food, including peanut butter slathered inside celery stalks, which I remember well from the 70s, and erotic cupcakes, which were much appreciated.

All the guests were given porn star named thanks to online name generators (mine was Ricky Spankalot). We then began the evening with a party game of my invention. There is a book that I have owned for years called Top Notch Nymph by Dana Firstenbed, and I long ago discovered that it was nearly impossible to open the book at random, reading a paragraph outloud, and have the words coming out of your mouth be any less than utterly galling depictions of sexual immorality. So, of course, I turned it into a drinking game. We passed the book around the circle, everyone read out loud, and, if they managed to discover a relative innocuous paragraph, we took a drink. Here is a sample paragraph, selected just now and bowlderized for those of you who might be at work, to demonstrate:

"Please keep it up a little longer." begged Sandy. "Let me lick the c*** juice off for you and keep it hard for a while. I'll be ready to f*** again in about 10 or 15 minutes."

Then it was on to Bat Pussy. The film elicited cries of terror and groans of horror from the assembled audience, although whenever the character of Bat Pussy emerged on her Hippety Hop, the crowd broke into spontaneous applause. The film is only 50 minutes long, but after 25 minutes, everybody decided they needed a break from it, and so we retired to the living room. There, we discussed a series of photographs we had discovered online that morning, a collection of snapshots someone had found at a swap meet. They were taken in the early Eighties and showed a group of 20s somethings proudly posing with a massive hunk of cocaine that they had acquired. Suddenly we got it into our heads to recreate these photos, and so we did so.

Then we returned to Bat Pussy, and drinking, and crying out in horror, and we continued like that until very early in the morning. One of our guests left her pants here, which delighted Coco. "That is the sign of a successful party," she declared.

Sailor Martin is sent to a lunatic asylum in this remix of the 1953 documentary Mental Hospital. Martin explains his sense of betrayal at the lying words of an imaginary orange dog and experiences first-hand the horrors of mid-20th century psychiatric treatment.

Original footage shot in Minneapolis in July 2006 on a Kodak z730 and edited using Apple's iMovie software.

More Sailor Martin.

OF COURSE, WE ALL REMEMBER the 1986 remake of Alien that starred an Amish man and a goat.

More Vinyl Oddities.

THERE IS A VERY SMALL LIST of the greatest cocktails ever made. These are the cocktails that are so distinctive as to be impossible to mistake for any other mixed drink. These drinks so perfectly mix their constituent ingredients that they become the subject of purist sensibilities. There is the Martini, for instance. We won't discuss the so-called Vodka Martini, which should properly be called the Kangaroo, because it is generally a brine and olive flavored shot of pure vodka, and that is not a Martini at all. No, the Martini is a mix of gin and vermouth, and is infinitely perfectible, according to the taste of the drinker. A little more or less gin or vermouth will change the taste of the drink. A different gin or vermouth will make a different Martini -- Old Raj and Noilly Pratt is a very different drink than Beefeater and Martini & Rossi. Using an olive as a garnish makes a different drink than using a twist of lemon or a cocktail onion. It is never enough simply to order a Martini -- one must be an aesthetician about the subject. Many martini drinkers, myself included, have given up on asking bartenders to make the cocktail, because most bartenders are blunderers who can't be trusted to make the drink cold enough, or use refrigerated Vermouth, or make a drink without slivers of ice floating in it, or pour the cocktail into a small enough glass that it retains its frigid coldness until the last drop.

The Manhattan is another classic. Made of rye whiskey, bitters, and vermouth, it is a drink for seasoned drinkers who have developed a taste for savory, rather than sweet, cocktails; the immature drinker will not like any of the three constituent ingredients, and will find the combination of the three to be an abomination. These drinkers should be led down the street and deposited at the nearest fad bar that caters to college girls, plying them with a mixture of too-sweet vodka drinks and pounding techno music so they can get drunk and take photos of themselves kissing their girlfriends, which they will post to their MySpace page the next day to demonstrate how "crazy" they are. Do your thing, girls, we drinkers have serious business to attend to.

So here we have a drink calling itself the Galliano Manhattan, but it has none of the ingredients of an actual Manhattan. Instead, it is made from 2 oz. blended whiskey and 1 oz. Liquore Galliano, poured over ice and stirred. Blended whiskeys are the sort that generally come from Canada and have pictures of Mounties on their labels, and they are used for making drinks like the 7&7, which tastes more like a soft drink than a cocktail, and whiskey and sour for drinkers too timid to pound down bourbon and sour. To swap out rye whiskey, which actually tastes a little like the bread that old Jewish men use to make their sandwiches, for blended whiskey is a little like asking Picasso to paint a picture of a unicorn using crayons. Also, the Galliano Manhattan is lacking vermouth, and that's a shame. Vermouth and brandy were the two most common ingredients in classic cocktails (along with absinthe), and people have lost their taste for these great ingredients.

Nonetheless, the Galliano Cocktail actually manages to taste like a Manhattan, and I'm not sure how. The combines liquors seems to bring out the flavors that Galliano shares with vermouth -- specifically, the aromatic spices, such as clove and cinnamon. In the meanwhile, the sweeter elements of Galliano, particularly the vanilla flavor, are strangely absent, so the Galliano Manhattan winds up being an unexpectedly savory cocktail. The rye flavor is notably absent, but otherwise the Galliano Manhattan actually is a fair approximation of a classic Manhattan.

But, then, why bother? Here we have a drink that manages to make Galliano taste like vermouth, and, frankly, even the best vermouth is much less expensive than Galliano. You might as well make an actual Manhattan, and enjoy the snobbish pleasure of trying out different bitters and rye whiskeys and vermouths to find the combination that most satisfies your rarefied tastes. The Galliano Manhattan is a bit like a magic trick -- an impressive and unexpected illusion of one thing seeming to be another, but not an example of legerdemain you would want to experience more than once.

More Galliano cocktails.

IT HAS BEEN more than 30 years since Elvis Presley died on August 16, 1977, and his memory has been compressed into a few details: jumpsuits, sideburns, hip swivels, Graceland, and peanut butter and banana sandwiches. All of these details are more complicated than we remember them -- well, all but for the sideburns. The peanut butter and banana sandwich that Elvis loved, as an example, was pan fried with a lot of butter and drizzled with honey, making it more delicious than you might have guessed, and, obviously, murder on the arteries. It can also be made with bacon, in case you and your heart are mortal enemies and you have sworn to kill the organ with cholesterol.

To honor the sandwich, Reese's has made a Peanut Butter Cup that includes banana flakes, and is probably healthier than the actual sandwich that Elvis ate. The Odd Ingester got his at an Easter brunch when they were passed out as gifts to children. The children were mortified and refused to eat them, and so the parents wound up with them, and also refused to eat them. Well, The Odd Ingester has eaten weirder, and has eaten and enjoyed an actual peanut butter and banana sandwich, and so into his mouth it went. The candy is actually quite good, although if The Odd Ingester were given the choice between this and the ordinary Peanut Butter Cup, he would go with the latter. There's just too much going on with the Peanut Butter and Banana Creme Cup -- the banana taste is a little too strong and competed with, rather than complimenting, the chocolate. Besides, there are better ways to commemorate The King than by eating a novelty candy. The Odd Ingester recommends watching King Creole, which is a terrific and critically underrated film. You probably won't though. You'll probably just throw on some fake sideburns, swivel your hips, and talk about Graceland in a phony Elvis accent. Well, go ahead, then. But do The Odd Ingester one favor when you do so: wear a jumpsuit.

More from the Odd Ingester!

EVERYONE'S FAVORITE pierced and tattooed sailor puppet teaches basic mixology. After a few drinks, Martin's pedagogic skills deteriorate.

Filmed on St. Patrick's Day, 2006 in Minneapolis. This was the first Sailor Martin movie made since the puppet was recovered from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Original footage was shot on a Kodak EasyShare z720 camera, and combined with footage from 1949's "Alcohol and the Human Body," 1959's "Signal 30", and a 1913 image of two trains crashing taking from a reel showing highlights of the California State Fair. It was edited using Apple's iMovie software.

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MERILL WOMACH WAS IN A CATASTROPHIC AIRPLANE CRASH IN 1961. The accident left him horrifically burned -- ably demonstrated by a nauseating photograph of the man's swollen and flayed head on this album's inner-sleeve. Many would interpret this as a punishment from a petty God, asking, as Job did, "Is not destruction to the wicked? and a strange punishment to the workers of iniquity?" Womach, however, took the loss of his face as a gift from God, launching a career as a gospel singer, promoting his business providing prerecorded organ music for funeral parlors, and even getting a movie out of the deal: 1975's He Restoreth My Soul.

If only we could all be so lucky.

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RICHARD WIDMARK, the gaunt and sunken-eyed movie actor who died yesterday at the age of 93, started his career haunting the shadows of crime films. His first screen role, as the giggling hoodlum Tommy Udo in 1947's Kiss of Death, was a nasty piece of work, and the film provided Widmark with one of the most notorious scenes in film history: He menaces an elderly woman in a wheelchair, and, when he discovers she has been lying to him, flings her down a flight of stairs. His performance as Udo made such an impression that he was nominated for an Academy Award and immediately signed to a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox.

Widmark was too versatile an actor, and too likable a man, to be typecast as a psychopath, but he had a knack for playing bad men and petty criminals. In his first decade acting in Hollywood he turned in dazzling performances as a hustler on the wrestling circuit in Night and the City, a pickpocket in Pickup on South Street, and a virulent racist in No Way Out. His performances in each of these films were superlative -- he could inhabit morally corrupt or ambiguous characters with an unexpected and decidedly offbeat sort of glamor. He was a great 1950s antihero: with his high shoulders and his lean frame, he almost looked like a Saul Bass illustration, and his dialogue was often peppered with hepcat slang. (He sneers the following line at a cop in Pickup on South Street: "Pack up the pitch with the charge or drive me back to my shack.") In the mid-20th century understanding of the word, Widmark was cool.

In 1950, Richard Widmark starred in a film that was something of an oddity in his early career. The film was called Panic in the Streets, and it concerns the efforts of a U.S. Public Health Service doctor and a skeptical New Orleans policeman to chase down a vicious hoodlum who murdered an illegal immigrant, but contracted pneumonic plague from the dead man. If the murderer is not caught and inoculated within a few days, he will touch off a plague -- but the men who are chasing him must do so under a cloak of extreme secrecy, or risk panicking the public.

It's a great premise for a film, and won an Oscar for its screenplay, but the film's director, Elia Kazan, made an unexpected casting choice. He cast Widmark as the Public Health Service doctor, rather than the sadistic murderer. As the killer, Kazan brought in a hulking former boxer whose face had been badly damaged during World War II, when he had bailed out of a burning B-24 Liberator. That actor, making his screen debut, was Jack Palance.

The film is a thrilling cat and mouse game. Widmark plays his character as earnest but boyish and inexperienced, and he is paired with Paul Douglas, a heavyset and irritable character actor, here playing a New Orleans cop who at first can hardly be bothered to extend any help at all to Widmark. The two seem badly overmatched in their attempts to locate Palance's character, Blackie, who has thrived for years in New Orleans' run-down, impoverished, immigrant, and frequently criminal demimonde. Blackie is utterly ruthless -- in one scene, in order to prevent the police from following him up a rickety flight of stairs in the back of a tenement, Blackie flings one of his own men over the side of the stairway and to his death, a move that eerily recalls Widmark's notorious debut performance.

The film is shot with noir's use of of deep shadows and odd angles, and some of the performances recall the acting in German expressionism, the style of filmmaking that most directly inspired noir. When Blackie kills the illegal immigrants, as an example, his men pursue the sick and terrified man through the dark streets of the Irish Channel, and the pursuers adopt hunched, almost wolflike poses. Later, as Blackie, himself now displaying the symptoms of plague, desperately attempts to evade the police by scurrying underneath a Mississippi River dock, and then drags himself up a long rope leading to a ship, he is filmed so that he seems rodentlike.

But Kazan also decided to experiment with a documentary sensibility in making Panic in the Streets, and so the entire film makes use of real New Orleans locations, and often uses nonactors in smaller roles. These touches lend the film an authenticity that noir of the period, which was generally shot on soundstages, lacked. In one scene, Widmark attempts to locate Blackie by going to the workplace and saloons of dockworkers, and the locations and the dockworkers are real. They are a weary and tough-looking group, and they initially give Widmark's inquiries a quiet brush off. But when Widmark starts flashing money and offering to pay off informants, a dockworker takes him aside and explains to him that he has just put his own life in jeopardy, and, man, you believe it.

Panic in the Streets never really caught on as a critical darling, probably because it is, primarily, a well-made potboiler with some interesting directorial flourishes. Kazan would make good use of the lesson he learned in this film in two later, and better regarded, movies, returning to New Orleans in 1951's A Streetcar Named Desire and revisiting the world of dockworkers in 1954's On the Waterfront. But the film is more than just a steppingstone to Kazan's most famous films. Panic in the Streets is full of exquisitely detailed human moments, some of which are filmed with a off-kilter rhythm that makes them feel improvised. Widmark and Paul Douglas's relationship is keenly observed, as both men develop a grudging respect and affection for each other; this parallels nicely with Blackie's relationship with his sidekick, played with typically neurotic mannerisms by Zero Mostel, but without any of his usually comic bluster. As the film progresses, Widmark and Douglas become a good team, effectively closing a net around Blackie, who grows sicker and whose relationship with Mostel erodes. Suddenly, Widmark's job of finding Palance starts seeming possible after all, and this classic storyline, in which the hero must complete an impossible task, is nearly perfectly handled.

Watch Panic in the Streets on Archive.org.
Watch Panic in the Streets on YouTube.

Listen to the theme music to Panic in the Streets:



Download an MP3 of the theme music to Panic in the Streets.

More of the weirdest and wildest films from the public domain.

I CAN ONLY THINK of one explanation for this product: There must have been a moment when a bald man began to wipe his hands with a wet nap and thought, man, I bet that would feel pretty good on my head. And they were right. Thanks to the Bald Guyz company, Head Wipes are now on the market, designed to clean and moisturize the hairless pate, and make it smell like green tea in the process.

I've tried this product. I didn't like the odor, which reminded me of one of those awful scented candles women buy when they are depressed. But there really is something cooling and relaxing about rubbing these damp cloths on the head. There's no way to be dignified about using the product -- you're always going to look like someone who is misapplying a moist towelette. But men do all sorts of shameful things that feel good, and, frankly, if you're a man who has come to terms with his own baldness to the extent that you're comfortable purchasing this item, you can probably deal with the bewildered stares when you use it.

SURE, LOOKING AT BILL MOSS NOW, in his orange suit and pink string tie, it's easy to think he looks a little silly. But look at his beatific smile and those wicked sunglasses. He's the sort of man who can pour a smooth Chivas and Coke, ask a few telling questions about your horoscope sign, and throw some Little Anthony and the Imperials on the 8-track. He's the sort of man who drives a long white Cadillac with gold rims, and his house is decorated with life-sized ebony sculptures of panthers. Looking at him, you just know he smokes elegant cigarillos and flashes an unexpected gold tooth when he smiles, and he carries a battered paperback copy of Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo in his hip pocket. When Pam Grier is in town, they say she always meets him for a drink, and it's rumored that he once put a cracker cop in the hospital when he was pulled over on a phony speeding ticket and roughed up.

When Bill Moss says it's time to go to church, baby, it is time to go.

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THERE ARE NO STRIPPERS anymore. Not like there used to be. Not at the strip club that employs me, anyway. Every single one of them is in it for a book or a movie deal. Yes, the front of the house work is still mostly the same: 10-minutes of pole and floor work, followed by hour-long blocks of lap dances. But backstage things have changed. Nobody stands on the roof of the club anymore, using their breaks to chain smoke and scream at their boyfriends through cell phones. Nobody ducks into the bathroom anymore for a quick bump of cocaine. There are no fistfights, not like there used to be. I can't remember the last time a spurned lover pushed his way backstage and had a teary scene while all the other strippers laughed at him. And I miss those days.

No. Backstage at the strip clubs, the strippers all have notebooks and pens at the ready, or carry digital recorders, or keep laptop computers charging on the makeup tables. During their breaks, they rush back to update their blogs, or make quick calls to their agents to see how the bidding war on their journal is going, or meet with reporters for quick interviews. It's all about the interviews. Strippers nowadays even interview each other. Constantly. They borrow anecdotes from each other's lives, or use other strippers as colorful characters in their teleplays, or quiz each other about their favorite movies, and books, and sex positions, and men, which they then compile into bullet-pointed columns that they sell to Maxim and Esquire. There was a time when strippers were easily offended by each other, and would launch themselves into two-fisted battles and hair-pulling contests in response to a single eye-roll. Nowadays, they behave with mechanical good manners, groomed into them by an army of publicists, and the only fight I have seen in six months came when a stripper appeared as a political analyst on Face of the Nation and did not properly credit a quote from another stripper about information asymmetry.

And this has encouraged a new type of audience to flood the strip clubs. It used to be men would look for certain types that appealed to them. One might like big-haired brunettes who danced to heavy metal music, another might enjoy the company of very skinny redheads with tiny boobs, and a third might go for black chicks. They're still around, but they are being edged out by reedy young hipsters in heavy rimmed glasses who ask to see your résumé, CV, and press clippings before agreeing to a lap dance. They figure if you haven't got a column in Cosmopolitan yet, you must not be much of a stripper. These men make the job especially hard for people like me, who got into stripping for the fast money and the cheap drugs, and have no ambitions to use our career as steppingstone to media superstardom.

It's not through lack of opportunity. I've been approached by agents. They tell me I'm a natural. After all, I can offer a unique perspective on the world of stripping. I am, they needlessly remind me, a man, and in the cutthroat world of female exotic dancers, that gives me an edge.

This is true. I've always had that edge. Having a g-string clad man bumping and grinding at a titty bar was unheard of when I was hired at Sally Mae's, almost two decades ago. I was under the mistaken impression that Sally Mae's hired male strippers, and the manager at the time, an elderly alcoholic with failing vision, mistook me for a tall and homely lesbian. It took him almost a month to realize his error, and by that time I had become a fixture at the Northeast Minneapolis strip club. The other dancers liked me, because I was then, as I am now, a party boy. So, of course, I could write a book about my two decades as a stripper, and it would be filled with tales of late-night drunken street fights, week-long drug binges, and bisexual orgies. Agents assure me there is a market for this sort of writing, and that a book could be quickly spun into a movie deal, and they remind me that four of the last five Academy Award winners for screenwriting have been former strippers.

All I would have to do is tell my own story -- to a ghost writer, if necessary. I should tell of my unlikely success in the field, the agents insist. How, when I began, the audience would hoot derisively at me when I went out to dance, loudly mocking me and my signature song, "Bobo's Party" by Melanie ("Once I bought a curious bottle,
Once I bought a bottle for fun / Tell me what you gonna do with the bottle / When the curiosity's done.") How I ignored the taunts of the patrons and gamely performed my carefully choreographed routine, which consisted mostly of 70s dance moves I learned from syndicated episodes of Soul Train, including the Monkey Hustle, the Marcus Garvey Strut, and the Philly Bus Stop. Agents have told me I must relate how the strip club's regular dancers watched in terror backstage, certain that my noisily disapproving audience would storm the catwalk and string me up from the pole. And, yet, when the song wound down and the deejay shouted my name over the system, thunderous applause broke out in Sally Mae's, and the club's drunk and working class patrons threw wadded up dollar bills at me.

Word quickly spread about me, and the audience at Sally Mae's doubled. At first, people enjoyed the novelty. Old men would corner me between dances and flash toothless grins at me, then nudge me with their elbows and ask if I ever dipped my pen in company ink. (I did, I told them, eliciting approving slaps on the back.) Frat boys would prankishly buy each other lap dances from me, only to return the next night, sheepishly admitting that although they were not gay, I give one hell of a lap dance. I would console them and inform them that I am not gay either, and we would commiserate about a world in which two straight guys can't give each other lap dances without people making assumptions. They would ply me with $20 glasses of champagne, squeeze my shoulder, and, when drunk enough, quietly ask for another lap dance. Some of those frat boys are still regular customers of mine. In fact, I was best man at one of their weddings.

My audience was large and diverse. There was a long haul trucker who had my portrait painted on the side of his truck and would write me long, lonely letters from the road. There was a group of 20 meat packers who would crowd the club every Sunday and sing along to my theme song and raucously stomp their feet on the ground as I performed, whistling between their teeth. Several of these men regularly sent me flowers and chocolates backstage. There was even a well-known Minnesota politician whose bodyguards would sneak him in to the club through the back and hustle him into a VIP room, where I would perform private dances for him. He always brought a fresh bottle of brandy, and we would drink together out of snifters, smoke cigars, and then Indian wrestle for a while. He broke down into tears one night, and I held him for a long time as he confessed that I was the only man with whom he felt he could truly be himself.

These are the sort of stories that get agents very excited, and they don't understand when I politely decline their offers of representation. After all, strippers have so completely stormed the world of publishing that earlier this month Rolling Stone Magazine invented a new word for exotic dancers with literary ambitions: The Titterati. Publishing houses troll the internet in search of unsigned strippers with blogs, and six books on this month's New York Times Best Sellers list were written by strippers. The agents tell me that the market has never been hotter, and they throw promises of money and fame at me. Some accuse me of playing hard-to-get, of pretending not to be interested in order to drive my prices up. They compliment me on my business savvy. Some agents come with offers in hand, including a six-figure advance check and a beach house in Malibu. But I honestly don't want any of it.

The agents demand to know why. I'll tell you why. I've had a sample of fame and money already, and I think more than two weeks of it might kill me. It was years ago, and I don't speak of it, so it has been forgotten, although if you dig through back issues of Minneapolis's newsweekly, in an issue from May of 1988, you'll find a feature story that details how Hollywood courted me. There was a lot of attention on Minneapolis at the time, thanks to a number of R&B acts that charted nationally, and I was a featured dancer in a video by Ta Mara and the Seen. A casting agent by the name of Morris Feldshuh saw the video and flew me out to Los Angeles, where he put me up in his house in the Hollywood Hills.

Morris was 26 and fancied himself an enfant terrible. He specialized in getting porn actresses into feature films. There wasn't much to it, really: Morris was the son of a porn producer, Zimmie Feldshuh, and acted as a sort of coke-fueled yenta to young Hollywood. Let's say that a rising young actor had developed a crush on a porn starlet -- well, all he had to do was swing by one of Morris's frequent parties. Even if the starlet wasn't at the party, the budding screen star could whisper a few words in Morris's ear and arrangements would be made. A few months later, on the set of that movie star's next feature film, the porn starlet would find herself in a small but flashy cameo, usually with her top off. And Morris would end up with a movie credit and a nice paycheck.

Morris had an idea he could get me a role in an Al Pacino movie that was then being cast, Sea of Love; it was the role that eventually went to Paul Calderon. Morris's contacts were good enough that I spent a solid two weeks meeting with producers and doing screen tests. I even met with Pacino briefly, who seemed fascinated by me and insisted I teach him a few dance moves. It was a very exciting time for me, but also a perilous time.

Morris was a small man with a giant Jewish afro, and he cultivated an aura of danger. My first night in Hollywood, on a tour of his house, he showed me the contents of one of his walk-in closets. It was filled with automatic weapons and bags of cocaine, and he gregariously informed me that I could take whatever I wanted from the closet. He also gave me the keys to his spare car. He drove a 1997 Porsche Turbo S, but he also owned a 1992 Maserati Spyder, and this was the car I used to get from place to place in LA. Morris threw parties almost every night, which suited me, and I was a hit. The porn starlets loved me. Most of them had second careers as strippers, making sizable incomes touring the country's strip clubs, as I could talk shop with them. We had long and very serious discussions about the pros and cons of vinyl high-heel boots, the importance of tipping your deejay, and how to work a pole when you've just consumed three shots of Goldschläger. In the meanwhile, I could offer Morris's movie star guests tips on how to treat an adult entertainer. They offered me lines of coke and pressed up against me, asking cautious and intimate questions. Would it be weird for them to ask a porn starlet if they could visit her on the set? After a hard day of work, would the porn actresses be too tired for sex? Was it unreasonable, if you were in a relationship with a porn actress, to ask that she not have anal sex with her coworkers, but reserve that as something special for her boyfriend?

After the parties, I would head out with a group of starlets, or a group of movie actors, or both, to crawl Hollywood's nightclubs. Morris would usually beg off, making vague excuses and hinting at shady business transactions that he had to broker. And so into the Maserati I would go, usually with two or three intoxicated women clutching half-empty bottles of Cristal, and we would race down Sunset Boulevard or speed to the coast to skinny dip in the Pacific. It was often dawn before I returned to Morris's house, and I would have just enough time to shower and do a quick line before I was off to meet with another producer of the Pacino movie.

On the morning of May 29, I staggered in to Morris Felshuh's house at 7:15 am, and found Morris duct taped to a chair in the entryway. His hands had been bound with duct tape, and duct tape covered his mouth. Blood caked his nose, which whistled painfully as he drew fast, labored breaths. He stared up at me, helpless and terrified. I stood opposite him, bewildered. Then Morris glanced over to his right, to the living room. Two men stood in there, both with stockings over their heads. Both men were armed, one with a 9mm pistol, the other with a shotgun. One noticed me and stopped talking, and the other turned to look.

They both walked into the entryway, staring at me. One, the one with the shotgun, spoke: Yes?

What is this? I asked.

It's exactly what you think it is, the man with the shotgun said.

The men stared at me, perplexed.

The man with the pistol asked me a question: Are you a movie star?

No, I answered. Just a stripper.

I didn't think you looked familiar, he said. Then he said: Well, maybe it is time you got going.

I turned and walked out the door. I drove the 1992 Maserati Spyder to the airport and left it there, and then caught the next airplane back to Minneapolis. I never heard from Morris again, and I never checked to see what had become of him. When I returned to Sally Mae's the other dancers asked me about Hollywood, and I gave noncommittal answers and told them I didn't think it was a town I would want to spend much time in. My regular customers were happy to see me back, and I returned to the routine of dancing. After a while, people forgot that I ever went to Los Angeles.

Minneapolis is a good town for a party boy like me, especially as I near the age of 40. I can still close down bars. I can still end my shift at the strip club by going to a hotel with the other dancers and five bottles of Jägermeister, and not leave until every bottle is empty. I can still hold my own in a fist fight. I can still work a pole, and I'm still a brilliant lap dancer. I have fans in Minneapolis, and have made lifelong friends. I don't know how long I can do this, but I know I won't die doing it.

This sudden fad for strippers-turned-writers will pass, and a new group of writers will find themselves riding the zeitgeist. Perhaps the next group of bestselling novelists and award-winning screenwriters will rise from the ranks of meth dealers, or contract killers, or prison bitches. And we strippers will go back to what we do best: dancing for men, brawling backstage, partying all night, and consuming massive amounts of drugs and alcohol. Years from now, we'll look back on this time with puzzlement, remembering the brief period when exotic dancers defined the nation's reading habits. And there will be newer strippers, who missed it, and they will quiz the older strippers, fascinated by their brief flirtation with literary superstardom. And some will ask me about my experiences, and I will tell them that I never wanted to get published. And they will ask why, and I won't bother to answer.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

Footage of Sailor Martin is artfully mixed in with the 1957 educational documentary As Boys Grows, as Sailor Martin is given the task of teaching sex education to a group of schoolboys -- a task he fulfills by babbling misapprehensions about the process of coitus and urban myths about the human body.

Original footage shot in New Orleans in 2005 on a Kodak z730 and edited using Apple's iMovie software.

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ITEM TWO in our collection of ski-themed folk music. In this instance, guitar player Ray Conrad has made the tragic mistake of strumming his tiny guitar on his way up the slopes, and has plunged to his death. How many folk singers must we lose this way?

Word is, this is how Sonny Bono went.

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SOMETHING HAPPENED IN THE 1970s that caused Americans, seemingly as a group, to reject reason and embrace nonsense. The cliché of the era has hairy chested, gold chain-wearing swingers inquiring about astrological signs at discotheques, but that was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Americans were playing Mozart for their houseplants, sharpening their razors by leaving them overnight in plastic pyramids, avidly studying the fictionalized anthropology of Peruvian shamanism written by Carlos Castaneda, and screaming their neurosis away thanks to the groundbreaking and empirically unsupported psychological theories of Arthur Janov. Listing the fad pseudosciences that gained popular support would be a Herculean task, although, in fact, one television show from the era did a pretty good job at documenting the era's fascination with mumbo jumbo. That show was called In Search Of ..., and it ran for six seasons, from 1976 to 1982. During that time, it took a mostly uncritical look at Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, killer bees, psychic detectives, and Pacific shark worshippers. Initially hosted by Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone, the show found a new host after Serling's death. That narrator was Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner's costar from Star Trek.

The two episodes Serling narrated were based on the highly spurious claims of Swiss author Erich von Däniken, who produced a series of books investigating the possibility that human history is dotted with visitations from space aliens, and it was a theme In Search Of ... would return to numerous times during its broadcast history. Von Däniken's extraordinary claims also made their way to film at the hands of an Austrian director named Harald Reinl, who actually managed to garner an Academy Award nomination for his first stab at adapting von Däniken to the screen, 1970s Chariots of the Gods. In 1976, he produced yet another feature film on the subject, Mysteries of the Gods, and, perhaps inspired by the success of the Nimoy-hosted In Search Of ..., called upon William Shatner to act as the film's narrator.

The film is a mixture of real science and hooey, as pseudoscience often is. Shatner here is often seen with pillowy mounds of windswept hair, thick sideburns, and a yellow shirt with an alarmingly large collar, which Shatner wears up as though he were Dracula or Dr. Strange. In this ensemble, he travels the country, interviewing NASA scientists and certifiable wackos with an earnestness that suggests the he can't tell the difference between one or the other, which would make him a typical American in 1976. Shatner leans on a control panel in the ampitheater-sized firing room at Kennedy Space Center, where he interrogates Jesco von Puttkamer, a German-born rocket engineer who was then Senior Staff Scientist of Advanced Programs of Space Flight at NASA. Puttkamer is cautiously sympathetic to von Däniken's work -- he was a science fiction author himself, and would later go on to advise Gene Roddenberry in the making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Von Puttkamer, a rather imposing man with a dark mustache and an elegant pompadour of gray hair (come to think of it, he also resembles Dr. Strange), eloquently makes the case that extraterrestrial life is a mathematical certainty, and allows the possibility that a sufficiently advanced alien civilization might have found a way to visit the earth. Von Puttkamer grounds his observations in real science, and, for a moment, Mysteries of the Gods has the feel of a movie rooted in the real and genuinely fascinating possibilities of our vast universe.

Later, Shatner goes on to visit Dennis William Hauck, director of the North American International UFO Registry, who has made a cottage industry out of New Age subjects, publishing books on alchemy and hauntings. Hauck has also written three books about Shatner himself, including one called Captain Quirk that purports to be about Shatner's own UFO abduction experience in the Mojave Dessert shortly after Star Trek was canceled. Shatner treats Hauck's pronouncements with the same grave seriousness he affected when interviewing von Puttkamer, and, to the author's credit, he betrays a certain amount of skepticism, even showing Shatner slides of purported UFO photographs that turned out to be natural phenomenon.

But Hauck will be the last trace of skepticism in the film. Shatner meets with Anna Le Guillon Mitchell-Hedges, owner of the famed Mitchell-Hedges skull, a rather marvelous curiosity carved out of crystalline quartz. As Shatner holds the heavy object appreciatively, the woman peppers him with a series of tall tales about the skull, insisting that she discovered it under a collapsed altar inside a temple in Lubaantun in British Honduras, which she insists had been proven to have been crafted without metal tools and is 3,600 years old. These are the sorts of claims that cause psedoscientists to go into a speculating frenzy, as so perfect an objet d'art seems impossible to have been fashioned by ancient Mayans without alien assistance -- especially when Mitchell-Hedges goes on to claim that the skull possesses supernatural powers, even killing an Australian girl who mocked it.

Unfortunately, her tales are entirely unsupported by any documentary evidence, and were later refuted by outside research that demonstrated the skull was probably carved by jewelers equipment in Germany in the 19th century, and purchased by Mitchell-Hedges' father from a London art dealer sometime around 1944. But the film takes Mitchell-Hedges' claims at face value, despite the fact that they are extraordinary, and should, therefore, demand extraordinary proof.

Worse still, Shatner culminates the film by interviewing fraud psychic Jeane Dixon, who William Shatner introduces as having uncanny foresight, crediting her with predicting the Kennedy assassination. In fact, Dixon did predict that a Democratic president (unnamed in her prediction) would be assassinated in office, but in 1960 she predicted that Kennedy would not win the presidency. Dixon also predicted that World War III would begin in 1958 and that the Soviet Union would land the first man on the moon. Nonetheless, Shatner treats the older woman with a flirty deference, asking her about claims she made in the National Enquirer that aliens would land in a major city in the late 70s. She states boldly that she is certain of her prediction, and, of course, she was wrong.

There's not much to this film to recommend it, except as a document of one particular sampling of snake oil popular during the 70s. However, it suggests an unexplored aspect of Shatner's own autobiography -- that during the 1970s, when he was struggling to find work after being typecast as Captain Kirk, Shatner believed himself to have had actual contact with extraterrestrials, and that this film is, in part, an effort by the actor to understand the meaning of this experience. Whether Shatner was ever actually abducted by aliens seems a moot point. There is something unexpectedly touching about the story, in that Shatner, the actor who had helmed the fictional starship in the first adult work of science fiction on network television, after the show's cancellation and at the moment when his future seemed most uncertain, had found an audience in the stars.

More films of William Shatner.

YOU CAN THANK vinyl oddities for chasing down a preciously forgotten subgenre of the American popular music scene: folk songs about skiing. Bob Gibson -- he's the cast-wearing, besweatered, banjo-playing fellow in the back here -- has written and performed 11 songs about slaloming down powder-covered peaks, bearing titles such as "Ski Patrol," "Skiin' in the Mornin'," and "Skol to the Skiier."

None of these songs tell the story presented on his LP cover, in which Gibson's girlfriend, repulsed by his broken leg and drunk on the cognac worn around the neck of a nearby St. Bernard, has abandoned the folk singer to take up bestiality.

One last note: Good God, look at that woman's sweater! Who ever wore a turtleneck of such preposterous proportions! It doesn't look like a sweater so much as a powder blue volcano that has somehow managed to vomit up the God-like visage of a pug-faced redhead. Keep her drunk on Hennessy and keep bringing her dog-lovers, or she surely will destroy the mountain, and that will be another ski season ruined.

More Vinyl Oddities.

SAILOR MARTIN is edited into an undated stag movie, where he leers at the actress and eventually tries to get in on the action. The actress is reputed to be none other than pin-up queen Bettie Page, but almost certainly isn't. Sailor Martin footage shot in New Orleans in 2005 on a Kodak EasyShare z730, edited using Apple's iMovie software.

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AN ALBUM OF raucous, not-especially-well-done recordings of popular standards such as "My Gal Sal" and "Put on Your Old Grey Bonnet," performed by a band that sounds as though they never really learned the songs and sung by an unskilled voice who seems to have encouraged a room filled with exhausted New Year's Eve revelers to join in.

It's easy to believe, repeatedly played at top volume, this LP would bring around a sour-faced landlady and the sheriff's department, as the cover suggests. But there's something oddly charming about the recordings -- it actually sounds as though everyone involved is too drunk and having too much damn fun to care what they sound like.

Which is exactly right. From the back cover, describing the making of this album: "The flat slowly filled with confused-looking people who made beelines for the food and drink according to their inclinations. While much quaffing of ubiquitous comestibles was going on, Don Costa, the music director of this session, furtively crept around the room setting up microphones and shoving song sheets into those hands not filled with glasses or meatballs."

It's tempting to repeat this experiment. It's unlikely that contemporary partygoers would be able to join in on a rousing chorus of "By the Light of the Silvery Moon," but perhaps they could be enjoined to sing along to some power ballads from the Eighties. Imagine a dozen or so drunken party guests howling along to Night Ranger's "Sister Christian."

If that didn't bring an irate landlady clutching a torn lease agreement, it's hard to imagine what would.

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LET ME INTRODUCE yet another feature to this blog, Max "Bunny" Sparber's Jet Pack Tour of the World. As you can tell from the photos, I have recently acquired a small but very powerful jet pack, which, when I have the time, I will use to visit interesting locations around the world. We begin in Bemidji, MN, which claims to be the home of the legendary giant lumberjack, Paul Bunyan. In the photo above, you can see me jetting by the city's enormous statue of Bunyan and his giant blue ox, Babe.

Below you will see photos of me jetting past Lucette Diana Kensack, Bunyan's 17-foot-tall girlfriend, in Hackensack, as well an enormous statue of a Native American outside an Indian-themed gift shop in Bemidji. All pictures can be clicked on to expand.



MORE FROM THE JET PACK TOUR!

THERE IS A STORE in Royalton, MN called Treasure City. In it, you will find aisle after aisle of the sort of stuff that might once have been found in the back of comic books, such as whoopie cushions, slingshots, stuffed piranhas, and an unexpectedly large selection of nunchucks. It was here that The Odd Ingester purchased an item called Formula Sour, a liquid candy that comes in a test tube. The candy's label has a series of warnings on it: Shock your buds! Can u handle it?

The Odd Ingester is not one to shy aware from a dare from candy. The ingredients seemed promising: malic acid, which is quite tart, and citric acid, which is the stuff that makes lemons and limes mouth-puckering. So, when The Odd Ingester had properly steeled himself for the shock, he dumped a glob of Formula Sour's thick green fluid down his throat and awaited the response, which is documented in photos below.

How is it? Well, if have you ever had the experience of purchasing a hot sauce and then becoming terrified of it, and hiding it in a drawer, and then avoiding the drawer for a few weeks, and then getting drunk and thinking, all right, I'm feeling crazy, and then pouring the hot sauce down your throat, and then realizing that it just isn't very hot at all and you have worked yourself up for nothing? Same thing with this candy, except substitute "sour" for "hot."

A week or so ago, The Odd Ingester accidentally ate a Sweet Tart after brushing his teeth, and the resulting sourness had him thinking he was going to need to be hospitalized. That experience made Formula Sour seem like weak tea in comparison. Sure, there is a hint of sour, but it's gentle; a fresh grapefruit produces more of an effect. You'll notice in the photos that The Odd Ingester is making a face of displeasure -- that is due to the taste of the candy, which is not very pleasant. It rather tastes like a Sour Patch Kid that has been liquefied and then mixed with nylon.



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FOR SOME PEOPLE, the Seventies will forever be remembered as a time when lesbian Jewish folksingers roller skated in tuxedos.

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This second Sailor Martin film remixes the 1950 educational documentary What Makes a Good Party with Sailor Martin's own disruptive partygoing behavior. Original footage shot in New Orleans in 2005 with a Kodak EasyShare z730 camera and edited with Apple's iMovie software. Additional cast: Courtney Mault.

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THE COVER OF THIS LP tells you everything you need to know about The Goldwaters. Actually, the band's matching red sweaters, emblazoned with the chemical symbols for gold and water, tell you everything you need to know. These are people who have mistaken clever for funny. Additionally, as these symbols were commonly used as a bumper sticker in support of Barry Goldwater's failed 1964 presidential campaign, we know that this group of four young men (all college boys, one a valedictorian!) weren't terribly original.

The Goldwaters sing folk songs in that spare, reedy way that was so popular back in the Sixties, backed by banjo and guitar and incorporating simple two- or three-part harmonies. But, in what I am sure they mistook for a vicious act of satire, the folk songs they sing favor invading Cuba and rail against the creation of a welfare state.

This is only funny if you find something inherently hilarious about using folk music -- at the time a medium of leftist protest -- to promote conservative talking points. Even still, you'd have to admit the the premise is rather thin for an entire LP's worth of song, even with the band engaging in such "comical" skits as pretending to be beatniks and proclaiming that they intend to live on government handouts. This may explain why the Goldwaters found it necessary to add a laugh track to their album: At least that way they could guarantee that somebody was laughing.

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BUT FOR A FEW EXPERIMENTS, this is the first proper Sailor Martin short film. It's pretty simple, and looks quite primitive to me now, as it was the first time I had tried my hand at editing Sailor Martin into pre-existing footage.

Everybody's favorite tattooed and multiply pierced ventriloquist dummy is remixed into scenes from the trailer for the 1950 film The Flying Saucer. Footage of Sailor Martin was shot in New Orleans in 2005 using a Kodak EasyShare z730 camera and the footage was edited together using Apple's iMovie software.

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Sailor Martin is a bawdy, hard-drinking, hard-living ventriloquist dummy styled after tattooed sideshow wild men (such as Omi the Great). Sailor Martin was originally designed by vent figure-maker Dan Payes and purchased by myself in 2005, when I repainted him with Sailor Jerry tattoos and began to act as his puppeteer.

Sailor Martin takes his named from a character in William Lindsay Gresham's novel Nightmare Alley. He appeared on the streets of New Orleans in 2005, telling dirty jokes to passers-by in the French Quarter. Here he also had occasion to open for Bustout Burlesque, telling obscene tales from the stage while dancing girls slipped into their pasties and g-strings backstage. Sailor Martin was left behind in New Orleans in the chaos following Hurricane Katrina, but was recovered, unharmed, some months later. He now resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Sailor Martin has starred in a series of short movies, all of which will be embedded in this site for your viewing pleasure. In them, Sailor Martin interacts with characters from old educational documentaries found at Archive.org's remarkable Prelinger Archives. As a result, Sailor Martin has found himself teaching a class on sex education (quite badly), peeping in on old stag films, and offering advice on making cocktails.

Look for my catalog of Sailor Martin films and related projects to appear here over the next few weeks.

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YES IT IS. It's pregnant women on swings.

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THERE WAS NOT MUCH of an art film scene in the United States in 1955. Art house theaters existed, yes, but they tended to specialize in European fare, films by Bergman and Fellini. American filmmaking had long been constrained by the studio system, which, until the late 40s, had a literal monopoly on movie theaters. Independently shot films tended to be made by exploitation merchants, looking to make a quick buck with cheaply made genre films, and generally distributing them to drive-in theaters. There just wasn't much of a market for self-consciously avant garde filmmaking, although tantalizing hints of the artistic possibilities of films would sometimes work their way into mainstream films, thanks to visionary directors, as well as subtly informing low-budget films, whose creators sometimes had unexpected artistic ambitions.

This makes the 1955 film Dementia quite an oddity. The film, a nightmarish tale of a murderous woman's journey through the back alleys of Hollywood at night, is self-consciously experimental. There is no audible dialogue in the film (although a later edit, retitled Daughter of Horror, added in occasional, and unnecessary, narration, read by a young Ed McMahon). Characters can be seen to whisper to each other, but the soundtrack in primarily a symphony of foley work (footsteps, laughs, slamming doors) and a disquieting soundtrack by Modernist composer George Antheil, which includes frequent theremin-like vocalizations by Marni Nixon.

The film follows an unnamed woman, dubbed The Gamine in the credits and played by Adrienne Barrett, and she is short-haired, short-statured, and has a peculiar, lop-sided grin. She wakes from a nightmare, retrieves a switchblade, and heads out for a night on the town. The film was lensed by William C. Thompson, a famously color-blind cinematographer with an unfairly tarnished reputation, thanks to having been cinematographer for Dwayn Esper's Maniac and almost all of Ed Wood's films, including Glen or Glenda and Plan Nine from Outer Space. Despite his unsavory associations, Thompson could really frame a black and white shot, and Dementia is often exquisite.

The movie superficially resembled noir, in the way the David Lynch's films often do, and Dementia borrows the look of the crime film. Hollywood has never looked grimmer, a city of side streets and long shadows, and Thomson's camera is notably expressive. He often crowds the frame, so that The Gamine is literally boxed into her environment, and the people that surround her are generally grotesque, leering creatures. Men in this movie have a predatory quality, physically blocking the Gamine's way, sometimes lunging out a seizing her -- a hobo who wraps himself around her is interrupted by a policeman, who beats him viciously.

Newspapers often blow into the frame, all with the same screaming headline about a horrific stabbing; The Gamine first sees this story when a laughing newsboy shows it to her, and she grins in response. (The newsboy, uncredited, was played by Angelo Rossitto, and he deserves to be mentioned; the actor, who was a dwarf, had an impressively long career in Hollywood dating all the way back to 1927. He appeared as the knife-wielding Angelo in Tod Browning's Freaks, but might be best remembered for his performance as the rebellious "Master" half of Master-Blaster in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome; he also happened to actually own a news stand.) The Gamine meets with an oily, mustached lothario, and, wordlessly, the film suggests the man is a pimp and The Gamine a prostitute. After some bargaining, she climbs into a car with a tumescent rich man, played by character actor Bruno VeSota, who was a favorite of Roger Corman, and who coproduced (and, by some accounts, wrote and directed) Dementia.

The rich man takes The Gamine back to his apartment, on the sixth floor of a cavernous building; as he passes through the enormous lobby, he passes a washerwoman scrubbing the floor. He pauses in front of her, removes his cigar, and deliberately drops it directly in front of her, onto the spot she has just cleaned. It is a quietly vicious moment, an expression of pure contempt. It won't be long before the rich man is dead at the hands of The Gamine, who still has her switchblade on hand.

The rest of the film has The Gamine running from the police, including an extended, and breathtaking, sequence in which she flees through the pitch black streets of Hollywood with a patrol car behind her, picking her out in the darkness with its spotlight. She winds up hiding out in a jazz club, where West Coast jazz great Shorty Rogers plays a wild post-bop number as the jazzbos in the club go wild. One patron, played by an uncredited Shelley Berman, lies on a stairwell and shakes his head wildly, while nearby, an unctuous ladies man sits between two women, alternating passionate kisses between each of his dates.

These brief descriptions don't do justice to how essentially weird the film is, and how sustained its sense of sexual menace is, and, when the film was released, censors didn't know what to do with it. It looks and feels like a crime film, and so they applied the standards of a crime film to Dementia, and refused to release it. The film's suggestions of drug use and sexual impropriety was more than they could stand, and its very real violence repelled them (in one scene, the Gamine must reclaim a locket from a dead man's hands; his fist is locked in rigor mortis, so she simply cuts the entire hand off.) The film languished for years, and eventually was purchased by a company called Exploitation Pictures Incorporated, who trimmed out some of the violence and added McMahon's ham-fisted narration; this version is famous as the film that teenagers watch when a gelatinous monster attacks in the film The Blob.

The story behind the film remains somewhat mysterious -- it is credited to a man named John Parker, who also gets production credit, but his work as writer and director has been disputed; if it was his film, Dementia was the first and only film he ever made. I'm not sure it is necessary to know the story behind Dementia, though; although it looks like noir, it is sui generis, the only example of its kind. It is undeniably an art films, made at a time when such a thing didn't exist in the United States. And, like the films of David Lynch, the film is improved by its sense of being mysterious and unexplainable. Some films suffer at the hands of too much explanation.

Watch Dementia at Archive.org.
Watch Dementia at YouTube.
Watch Dementia at Brightcove.

Listen to "New Concepts in Modern Sound" by Shorty Rogers:



Download an MP3 of "New Concepts in Modern Sound" by Shorty Rogers.

More of the weirdest and wildest films from the public domain.

"YOU ACT SCENES opposite your favorite star," proclaims this cover of this LP, and one must wonder, for whom was "Slapsy" Maxie Rosenbloom a favorite star? Sure, the pugilist-turned-actor had an impressive resume of playing washed-up boxers and Damon Runyon-style petty criminals, but, honestly, was there anyone who watched The Stork Pays Off, Wine, Women and Bong, or Cottonpickin' Chickenpickers and thought, "Just can't get enough Slapsy"?

There must have been some. Enough to justify this record, at least, part of a series that included such legitimate film luminaries as Cesar Romero, George Raft, and Paulette Goddard. The records were simple acting exercises: They came with their own scripts, and the dialog was divided up between the record purchaser and the movie star, so you could actually perform a scene with, say, Tallulah Bankhead without having to move to Hollywood, get an agent, become bisexual, and develop an expensive cocaine habit.

This LP has "Slapsy" playing his usual assortment of cant-slinging hoods and thick-speaking boxers, and the resulting scenes are sometimes unintentionally hilarious, such as this one, in which the record buyer, playing "Joey," gets to repeatedly backhand Maxie Rosenbloom, playing "Al." The dialog is as follows:

ALNo -- no, Joey. I didn't steal no money. (crying) I did it for you, Joey -- I did it for you.

SOUND: Joey slaps Al. Al cries in hurt pain.

JOEYAre you gonna tell me the truth?

ALWhat do you want me to tell you?

JOEYI want you to tell me where you were this morning. I can't protect you anymore, Al. Not any more. This time it's murder.

ALJoey -- I didn't murder nobody!

JOEYLiar! (SOUND: Joey slaps Al) Liar! (SOUND: Joey slaps Al) Liar! (SOUND: Joey slaps Al)

One expects that there is a terrific business opportunity in this scene. Just rerecord it with a variety of contemporary performers reading Rosenbloom's part, and sell the CD. Who wouldn't want to pay good money to perform a dialog in which they get to violently abuse Pauly Shore, as one example, or Paris Hilton, or Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Mel Gibson, or whatever celeb you despise the most.

It's a million dollar idea, if you think about it.

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I AM LISTING this film under its original title, rather than the title it was given when it was distributed in the United States. Here in the U.S., it was called Horror Hotel, and that's how you will find it listed on most online video sites, but that is a blunt and unimaginative title. The City of the Dead is a far more atmospheric title, and appropriate, because this film is almost nothing but atmosphere.

It's story is so slight it can be summed up in a few sentences: College girl goes to small New England town to research a historic witch trial. Girl disappears. Brother goes to investigate. New England town is still full of witches. They fight in a cemetery. The end. But that capsule summary doesn't give a sense of the real oddness of the film, some of it deliberate, some of it accidental.

The whole of the film was shot on a soundstage, even external scenes, and so the entire New England town is represented by a few rickety buildings. The smallness of the set is cleverly covered by shooting every scene as though it were night, and then not so cleverly covering the town in fog. There is too much fog in Whitewood, the movie's fictional town. It's an ever present and impossibly thick pea soup, hugging the ground and embracing the film's characters. City of the Dead's hapless heroine, played by a perk young blond actress named Venetia Stevenson, drives through this fog at the start of the film, and continually passes figures shrouded in the fog, just waiting by the side of the road. Everyone else in the film, when driving, will pass through identical fog and see identical figures, an effect that is initially creepy until you realize that some of them are not meant to be menacing. One, for instance, is a gas station owner who exists only to give directions to Whitewood, coupled with stern warnings ("They don't like strangers there!"), and after a while, you get to wondering why this fellow hangs out in the fog so much.

Stranger still, although the film is set in the Eastern United States, it was filmed at the Shepperton Studios in Surrey, England, and almost the entire cast is English, including Hammer film star Christopher Lee as a menacing college professor. They all gamely pretend to be Americans, and affect, with more or less success, the Boston Brahman accent of William F. Buckley. The South Africa-born Dennis Lotis, as the older brother, fails spectacularly, but even with the actors who sound legitimately American have a certain mannered quality to their speech. This contributes a stagy, unreal quality to the film that accidental gives it the quality of story that takes place in a metaphoric space, such as a fable or a fairy tale. The film also features an unworldly soundtrack by Douglas Gamley, a misshapen mass that prefigures The Omen's extensive and similar use of "Carmina Burana" by 16 years, and is just as effective at setting a fantastic and diabolical mood.

The City of the Dead benefits from an excellent climax. Whitewood's coven of witches keep themselves artificially alive through a series of sacrifices, which only works two days out of the year, when the town clock strikes 13. They may not murder their victim until the 13th tintinnabulation of the bells, and, as it turns out, these witches are deathly allergic to crosses, bursting into flame if the shadow of a crucifix crosses them. City of the Dead's climactic scene takes place in the town cemetery, where the witches are holding a girl down with a knife to her throat, counting off the number of chimes, as a protagonist, a knife stuck into his back, slowly staggers at them with a six foot tall cross torn off a grave. The fog swirls, bells ring, the girl screams, witches explode into flame, and a profane chorus sings madly, and suddenly all of the strange, mannered qualities of the film come together into something genuinely astounding.

Watch The City of the Dead on Archive.org.
Watch The City of the Dead on Google Video.
Watch The City of the Dead on YouTube.

Listen to the theme to City of the Dead:



Download an MP3 of the theme to The City of the Dead.

More of the weirdest and wildest films from the public domain.

AN LP FROM the only time in human history when you could dress like Truman Capote and, with the addition of some gold jewelry, look like a pimp.

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AT THE SOUND OF A WEEPING BABY, I go into a panic. The baby will soon begin screaming, and there is nothing I can do to stop it.

From what I hear, the best way to calm a baby is to distract it by waving something before its eyes, but the one time I tried that was a disaster. I was idling outside a state-run assisted living apartment complex, staring in horror at an infant on the passenger seat next to me. It turned first red, then blue, screaming until it ran out of breath. Then it continuing to scream silently as it flapped its tiny arms, choking on its own wailing. Desperately, I turned off the car's engine and snapped the keys out of the ignition, thrusting them towards the baby and jangling them. "Look, baby!" I called out. "Look at the shiny thing!"

This might have worked, but I dropped the keys. They noiselessly bounced off the baby's forehead. Abruptly, the baby stopped screaming. Its eyes widened into a surprised expression that mirrored my own. Then the baby inhaled sharply, making a sound like a broken bellows. Then it screamed again, doubling its previous volume.

I turned away, cupping my hands over my ears, and thought about the baby's mother. She was in one of the sad-looking, dilapidated government-run buildings. My eyes swept along the apartments as I tried to remember which she had entered and wondered when she would return. After all, how long could it take to fellate a quadriplegic? If she took more than 20 minutes, I was supposed to go in and make sure she was okay. I was supposed to do this, because she had told me to. I was supposed to do this because, although I didn't know it at the moment, I was her pimp.

I had never planned to be a pimp. I wasn't the pimp type. From what I knew of the profession, pimps controlled prostitutes through a combination of brutality and fast-talking, but I was capable of neither. Pimps spoke with their fists, and would break a nose if you looked at them crosseyed.

By comparison, the last person I had hit was my brother. He was eight years old at the time, and I was thirteen. He had flown into a fury when I refused to move from his favorite television-viewing spot on the sofa, and had leaped upon me, fists flying. I pushed him away and, tasting blood leaking from my lips, balled up my fists and struck him in the ear. He held his hand up to his head, startled, and then sneered. "C'mon," he said. "Is that all you got?" I gave him his seat.

Obviously, I am not a fighter. Neither am I a smooth-talking Svengali, capable of commanding a dozen nubile women with just a few silky words. Whenever nervous -- which is often -- I fumble in my speech, my sentences trailing off into nothingness. My friends helpfully try to fill in the blanks, suggesting possible endings to the comments that I mumble and then cut short. "Where did you say you were going?" they ask. "The bathroom?"

I shake my head weakly. "Where then?" they continue. "Home?" No answer. "A bar?" The more they ask, the more nervous I get. Eventually I just forget what I had intended to say, and they stop asking.

I could imagine myself raising my hand to feebly slap a whore, and barking out to her, "You get out there on the street and make me my goddamn money, or I'm going to ..." and then trailing off into nothing. What was I going to do anyway? Nothing.

Pimping chose me, as had most of my past employment in my directionless life. Pimping was the most recent of a long series of jobs that I had neither applied for, nor desired, but wound up doing because I am pathologically unable to say no. For example, several years ago I had been rummaging through a garbage can behind a drugstore, hoping to find comic books with their covers torn off, and heard a voice saying, "Kid, do you got a few hours?" The next thing I knew, a year of my passed, spent illegally dubbing pornographic films in the basement of an adult bookstore. I carefully labeled each copy with notes specifying names of actresses, types of scenes in which they appeared, and the location of these scenes on the tape. "Mona Wilde," I would write. "Double penetration. 10:13:33."

I did not ask what happened to these tapes, and did not care. Some tapes, I knew, were packed up in nondescript mailing boxes and sent to such diverse locations as Hong Kong, Blackpool, and Baghdad, but I never asked why and nobody bothered to explain. It was a solitary job, and depressing, affecting everything in my life. Watching late-night television seemed strangely anticlimactic, as I constantly expected the elderly actors in reruns of Golden Girls and the cheerful hosts of infomercials to tear off their clothes and leap upon each other. Picking at my food at Taco Bell and eavesdropping on strangers' conversations, I was always surprised at how mundane they were. Why would anybody talk about shopping and doing laundry, I wondered, when they could be calling out rawer, more interesting stuff? They could shout out their desires for each other in rpugh, frightening language, using startling metaphors for their genitals, and pepper their demands with extraordinary curse words. That's what the women in the films did, anyway.

I concluded that nobody spoke this way, just as nobody ever approached total strangers in hospital waiting rooms, climbed astride them, and made noisy, vulgar love to them as the remaining patients looked on appreciatively. This was the stuff of fantasy, and the real world was inevitably tamer. Perhaps in their bedrooms, with the lights out, people quietly stripped off their clothes and whispered filthy words in their lovers' ears, giggling all the while, but they did not speak that way in casual conversation. Loud, crude language existed only in fiction, I was certain of it.

I was wrong. Lilly Greenberg spoke that way. The first words I heard from her, in fact, were these: "Baby, I know I been gone a long time, but I am ready to get back into the fucking game, you know what I'm saying. I just took time out to have my baby, but I'm ready to get back on my knees, sucking cock, fucking cock, pulling cock -- if it can be done with a cock, baby, I'm ready to start doing it again."

This monologue took place in the stairwell of the adult bookstore, echoing and carrying into the small room where I worked. I turned off the two videocassette recorders used for dubbing and listened, hearing a high-pitched man's voice answering her. I recognized this voice as belonging to Joey Miller, one of the owners of the bookstore. Joey was a tiny man with a pencil-thin mustache and pointed, mouse-like features. When upset, Joey's voice shot up to a shrill squeak.

"I don't need the hassle, Lilly," Joey squeaked at her. "I know you gonna be dragging that kid around with you everywhere, and there ain't no bigger a pain in the ass than a ho with a baby."

"C'mon, Joey," Lilly pleaded. "The baby won't be no trouble -- he'll just sit in the car. You know it's easy money, Joey. Ain't nobody working the cripples. I can make you some good, fast money, baby."

"No, no, no," the high voice answered. "I ain't gonna have it. I got too much to worry about without driving some busted up ho to some retardate's house and waiting in the car with her goddamn baby."

Footsteps echoed from the stairwell, exiting through the back door, and Lilly called out angrily: "Well, fuck you then, Joey! All I need me is a fucking driver, you cocksucker! Lilly gonna make her OWN damn money, and you ain't going to see a red motherfucking cent of it." Her voice climbed in pitch and volume. "YOU HEAR ME, JOEY, YOU FUCK, YOU COCKSUCKER? YOU AIN'T GETTING A PENNY OF THAT CRIPPLE MONEY!"

The door to the back exit slammed shut, and I switched the dual VCRs back on. I turned my attention to the television, where three women lay splay-legged on a sofa. I wrote it down: Jenna Fox, Holly Fine, Lori Minx. 3-way. 45:28:17. On the screen, the women groaned in anticipation as one removed an enormous triple-ended dildo from her purse. I carefully noted the sex toy on my sheet of paper, wondering to myself how many real women carried such cumbersome rubber products in their purses in the off-chance that their afternoon tea with their best friends might turn into a lesbian orgy. Not many, I guessed.

I did not know Lilly was behind me until she spoke. "Christ!" she shouted, "Did they lube that thing? That's got to hurt like a motherfucker!"

When I am startled I often jump and shriek, but my reaction in this instance surprised even me. Lilly was unfazed. She responded as though every day, on at least a half-dozen different occasions, men turned towards her and began screaming. She crossed to me and clamped her hands across my mouth. "Didn't mean to scare you!" she said, laughing. "You a jumpy son of a bitch."

"Say," she said, looking at me thoughtfully. "Do you own a car?"

I picked Lilly up the next day at 3 p.m. She was a tiny, dumpy woman in her late 30s, and she was dressed in a polyester nurse's uniform. Although she talked a blue streak, peppering her conversation with expressions such as "sho' 'nuff" and "like a motherfucker," Lilly was visibly Jewish. She had an olive complexion and frizzy brown hair, and she wore no jewelry but for a gold chai dangling between her enormous breasts. She slung an huge knit purse over one shoulder, and tottered on two-inch-long white stiletto heels. When she came out to meet the car, she carried a sleeping infant child with her. When Lilly climbed into the front seat, she simply lay her infant across her lap like a limp rag doll. She turned to me and smiled. "We gonna make us some good money today," she said excitedly. "I'm gonna blow on those limp cripple dicks until money explodes out of the top of their motherfucking heads."

As we drove, Lilly told me of her life, occasionally pausing to dab at a string of drool that spilled out of the mouth of her unconscious infant. Lilly was a former nurse, and had worked for many years as a personal care attendant for a nonprofit organization called The St. Paul Physical Rehabilitation and Resource Center. This was the first place people with permanent disabilities went after their hospital released them. It was where they learned to adjust to their new lives without limbs or strapped into wheelchairs. Lilly spent seven years teaching young men with spinal injuries how to paint with brushes clenched between their teeth, or giving sponge baths to elderly women who had lost their motor functions after a doctor had severed the wrong nerve during bypass surgery. She worked with stroke victims, helping them to walk again, and she assisted children who had lost hands in horrific accidents, taking them on daylong field trips to the zoo.

Lilly was fired from The St. Paul Physical Rehabilitation and Resource Center when they discovered that she was stealing money from her patients. "I had a candy habit," Lilly confessed to me. "I can't keep the shit out of my nose. I dried up when I was pregnant with the baby, though. I worked with enough retarded kids to know that I don't want one of my own. Shit, if this little bastard had come out a mong, I would have drowned him in my bathtub." Lilly then leaned over and tenderly kissed her baby's head.

Before Lilly left The St. Paul Physical Rehabilitation and Resource Center, she stole her nurse's uniform, and she told me that she walked out laughing. "I already knew how to make better money anyway," she told me. "Shit, if they knew what I was doing besides stealing, they would have thrown my silly little ass in jail."

Lilly had discovered that many of the patients would pay her to have sex with them. "Them cripples knew what a lonely life lay ahead of them," Lilly said, shaking her head sadly. "What are they gonna do -- fuck another quad? You got two quadriplegics on a bed, lying next to each other, neither of them able to move their arms or feel their lower bodies. What, is some guy gonna come in the room and push them together, and then just kinda shove on them while they bump their catheters together?" Lilly giggled, thinking of this. "No, that wasn't gonna happen in a million years. If a guy in a wheelchair is gonna fuck somebody, it is gonna have to be a woman who can do all the work. And where are they gonna find a woman like that? Most bitches won't give them the time of day."

Lilly pointed at herself proudly. "I do whatever they want, and I know how to do it. I know all about their injuries. I know what to do to a man who can get a partial erection, but can't feel it. I know how to make men have orgasms in their bodies -- that's a talent right there, and most people don't even know that you can do that! Shit, you can climb on top of a quad and hump them until you crush their legs, but unless you know how to find the few spots that have some feeling, and how to work those spots, you just gonna be wasting your motherfucking time."

Lilly peered out the window, lost in thought, saying, "I know how to make them feel good, and that's worth some money." Then she pointed, saying, "This is the place."

I pulled the car up and let it idle. Lilly wrapped her arms around her child and lifted it to her breast, carrying it with her as she exited the car. She then turned and lay the baby down on the passenger seat, and she glanced up at me. "You can let the car run," she said. "This client still got feeling in his legs. He been without Lilly wrapped around him for so long, I bet he shoots his load just as I'm getting down on my knees, before I ever put anything into my mouth. Don't make no difference to me -- it costs the same no matter how long you take."

She patted her child again. It had not registered any consciousness during the entire ride, and it lay on the hot vinyl seat like a tiny corpse. "Aw, this poor little fucker," Lilly said. "Put me out of action for too fucking long. What can I say -- I fell in love." She sighed, reflecting back on something she did not share with me -- some distant pain. Then she shrugged and rose, saying, "The baby shouldn't give you no trouble. Mama's gotta go make some money."

She gently closed the passenger door, turned, and briskly trotted up the walkway toward the assisted living apartment complex. There were dozens of apartments in this complex, their paint peeling, their windows covered by pillowcases and sheets of clear plastic. Were it not for the steep concrete ramps that led up to the doors, these apartments would have been indistinguishable from any of the other complexes in this part of town. My father used to drive through this neighborhood while heading to the cemetery where his mother was buried. "Look at this place," he would sigh. "It used to be so nice. Look at them drunks! This town has gone down the crapper. The city should just burn it down." My father would then put his finger onto a switch on his left side and, with a slight gesture, lock all of the doors to the car.

Fifteen years later, the neighborhood was worse. Opposite me in the street, an unconscious indigent lay in the gutter, his pants pulled partway down, revealing a bruise-spotted ass. Three tough-looking young men in sunglasses stood on one street corner, one talking excitedly into a pay phone, the others staring at me with their arms folded. There were no trees on these streets -- there were not even many cars, and several of those parked nearby were half-eaten with rust and propped up on cinder blocks. I let my car idle, grateful that we would be leaving soon. The baby coughed, and I turned to look at it. The baby slowly opened its eyes, looked at me, frowned, and then began to cry.

It wasn't long after I had flung my keys at the infant that Lilly banged on my window, hollering. "Hey," she said. "Don't you worry about the baby! I need you to go into the apartment. The motherfucker won't give me my money!"

I rolled down the window and looked up at her. She was breathing heavily and dabbing her face with a tissue. "What?" I asked.

"It's just like I said it was going to be," Lilly called out, crossing to the passenger side. "The motherfucker sprayed early. Now he don't want to pay me. I told him I was going to go out and get my pimp, and he'd better be ready to get the shit knocked out of him." She pointed to the apartments. "He's in number 17. Go fuck him up."

She pulled her baby out of the passenger seat and rocked in place. The child immediately stopped screaming. Both stared at me.

"What?" I asked.

Lilly blew up. "You the motherfucking pimp, motherfucker! You gotta go get the money! I did my goddamn job, now you gotta go do yours! GET THE MOTHERFUCKING MONEY!"

I had thought that I was just a driver. Up until this moment, I did not know I was a pimp.

I considered my options. Either I was going to have to walk into a stranger's apartment and threaten violence, or I was going to have to deal with Lilly.

On one previous occasion, I had made a decision because I imagined a newspaper headline. Once, when I had a severe cough, I tried to clear my throat using a technique that I had read about in a book on yoga that I had found in a pile of bottles in an alley. Apparently, some yogis swallow long strips of cotton dipped in salt water, and then pull the phlegm-coated cotton strips back out of their mouths. Not having any long strips of cotton, I improvised by tearing up an old pair of underwear and attempting to swallow that. I gagged and vomited. As I fought for air, I imagined the newspaper headline: MAN CHOKES TO DEATH ON OWN BOXER SHORTS. I never repeated that experiment.

At this moment, seated in my car and looking up at Lilly's red face, I imagined another headline. This one read: PROSTITUTE USES INFANT CHILD TO BEAT PIMP TO DEATH. I climbed out of my car and slowly walked to apartment seventeen.

I figured perhaps this was something that could be resolved reasonably. Perhaps if I simply talked to this stingy customer, calmly explaining the circumstances, he would nod his head toward his kitchen. "You make a lot of sense, mister," he would say. "The money's in a coffee can next to the refrigerator."

But the moment I saw the handgun, I knew that there was no reasoned conversation to be had in apartment seventeen. It was a shiny silver revolver, and its possessor simply held the thing in his lap. "You the pimp?" he asked.

"I'm just the driver, man," I answered, terrified. It did not matter to me that the pistol was not pointed at me. I felt myself becoming hysterical, my hands shaking. I turned to run.

"Whoah, buddy," the quadriplegic called out. "Don't think I can't shoot you in the back. I was a Navy SEAL. You'd be dead before you got three feet down the ramp."

I turned back and stared at the man. He had long hair and a beard, both unkempt and streaked with gray. He was hunched forward in his wheelchair, his head and neck curving forward as though his chin desperately wanted to rest on his chest. He wore a stained green T-shirt that read "If it moves, kill it; if it don't move, fuck it" and a billowy pair of camouflaged pants. He eyed me, scowling, and then raised the revolver. His hand trembled severely as he did so, and the revolver jerked back and forth wildly. I clenched my jaw, waiting for an accidental gunshot.

"C'mon in, partner," he said, and waved his gun awkwardly toward his apartment. I nodded grimly and entered.

His apartment was empty of all furnishings but for a medical bed pushed against a far wall. Empty cans of Milwaukee's Best beer littered the place, an enormous number of cans, some stacked into pyramids on the windowsill and the kitchenette counter top. Smashed cans lined the walls, seemingly having been crushed and knocked across the room by the massive wheels of my captor's electric wheelchair. A tiny black and white television set sat on the floor opposite the bed, propped at an extreme angle so that the screen faced up. It played noiselessly, a black and white image flickering across its filthy screen.

The SEAL leaned his head further forward, scratching his chin with the barrel of the gun. "Let me ask you something," he said. "Let's say you're sick, and you call a doctor. He comes over to see you, but just as he comes in the door, you get better. Do you have to pay him for treatment?"

"I don't know?" I said. "Do you?"

"Hell, yes!" my captor responded bitterly. "But it ain't right! Your nursey out there in the car wants to charge me fifty bucks for her coming on over, but she didn't do nothing. She didn't handle no part of my body, she didn't suck on anything, she didn't beat off anything. I say that I shouldn't have to pay her for anything. I been ripped off too often, partner, and I don't got the patience for it. If nursey sucks cock, she gets paid for sucking cock -- but if she don't suck nothing, what do I got to pay her for?"

I stood in silence, desperately trying to think of an answer. He watched me for a moment, then sighed. "Now she's gonna send in her pimp to beat me up? Hell, boy, if I wasn't in this chair, I'd kick your teeth right down your throat. I've got half a mind to shoot you in the chest, just for bothering me. How would you like that?"

"I wouldn't," I answered weakly.

"No, I reckon you wouldn't, and I reckon it would be a big fucking mess that I would have to take care of. You'd bleed all over the place, and your body would just lie there until either my personal attendant or the police came, and then I would have to explain why there was a dead pimp on my floor. That sounds like a huge goddamn hassle, don't it, son?

I agreed with him that it did sound like a huge goddamn hassle.

"You're goddamn right about that, chief," he said. "So I tell you what I'm gonna do for you. I ain't gonna give you the fifty bucks you want, but I will give you ten, seeing as I brung y'all up here and all. Does that seem fair to you, or do I have to shoot you in the belly?"

As far as I was concerned, that sounded reasonable, and he did not have to shoot me in the belly. He nodded, and then gestured wildly with the revolver, jerking it towards the kitchenette. "If you go into the kitchen and open the refrigerator, you're gonna find a bunch of bills in the crisper. You take just ten dollars from the wad, killer. I'm gonna watch you the whole time, and if I see you take so much as a single dollar more than ten -- well, let's see if you can guess what I'm gonna do."

I guessed that he was going to shoot me in the belly. He nodded and smiled. "Smart boy," he said. "You just better be smart enough to count to ten."

I crossed to the kitchenette, and he wheeled his chair behind me, crushing beer cans as he did so. I opened the refrigerator and leaned in. It was empty but for half a case of Milwaukee's Best. I opened the crisper, and felt the revolver press into my side. "Slowly now," the Navy SEAL said in a whisper. "I'm not likely to miss from here."

In the crisper was an enormous wad of bills, three inches thick, wrapped in a rubber band. I removed the rubber band and noticed that, while most of the bills were tens and twenties, there were three or four hundred dollar bills at the bottom.

"Don't get greedy now, boy," the SEAL whispered. "Just take what's yours and get going."

I took a ten dollar bill, folded the wad in half, and wrapped the rubber band around it again.

"Back in the crisper now, boy," the SEAL said, exhaling. "Our business together is done."

As I was reaching to put the money back into the crisper, I heard a thud behind me, and felt the pressure of the SEAL pressing up against me, pushing me into the refrigerator. With a clatter, his revolver fell to the ground. The SEAL cried out, his words muffled against my back. The next voice I heard was unmistakable.

"Oh, you miserable MOTHERFUCKER," Lilly cried out. "Try to keep me from my motherfucking money, cocksucker? I'll tear your goddamn head off!"

The pressure of the SEAL lifted, and I turned. Lilly stood behind the SEAL, her baby in one arm, asleep again. She held the SEAL's long hair in her other hand, tugging furiously. He howled in pain as she yanked, hissing at him. "FUCK YOU," she called out. "COCKSUCKER! Give me my fucking MONEY!"

She tuned and looked at me, eyes wild. "Get the gun," she ordered, and I reached down and grasped the revolver. It was heavy and cold. I looked back up at her. "Now grab the money," she ordered, and the SEAL roared in anger.

"Oh, you don't like that, motherfucker," she snapped at him. "You're lucky I don't have my pimp shoot your motherfucking head off! He'll do it, too -- he goes fucking crazy when he's threatened." She stopped, and then looked at me thoughtfully. "Come to think of it, I'll get the money. You kill this motherfucker."

He cried out in terror, and I stood up, mouth agape. "Lilly," I said.

"You're the motherfucking PIMP," she cried out. "Kill this cocksucker! Make an example out of him."

"Oh, Christ, man, don't kill me," the SEAL pleaded. He began to weep. "Take the money, but just don't kill me," he said.

The baby woke at the sound of his voice. It surveyed the room for a moment, and then began to scream. "Aw, son of a BITCH," Lilly cried out. She released the SEAL's hair, made a fist with her hand, and punched the man in the back of the head. He jerked, and then sobbed. "See what you DONE?" She cried out. "You woke the baby."

Lilly stormed past me, pushing me to one side, and pulled the money from the crisper. She waved it in the SEAL's face triumphantly. "Try to rob me, motherfucker?" she called out, her voice barely audible above the din of the screaming infant. "Now we're going to put a bullet in your motherfucking skull!" Lilly then marched out of the apartment, leaving me and the SEAL behind. After a moment, the distant wail of the baby quieted.

The SEAL looked at me expectantly, choking back his tears. "All right, do it." he said at last, his voice quavering. "But shoot me in the head, so it's quick."

He closed his eyes, expectantly.

I looked down at the revolver in my hand, and this time, rather than simply imagining a headline, I imagined a complete news story. The page was splashed with graphic photographs of the SEAL lying on the floor of his apartment, surrounded by empty beer cans and his own pooling blood. Alongside the dead SEAL was a photograph of me, surrounded by police with shotguns, my hands shackled behind me. The police were bringing me to my trial, and I was surrounded by protesters in wheelchairs. They held placards that read "Fry the bastard!" and "No mercy for the quad killer!" The accompanying text told of my miserable life, describing me as a "drifter" who had "moved along the fringes of society, never keeping one job for very long." The text explained how I had eventually wound up a pornographer and a pimp, and how I had murdered a helpless disabled man and stolen his life savings. "He never amounted to much," the paper concluded. "He never succeeded at much, and in the end, all he knew how to do was kill."

This was my life, I knew it, and I was repulsed by it. I looked at the SEAL in his wheelchair before me, sobbing, waiting in terror for me to end his life. How did I wind up here? Was this to be my life: a succession of failures leading to uncontrollable violence? I shook my head fiercely, my teeth grinding together. "No," I said.

The SEAL opened his eyes. "No?" he said. "What do you mean, no?"

"No, I'm not going to be a failure," I said, and then repeated it: "I'm not going to be a failure!" My lips peeled back from my teeth into an enormous, beatific smile.

"Son?" the SEAL asked, looking on and shaking.

I nodded at him. "I'm going to do the right thing," I said. "For the first time in my life, I'm going to do the right thing."

"Oh, God, chief, I'm glad to hear that," the SEAL said, sighing heavily. "You go ahead, son. You do the right thing."

I reached out and hit the SEAL with my open hand. It made a light, wet slapping noise. The SEAL cried out, frightened. Then he frowned, confused.

"What was that?" he asked.

"I just hit you," I said.

"Not very hard," he said.

"That was a your warning," I told him. "You ever mess with us again, I'll come back here and kill you. You tell anybody about what happened today, I'll come back and kill you. If I decide I don't like you -- well, what do you think I'm going to do?"

"Come back and kill me?" the SEAL asked, terrified.

"Smart boy," I said, and walked out of the apartment. I crossed to my car and climbed in. Lilly sat in the passenger seat, breastfeeding her baby, and she looked at me expectantly. "I didn't hear a shot," she said.

I looked at her. "Well?" I asked.

"Well, what?" she responded.

"Where is it?" I asked.

"Where is what?" she asked.

I faltered for a moment, unable to complete the sentence. She looked at me expectantly. "Where is what?" she repeated, slowly and forcefully.

"Where is ... " I said, then paused again.

"You gonna finish your sentence any time today?" Lilly asked, looking annoyed.

I stared back at her. I had not wanted this. I had not chosen to be a pimp. It had chosen me. But if this is what I was to be, so be it. I forced the words out of my mouth, haltingly, trembling.

"Bitch," I said. "Where is my god damn money?"

Lilly gasped. She stared at me, then laughed. After a moment, she nodded, then opened her purse and removed a pile of bills. She pressed them into my hands.

"Good boy," she said. I started the car and pulled away from the assisted living complex. We had a long day ahead of us, and Lilly had money to make.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

THERE IS A STRANGE GENRE of Italian film called peplum, in which muscle men, often American, play characters from ancient myths, often Hercules. The Italians churned out hundreds of these films in the late 50s and early 60s, and, for modern viewers, they are pure camp, full of accidental homoeroticism, terrible special effects, and male pulchritude. Film is a medium of spectacle, but has tended to shy away from filling the screen with the undeniable spectacle of half-naked bodybuilders, except in the case of peplum, which was nothing but.

Bloody Pit of Horror was filmed at the tail end of these movies, and while it is ostensibly a horror film, it stars a muscle man, and has him shirtless for most of the movie. The bodybuilder is a Hungarian-born former Mr. Universe, Mickey Hargitay, who is best known in the United States for being the husband of bombshell Jayne Mansfield and the father of Law & Order: SVU's Mariska Hargitay. Mickey Hargitay had starred in one pepla before appearing in The Bloody Pit of Horror, 1960's The Loves of Hercules. I mention all this because it is important to enjoying Bloody Pit of Horror. Although the film starts by quoting the Marquis de Sade and includes interminable -- and underwhelming -- scenes of torture, it works best as a weird satire of Italian sword and sandal films.

The Italian name for Bloody Pit of Horror is Il Boia scarlatto, or The Crimson Executioner, and it is this titular character's story that frames the movie. He was a Medieval heretic who dressed in a red cowl, black leather harlequin mask, and crimson cape and tights. In a dungeon beneath his castle, the Crimson Execution committed all manner of atrocities, torturing and murdering people who fell short of his definition of perfection. The killer was eventually caught and executed, entombed in his own dungeon.

Fast forward to the 1960s. The Crimson Executioner's castle has been taken over by a reclusive former movie star, played by Hargitay. His castle is invaded by a small group of photographers and semi-clad women, hoping to use it as the set for a series of suggestively morbid photographs that will grace the cover of cheap Italian horror novels. Hargitay is initially accommodating, but it isn't long before he dons the costume of the Crimson Executioner and starts tossing women into iron maidens, burning men alive, and, in one bizarre scene, stringing a model up to a spider web made of electrical cables, all tied to crossbows, so that if anyone tries to rescue her they will set off a deadly crossfire of crossbow bolts.

All of this seems perfectly ridiculous, especially by modern standards. We're in a time when extended torture scenes are very much in vogue, and filmmakers are determined to represent them with a realism that would have naive moviegoers mistake the sequences for snuff. Hargitay's torture victims, in the meanwhile, simply seem smeared with karo syrup, no matter what he does to them, and they respond by pouting and looking vaguely put out. The film misses the psychosexual terror of de Sade's writing by a wide berth. However, the film's screenwriters, Romano Migliorini and Roberto Natale, give Hargitay considerable opportunity to explain his actions, and his explanation is, by accident or design, a hilarious satire of the peplum movie genre.

As he tells it, he was an actor in Hercules movies, but eventually began to worry that the physical imperfections of those around him might somehow contaminate his perfect body. So he retired to a castle, with a small retinue of mustached bodybuilders who act as his servants, where, presumably, he works out a lot. As he explains his murderous motivations, he slathers his naked torso with oil, telling of his desires to live in a world of physical perfection. "Yes, the black fire of the long-awaited vengeance is here," he declares, grinning madly and gesturing as though he was about to lunge and strangle someone. "The Crimson Executioner has passed judgment!" Later, when he is threatened, Hargitay curls inward, mortified, crying out "My perfect body!"

I can't be certain that the filmmakers intended these scenes to be satiric jabs at Italy's strange obsession with movies about loincloth-clad bodybuilders, but it is hard to imagine how else they were meant. What else could the film be but but a comedy, albeit a dark one, when the main villain is driven so mad from starring as Hercules in peplum that he feels the need to murder gorgeous female models because they are simply not as beautiful as he is?

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"I HAVE TO SAY MY PRAYERS AT THE ALTER OF LOVE," she said, pushing me down into a chair and unzipping my pants.

"How can you pray with your mouth full?" I asked jokingly.

"That how I pray, stupid!" she mumbled, as her tongue began a benediction no man could refuse.

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THERE WERE THREE YOUNG GIRLS named Fox, from Rochester, NY, who seemed to contact a dead peddler in 1848. For many years, the ghost communicated with the girls through a series of rapping noises. This started a movement, Spiritualism, that turned into a mostly middle and upper-class hobby and had as its adherents primarily women. It was hooey, of course. Mediums were repeatedly discredited as frauds, their séances nothing but parlor magic tricks, and often their exposure was at the hands of professional stage magicians, such as Harry Houdini. Even the Fox sisters were faking it. The rapping sounds were created by a unique ability the sisters had to crack their joints at will.

In 1947 and 1948, the world of phony spiritualists was the subject of two separate noir films. The first, 1947's Nightmare Alley, starred Tyrone Power as a sideshow roustabout who steal a phony mindreading racket to bilk millionaires out of their fortunes. It was a grotesque but fascinating film, with Power's character a thoroughly unlikable bully. By the end of the film, he has fallen as low as a carny can go, working as a geek for bottles of cheap liquor.

The Amazing Mr. X, from the following year, wasn't quite as brutal a tale, but it is nonetheless a great crime film with a genuinely nerve-rattling supernatural element. It tells of a wealthy widow, played by Lynn Bari with elegant mannerisms but an unexpectedly wicked sense of fun. She is readying to remarry to a nice but very square suitor when she thinks she hears her dead husband's voice calling to her. During a late-night stroll on a secluded, heavily shadowed beach, she runs into a queer figure with a thick Austrian accent, silkily ingratiating mannerisms, and a pet raven. He introduces himself as Alexis. He then tells her things he couldn't possibly know about her life and informs her that her dead husband is, indeed, trying to reach out to her from beyond the grave.

Alexis is played by Turhan Bey, who, with his Turkish and Czech parentage, specialized in exotic characters, and his character in this film is a fraud. He's been researching the widow for quite a long time, including placing his brassy girlfriend, who affects a mock Swedish accent, in the employ of Lynn Bari. The widow's dim and coltish sister, played by Cathy O'Donnell, suspects something wrong, and turns to a detective who is himself a former magician, and, as he talks, unconsciously performs sleight-of-hand tricks, such as rolling quarters on his knuckles and producing endless amounts of cigars.

They break in on a séance in progress, hoping to reveal that Alexis's spiritualism is just a series of tricks. It is; over the course of the film we've been privy to a fascinating assortment of mechanical devices that allow the medium to fake contact with the dead. They sit Alexis down, hold him by the arms, and demand that he produce a spirit. And, to everyone's surprise, including Alexis's, he does, in the form of Lynn Bari's deceased husband. But the spirit's motivations are uncertain, especially when he begins showing up in her bedroom late at night and encouraging her to kill herself.

The Amazing Mr. X is the sort of chilling crime story that American popular culture had really mastered in the middle of the 20th century, and was turning out in amazing quantities, particular on radio dramas such as Inner Sanctum and The Whistler, which managed to create well-made stories of terror every week for decades. Much of The Amazing Mr. X is so draped in shadow that it might as well be a radio drama -- tiny shafts of light illuminate just the side of a face, or an open door in the distance, or the unearthly glow of a face in a painting. The film was lensed by John Alton, who was noir's most famous cinematographer, and he specialized in creating stark tableaux of light and darkness, a high-contrast chiaroscuro world of dim figures shooting in other in darkness that was perfect for American crime melodramas. In fact, in 1945 he wrote a book about the art of cinematography called Painting with Light, in which he discussed The Amazing Mr. X extensively.

In The Amazing Mr. X, more than in any of his other films, darkness itself is a character. Many of the most important scenes happen at night or in blackened rooms, and this serves the audience in the same way that the lack of visuals in a radio drama did, by forcing viewers to imagine what they were seeing. During a séance, only the widow and her sister's heads are visible, seated opposite each other across a table with a crystal ball in its center. As they sit, a black figure repeatedly crosses in front of them, invisible to them but visible to the audience as it eclipses the sisters. It is Alexis, padding around the room in the darkness to set in motion the machines that will fake a ghost, but, in this scene, his is a figure of pure darkness, revealing himself only by stealing away the scene's already scant light.

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HOW WE PINE for the days when neuroses were cute. During the Fifties and Sixties, comedians mined their petty ticks and anxieties for a comedy motherload. Where you a nervous, stammering Jew with a persecution complex and a problem with women? You were Woody Allen! Were you a milquetoast, overly deferential nobody terrified of authority? You were Bob Newhart! Were you an psychotic glutton with impulse control problems? You were Johnathan Winters! And Victor Buono! And Zero Mostel!

Dr. Murray Banks obviously saw this collection of mental misfits and thought, "Aha, I'm a psychologist! There's got to be some gold in them hills for me!" After all, look at his patients, represented on this LP by a series of cartoons that look as though they could have been pulled off a napkin in a cocktail lounge. Bold, jittery lines represent such classic neurotic types as the nail-biting phobic, the cigar chomping egoist, the repressed schoolmarm, the infantile prankster, and, er, the red raincoat-clad flasher at the back.

It's been a long time since professional therapists could tour the country with breezy routines about the mentally ill. Neuroses just aren't that funny nowadays, especially since so much of human behavior has been made pathological. Are you a little clingy with your lovers? Why, you're just codependent. Easily distracted? Attention deficit disorder. Feel a little blue sometimes? Bipolar. Drink a little too much? Alcoholic. Like to start fires? Pyromaniac.

Nobody now jokes about these experiences. They just medicate themselves for it and struggle through, knowing that they suffer from a disease -- a disease of the mind, like a cold, but in the cranium. Joking about such a thing would be like mocking someone with cancer, or someone who was born with flippers where there arms should be. Who would laugh about that, except the sort of back-slapping, raffish fraternity boy who enjoys movies by the Farrely Brothers, presumably as part of an evening that includes beer bongs and roofies. And even the Farrely Brothers are now making movies about how sweet retarded people are and how fat people deserve our respect.

There's no comedy in mental illness nowadays. Woody Allen is no longer America's favorite neurotic clown, he's just some old pervert who married his daughter and makes increasingly meaningless, insular movies about white people making smartass comments to each other in Manhattan. Hell, if we wanted that, we'd just tune in a rerun of Sex and the City, or Friends, or Mad About You, or Seinfeld. Maybe these television characters are a little confused sometimes, maybe a little self-centered, but none of them are swallowing Ritilin or Prozac by the handfulls while they battle erratic moods or obsessive compulsive disorders. They're mean to each other, they're petty, they're immature, and they're often doltish to the point of idiocy -- but at least they're sane.

They're sane, god damn it.

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IT'S HARD TO COMPLETELY EXPLAIN what qualities make a bad film watchable, in part because it varies from film to film. There are a lot of films that are just pure dreck, of course, and there is no pleasure to be had in screening them. And then there is a film like 1977's Black Samurai, a vehicle for martial artist Jim Kelly, who blew the considerable opportunity he was given by being cast in Bruce Lee's legendary Enter the Dragon by starring in a string of low-budget monstrosities. Black Samurai is a terrible film, but great fun.

Black Samurai might have been a good film, had it been written and directed by filmmakers who were skilled at adapting pure pulp to the screen. The source material is interesting enough: a series of entertaining potboilers by Marc Olden about a black man trained by a samurai master. Director Jim Jarmusch drew from similar ideas for his 1999 film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and produced a meditative minor masterpiece, and since 1991 the hip hop group The Wu-Tang Clan has been producing terrific albums with themes borrowed from 70s martial arts films and blaxploitation.

Unfortunately, Jim Kelly had director Al Adamson at the helm of Black Samurai, and Adamson was a hack. The son of exploitation filmmakers, Adamson spent his career grinding out inexpensive but lurid genre films for distribution in the drive-in circuit, films with titles like Blazing Stewardesses, Brain of Blood, and Horror of the Blood Creatures. Adamson met his own lurid end in 1995 when he was murdered by his live-in contractor, who buried him under fresh cement and then assumed his identity while on the lam. Adamson was a supremely unskilled filmmaker who was barely able to frame a decent shot, much less create a cohesive film, and so Black Samurai consists of lackluster martial arts scenes (choreographed by Kelly) framed by absurd, impossible to follow plot points.

So it should be unwatchable. It really should. And yet there is a second, and fantastically entertaining, aesthetic at work here. The film might not succeed at making a lot of sense or generating any real excitement, but it strives mightily to make Jim Kelly seem like as much of a badass as possible, and the results are often hilarious. Herbert Ashbury's 1949 book The French Quarter tells of the stevedores who used to work the New Orleans docks, who were, to the man, recklessly violent, and who had a tradition of taunting each other with absurd boasts before fights. These were tall tales of past fights, in which they single-handedly brought down stampeding bulls, or beat entire battalions of soldiers, or drank cocktails of rattlesnake poison. This film feels like one of those stevedore boasts, but transplanted to the 1970s and stealing ideas from comic books.

So Jim Kelly winds up being an agent for an organization called D.R.A.G.O.N., the Defense Reserve Agency Guardian Of Nations. His antagonist is Janicot, a warlock with a drab wardrobe and the mannerisms of a community theater Shakespeare actor, who has kidnapped Jim Kelly's Asian girlfriend and is demanding a weapon called a "freeze bomb" (never explained) for her return. He commands an army of Zulu warriors and dwarf murderers from a small Pacific island. He performs Voodoo rituals and throws enemies into a snake-filled dungeon in his castle home, which greatly resembles an old Spanish mission. Oh, and Janicot owns a buzzard named Voltan who he can command to attack.

Jim Kelly, in the meanwhile, drives a purple Porsche with side-guns designed to shoot out the tires on other cars, practices nunchucks in his living room, travels around via jet pack, wears a track suit similar to the one Bruce Lee wore in Game of Death (but red with gold stripes, rather than gold with white stripes), and demonstrates elaborate martial arts footwork while taunting his enemies by calling them sissies.

Now, admittedly, it helps to be 10-years-old to find this sort of stuff pretty cool, and the further you move away from that golden age, the sillier Black Samurai's idea of badass becomes, especially when it is this ineptly presented. As a result, some viewers will never be able to enjoy the film, seeing as an artless exercise in nonsense. But for those of us who spent our childhoods hiding under our covers with a flashlight and a comic book, Black Samurai is awash with nostalgia, because it reminds us of a time when a film like this would have been terribly exciting for us, when there was nothing in the world we wanted to be more than a samurai-trained blaxploitation hero with a jet pack, before such things became ridiculous, and our childhoods ended.

Watch Black Samurai on Archive.org. (Note: This version is somewhat bowdlerized, with some lines overdubbed and some gratuitous nudity removed.)

Listen to the theme to Black Samurai:



Listen to the Taxi Theme from Black Samurai:



Download an MP3 of the theme to Black Samurai.
Download and MP3 of the "Taxi Theme" from Black Samurai.

More of the weirdest and wildest films from the public domain.

PHIL TAUBMAN looks like the sort of guy you find in old movies, and so it's easy to imagine storylines in films that feature him. You know the type of character that Taubman resembled: Women meet him in bars, where he dazzles them with his broad smile and natty mustache. He's not a handsome man, but neither is he ugly, and he has an impressive sartorial sensibility: white shirt, white tie, white vest, and herringbone dinner jacket. One imagines he smells of hair oil and cheap cologne, and swallows bourbon lowballs in a single gulp. He tells corny jokes and laughs often, and there's something about him that's a little dazzling.

He plays organ at New York's Penthouse Club, and so what if you've never heard of it, it's a big deal. It overlooks Central Park, and Maxine Sullivan used to sing there, and all the bigshots drink there when they are in town. Taubman has a million stories about late nights with Sinatra, who always drinks Jack Daniels, and drinks until dawn. About tipsy starlets from Hollywood who dote on him. About gangsters who hire him sometimes to play weddings in Long Island, and pay him three thousand dollars for playing seventeen songs.

A women gets pretty dizzy after a few hours with Taubman. It's partially they way he talks -- silky smooth and insinuating, in a deep baritone that purrs like a kitten. The liquor has something to do with it as well. Taubman can really put them down, and everytime he finishes one, he orders another for his date as well. By the end of the night, a girl finds herself thinking that maybe Taubman ain't so bad a fella after all.

He offers to share a cab, and, at the apartment, invites himself in for a nightcap. He settles in on the sofa and pats the seat next to him, and then he's an octopus -- eight arms all over. Receiving a slap on the cheek, he turns suddenly mean. "Who the hell do you think you are?" he hisses. "Who do you think you are to say no to me?"

If the Phil Taubman movie you imagine is a romantic comedy, a sassy female roommate or handsome neighbor always shows up just in the nick of time, popping Taubman on the chin with a blow that drops him to his knees. He slinks out, scowling, promising the girl that she will never find work in New York, Phil Taubman will see to it. Or, if the fantasy is a drama, no roommate or neighbor shows up, and the camera pulls away just as Taubman lunges. Years later, walking with a girlfriend, Taubman's date will notice that she is passing the entry to the Penthouse Club. Her friend will pause, excited, saying, "I hear this nightclub is great! Want to try it?" And the date will simply glance down at the sidewalk and keep walking.

Of course, the real Phil Taubman was probably a sweetheart. In fact, he probably rarely went out on dates. After all, most of the women he met must have seen the same films we did.

More Vinyl Oddities.

I ONCE SAT NEXT TO STANLEY KUBRICK, the film director, on an airplane. After about 25 minutes of silence, he scowled at me. 25 minutes later, he extended his middle finger at me. Then he pulled out a portable chess set and asked if I played.

I was on the chess team in high school, I answered.

Good, he said. Let's play, you little twat.

He destroyed me. He knew all the moves. He pinned my pawns, he forked my knights, he deflected, he undermined, he zwischenzuged. With each move, he would hiss at me under his breath. Cock, he would hiss. Pussy. Asshole.

When I finally toppled my king, his lip curled with disgust. You call that a chess game? He asked. Tom Cruise played a better game. Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise is a moron.

Then he ordered a flute of champagne from the stewardess. When it arrived, he dumped it in my lap. Later, Shelly Duvall told me he used to do that to her all the time.

She laughed when I told her about my flight with Kubrick. Especially when I told her that, just before the plane landed, Kubrick had slapped me, hard, across the face, growling, his beard flecked with his own spit.

That means he liked you, Shelly Duvall told me. If Stanley hadn't liked you, he would have simply turned away and refused to speak to you.

Now, when I watch his movies, I always notice the bruises on the cast members. Watch The Shining, for example. Jack Nicholson's shirt collar is always brown from dried blood. Duvall told me that whenever Nicholson would take a nap, Kubrick would nick his throat with a straight razor. God, he loved Jack, she told me.

Or Paths of Glory. Kirk Douglas has a black eye in several scenes. Apparently, Kubrick gave it to him on his birthday. Peter Sellers walked with a limp for most of his life because Kubrick crushed his foot with a bowling ball at the wrap party for Lolita.

I watch those movies and remember the slap to my face fondly. But, at the same time, I feel a little jealous. Just a slap?

Maybe if I hadn't been so rattled, I could have beaten Kubrick at chess. If I wasn't so frightened of him, at the very least, maybe I could have put up more of a fight, made the game more interesting for him. And maybe then he would have respected me more, liked me more.

Maybe he would even have knocked out a tooth.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

WILLIS O'BRIEN is a legendary name among fans of the films of the fantastic. He was the man who created King Kong. I'm not talking about the film, mind you; that was brought to the screen by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. I'm talking about the monster himself, which O'Brien designed and animated, along with the various prehistoric beasts to be found on skull island. O'Brien essentially invented stop-motion animation, and, by the time King Kong rolled around, had already been making films about dinosaurs for 18 years, beginning with silent shorts he made for Thomas Edison. O'Brien had a particular taste for dinosaurs, and he had an idea for a film that he attempted to raise money for in 1942.

That film was to have been called Valley of the Mists, and told of cowboys discovering a living Allosaurus in the Grand Canyon. O'Brien's was unable to find financing for it, part of a string of disappointments to haunt his later career, although one of his disciples, Ray Harryhausen, eventually brought it to the screen as The Valley of the Gawngi in 1969, seven years after O'Brien's death. The film was mildly successful and fondly remembered, as a battle between dinosaurs and cowboys in the Sixties was a cross-genre treat in the way that a film about ninjas battling pirates would be today.

But in the public domain is an earlier attempt to bring O'Brien's script to the screen called The Beast of Hollow Mountain, lensed in 1956. The script, credited to O'Brien and Robert Hill, doesn't hew very closely to O'Brien's original vision (Gwangi is much closer to what O'Brien had in mind). And Beast can't boast of the extensive use of stop-motion in Gwangi, which has dinosaurs appearing throughout the film, including a dazzling climax in which the Allosaurus attacks a circus elephant and then pursues the film's heroes into a burning cathedral. Beast's Allosaurus doesn't show up until the film's final 20 minutes, and isn't as sophisticated a piece of animation as Harryhausen's; The monster moves thickly and jerkily, and has nothing of the personality that both O'Brien and Harryhausen could bring to their creatures.

Nonetheless, Beast has its own pleasures, and a lot of them have to do with the fact that this film was made in Mexico. Beast was shot almost entirely on soundstages in Mexico City and on location in Tepoztlán, a town in the Mexican state of Morelos. The film's live-action director, Ismael Rodríguez, was Mexican, as was almost the entire cast of the film, but for star Guy Madison and female lead Patricia Medina, who plays a Mexican. Most of the film details a battle between two ranchers, the American Madison, who was a solid, if bland, star of b-westerns, and a local rancher, played by Eduardo Noriega, who was a major motion picture star in Mexico.

Range wars were a common theme in Westerns, but it's interesting to see this storyline transplanted to Mexico. Madison looks like a rather typical film cowboy, of course -- he even has the same rolling gait of John Wayne -- but the rest of the cast is dressed in Mexico cowboy duds, and they're rather spectacular. American cowboys, with the notable exception of Roy Rogers, tended to dress down, in drab browns and blue denim. The Mexican film vaquero, by comparison, was a dandy, in elegant charro suits, brightly colored silk neckerchiefs, and exquisite sombreros. Everyone in the film speaks English, perhaps out of deference to Guy Madison, although they continue to speak English even when he isn't around. Madison, to his credit, actually peppers his dialogue with a lot of Spanish, greeting people with a cheery "Buenos dias" and saying "sí" whenever he means "yes."

Mexicans generally weren't treated very well by American films of the 50s, particularly in cowboy movies, where they tended to be grotesque stereotypes; it's rather startling to see a film of the era that is meant for American audiences that features almost exclusively Mexican actors that rarely descends into broad caricature -- this really is just a cowboy movie in which the cowboys happen to be Mexican. Madison has fallen in love with Patricia Medina, who happens to be Eduardo Noriega's fiancée, and this plot is treated exactly as it would be in any other Western, despite the fact that Medina is supposed to be Mexican. Compare this to Giant, which came out the same year, in which one character's marriage to a Mexican woman is essentially treated as an interracial marriage.

Additionally, the fact that Beast is set in Mexico gives it a distinctive personality despite its rather trite storyline and lackluster lead performance. For one thing, few American westerns are set on the edge of a swamp, as this one is. There is a weird sense of menace that this gives the film, as people apparently wander into the swamp quite frequently and disappear, and everyone just assumes they drowned. One of Madison's employees, a heavyset drunk named Pancho who has a little boy named Panchito (rather hilariously, everyone in the film refers to them as "the Panchos"), rides into the swamp one afternoon. When he isn't back a few hours later, everyone just shakes their heads and begins making plans about how to raise Panchito, who they now know to be an orphan. And we've seen how deadly the swamp can be in the first scene in Beast, in which a rancher, looking for lost cattle, stumbles into quicksand.

Of course, in the last 20 minutes of the film it comes out that many of the cows and ranchers who have disappeared in the swamp were not victims of quicksand, but were, instead, gobbled up by an Allosaurus. And though the animation might be primitive, the climax is nonetheless great fun, as the prehistoric monster chases cowboys through hills and bluffs, tearing roofs off farm houses and flinging men around like rag dolls. Since almost everybody is dressed in their elegant charro uniforms, it rather looks like a dinosaur is battling a group of mariachis on horseback, and there is simply no other film that contains so strange an image.

Watch The Beast of Hollow Mountain on Archive.org.
Watch The Beast of Hollow Mountain on Google Video.
Watch The Beast of Hollow Mountain on YouTube.

Listen to the festival music from The Beast of Hollow Mountain:



Download an MP3 of festival music from the film, composed by Raúl Lavista and inspired by Mexican folk music.

More of the weirdest and wildest films from the public domain.

MY GRANDFATHER came to America from Belarus in the first decade of the 20th century, or thereabouts. As a result, myself and my brothers have always seen ourselves as Russian Jews, despite the fact that Belarus isn't Russia, precisely, and the fact that we also have Polish, Moldavian, and Romanian ancestors. I would tell people I was a Russian Jew despite the fact that I was adopted, presumably from Irish-American biological parents. Never mind that that the Sparbers came from Borisov, outside Minsk, or that if you mentioned us being Russian around my father he would retort "We're Jewish, not Russian" -- I grew up with a deep curiosity about Russia. And why not? It's a fascinating, marvelous, and tragic place, and when I was young, throngs of Jews escaped from it to the United States. I knew and was friends with many of these expatriates, and, during my childhood, it seemed impossible to find a synagogue that was without banners reading "Save Russian Jewry."

Nowadays I find myself exploring my questionable Russian ancestry the same way I explore my uncertain Irish identity, by going to bars and drinking the appropriate liquor, and nibbling on whatever vegetarian food you can order at the bar. But I also like to go to Russian and Irish stores and look around, so, whenever I'm in St. Louis Park, I swing by the EuroGormet Deli in the Texa-Tonka shopping center and chew on Russian vittles.

I picked up a few candies this afternoon. I don't speak or read Russian, so I never know what the hell they are until I eat them, and, even then, I'm sometimes not certain, which doesn't really bother me. I never remember precisely what nougat is either. However, to write about these candies, I thought I should try and figure out what they are called, at least, which I did with the help of Google Translate. So if the translations are inaccurate, you know who to blame.

Here we have a candy called охотничьи, which, as I understand it, translates to "hunting," which would make sense, as its wrapper has an image of a shotgun, rounds of ammo, and a green hunting cap with a feather in it. The logo also has the word конфеты on it, and that's a good word to know: it means "candy." The candy itself has a hard chocolate shell, but is light and almost wafer-like inside. Initially it tastes like coffee, and then it grows more chocolatey the more you eat, with a hint of hazelnut.

The second candy is called Золотой петушок, which seems to translate as "Golden Cockerel," which is a pretty imposing name for a candy. But, then, this is a candy that has a pretty imposing wrapper, with a proud rooster strutting beneath the moon, bordered by red bands spangled with gold stars, which, in turn is banded by blue with depressed-looking moons. The candy has a thick crisp chocolate shell, with an almost marshmallow-like interior. The wrapper lists lemon as a flavoring, but it's too subtle to be noticeable.

This candy, with the delightful illustration of a goose with an oversized reddish-orange bill, almost has the name you would expect. It's called гусиные лапки, which translates, approximately, as "Goose Foot." The other word on the wrapper is карамель, which translates as caramel, and that's precisely what the candy is. However, Russian caramel, or, at least, this Russian caramel, doesn't taste precisely like American caramel. This candy has a honey-like quality, and a taffy-like consistency when you let it melt in your moouth. Bite it, however, and it collapses like a wafer.

This is a small candy, about the size (and looking very much like) a segment of a tootsie roll. As near as I can make out, the candy is called Золотой ключик, or "Golden Key," which must be pretty close to the actual name of the candy, as the wrapper features yellow keys on brown diamonds. This is also a caramel candy, although harder, waxier, and more typically caramel-tasting that the last, albeit with the same hint of honey, which is rather pleasant.

That's right, this candy is called Kinder Surprise, and neither of those words are Russian. Nonetheless, everything else on the package is written in Russian, so presumably this is a Russian candy meant for an international audience. There's actually very little chocolate in the egg -- just a thin milk chocolate layer, which is very sweet and tastes quite a lot like white chocolate (and, while the exterior of the egg is brown, the interior is white). It surrounds a large yellow plastic pill. The pill opens, with no small amount of difficulty, to reveal a toy. In my case, the toy was a small, green creature that had a lizard-like or cartoon-dragon look to it, carrying a flag emblazoned with an image a genie's lamp with smoke pouring out of it. The egg also contains a slip of paper directing me to a Webpage: www.magic-kinder.com. There, I enter a code on the scrap of paper, and the Web page explains to me that my toy is named "Green Messenger." "He's always got his head int he clouds and dreams of making everybody's dreams come true," the page further informs me, which is good to know. The it suggests I download a little video game to play, but I won't do that, as I have had bad experiences with downloads from Russian Web pages in the past.

More from the Odd Ingester!

NO, IT'S NOT A LOST DISNEY ALBUM detailing the adventures of Spartacus when he lived in a tree and made friends with woodland creatures. It's a gay comedy album -- the old-fashioned kind, that tried to use comedy as a tool of social justice. The album consists of a series of short, purportedly humorous sketches in which homosexuals reveal that they are regular people, with regular worries, just like everyone else.

"A different comedy album," proclaims the LP's cover, and God Save the Queens genuinely is different than other comedy albums: it's not funny.

More Vinyl Oddities.

THE CHAMBERS HOTEL in downtown Minneapolis has an Art-O-Mat, along with some enjoyably freaky art, so I decided to wander on by this afternoon and purchase something. The Art-O-Mat, as you might guess, is an old cigarette machine refitted to distribute little works of art. You buy a coin for $5, make a selection (and there are many), and walk away with something small and unique.

I got a Person Passion Puppet by an artist named Martha Schermerhorn (click photo to enlarge), which turned out to be a little papercraft man with the word "Lust" affixed to his string. Perhaps this is meant to represent my overriding passion, so watch out ladies. I'm guessing there wasn't a puppet for "endless need for novelty."

More from The Sparber Gallery.

DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS is mostly remembered as one of the first action film stars. Even today, his his physical derring-do makes films such as The Mark of Zorro (1920) and Robin Hood (1922) astonishing -- he tended to prance around on what seemed to be tiny feet, leaping across the soundstage, scampering up walls, and flying back and forth from the rafters. And he really did these things, without the aid of wires or trampolines or cushioning, which is obvious in his films, as they were shot with relatively few close ups and static camera shots, as though someone had simply locked down a camera and filmed a stage play. As a result, viewers might be left with the uneasy sense that they are witness to a chimpanzee who someone has dressed in elegant period costume, given a fencing saber, and set loose.

Fairbanks also had a daffy sense of humor. His comic sensibilities aren't that surprising -- after all, he began filming on the same studios as the Keystone Cops. Additionally, Fairbanks had a very close friendship with Charlie Chaplin (the two of them, along with Fairbanks' wife Mary Pickford and director D.W. Griffith, would eventually found United Artists.) He favored quick sight gags and broader physical jokes, which show up in unlikely places in his films, even when the movie itself is supposed to be a straightforward actioner. He did very few real comedies, although one that survives must rank as one of the weirdest comedies ever made.

The film is called The Mystery of the Leaping Fish, and is a two-reel short, so it clocks in at just under a half and hour. With a scenario by D.W. Griffith and Tod Browning, who eventually would direct both Freak and Dracula, the film has Fairbanks play a character named Coke Ennyday, and that should provide a clue as to what sort of a film this is. Apparently using Sherlock Holmes's cocaine and morphine habit as a jumping off point, The Mystery of The Leaping Fish presents us with a detective who wears a bandoleer of syringes and keeps a dog bowl filled with cocaine at his desk. Every few minutes Fairbanks gives himself and injection or throws a huge handful of white powder at his own face. He keeps a schedule by his desk of his daily activities (it resembled a spinner from a board game), which are divided into four categories: "Sleep," "Eat," "Dope," and "Drink."

When the police ask him for his help in an investigation, he leaps to action. Their concern is a tall, lean society swell who seems to have a lot of money (and he does: at one point he is shown sleeping in bed under a mountain of cash) but no recognizable income. Fairbanks, who, in this film, shows a peculiar taste for garishly checkered garments, jumps into his checkered sportster. It's a strange automobile, small and narrow but with an aftcastle built in. In the aftcastle sits an elegantly dressed man with a long bugle, and, whenever Fairbanks drives around, the bugler lifts his instrument and plays like a medieval herald. Occasionally they play checkers.

Fairbanks investigates a business that offers flying fish rides. These are inflatable toy creatures with long, winglike fins that people float around on in the ocean. Fairbanks rapidly discovers it is a front from opium smuggling. One scene has him peering through an enormous telescope at the ocean when his snooping is discovered by the society swell. Fairbanks distracts him, and, when the man's back is turned, folds the telescope up into a top hat and opens his jacket. A beard springs out of Fairbanks' jacket and onto his face, and the actor hunches over, pretending to be an old man, which the society swell now mistakes him for. It's a very fast gag, and eye-popping.

Fairbanks's coke-addled detective eventually uncovers the opium, which he devours like molasses. He spends the rest of the film staggering around in a drug frenzy, affecting a strange and hilarious walk that seems like a combination of the jerky motions of a wind-up robot and the sailor's jig that Popeye would sometimes dance. Fairbanks doesn't stand still for a moment, buzzing around the set or turning circles in place, even when he is attacked by Chinese laundrymen. He dispatches them by jabbing them with syringes, which cause them to perform little robot jigs of their own before flying up to the rafters or leaping through windows.

The knockabout slapstick comedies of the early 20th century had acquired the nickname "coke comedies," but mostly because their filmmaker's made extensive use of undercranking the camera when filming scenes, which sped the action up to a frenetic pace when the film was played back. The Mystery of the Leaping Fish is one of the only films of the era to actually use cocaine as a source of comedy. The timing of the film is especially interesting, as cocaine, which had been widely available in neighborhood drugstores in the Victorian era, had been demonized in the early 20th century and outlawed three years before this film was made. Anti-cocaine crusaders fanned the public's fear of cocaine with racism, claiming it was the source of African-American crime. (“Most of the attacks upon the white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain,” according to Dr. Christopher Koch, who was a member of Pennsylvania's State Pharmacy Board.)

Despite the hysteria, just a few years after the ban Hollywood produced a comedy about a white man who is given almost superhuman powers by his use of cocaine. I guess we shouldn't be surprised. Hollywood may not make films like this anymore, but anyone who has spent any time in the film industry will be able to tell you that there are quite a few Tinseltown professionals who share this comedy's understanding of cocaine: It makes you funny, interesting, and powerful.

Watch The Mystery of the Leaping Fish on Archive.org. (Warning: soundtracks cuts out halfway through, and film may not play all the way through)
Watch The Mystery of the Leaping Fish on Google Video.
Watch The Mystery of the Leaping Fish on YouTube.

More of the weirdest and wildest films from the public domain.

WHO KNOWS WHAT THE Chinese are thinking when they make products like this. I'm not even sure the idea is theirs; it might just as easily be the brainchild of the American distributor, Galerie, who then contracts Chinese laborers to create plastic petri dishes filled with slices of corn syrup and gelatin made to resemble human brain tissue.

This isn't a dollar store item, either. Coco picked this candy up for me at Target, of all places. And a part of me feels the need to applaud the ghoulish ingenuity at work here. Perhaps there are children out there who secretly think of themselves as mad scientists, and want to explore that as a possible career option, and so want an appropriate candy. Or perhaps there are budding cannibals who might devour something truly awful were it not for the fact that they can feast on a sugary representation of the thing they have a mad appetite for. And, while I have never actually tasted brain, I have a feeling these little rubbery confections are more palatable -- one even tastes like apricot!

More from the Odd Ingester!

THERE IS ONE QUESTION that everybody asks. Two years? Reporters stare at me uncomprehendingly, tape recorders out, pencils scribbling furiously on notebooks, waiting to hear my answer. But it is not a very difficult question. One you've sat down on the toilet for more than a few hours, you might as well just stay there.

Two years? I could have sat forever. I protested as the paramedics pried the toilet seat off the toilet. They had originally simply intended to remove me from the toilet, but after two years, you sort of physically grow onto the seat. So out came the crowbar, and off I came, toilet seat and all.

I protested in part out of embarrassment, because, honestly, after two years on a toilet seat, you're not going to want to see inside the toilet. But I also protested because I did not want to go.

The next torrent of questions from the reporters concerns mental illness. Of course, the doctors tested me. They came to my hospital bed and went through a series of tests with me, most of them multiple choice questionnaires. The questions were interesting, too. I was asked to choose whether I would prefer to be a majestic American eagle or a stronghearted turtle. I was asked whether I would travel to Europe or Africa, given the chance. I was asked if I ever read newspaper headlines that directed me to do things I did not want to do. Once I had completed the questionnaires, the doctors scratched their heads, baffled. They simply could not understand why someone would sit on a toilet seat for two years, unless they were mentally ill. But their tests revealed no illness. The worst that could be said of me was that the muscles in my legs had atrophied quite a bit; I have been in physical therapy for a month now, and can walk almost 10 feet on my own. But my mind is strong.

The reporters turn their questions to my girlfriend. They are as confused by her as they are by me. It was our shared apartment. Didn't it bother her that I never left the bathroom. She shrugs. We have a two and a half bathroom apartment. She still had a bathroom all to her own, and it had the shower.

But she brought me food. The reporters demand to know why. She shrugs again. She wasn't going to let me starve, was she?

Her nonchalance confuses the reporters, but why shouldn't she be nonchalant? I was in the bathroom for two years. By the time the paramedics came for me, it had long since stopped being weird for her. Still, it must have seemed odd at first. She nods at the question. She asked me how long I was planning to stay in the bathroom. I told her I didn't know. For a while, she asked if I wouldn't be coming out soon, and I told her I didn't think so. After a while, she stopped asking.

Sure, we had our problems. A relationship is always going to have its ups and downs. Probably more when one person won't leave the bathroom. We weren't sure our relationship would last. In fact, we broke up for about three months, and decided to live as roommates. She dated a few times, even seeing one fellow for a few weeks. It didn't last. He met me, and never called her again. Eventually we reconciled. She grew to enjoy having the apartment all to herself, even if it meant bringing me meals and cleaning my dishes. I paid my share of the bills, though. I was a child actor in movies such as Bugsy Malone and Skatetown USA, and receive small but regular residuals. It isn't much, but, when you live in a half-bathroom, you don't need much.

Of course, the reporters are unsatisfied with every answer. They can't comprehend why I would spend two years on a toilet. They keep circling back to that question. Why? Why? I don't have much of an answer for them. I hadn't really planned to. I hadn't planned anything at all. One night I just sat down on the toilet with a book. The book was Bedtime Laughs, an paperback collection of risqué jokes and cartoons edited by Paul Steiner and published in 1956. I had found it in a thrift store and purchased it because it looked amusing. It was amusing. I found myself enjoying it so much that I read the entire book, continuing long after I had completed my need to use the restroom. I read the book and laughed long into the night. When I finished the last page of the book, I closed it and looked around the restroom. I thought to myself that this had been nice. I couldn't remember when I had enjoyed a more pleasant evening. I went out into the apartment, past my sleeping girlfriend, and got another book. I believe it was Playboy's Executive Reader. I remember thinking that these seemed like the sort of books you should read when you are in the bathroom.

When my girlfriend woke that morning, she knocked at the door to make sure I was okay. I assured her I was, and she left for work. I left the bathroom once more, to fetch my laptop computer, and I logged on to Amazon.com and began to order books and magazines. I ordered the Uncle John's Bathroom Reader series, and a copy of The Great American Bathroom Book. I put in a subscription to Playboy. I ordered a recent copy of the Guinness Book of World Records. And then I thought, what the hell, and got subscriptions to Readers Digest, People, The National Enquirer, and, out of curiosity, Cosmopolitan.

I never left the bathroom again. At least, not until the paramedics came.

I suppose it was bound to happen. I knew I couldn't remain in there forever, but I preferred not to think about it. I washed myself using water from the sink, and I entertained myself with reading and the Internet. (I was quite a well-known character on a number of online forums, including 4chan and Metafilter, where I posted under the user name WC4EVA.) I would sometimes think of my life before I moved into the bathroom, which consisted mostly of unsuccessfully auditioning for television pilots. I remember running into Scott Baio at one of the auditions. He did not recognize me until I introduced myself. We commiserated for a while about the fickleness of the entertainment industry, and how it chews up and discards child actors. We then exchanged telephone numbers and promised to get together for drinks, but never did. I do not miss that life, although now, I expect, I shall have to get back to it, or something like it, anyway.

Of course, the reporters also want to know about my parents and friends. Surely they must have missed me. I do not really wish to discuss my father, who I had not spoken to for years, since a messy custody battle following my parent's divorce when I was 10, during which it turned out my father had embezzled all the money I had made as an actor. My mother passed away a few years ago. In fact, she died just six months before I went into the bathroom, and I took her death particularly hard. In the months following my mother's death, I just sort of drifted away from my friends. The relationships seemed shallow to me; these were all people I had befriended in my late teens, and had remained friends with more out inertia than anything else. After the death of my mother, my friends seemed lost as to how to console me, and I grew easily irritated by them. Once I was in the bathroom, I found people on Web forums with whom I shared real interests, and, although I never met any of these people, my online friendships seemed truer and closer than any I had in my real life. Now, I suppose, I won't have as much time for those friends. Ever since my story first appeared in the news, old friends have been calling and emailing, mostly, I suspect, out of a perverse desire to snoop. Some have offered to take me out for drinks when I am well enough to leave the hospital. Perhaps I should take them up on it. And my father has been trying to reach me. So far, I have rebuffed his calls, but he has gotten word to me that he has managed to get a producer interested in doing my story as a television movie of the week. If I am to return to my old career, I guess this may be a good start.

The reporters want me to tell them the story of how the paramedics came to pull me off the toilet, but I don't really want to talk about it. The story exhausts and depresses me. It's not much of a story anyway. The toilet got clogged, my girlfriend called the repairman, he came to make repairs, he called 911. Twenty minutes later, I was on my way to the hospital with a blanket around my waist and the seat of a toilet attached to my ass. I remember crying the entire time.

What now, the reporters ask, and it is a question I have asked myself. What now? I expect I might be able to capitalize on the infamy this has brought me, for a short while, anyway. I can become a sort of professional freak -- the guy who sat on a john for two years. There's about three months of talk shows ahead of me. I'm scheduled to be on Oprah in two weeks, and, from there, it will spiral downwards until I am doing 6am interviews with obnoxious morning deejays who all hosts shows titled "The Morning Zoo." With the help of a ghost writer, I can get a book rushed into print. It will sell for a few months, and then work its way to the remaindered tables. I've been in the public eye before. I know how short the lifespan is for novelty celebrities. But if I can put in six months of solid, if depressing, work, I might be able to make enough money to live off for the rest of my life. Occasionally I might get pulled out of mothballs to make a cameo here and there -- I imagine a scene in an Adam Sandler film, 15 years from now, in which he opens a restroom door and finds me in there, and turns to the audience to patiently explain that I am that guy who sat on a toilet for two years. And nobody laughs.

For two years, I enjoyed life. I read, and surfed the Web. I often stayed up all night reading joke books, and laughing. Now I am the punch line, and I'm not a very good one. The reporters will go back to their offices and file their bewildered stories. Even now, they are packing up their cameras and digital recorders, shaking their heads and laughing to themselves. Today has been another reminder of how strange the world is. Tonight, when they go home, they will tell their spouses about the man they interviewed today, and they will laugh, and they will not know what else to say.

Me, I'm tired. I should go back to the hospital, back into bed, and sleep, as I have two hours of physical therapy tomorrow. I'd like to check in on the Web forums I used to frequent, but I'm afraid to. I probably have become of figure of fun there, and I don't have the heart to be mocked by my former friends. I had originally made plans to have lunch with my girlfriend tomorrow, but she canceled. She says she needs time to think. The stress of being in the public spotlight has been very hard on her, and she does not enjoy feeling like the world thinks she is a weirdo. I don't know what to say to her. I don't even want to think about it.

At this moment, all I want is to go to the bathroom.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

Although he was not recognizably human, in 1908 the old man was nevertheless recognizably Jewish. He looked as I imagine he must have looked for a thousand years. He was dwarfish and twisted, with long, gnarled limbs that grasped whatever they could clutch with a fierce clawing motion. His gray, matted beard and sidelocks met on the ground, where they tangled with each other and with the filthy fringes from his prayer shawl. He was small enough that my great-grandparents could fit him into an accordion case, and this is what they did, so that his moans and wheezing might be mistaken for the sound of wind running through an instrument's reeds. They carried him aboard the Lusitania, and my great-grandfather never let go of the accordion case, holding it to his side and whispering to it as they sat in steerage. When they eventually saw the Statue of Liberty, my great-grandfather kissed the accordion case and whispered to it, "Nyu York, Eliyahu, Nyu York!" The accordion case coughed and rattled back, unconcerned.

This is how the Jews brought the prophet Elijah to the New World.

My great-grandparents kept him under the sink of their tiny Brownsville apartment, feeding him dates and fortunes cookies, which he devoured -- fortunes and all -- by pulverizing the food against his gums with short, spastic jabs of his crooked hands. Elijah terrified the children, as a series of strokes had left him foul tempered, and he frequently flew into rages. His fits could last for hours, during which he would fling plates and silverware at my great-grandmother, who would do her best to subdue him by beating the prophet with a carpet whisk.

When my grandfather Jack was a boy, Elijah terrified him; every Passover, Jack was required to bring the old man a glass of wine, as tradition dictated. Jack knew through bitter experience that it was a bad idea to get too near the prophet. He recounted that one year he attempted to push the glass of wine across the floor to Elijah with a mop handle. The old man watched Jack warily, peering at him sideways through half-closed, yellow eyes, and when the mop handle got close enough Elijah lunged.

As they did every year, the neighbors stood outside in the hallway, ears pressed to my great-grandparents' door. When they heard Jack's screams, they gossiped, as they always did. "Ach, it is the Sparbers," they muttered to each other. "Every Passover it is the same. They beat their children! Ten times, once for each plague!"

While Elijah's temper seemed boundless, as years passed and the prophet grew older he quieted almost to the point of docility. My father does not like to discuss it, as he feels responsible, but the prophet's change in temperament came swiftly, with a tragic incident that occurred in my childhood home in Minneapolis.

My father owned a large German shepherd. Once when we were out, the dog got into the old man's crawlspace in the basement. We returned home to a house littered with clumps of hair and shreds of the old man's leather phylacteries. We found the dog and the prophet in the living room. Elijah lay face down on the floor with his arms splayed, looking very much like a rag doll that somebody had casually tossed aside. The German shepherd, growling and wagging his tail, pounced repeatedly at the prone figure and chewed at its leg. Madness still glowed in the eye of the prophet after that incident, but it was the madness of fear rather than the madness of rage.

Elijah grew very quiet, huddling against walls when we came near and fleeing into closets or hiding under beds when he was able. At night, we could hear his terrified voice whispering in Yiddish, the sound creeping up from his basement crawlspace through vents and emerging into our bedrooms as hoarse mumbling. These sounds unnerved me, and were the cause of uncountable nightmares. I would wake, screaming, and my father would come into my room and sit on the side of my bed, wiping the sweat from my brow with the back of his hand and telling me stories about the Messiah. When the Messiah came, he explained, there would be peace throughout the world. All the Jews would converge in Jerusalem, and God would slay Leviathan in the deep. God would spread the skin of Leviathan over Jerusalem, where it would hang like a great, glowing canopy. We would gather at tables to hear the words of the Messiah, we would eat the sweet flesh of Leviathan, and both would be more delightful than anything we knew.

"This is why the prophet Elijah is so important, Max," he would tell me. "It is Elijah that will tell the world of the Messiah's coming! He will go from door to door, knocking and saying, 'Gather your prayer shawl, gather your phylacteries! He is here! The Messiah is here!'"

However, by the time I entered college, I no longer ate meat, and I no longer hoped for a Messiah. I did not wish to go to Jerusalem and devour the flesh of Leviathan. It was at this time that I received the prophet, along with a pen set, as a gift to celebrate the onset of my adult life. I despised my responsibility for Elijah. I had no love for this man, who had been a burden on my family for too long. He was little more than rags and bones now, and he gave off a powerful odor that I could not inhale without gagging. I did not want to tend to Elijah.

I hid the prophet in the closet of my dormitory room, opening the door only long enough to fling scraps from my dinner plate onto him. I felt a mixture of guilt and resentment toward the old man. At night, when I would hear the voice of the prophet mumbling in Yiddish from inside the closet, I would close my eyes and secretly hope that God rejected those incomprehensible prayers. I imagined the words of Elijah rising to Heaven as wisps of smoke, and entering through the nostrils of God. I imagined God spitting the prophet's prayers out of His mouth as though they were filthy rags. Then I would sleep, and in my dreams, I would be terrified.

Elijah disgusted my girlfriend, who shared her dorm room with an easily shocked girl from Iran. This rendered neither of our rooms suitable for intimacy. We struggled to find locations to satisfy our desires, but every abandoned classroom or empty soccer field failed us. In the first instance, just as we were flinging our discarded clothes onto the chalkboard and front row of desks, a dozen first-year calculus students filed in and burst into embarrassed giggling. In the second instance, as we lay on the grass, furiously pawing at each other and gasping for air, a squad of cheerleaders stormed the field and stood above us, arms akimbo, demanding that we leave.

Unfortunately, my girlfriend's Iranian roommate never seemed to leave their dorm room, where she spent hours on the telephone speaking in rapid-fire Farsi. If we intruded during her conversations, she would stare at us from underneath her veil and her eyes would widen, followed by an inevitable high-pitched gasp. My girlfriend did not want to imagine how her roommate would respond if she witnessed us doing so much as holding hands.

My room was no better an option. No amount of discussion concerning Elijah made the prophet any less offensive to my girlfriend. She was not Jewish, and did not care one way or the other if he was a figure from the Old Testament. "Whoever he is," she would complain, "he needs to be in an nursing home. At least there they would clean him!"

Finally, in order to act on my lust, I decided to pay $50 to the two intermural wrestlers who lived in the dorm room next to mine. I asked them to look after the prophet for several hours. When I left the old man with the wrestlers, he turned away from me and pressed his head and hands to the wall, shoulders rising and falling gently as he wept. The wrestlers seemed unconcerned. "He'll be all right," they promised me. "Go and take care of your lady."

While my girlfriend and I indulged our desires, the wrestlers fed Elijah beer and pizza. They turned their music up and danced around the old man, clubbing each other with their massive arms and howling. They went through their drawers and found their cheapest cologne, which they dumped on Elijah to cover his smell. They watched a pornographic movie with the prophet, smoking marihuana out of a six-foot plastic bong and blowing the smoke in Elijah's face. They used cigarette lighters to singe his beard and sidelocks, and they brought trinkets from their Hawaiian vacation out of their closet and decorated the old man with them. When I came for Elijah, two hours after I had left him, he was slumped on one of their beds with a plastic tropical-flower lei around his neck, a grass skirt around his waist, and a coconut-half bikini slung over his shoulders. He lay there, staring up at the ceiling, not blinking. One of the wrestlers lifted a tiki mug to me, toasting me with a tropical cocktail. "Hey," he said blearily. "Your grandfather is pretty cool."

The prophet was not breathing.

It took 20 minutes of CPR before paramedics produced a heartbeat. I visited Elijah every afternoon for a month, drowning in shame. I sat by his hospital bed and stared at the old man. I spoke quietly to him and grasped his hand, rubbing his dry, paper-like skin and praying he would come out of the coma. At the end of the afternoon, my father would join me, and we would go down to the hospital's cafeteria and eat dinner in silence. At first, I tried to apologize to my father, but he raised his hand to silence me. "It was too big a responsibility," he said, his voice breaking. "This is my fault. I should never have asked you to care for Elijah."

I would walk with my father to the hospital room, and he would take a seat alongside the prophet's bed. He would lean down towards the old man, whispering. "What now, Eliyahu?" my father would ask. "What now?"

My grades plummeted and my relationship with my girlfriend ended. I did not attend class, but instead wandered around the campus, filled with black thoughts. At night, I would watch the news, and I would hear of wars and murders, and wonder if it was not somehow my fault. What if the Messiah was ready to come, I wondered, but could not? What if the Messiah waited in Heaven, astride his white stallion, waiting for Elijah to announce him -- and because of my stupidity, that announcement would never come?

Unable to bear these thoughts, I drank, and the more I drank the angrier I grew. What sort of God, I asked myself, would keep the prophet alive in such a debilitated state? What sort of God would allow Elijah to grow mad and frail, so that a little bit of excitement might kill him? Was this my fault, I asked, or God's?

Drunk, I stumbled to the hospital. It was late at night, and the building seemed abandoned. I passed through the hallways unnoticed, as though I were in a dream, until I reached Elijah's room. I stood above the prophet and wept, wanting to press a pillow into the old man's face until he stopped breathing again. If the Messiah cannot come without this ruin of a man, I told myself, then the Messiah does not deserve to come.

I leaned over and pressed my lips to the old man's ear and, for the first time in my life, I whispered to him. "Gather your prayer shawl, gather your phylacteries," I whispered. "He is here!" Then I returned to my dorm room and slept without nightmares.

When I came to the hospital the next day, Elijah was gone. An orderly went through the old man's room, changing the sheets on his empty bed and spraying air freshener. On the floor, swept into a little pile, were half-eaten dates and fragments of a fortune cookie. From outside the room, from some distant hallway, I heard the moans and wheezes of an accordion.

(First published by Strange Horizons Magazine, September 14, 2000)

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

SHEILA WAS BLONDE, long-legged, and wild for action. She had an aura of sexuality and unleashed passion that set men afire.

After the pleasures of her body, other women seemed tame, because Sheila knew all the tricks that had ever been invented about pleasing males.

Barnett was just a hard-working private eye, but after he went to work protecting Sheila, his life got pretty complicated.

There were murders, stolen diamonds, and the threat of arrest by the police. But these were minor dangers compared to the consuming lust of fire-ball Sheila, when she opened her arsm to him and led him to bed.

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WHEN MIKE PACHECO INVITES YOU ON A BONGO DATE, that's just what you're going to be getting. The LP is 30 minutes of Pacheco banging out rhythms on his bongos -- and nothing else. Nothing.

It doesn't matter that you're a sultry blonde in a black beret, wearing a revealing top and a skirt slit all the way up to your thighs. It doesn't matter that you smoke cigarettes from a red holder, or that you pose beneath streetlamps with a cocky, angular come-hirther posture, a look of expectation playing across your desirous eyes and pouty mouth.

If you want a regular date, a fella who will leer at you, treat you to drinks and dinner, and later paw at you in ecstatic animal lust, look elsewhere. You're with Pacheco, and Pacheco plays bongos. Period.

More Vinyl Oddities.

FILMMAKER DWAYN ESPER can't really be discussed by looking at individual films, because his movies are, without exception, terrible. He was a gallingly incompetent filmmaker who is most famous for having acquired the rights to Freaks, Tod Browning's notorious 1932 shocker about life in the sideshow; Esper retitled it Nature's Mistakes and toured it for years with a stage show of actual freaks. Esper's own movies focused on the lurid, particularly on venereal disease and psychosexual depravity, which he ground out with a maximum of resourcefulness and a minimum of competence. The acting in Esper's films is terrible, the narrative tends toward the nonsensical, and the editing is bewildering. Eddie Muller and Daniel Faris, in their books Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of "Adults Only" Cinema, said that "Dwayn Esper made Ed Wood look like Orson Welles," and, man, they weren't joking.

But Esper was a keen businessman, working outside the Hollywood system, and part of the reason his films are so weirdly disjointed is because they were designed to be re-edited on the fly. Esper carried a reel of what he called "pickle and beaver" shots, and these could be cut in or out of his films, depending on the possibility of a police raid. As a result, Esper's films are a fascinating study of primitive cinematic exploitation. They constantly hint at wild and graphic behavior, but, in their current incarnations, barely show them. Trust, however, that late at night, in a tent in Poughkeepsie at the tail end of the Great Depression, when the police were busy with elsewhere, you would have seen things that might have gotten you jail time.

Maniac (1934): The subject of this early Esper film is madness; in fact, the movie is constantly interrupted by intertitles explaining the definitions of terms from abnormal psychology, including dementia praecox and paranoia. So it is appropriate that Maniac is one of the maddest films ever made. Borrowing liberally from the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe, the film tells of an especially mad scientist and his violently unbalanced assistant. The first is a wild-haired, gray-bearded Teutonic shrink, played by Horace B. Carpenter, who delivers all his dialogue at maximum volume in an impenetrable German accent. His assistant, played by film make-up artist William Woods, is a former vaudevillian with a talent for impersonation. The shrink has a side-hobby -- specifically, he brings the dead back to life, as demonstrated by a constantly beating heart on his desk. When the psychiatrist demands his assistant shoot himself for the sake of science, the assistant turns the gun on Carpenter instead, then takes his place. And this is where things start getting crazy.

There is no point in trying to recap the plot, which is really a series of disconnected events, so I will simply recap some highlights. A patient who thinks he is an orangutan accidentally receives a shot of "super-adrenaline," causing him to kidnap a female zombie, tearing her top off in the process. A cat breeder explains his business philosophy, which is to feed cats to rats, and then feed rats to cats, and sell the pelts. Two women get in a fight with syringes in the basement of the professor's asylum, knocking each other around with shocking brutality. The assistant seizes a cat, plucks its eye out, and declares "Why, it's not unlike and oyster or a grape!" He then eats the eye.

To represent his growing madness, the assistant will sometimes simply cackle in place as Esper superimposes demonic images from Haxan, a silent German film from 1922 about the history of witchcraft, because nothing says "madness" like heavyset men in theatrical devil costumes. Maniac wraps up with a stern title card explaining the dangers to society of untreated mental illness. By this time, such a warning is completely unnecessary. We've seen enough madness for quite a long time, thank you.

Watch Maniac on Archive.org

Marihuana (1936): Of the three Dwain Esper films widely available in the public domain, this is the one that comes closest to actually resembling a film. It's relatively tightly scripted, Esper's direction is occasionally competent, and the cast is passable. The film also contains some surprisingly humane flourishes. There's no clear reason for this -- after all, the film is standard Esper exploitation fare, detailing a woman's fast slide into a thoroughly dissolute life after one puff of a marijuana cigarette. The film was scripted by Esper's wife, Hildegarde Stadie, who also wrote the screenplay for the impossibly bizarre Maniac. (She was quite a character herself, the daughter of a snake-oil salesman who spent her childhood selling something called Tiger Fat; the sales technique involved the preteen Stadie appearing fully nude, draped in a python.) There's just no reason why this should be better crafted than any other Esper film, but it is.

The main character is the wonderfully named Burma Roberts, played by the equally wonderfully named Harley Wood, who spent most of her career as an uncredited extra in b-unit westerns and crime films. I'm not sure why her career fizzled, as she was attractive (she rather resembled Julia Stiles) and fun to watch. She charts her character's decline with alarming swiftness -- the film is only 50 minutes long, but over the course of it she watches a friend drown at a beach party, gets pregnant, pushes her boyfriend to get work for a drug dealer, loses him in a gun fight with cops, give up her baby for adoption, sell heroin, kidnaps a child, and eventually overdoses -- and the drowning doesn't happen until the film's midpoint! She moves quickly from a naive teenager given to jealous tantrums to a hardened drug pusher, and if the transformation isn't exactly believable, she carries it with aplomb.

She is given most of the film's unexpected touches. Early on, she chats with her boyfriend, grinning at him while leaning on the side of his convertable. Briefly, the camera cuts away to her legs, revealing that she is actually kneeling on his running board and waving her feet, an unconscious gesture of pleasure. It's as though Esper noticed she was doing that, thought it was a nice expression of her character, and decided to film it, but this scenario is hard to believe. It's the sort of thing a good director does. Similarly, she has a moment when she has decided to move out of her parent's house, and she glances down and sees a nervous pekingese staring back up at her. Burma scoops the dog up and cradles it, looking heartbroken, before the image fades. In a film made so cheaply and quickly, you wouldn't expect the filmmakers to have gone out of the way to locate a dog to film this scene. Perhaps one just wandered by.

There is one last element to the film that is unexpected: actual nudity (there is a little in Maniac as well). And I'm not talking about random clips, unconnected shots of flesh that could be edited into the film. The nudity in this movie is tied into the storyline, and couldn't be edited out. At the beach house, a group of girls smoke marijuana, giggle for a while, and then decide a skinny dip might be just the thing. They peel off their clothes and go running out to the surf, screaming merrily, breasts and asses visible, if dim in the moonlight. It's not much nudity, and would hardly raise an eyebrow nowadays, but this film was made six years after the Hayes Code effectively outlawed anything remotely unseemly, and so is quite shocking in a film of the era. Almost as shocking as the fact that Dwain Esper made a film with a fine lead actress, some smart direction, and a cohesive narrative.

Watch Marihuana on Archive.org.
Watch Marihuana on YouTube.

Sex Madness (1938): Despite its lurid title, this is a rather by-the-books exercise in making a sex exploitation film, in that it pretends to be concerned with the scourge of social diseases. To that end, Esper's film expends most of its narrative telling the story of Millicent Hamilton, played by a actress named Vivian McGill who plays her role with the exaggerated hand-fluttering and quavering voice of a distressed damsel from a Victorian melodrama. She would never again appear in any film. Poor Millicent wins a beauty contest and heads to the big city to make it in show business, leaving her dim but doting boyfriend behind. She winds up at a show-business party where everyone is dressed like characters from the Rudolph Valentino film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as Argentinean landowners (one woman dances a solo tango that seems to consist of nothing but her spinning in circles with her arms outstretched.) Here Millicent is plied with wine and wakes up with syphilis.

Millicent embarks on a course of Neosalvarsan, or at least we must assume she does -- the film's doctors never really go into any specific medical detail, or even discuss medicine at all, for that matter, but Neosalvarsan was the treatment at the time, and, according to this film, the course of treatment lasted at least two years. But Millicent is anxious to return home and marry her beau, and she falls for a quack doctor's spurious treatment, which he guarantees will cure her of the disease with just a few simple shots. She marries and has a child, who instantly becomes sick and feverish, and her husband goes quickly blind from syphilis, leaving Millicent contemplating suicide at the film's end.

But forget Millicent, and forget every other aspect of the film that pretends to serve a social function, such as the character of a millionaire who donates money to stamp out venereal disease, only to discover that his own son is a victim. The real point of films like this is weirdly pornographic, in that they generally included graphic footage of the ravages of syphilis (mostly snipped out of the online versions of this film), that often included flashes of full-frontal nudity.

Sex Madness also includes an opening scene which ranks as being nearly as mad as anything Esper would put into Maniac. Set in a burlesque theater, it shows a tableau of pure lust, Esper style. A young couple sits side by side, the boy begging the girl to spend the night with him. And we see the millionaire's son, with a group of his chums, commenting on the burlesque performers ("She's got 'it,'" he declares, using slang that was passé a decade earlier.) Then we see a lesbian pawing grotesquely at her frightened date. And then we see a sinister man, staring at the show with beady eyes and pursed lips. He leaves the theater, and a young girl passes in front of him. Esper instantly cuts to a newspaper headline telling of a girl who was raped and murdered. Even in a film in which every sexual liaison outside those enjoyed in the marriage bed leads to misery, this is jarring. I guess in Esper's world, sometimes the agony of sexual immorality happens over time, and sometimes it happens instantly.

Watch Sex Madness on Archive.org.
Watch Sex Madness on Google Video.
Watch Sex Madness on YouTube.

More of the weirdest and wildest films from the public domain.

THIS PRODUCT IS exactly what it appears to be. It is a large plastic bug whose head you tear off, and then you squeeze the torso and eat the pasty candy that comes out. It is one of several for sale at my favorite dollar store, all representing different insects, all with different flavored paste. I went with the Rhinoceros beetle, which features a lemon flavor. I don't know why. Perhaps because they are often used as pets in Asia, and this is a Chinese-made candy (distributed by Imagine Global). Rhinoceros beetles are also used by gamblers, because the males will tend to fight each other, which makes me feel like some sort of game could be made out of this candy. You could purchase several, pretend that they attack each other, and then devour the thick paste that spills out of the loser.

How does it taste? Well, pretty good, actually. But does that matter? The entire point of the candy is that you tear the head off an insect and suck down its insides. You're either going to enjoy that experience or not, and the actual flavor of the candy is entirely secondary.



More from the Odd Ingester!

IOWA IS NOT REALLY KNOWN for its cocktails, but one of the state's native daughters, Mrs. R.E. Taylor of Des Moines, should have a statue built in her honor. She invented the Silver Dawn, and it is the first of the many Galliano cocktails I have tried that I would describe as being legitimately great. Don't get me wrong -- the Harvey Wallbanger and its relatives are great drinks. But Galliano is used as a subtle additive to them, and so they can't really be described as Galliano cocktails.

The Silver Dawn, on the other hand, is a cocktail based in Galliano's unique taste, and it is the flavor of Galliano that really defines the drink. I don't know what muse possessed Mrs. Taylor when she sat down to create the drink, as her ingredient choices and measurements are completely unexpected. Here is how the drink is made: 1 oz. Liquore Galliano. 1 oz. gin. 1 oz. fresh lemon juice. 3/4 oz pure maple juice. Stir with ice and serve in a cocktail glass.

1 oz. lemon juice? That's a lot for a drink; so much that the lemon flavor would generally overwhelm the drink. And maple syrup? That is so uncommon a cocktail ingredient that I can think of only five other drinks that use it, none of them popular (all use lemon juice in copious amount, however, so it is safe to presume Mrs. Taylor knew them).

The resulting cocktail is delicious in the way truly great cocktails are delicious. It's a sweet drink, but the gin and the lemon juice balance out the sweetness so that it doesn't have the almost candy-like quality of many modern sweet cocktails. The gin flavor is quite subtle, and so the two dominant flavors are the Galliano and the maple syrup. As it turns out, they are a perfect compliment for each other, both recognizable but never competing with each other. The anise flavor of the Galliano is very subdued in the drink, although still recognizable, and the herbal flavors really come to the forefront. It's is a very strong-flavored cocktail, and, because it doesn't taste like any other cocktail I've ever had, the effect is initially startling, as most cocktails taste like variations on other cocktails. It takes a moment to acclimate yourself to the new flavor, but just a moment, as your taste buds tease out the individual ingredients. They're all there, too. Some cocktails, particularly those created during the Prohibition, are meant to hide the flavor of bad alcohol, but pre-Prohibition drinks were designed to enhance the native flavors of good liquor. This is a relatively modern drink, in that it was created in the 60s or thereabouts, but it has the quality of a classic pre-Prohibition drink, in that it's really a showcase for Galliano.

I can't stop drinking them. This is a positively dangerous drink.

More Galliano cocktails.

ONE OF THE MORE INTERESTING aspects of Shatner's film career is just how many of his films appear, on first blush, to be exploitation, but are, in fact, something more. Both The Explosive Generation and The Intruder look to be crass sensationalism, but turn out to be sensitive, if somewhat hand-wringing, dramatizations of significant social themes. And while Shatner turned in performances in a few entertainingly z-grade horror films, they came about at a time when really grotesque violence was just starting to enter the mainstream; as a result, they seem almost naive by today's standards.

Impulse, on the other hand, really feels like exploitation. Made in 1974, it was directed by William Grefe, a man who had a long history of helming films shot in Florida and and bearing titles like Death Curse of Tartu and The Hooked Generation. Unlike Big Bad Mama, the other Shatner film that legitimately deserved to be called exploitation, Impulse doesn't trade in female nakedness. No, it is exploitation because it is cheap and badly made, and turns its attention to an exploitative topic -- specifically, Impulse is about a murderous psychopath. Nonetheless, the film is tremendously entertaining and inadvertently hilarious, and William Shatner gets much of the dubious credit for that.

Briefly, Shatner plays Matt Stone, a gigolo and con artist who, as a boy, witnessed his mother being manhandled by a World War II veteran and so killed the man with a samurai sword, which happened to be nearby. As an adult, he parades around Florida in an embarrassing series of polyester suits, a J.C. Penny version of a Seventies' swinger. He meets and seduces older women, living off their largess while passing himself off as a financial investor.

He's also dangerously unbalanced. When one woman catches him with a belly dancer, he promptly strangles her, locks her in her car, and dumps both in a river. Shatner occasionally signals that he is going into these psychotic fugues by pressing his pinky to his mouth, the same gesture he me made, as a child, after plunging a katana into his mother's attacker. It's a ridiculous gesture, contrived and silly looking. In fact, Shatner is unable to convey any genuine menace in this film at all. In one scene, he attacks a woman who blocks his way at a park. Or, rather, he attacks a bouquet of balloons she carries, popping them viciously and then barking at her "People like you should be ground up for dog meat!" Rather than seeming dangerous, Shatner seems pathetic and inept in this scene; his popping of the balloons comes off as an act of impotent bluster.

Weirdly, this works. Shatner's character, Matt Stone, is not meant to be seen as a malevolent figure of menace. He is inept, he's a fraud, and he would be simply laughable for for the fact that, when he's really pressed, he's likely to grab whatever is nearby and stab you with it. This is highlighted by is a rather elongated murder at the film's midpoint, in which Shatner decides to off an old acquaintance, another con man portrayed by Harold Sakata, playing a character named Karate Pete. Sakata is most famous for having portrayed the mute killer Oddjob in the film Goldfinger, and it is easy to see why he wasn't given any dialogue in the James Bond film, as Sakata is terrible at line readings. (In one instance, Shatner shoos him out of his hotel room, claiming there is a woman coming; Sakata grins feebly and stutters out the immortal line "You all the time horny.") Shatner decides to kill the man at a drive-through car wash late at night.

This is obviously something Shatner has taken time to arrange, as he has a noose at the ready, carefully tied to the roof of the car wash, knotted at one end so, once Shatner gets the noose around Sakata's neck, he can use the rope to climb down the side of the building. It goes disastrously wrong. Shatner doesn't shimmy down the side of the building using the rope, as he had planned -- he tumbles off it. And Sakata produces a knife from his pocket and cuts himself free from the rope. Eventually, Shatner simply hops in his car, chases Sakata through the car wash, and runs him over.

This is witnessed by a little girl, the daughter of one of Shatner's lovers, and the rest of the film is a battle of wills between Shatner and the child, a battle that has Shatner badly outmatched. She taunts him with her knowledge of his crime, and he is powerless against her, unable to do anything but waggle his finger menacingly at her. Eventually he snaps and chases her through a cemetery in one of the most protracted and least exciting chase scenes ever put on the screen. It's also a strange scene from a directorial standpoint. It is late at night, and yet, when they run into the funeral parlor, they pass a body laid out in a coffin. Shatner chases the girl around the funeral home for a while, and then past the coffin again, at which point it becomes obvious that a funeral is in progress. Shatner assaults a few of the guests, and then leaves, running over to the nearby house of another woman, killing her goldfish as she watches in horror, and then stabbing her to death.

Obviously, this raises more questions than it answers. My brief description might seems as though it makes the scene more confusing than it is, but, trust me, the scene is just as confusing when you watch it. You find yourself wondering why people are having a funeral so late at night. Why don't they do anything the first time Shatner races through their funeral chasing after a screaming little girl? Why does Shatner kill the goldfish?

The murder of Karate Pete turns out to be a metaphor for the entire film, which is full of carefully knotted nooses that are mishandled and don't work, in a manner of speaking. There's a certain accidental comedy to watching scenes like this get lost in their own complexity, but, in the end, the slasher films of the Eighties got it right. Why bother making elaborate plans for murder when the simplest, most brutal methods are the best. You've got a car, man; just drive over your victim and be done with it.

More films of William Shatner.

THIS IS AN ODD LITTLE FILM that made an odd little mark on history, in that it was the first Japanese science fiction film produced in color, although most contemporary copies are so dulled and faded that it might as well be in black and white. Warning From Space (originally released as Spacemen Appear in Tokyo; a much better title) tells of a group of aliens from a planet called Paira, which has a twin orbit with the earth; the planet is always on the opposite side of the sun from us, and therefore occluded from our view.

The film details the Pairans' rather inept attempts to contact the earth to warn of an impending collisions with a stray planetoid, dubbed Planet R. In their natural form, the Pairans are meant to look like human-sized starfish with one glowing eye in their middle. The Pairan costume was designed by Tarō Okamoto, an avant garde Japanese painter and sculptor, and his creations are both visually splendid and a little silly. The Pairans are obviously humans in starfish-shaped swaths of fabric, and, as a result, look quite a lot like Maggie Simpson in her snow suit. Nonetheless, it's a rather startling creation, and the Pairans' spacecraft is a large, neutral space with only two perpetually spinning rings, like the ones that encircled Zod in the movie Superman, for decoration. The resulting effect resembles something you might see at some occult-themed modern dance performance, and Warning From Space deserves some credit for creating such idiosyncratic aliens.

Alas, the Pairans aren't very good at making contact with humans. When they first land in Tokyo, their space ships and bizarre appearance instantly create panic. Later, one of the extraterrestrials changes her form to that of a human woman. Unfortunately, she bases her appearance on that of a popular tap dancer, and so can't go anywhere without being mobbed by fans. Japan's scientists figure out her secret pretty quickly, in part because she can't help but behave in an alien fashion. Playing tennis, she leaps 10 feet in the air to return a serve, and she has a habit of simply walking right through doors rather than open them.

Eventually, she convinces a group of scientists that Earth is in imminent danger of destruction, and the last half hour of the film is a surprisingly languid disaster movie. As Planet R rushes toward earth, it generates intense heat; we see dogs collapsing in agony, and birds falling out of the sky. Rivers flood and buildings crumble, but they seem to do so in mostly abandoned cities, so there is little human carnage.

The cities have, in fact, been evacuated, in a series of brief but effective scenes. Japanese films have demonstrated a particularly skill in lensing mass terror, and here huge crowds of people flee down streets with their possessions, and it isn't merely chaos. Everyone seems to know precisely where they are going in such a hurry. We even witness a monastery as the monks ceremonially shut it down, an image of great poignancy compared with the unthinking anarchy of American disaster films.

Like Matango, Warning From Space was clearly made in the dreadful shadow of the atomic bomb. The only possible hope for humanity is the theoretical work of one scientist, who has accidentally unlocked a formula that would generate an explosion that would dwarf any atomic arsenal. The Pairans are terrified of this formula, and a rather nasty lot of international criminals want to beat it out of the scientist and sell it to the highest bidder. The film touches lightly on the ethics of bringing such a destructive force into the world. In a plot point that is rather surprising in a film that was made a scant decade after Fat Man and Little Boy destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the film's characters come to the conclusion that such destructive power is not inherently immoral, but that it's morality is based in how it is used.

Watch Warning From Space at Archive.org.
Watch Warning From Space on Google Video.

More of the weirdest and wildest films from the public domain.

WELL, WE WERE ALL WONDERING what happened to the Kali, the four-armed Indian Goddess who inspired the murderous Thugees in films such as Gunga Din and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Apparently she tired of her following of demented stranglers, threw off her garland of skulls, cropped and bleached her hair, and donned an ill-shaped red dress to move West and become a cover model for cheesy organ duets.

More Vinyl Oddities.

THIS IS AN INTERESTING COCKTAIL, and evidence that the Galliano cocktail book I am using, Discover Gold, is quite old. Because the Golden Gimlet, despite its appealing name, is made with ingredients modern drinkers aren't going to enjoy very much. Oh, I'm not talking about the Galliano; it is a peculiar liqueur, but one that is easy to develop a taste for. And I'm not talking about lime juice, which everyone loves, and is the ingredient that turns this drink into a gimlet. I'm talking about bitters, which tends to just confuse people nowadays, and dry vermouth, which contemporary drinkers have developed such a distaste for that bartenders have stopped including it in cocktails altogether, even the martini, which is not a martini at all if you leave out the vermouth.

Here is how you make the Golden Gimlet, although I will be surprised if anyone tries it: Mix 1 1/2 oz. Liquore Galliano with 1 oz. dry vermouth and the juice of a half of a lime. Toss in a dash of bitters and stir with ice. Strain into a 7 oz. highball glass and top with soda.

I'm generally one to sing the praises of vermouth over a chorus of opposition, and I don't think you can be a really mature drinker until you learn to love the fortified wine, which is an essential ingredient in many classic cocktails. However, I will save that lecture for another time, because the Golden Gimlet is a misfire. Vermouth and Galliano just do not mix well; the resulting drink simply tastes like Galliano that had gone unexpectedly bitter. And the addition of the soda water leaves the cocktail watery in a very unsatisfying way.

There are people out there who love bitter cocktails. Most of them come from war torn Eastern European countries and got in the habit of drinking bitter drinks under a regional belief that they are good for the digestion, or ease the flow of blood, or increase the appetite, or whatever myth about bitters is popular in their country. They slam down straight shots of Campari and grin at you, daring you to do the same. They come from hard lives, filled with tears, and they are of the opinion that their drinking habits somehow reflect their hardscrabble and agonizing existence. The Golden Gimlet seems as though it had been invented to make Galliano palatable to such people. The rest of us are going to find the cocktail a chore, something to be choked down so as not to waste good alcohol, and a cocktail should never be that.

More Galliano cocktails.

IF YOU'VE EVER spent time reading through collections of supernatural fiction, you've certainly stumbled across William Hope Hodgson's intensely creepy 1907 tale "The Voice in the Night" (if not, the story can be downloaded as a PDF here.) Hodgson's story tells of a becalmed schooner that is approached at night by a murky figure in a rowboat, who begs food. He tells a tale of a shipwreck, whose survivors make their way to an island covered in a a pernicious fungus. Eventually, fungus consumed the survivors, and, as the rowboat pulls away, the witnesses aboard the schooner see that the figure aboard the rowboat is barely human.

In 1963, the Toho film company, who were also responsible for the Godzilla films, tried their hand at bringing Hodgson's tale to the screen. They placed Godzilla director Ishirô Honda at the helm, and he crafted an almost perfect horror story that goes absolutely haywire at the end. The film was originally titled Matango, although it has received some unfortunate alternative titles as it has been rereleased by companies that specialize in public domain films, including Fungus of Terror and Attack of the Killer Mushrooms; the latter is how the film is listed on Archive. org, which is a shame, really.

Mantango follows a group of Tokyoites on a pleasure cruise that goes quickly bad when they steer into an unexpected squall. They wash up on an uninhabited equatorial island in the Pacific, which seems devoid of life but for vegetation and brightly colored, oversized mushrooms. Even birds avoid the island, although there is evidence that other people have been stranded, including a fungus-covered wreck in a lagoon. It's a strange ship, carefully designed to hide its nationality and showing traces that it was intended as a research vessel, studying radioactivity. The captain's log is incomplete, warning only that the indigenous mushrooms should not be eaten, and that the crew of the ship often wandered into the woods and disappeared. Ominously, every mirror on the ship has been removed and smashed.

Soon, the castaways start seeing strange shapes in the distance in the woods, and spongy humanoids wander onto their ship at night. Worse still, the fragile camaraderie of the group splinters, particularly driven by the presence of two young women aboard the ship, one of whom deliberately flirts with all the male survivors. ("They all want me," she declares proudly.) Driven by starvation, some of the survivors begin to eat the native fungus, and experience violent hallucinations. And then, when the survivors have dwindled to just a few, the whole forest seems to come alive in a Technicolor nightmare of moving fungi, all laughing madly.

It's an outrageous climax, causing some critics to speculate the the film is a hallucinogenic meditation on atomic warfare. This speculation isn't merely idle, either; the film makes explicit references to atomic testing, as did the original Godzilla, and the first character to eat the mushrooms launches into a monologue about ceremonial uses of hallucinogenic fungus. Additionally, the film was reportedly very nearly banned in Japan, as critics felt the film's makeup too-closely resembled the appearance of radiation poisoning.

Users of hallucinogens will sometimes explain that, eventually, the hallucinogenic experience becomes a confrontation with death, and bad trips often include images of skeletons and decomposition. I suppose horror films serve the same sort of function, and this one does it well; it doesn't merely look at the way death consumes the human body (with fungal infection here standing in for decay), but also the death of civility and reason that sometimes follows a tragedy. (The most harrowing example of this is when one of the male survivors tells the rest that he plans to go the the womens' cabin that night and rape them; one of the women, played by cult favorite Kumi Mizuno, demands that the other men protect her, and they all turn their heads away in mute refusal.) As the tragedy that these survivors are experiencing is explicitly tied to atomic radiation, the hysterical climax of the film becomes even more poignant. After all, the atom bomb wasn't a commonplace horror, it was madness.

Watch Matango on Archive.org.
Watch Matango at Google Video.

Listen to Kumi Mizuno performing a tropical-themed song from Matango:



Download an MP3 of Kumi Mizuno performing a tropical-themed song from Matango.

More of the weirdest and wildest films from the public domain.

MY SERIES OF REVIEWS of the films of William Shatner is coming to a close. I own two more of his films, which I plan to write about soon, and the rest of his work from the 60s and 70s is increasing obscure and hard-to-obtain. I won't completely close the book on Shatner's film and television work until I'm satisfied that I have tracked down and written everything worth tracking down and writing about, but, for now, I feel I have well-represented the mostly unexplored body of work Shatner created during the first few decades of his career.

As I wind down this first series of reviews, I'd like to get started on a second, longer-term project that I have dubbed Public Domainia. There are quite a lot of films in the public domain, for one reason or another. Some studios went bust and their catalog was ignored, and nobody was around to renew the copyright on their films when the time came. Some foreign films were inadequately copyrighted, or come from countries with less draconian copyright laws than the United States, and so relatively recent films produced by these countries' studios are now freely available. (Japanese movies that were made prior to 1953 are all in the public domain, as an example). And some films just accidentally entered the public domain for one reason or another; most famously, Night of the Living Dead was first distributed without a copyright notice, reportedly due to a last-minute change of title card, and so inadvertently was turned over to the public domain due to the stringent copyright laws of the time.

Most of these films have made their way to the Internet, and more do every day. Organizations like Archive.org have amassed huge collections of these works. And some of them are very, very strange. There are Poverty Row American thrillers and Spanish horror films that seemed to have been made in fits of hysteria. There are Japanese science-fiction films that walk a very thin line between uncontained imagination and absurdity. There are cult films made by filmmakers with strange passions for audiences looking for the thrill of the new. And there are works of pure exploitation, dashed out by sleaze merchants who pretended they were making educational films for the edification of the population, but created movies that showed maximum violence and pulchritude while at the same time using a stern-voiced narrator to condemn it.

It is my plan to seek out the hidden greats in these enormous online film archives. These are films that are too weird, too frightening, too wild, or two alien to make much of a profit, and so wouldn't enjoy a well-promoted DVD rerelease nowadays. Thanks, however, to the existence of the public domain, these works are nonetheless freely and widely available, and can still shock and amaze us anew.

More of the weirdest and wildest films from the public domain.

AS MUCH AS I may be a fan of Bizarre Foods host and fellow Minnesotan Andrew Zimmern, whenever I got to the dollar store, I end up wondering why he feels the need to travel to Vietnam to devour a beating cobra heart. He could just stay at home, raid the dollar stores, and discover food that is just as perplexing.

In fact, I can't go shopping without feeling overwhelmed by the bewildering culinary options out there. Take Sipahh's Milk Flavoring straws as a relatively tame example. Here we have yet another Chinese-made food product being distributed in the United States, mostly, I would assume, to children. "A fun way to drink milk," its packaging inform us. But their idea of fun is peculiar, as the straw itself looks like a demonstration model a plumber might use to show how a drain gets clogged. The straw is a translucent plastic, about three-quarters filled with a grotesque brown blockade. Never mind that the clog is made out of sugar, tapioca starch, cocoa, and malrodextrin -- in other words, a chemical chocolate milk -- the visual image is quite displeasing.

Using this product is rather simple. You pop the straw into milk, and then suck the milk through the straw, flavoring it. And how does it taste? Like very weak Ovaltine, without the health benefits of malt extract. There's a strange marketing scheme going on here, as though the manufacturer worried that chocolate milk just wasn't fun enough for children, even when drunk through a straw, and decided the remedy for that was to have children imagine that chocolate milk is created in the same way that drain cleaner unclogs pipes. As an added bonus, the resulting product doesn't taste as good as chocolate milk. What problem that solves, I don't know. Perhaps there are children who were complaining that chocolate milk is just too delicious.

Sorry, Andrew. In its own way, this is as bizarre a food as whelk over dry ice. Perhaps stranger, as you need not go to Beijing to experience it; instead, our neighbors seem to be consuming it.

More from the Odd Ingester!

WHAT DO WE LEARN from this LP cover? Well, firstly, "Ivy" Pete and His Limbomainiacs seemingly can be ordered via mail. They come in a flat wooden box. Open the box and they spring out, Tropical-print shirts, straw hats, guitar, flute, and congo drum at the ready. Say the word, and the Limbomaniacs will enthrall your brown-suited, ivy league-haircutted guests and their much wilder girlfriends with such thrilling Bahamanian songs as "Donkey Wants Water" and "Man Smart, Woman Smarter."

We also learn that thin white men in monkey suits once threw outrageously dangerous parties. One supposed that after a three-martooni lunch and a long day of writing commercial jingles, such men got a little crazy. "Sure, it's fun to limbo," they must have said to each other over Havana cigars, then still available, "but how can we really spice things up?"

The answer, of course, was fire. The limboing woman on this LP arches backward delightedly; she would be less cheerful a moment after the picture was snapped, when her beehive hair-do, carefully built up with layer after layer of alcohol-based hairspray, erupted into a fast-burning conflagration. The next day at work neither of the men pictured would explain the redness of their hands or the peeling skin. The first rule of limbo club is that you don't talk about limbo club.

More Vinyl Oddities.

EVER SINCE German company Haribo introduced the Gummibärchen, as, as we know it, Gummi Bear, in 1922, this rubbery confection made from glucose and gelatin has been gaining steam. In the Dollar Store I favor, near the Target on Lake Street and Hiawatha, it sometimes seems like half of their candy is some variation of this candy, redubbed "gummy" rather than "gummi," presumably for legal reasons. Perhaps because someone discovered that the rubbery sugar Gummi Bears are made from can be molded into almost any shape, these candies often take strange forms, such as gummy ice cream cones, or cheeseburgers. I shall try each of these at some point or other, but I thought I would begin my exploration today with Make Your Own Gummy Pizza, distributed by a company called Frankford, out of Philadelphia, but manufactured in China.

As you can see, constructing the Gummy Pizza is a four-step process. First, you lay out the pizza crust itself, which has the appearance, and, to an extent, the taste of Play-Dough sprinkled with sugar.


The next step in the addition of the "tomato sauce." This is an extremely sticky and viscous fluid with a dull pink color and a taste that is at once sour and plastic-like. It's actually unnerving how sticky it is. I used to have a nightmare when I was younger in which I dive into a swimming pool, but discover, to my horror, that the pool is filled with orange soda. Then I run to a shower to wash it off, and syrup pours out of the shower and all over me, and I know, with mute dread, that I will never stop being sticky. This faux-tomato sauce is that nightmare in candy form.

Next you add the "cheese," which is, in fact, a very powdery, Pixy Stix-style sugar, dyed yellow and, again, made to taste like a sour plastic. You sprinkle it onto the Gummy pizza, and it glues itself into place atop the ersatz tomato paste. At least the company provides you with such a superabundance of this candy cheese that it completely covers the the terrifying tomato sauce syrup.

Lastly, you drop oddly colored little gummy shapes onto the top of the pizza. These are supposed to be the toppings, but they are toppings as created by someone who has never had a pizza. They're just random shapes, some long and wormlike, some short and squat. Some of you may have seen paintings done by monkeys (if not, here's one I own), and these toppings rather resemble what a chimpanzee might produce if you dabbed a blob of color on his thumb and asked him to paint a mushroom.

Once the pizza is assembled, it is time to eat it. Here is a short photo-essay of my Gummy Pizza dining experience.

































As you might imagine, it was less than satisfying. It's sort of amazing that they can create a Gummy candy that resembles a pizza, but forgot to make it taste like candy.

More from the Odd Ingester!

AS I MENTIONED when I began this blog, I have been wanting to do more entertaining. I think there is something of a lost art to it, or, at least, I have had far too many experiences where the total extent of a host's or hostesses' commitment to their own party is to invite people over, put some music on, put out some liquor, and then proceed to drink themselves into a coma. If you have wallflowerish tendencies, as I do, this can leave you seated on a sofa somewhere, sipping tepid beer and listening in a conversation about Bon Jovi's acting career, a subject you have no real interest in.

And there was a time when the host or the hostess would introduce you to people you don't know, and do so rather cleverly, saying "Oh, you haven't met Mr. Shnickdonovan, have you. It will interest you to know that Mr. Shnickdonovan studies the art made by insane people, which I know you also have an interest in." Then you and Mr. Shnickdonovan can have a lovely conversation. Nowadays, you're left to your own devices, and must introduce yourself to total strangers, which is something that I am convinced people are only really comfortable doing when they are medicated, and then are not very good at it.

I've decided to try my hand at some of these dying social arts. This past evening, as an example, I invited a few friends over for a showing of The Wicker Man, a cult film from 1973 in which Edward Woodward plays a police detective investigating the disappearance of a little girl on a Scottish island that has reverted back to paganism. It's a strange and fascinating film, and certainly just showing it would be enough entertainment for an evening, but this seemed the perfect opportunity to create a centerpiece, once a tradition at any party.

To this end, Coco and I went to the supermarket and bought marshmallows and pretzel sticks. Both come in two sizes, small and large, and we bought them both. Then, before the party began, I used them to create my very own Wicker Men. For those of you who haven't seen the film, I won't ruin the climax by describing it in too great detail; suffice it to say that the Wicker Man is exactly what he sounds like, a man made out of wicker.

The process of making these was not terribly complicated. I used the pretzel sticks as the limbs and the marshmallows to join them. The photo to the left shows the way I connected all of this to form a man-shaped creature who looks made out of twigs. He could not stand upright, alas, but nonetheless we thing the centerpiece looked rather nice, particularly surrounded by candles. Additionally, the little pretzel Wicker Men tasted unexpectedly good. You wouldn't expect marshmallows and pretzels to be a good combination, but you would be wrong. The saltiness and the sweetness go quite well together, as do the textures. Additionally, since the creatures are jointed by the marshmallows, they can move about a bit. As The Wicker Man is a sort of a musical, in that the pagan characters in it seem to break out into 70s-sounding British folk songs every five minutes or so, feel free to make your pretzel Wicker Men dance along.

Here are photos of Myself, Coco, and some of our friends enjoying our pretzel Wicker Men:

MY DESK IS CLUTTERED with panicked memos about the television show. There is a problem with the talent. In particular, the actor playing the main character, a golem, insists on whining and stuttering his lines as though he were a neurotic New York drag queen, which everybody agrees sounds wrong coming from a creature that can snap somebody's neck like a brittle twig. "I take revenge for the Hebreweth," he declares in an effete voice, causing his director to fling the teleplay onto the studio floor and storm out, flying into my office to complain. "It's not bad enough he lisps out the word 'Hebrews,'" comes the protest, "but he also insists on fluttering his hands around his face like a silent film star and winking at his victims."

Because I created the show and am its executive producer, everybody looks to me for the solution. I have none to offer, and am certain that this is the moment when my fraudulence will become general knowledge. I should not be producing for television.

I have heard that everyone in Hollywood feels like an impostor. But I really am an impostor. My success in this town is based on a short play that I am supposed to have written. Titled Hard Times on Block A, the one-act tells the story of a group of prisoners who are planning a riot. They whisper their schemes to each other while tearing off scraps of metal from their beds and sanding them down into makeshift knives, and the audience knows these men to be doomed. Even Mook, the fresh-faced boy who is struggling to get himself a G.E.D. so that he can get a real job and support his new family once he's out of the pen. When my play debuted at the Western Theater's Festival of New Short Plays, an audience member cried out, "No, Mook--you've got your whole life ahead of you!" This audience member wept openly when a prison guard cornered the boy and beat him to death with a nightstick at the play's climax. The anguished audience member was none other than Whoopie Goldberg, and by the next afternoon I had an agent at William Morris and a meeting at Fox Television.

But I hadn't written Hard Times on Block A. I found the manuscript in a dumpster outside the California State Prison in Lancaster, which I was digging through in hopes of finding a sandwich. The true author is a convicted spree-killer named Frankie Whitmore, who is called "The Pick-Axe Psycho" by everybody who knows of his heinous mass murders. I receive letters from Whitmore on a daily basis, sometimes several letters per day, all spelling out in graphic detail what Whitmore will do to me when he is paroled. Usually his plans involve duct tape, a sharpened pick-axe, a shallow grave, and a bottle of hydrochloric acid. Fortunately, Whitmore is serving 27 consecutive life sentences, which means he will not be up for parole until he is 86 years old. Unless there is a jailbreak, or Whitmore proves to be an uncannily vicious old man, I should be safe.

Nonetheless, his letters terrify me, and I tend to flip through them obsessively as I sit behind my desk at the studio. Although Whitmore has repeatedly gone to the press with his assertion that I stole his play, his accusations have fallen on deaf ears. The fact that he was captured by the FBI while cooking his last victim into a thick, greasy gumbo has encouraged the press into believing that anything Whitmore says is probably crazy. Besides, how could there be anything to the man's claims when I am in the process of developing my own sitcom at Fox television?

But the television show is also a forgery. Despite having spent the entire previous afternoon digging through dumpsters outside of penitentiaries and county jails, I had no ideas at all when I went in to the Fox Television headquarters at Studio City. I met with Moshe Greenberg, an Orthodox Jewish man who was the Executive Producer in charge of development. As I entered his office, I found him seated behind his long oaken desk, reading a book. He glanced up at me and then rose to shake my hand. "Mr. Max 'Bunny' Sparber," he said. "Whoopie told me that you write the best dialogue since Mamet! I hope we can find a place for you at Fox."

I thanked him, feeling beads of sweat forming on my forehead. We stood in silence for a few moments, and then my eyes settled on his book. I pointed and shrieked at him, crying out in a much louder voice than I had planned. "What is that?" I hollered.

"It's a book on Rabbi Judah Leow," Greenberg answered, frowning. "He was a mystic in Sixteenth Century Prague who is supposed to have build a man out of clay to protect the Jewish community from attack."

He stared at me. I raised my eyebrows in what I hoped was a mask of interest.

"This creature was called a golem," Greenberg said.

"How funny," I said. "That's exactly the idea I had for a sitcom."

Greenberg pressed a finger to his lips, intrigued. He sat down, leaned forward towards me, placing his elbows onto the oaken surface of his desk and rested his chin on his hands. "Tell me more," he said.

"Our story is set in contemporary New Jersey," I fibbed, speaking quickly. "A young rabbi named Michael Loew gets a package: a large shipping crate from Prague. He opens it, and discovers a man made from earth. He tries to put the creature to work at his synagogue, but it turns out to have a tendency to go berserk without warning and strangle Gentiles. Hijinks ensue."

"I like it," Greenberg said. "Can we give him a young wife and a nosy next door neighbor?"

"We can give him as many nosy next door neighbors as we want." I declared. "The mud monster can kill a new one every week!"

Greenberg nodded, excited. "But what will we call it?" he asked.

I thought for a moment, and then shrugged. "How about My Best Friend is a Golem?"

Greenberg clapped his hands together and nodded. By the beginning of the next week I had my own office at Fox and a team of comedy writers working twelve-hour days to produce fourteen half-hour scripts--an entire season. The writers pestered me constantly with questions, but they required only a "yes" or a "no" from me. I randomly began to agree to some ideas and disagree with others, and despite my nervousness, nobody seemed to notice that my decisions were entirely arbitrary.

"Can we give Rabbi Loew a young daughter?" a writer asked.

"Well, no. No we can't," I answered, my cheeks heating up. The writer stared at me for a minute with a quizzical expression on his face, and I expected him to point his finger at me and call out "imposter!", but instead the writer simply nodded, saying, "You're right. The Rabbi is too young to have kids."

But the next day another writer asked if we couldn't do an episode in which the Rabbi discovers a underground city buried in his back yard, and I nodded my head eagerly, saying, "That's a swell idea. Keep them coming!" In my erratic universe, a rabbi could not teach inner-city kids the value of sharing, but he could suddenly invent a potion that changed unsuspecting coworkers' genders (in an episode titled "Which Miss is This?")

In fact, up until we actually began filming, I was starting to feel comfortable in my dual position as the show's chief writer and head honcho. I was surrounded by professionals, many of whom did jobs that I could never hope to fathom (key grip? Best boy?), and they did them with a cheerful alacrity that lulled me into believing that I could hide my incompetence forever. I would make my fortune in television, and nobody would ever know that I spent my days hiding in my office, browsing through bondage-themed chat rooms on my computer or vainly trying to feed the remains of my Happy Meal lunch to the songbirds that perched outside my window.

But this problem with the actor was going to blow it all. I couldn't solve the problem. Hell, I was afraid of actors. They were often much taller than me and spoke much too loudly. When I met the cast of My Best Friend is a Golem at the first script read-through, they hugged me forcefully and boomed about how thrilled they were to be working on such a marvelous comedy, and I spent the remainder of the day hiding in a bathroom. Even the actresses scared me. One of them somehow got hold of my home number and called me, asking questions about her character that I could not possibly answer. "According to the script, Gigi is an au pair girl with psychic powers," she said. "How did that affect her when she was a little girl?"

"I can't discuss it right now," I answered in a panic. "The man just came to build the pool."

"Can we get together to talk about it?" she insisted. "Perhaps over quiet drinks at my house?"

"I'll call you back and let you know," I cried out, and then hung up the telephone. I quickly picked up the receiver and dialed my phone company to tell them that I needed a new, unlisted telephone number as soon as possible. Then I called a construction company and asked how soon they could come over and build a swimming pool, in case the actress should ever check on my improvised excuse. I spent the next several weeks pretending I had laryngitis, and whenever the actress came to me with questions I simply pointed to my throat and made horrific coughing noises. This trick worked with all the actors, up until this afternoon.

Now, with the show's director opposite me, I briefly consider feigning laryngitis again, but it is too late--he has already heard me speaking, as I have been repeatedly saying, "Sure, the actor playing the golem is a problem, but what do you expect me to do about it?"

"Could you just talk to him?" the director asks. "It's your show, and he respects you. Just tell him that the whole drag queen thing is not such a good idea. I'll call him in, and you speak with him. I'm sure he'll listen to you."

Before I can protest, the director stands and opens my office door. "Big Jim," he calls out, "will you come in here please?"

And in walks Big Jim Heywood. He is seven and a half feet tall and thick as a tree trunk. Jim is an ex-wrestler who got his start in film playing villains in Schwartzeneggar movies, and will occasionally relieve stress when he is rehearsing by tearing a telephone book in half. Big Jim is visibly upset. He enters the office and immediately begins pacing, clenching and unclenching his meaty fists. He looks at me, furious, and I glance away from him, pretending to look at a letter on my desk.

Unfortunately, I find myself reading one of Frankie Whitmore's vivid descriptions of his plans to disembowel me.

"Everybody agrees, Big Jim," the director says. "It's not working."

Big Jim smashes one fist into a nearby wall with a shout of rage. "Not working?" he cries out. "Screw not working! I'm trying to give my character depth!"

The director shakes his head and puffs out his cheeks, expelling air. "I can't talk to him," he says, throwing his hands up and turning to me. "You talk to him."

Big Jim turns to me as well, eyebrows knitted, lower lip extended into a pout that would be comical on any other man. "You got something to say to me?" Jim asks.

I look down at the letter again, and a line from it catches my eye. "This is my story," I read.

"I know it's your story," Big Jim protests.

"You're stealing my story," I read. Big Jim grows quiet, and then he lowers his head. Encouraged, I read further.

"Mess with my story, and you mess with me," I read. "Mess with me, and I start thinking about evil things I might like to do."

"Aw, boss ..." Big Jim says, shifting his weight and kicking the ground.

I raise my voice. "I gots all sorts of evil thoughts in my head," I say. "Maybe I'll just get my pick-axe. Maybe I'll drive it so deep into your brain that it explodes out from under your jaw. Maybe I'll tilt you over and let the contents of your skull slide out onto a hot griddle and I'll cook me up a little snack."

"Aw, geez, boss, you don't need to do that," Big Jim says nervously.

"Maybe I'll cook me up a big mess of brains," I cry out, slamming my hand down on my desk. Big Jim flinches. "Maybe I'll spend my afternoon dining on the insides of your empty head! How does that sound?"

Big Jim's mouth drops. He works his jaw a few times, and then holds his hands up protectively. "Whatever you say, boss," he whispers. "I won't mess with your script. I'll read it just like the director says." Then Big Jim turns and flees out the door.

As soon as he is gone, the director guffaws. "That's the way to do it," he says, delighted. "You sure have a way with actors. You're going to go far in this business." He winks at me and exits as my assistant enters, carrying today's batch of mail.

On top of the stack is another letter from Whitman. I tear it open and devour it, looking for paragraphs, sentences, even single words that might come in handy in the future. Maybe later today I will call Whitman and tape-record our conversation. That man has a gift for effective language.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

I CAN'T RESIST MOBILE HOME GIRLS. I repeatedly find myself lying on linoleum floors, pants around my ankles, as a hysterical woman shakes me with jiggling arms, her ample breasts spilling out of their Wal-Mart-brand brassiere.

It always end the same way. As I slowly edge towards consciousness, I see a lipstick-smeared mouth emit a shrill, adenoidal warning: "You gotta get up! My husband is coming up the road in his pickup!"

As I tear off the tiny plastic window in the kitchenette and attempt to pull myself out through its undersized opening, I make frantic resolutions to never again return to the trailer park.

But, as I say, I can’t resist the girls. With their red, apple-round cheeks and their darkly-rooted blond hair, they seem to me to be the perfect image of pulchritude. I see their plump fingers and long, polka-dot painted fingernails and wonder what those hands might look like slathered in baby oil. I see trails of hickeys running down sunburned necks and disappearing beneath loose, yellowing T-shirts, and I wonder what noises these girls made when the hickeys reached their nipples, and if their nipples were likewise sunburned. I find myself driven wild by pale blue homemade tattoos, created by pressing a sewing needle into skin and then dripping India ink into the pinprick.

These girls all have initials tattooed onto their knuckles, or a tiny cross on their palm, or teardrops spilling down one cheek. "I got these for my boyfriend in prison on that aggravated assault charge," one explained. "One for every year he's away."

"How long until he gets out?" I asked, and then pressed my tongue into her belly button.

"Oh, he been out for six months now," she answered, and then a banging came at the front door. Again I found myself scrambling out of a kitchenette window, its hard faux-wood frame digging deep grooves into my naked chest and back as I muttered more resolutions to myself.

Even as I say them, I know these are promises that will not keep. How can I give up these depraved, mid-afternoon encounters with new brides who, at age 19, already have three sons and spend their afternoons watching television talk shows? "You leave mama with her friend alone for a while," they instruct their children, shooing them out onto the patch of scorched grass withering before their mobile homes. These women then slam the door and drench my neck in sloppy kisses, whispering huskily into my ear that I should do it, do it now, before Judge Joe Brown comes on the air.

The trailer park requires no sophisticated seduction technique. Mating is stripped down to the essentials, requiring only proximity and beer. I begin at the bars, buying drinks for long haul driver's wives. Within an hour, their panties will be hanging from broken light fixtures.

And it is just as easy to simply knock on a door with a case of beer, saying, "I can't drink more than half of this, and you look a little lonely." It usually doesn’t take more than 12 fluid ounces before I have a gap-toothed, buxom waitress grinding her buttocks against my face as she cries out that Baptists are always bad tippers and Mormons are too chatty.

It helps that I, Max "Bunny" Sparber, am a Jew. In a country where 98 percent of the male population is circumcised, my absent foreskin is nonetheless a novelty in the mobile home. "Oh, isn't that darling!" one woman called out, examining my penis. "Look at that little helmet! It looks just like Darth Vader!"

As I lay drenched in my own sweat on a grimy mattress, I often feel my partner quietly slip out of my arms and tiptoe into the other room. Then, in a hushed voice, I hear her whispering into their telephone: "Hi, Renee, it's Darla. It turns out Jews like it real dirty."

There will be some stifled giggling, and then the conversation inevitably ends with these words: "Just a minute, Renee, I got a call on the other line. Hello? Oh ... Jimmy? You're what? But I thought you was gonna work until twelve o'clock tonight! What's that? You're calling from your cell phone? You're in your truck? YOU'RE RIGHT OUTSIDE MY DOOR?"

More kitchenette windows. More meaningless resolutions.

Sometimes it ends worse. Sometimes it end with angry fathers, shotguns, and midnight calls to wake up the preacher. My first marriage was terrifying, and not just because of the real risk of getting sprayed with birdshot. I looked at my weeping bride, in her acid-washed denim maternity wear, and thought sad thoughts. It's over, I thought. I have a wife now. I can't go back to the trailer park.

The fifth wedding was much easier.

My ravenous appetite for trailer park affairs infuriates my wives, who have given up so much to marry me. After all, I insisted that they convert to Judaism. "I gave up my personal relationship with Jesus Christ Almighty," one of them, Suzie Jo, I think, complains. "You should be able to give up your relationship with Jimmy Terrapin's ex-wife from the soda shop."

My wives drag me onto afternoon talk shows to try shaming me into giving up my wanderings. It seems every few weeks I get another call from a television producer offering to fly me out to Los Angeles and put me up at a fancy hotel for a week. "What is this all about?" I ask.

"Oh, we're just doing a show on Jewish men with multiple wives," the producers tell me. Of course, when the curtain parts and I walk out onto the soundstage, the furious screams of the audience tells me that the producer hasn’t been completely forthcoming. The host points at me and then turns to the camera, saying, "Welcome back to 'My Husband is a Five-Timing, Scheming, Lying Sex Addict Who Made Me Change My Religion.'" I then must spend the next hour answering audience members who stand up and bark angrily: "I gots a question for you, Max 'Bunny' Sparber. You make me sick, what you done to these women."

"I don't understand," I reply. "What is the question?"

"What is the question?" the audience member shoots back. "I'll tell you what the question is: You’re not even that good looking."

My wives, who have picked up a bit of Yiddish, spend the rest of the show shouting at me and fighting with each other. "I'm gonna kvetch all I wants to," one cries out. "Oh, lord, am I gonna make a gevault!"

Women from the studio audience stand up and cheer at these words, shaking their fists angrily at me, but at the end of the show these same women sneak notes to me backstage. "I just want to tell you I think you’re darling," the notes read, "and I ain’t never been with a circumsized man." Inside the notes, inevitably, is a key to the door of a mobile home.

Even as I sneak out of my Beverly Hills hotel room and flag down a taxicab to take me to the Los Mangos Trailer Park in Santa Cruz, I know I have a problem. If I continue with my behavior, I will end up dead at the hands of a jealous boyfriend with a Bowie knife. Or, if I’m not murdered, I will end up with a 18 screeching wives who try to make matzah by flattening out Wonder Bread with a rolling pin, speak in tongues at the synagogue, and give birth to en endless number of children with strangely hyphenated names, such as Haiyyim-Bob and Shlomo-Billy-Joe.

I’m never going to stop unless I do something drastic. Today I find myself filled with black thoughts, staring at the front lawn of my tar-paper shack. It is filled with my children. Some shoot at Hebrew National Fund boxes with rusty air rifles. The girls play with Barbie Dolls. "Don't I look pretty," one says, holding her doll in front of her mouth. "I bought a new pair of cut-off jeans for shabbos."

I start sobbing.

One boy pauses in what he is doing, throwing old boots at squirrels. He stares at me, a look of worry crossing his filthy face. "Why are you crying, daddy?" he asks.

I rise and cross to him, and then fall on my knees before him, embracing the boy.

"Daddy's got to go away," I say sadly. "But that doesn't mean I don't love you, Bo-Yankele."

"My name is Zalman-Elvis," the boy answers.

I kiss his forehead, and my lips leave a mark on his forehead -- a patch of clean, red skin beneath layers of oily, lead-flavored grime. Then I turn and leave.

I need to go someplace where there are no trailer parks, where mobile home girls are as rare as the American bison. I need to go someplace where Jewish women are plentiful and assertive enough to help me curb my sexual fetish, warning me sternly away from the trailer parks with simple phrases such as, "So go, go back to your shiksah harem, because you're too good for your own kind!"

I need to move to Manhattan. I walk slowly out to my Ford truck, deep in thought. There I sit in the driver's seat, going over Triple-A travel maps of the highways that crisscross the United States. To get to New York, I am going to have to drive through Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. I know the going is going to be rough, especially in the Southern states. I exhale heavily, and turn the key to my car. I am going to make this trip, no matter how difficult it might be and how long it takes me.

Reasonably, I expect to get to Manhattan in about 16 years.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

WELL, IT IS QUITE A TIME for the fake memoir. Just in the past few weeks, we've discovered that Margaret B. Jones, the author of a memoir of her experiences as a half-white, half-Native American gangbanger in South Central Los Angeles called Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival, didn't actually work as a drug runner for inner-city gangbangers. Instead, she grew up in Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley, although presumably she had some encounters with minorities and drugs there, perhaps purchasing marijuana from her pool boy.

At the same time, we learned about Misha Defonseca, who authored a memoir of her experiences in the Holocaust titled Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, during which time she claimed to have been cared for by wolves after her parents were taken away to the concentration camps. While it should have surprised nobody that she was not actually assisted by wolves, as it turns out she is not even Jewish. "I felt Jewish," she explained. One assumes she also felt wolfish.

And, of course, there is the story of JT Leroy, a young transgendered ex-male prostitute from an abusive past who turned out to be a a middle-aged woman, and James Frey, who suffered the humiliation of being tongue-lashed by Oprah after it turned out his memoir of drug abuse, titled A Million Little Pieces, was grotesquely exaggerated. And we must not forget Forrest Carter, the white supremacist who wrote a surprisingly moving fake memoir about his invented childhood as a Cherokee Indian titled The Education of Little Tree. The fake memoir is a literary genre with a storied history, and, obviously, has become quite a lucrative market, and I feel that it is time for me to crack this market. After all, you don't need to have experienced any of the events you tell of to write the sham autobiography. You don't even need to be all that credible. You just have to be willing to lie. And I have the will to lie.

And so it begins, my epic tale of my wild life, which I have decided to call I'm Just a Bad Boy, after the song by the Jive Bombers, and also because my fabricated memoir will contain numerous stories of hideous misbehavior, which seems to be what the genre demands. I shall publish an anecdote, here and there, as the mood seizes me. I will keep the anecdotes short and self-contained, because I am serializing this book. But, make no mistake, they will all add up to a tale of a life lived badly, and, just as has been the case with the other great liars out there, I expect to be handsomely rewarded for my work. Publishers, I am open to your offers.

LISTEN TO "BAD BOY" BY THE JIVE BOMBERS:



Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

THERE WERE A NUMBER OF HARMONICA BANDS at one time, certainly the most famous being The Harmonicats, who enjoyed a number one hit in 1947 with "Peg O' My Heart." Johnny Puleo wasn't as well known as Jerry Murad, the Harmonicats' founder, but he managed to put out several dozen albums, none of them trading in on his most novel quality: Johnny Puleo, as this album cover shows, was a little person.

But, honestly, is that really the most interesting thing in the photo? It's a veritable cornucopia of puzzling images. For example, why is Puleo dressed in lambswool chaps, like some sort of Tuvan cowboy? His harmonica hangs from a holster, continuing the cowboy imagery, so why isn't he wearing cowboy boots? Instead, he wears rather bland black shoes, the sort of thing you would expect to see on a banker, not a minuscule harmonica player! And what's with that hat? It looks as though Puleo had accidentally lost his derby under a bus, retrieved it, and decided to wear it anyway, flat or not.

And there's his band. As far as we can tell from this photo, Puleo's fellow harmonica players were three gay sailors conducted by an out-of-work circus ringmaster. "A Study in High Fidelity Sound," the LP cover promises, but who cares? It would take months of solid effort to decipher the meaning of this album cover, much less get around to listening to the album.

More Vinyl Oddities.

I AM of the opinion that everything can be improved with the addition of a little lime. And I'm not just talking about cocktails, although they certainly get better with a little squeeze of Citrus aurantifolia. No, I think you can throw lime into just about anything and see a benefit. British sailors are an excellent example from history. Thai food has never shied away from the lime. I suspect you could sprinkle a little lime on the Gaza strip and see Palestinians and Israelis serenading each other with love songs the next day.

The Galliano Mist is nothing but Galliano and lime -- specifically, 1 oz. Liquore Galliano and one-quarter of a lime, served over ice in an old-fashioned glass, with the lime squeezed over the Galliano and the remaining shell dropped in. Although it is an easy drink to make, I would put it in the category of an advanced Galliano cocktail, because it is a drink that really is only appropriate for people who love Galliano. This is the pure blast of the stuff, a solid shot, unadulterated but for the added taste of lime. It puts me in mind of Erik Satie's "Vexations," which was an exercise in unresolved tritones that Satie suggested be played 840 times. For the broad-minded music fan, such a piece of music is enjoyable a few times through, as confusion and curiosity give way to appreciation for Satie's compositional boldness. But it takes a real fan to sit through all 840 performances, which takes 12 hours. In fact, it has only been played this way once, and only one audience member managed to sit through the entire performance.

There are some differences, of course. It doesn't take 18 hours to down the Galliano Mist, although I would recommend against gulping down the drink in one fast motion. Secondly, Galliano actually becomes better the more you drink it, and so there is the real possibility that someone who does not like Galliano might be a fan at the end of the drink. With the Satie piece, one imagines his suggestion that it be played umpteen hundred times was an expression of his puckish humor, and he never expected anyone might be crazy enough to do such a thing. So that performance was more of a dare, just to see if it could be done, while the Galliano Mist is something people might do more than once, and enjoy it. Of all the Galliano cocktails I have written about so far, this is the one where the anise flavor is the most prominent, although it is quite sweet, unlike other anise liqueurs such as Ouzo and pastis. Even for people who aren't mad for Galliano except in teaspoons, added in to other cocktai