Max "Bunny" Sparber

NOWADAYS it seems like a footnote in wrestling history, and people don't speak of it much anymore, but there was a few years starting back in 1962 when there were a dozen or so trolls participating in the American Wrestling Association.

The public wasn't too keen on trolls, and so magazines like Inside Wrestling found themselves inundated by letters from angry fans, demanding the banning of the creatures from the ring. At that time, however, there was no rule forbidding trolls, as there would be later. And so unscrupulous promoters recruited the beasts, mostly from the northeast side of Fargo, North Dakota, where they were plentiful.

Of course, trolls are unpredictable, and so some of these early wrestling matches turned out to be disastrous. There was a demonstration match scheduled at a civic center outside Milwaukee that was canceled at the last minute because the troll wrestler, a nine-foot behemoth with elephant tusks named Ansgar, turned to stone when exposed to sunlight. This fact was known, and so every effort was made to keep in him the shade prior to the match, but one night he stupidly got caught in the sunrise attempting to steal a keg from the back of a Pabst Beer truck.

In Des Moines, another troll wrestler -- Asmund the Ugly -- forgot his training during a match and turned his fury on the jeering audience. He lunged out of the ring and was about to savage a small boy when an alert police officer shot him in the neck. This terrified the troll, and he fled beneath a trestle bridge that spanned the river, where it is said he lives to this day, still dressed in his yellow unitard.

Some trolls turned out to be natural fighters. A seven-foot tall troll named Vidar managed to pin nine wrestlers in the spring of '62 until he was defeated in a cage match with Canadian wrestler Gene Kiniski, who felled the creature with a wicked flying headscissors. Some old-timers still refer to the Gene as "Troll Killer" Kiniski, and this is the reason why.

Most of these matches have been forgotten, and only the most dedicated fan remembers the tag team match between the Fabulous Kangaroos and two mountain trolls imported from Norway (the mountain trolls were disqualified, as one repeatedly raked the eyes of Kangaroo Don Kent, an illegal move). Fewer still remember that wrestler Reggie Lisowski, better known as The Crusher, briefly partnered with a 360-pound hill troll from Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, until he relented to popular sentiment and teamed again with his longtime partner Dick The Bruiser.

Of course, there is one battle from this era that everyone remembers, to some extent. In 1965 a match was arranged between reigning AWA champion Al Sparber, my uncle, who was a former Olympiad and an imposing scientific grappler, and a forest troll named Kolbjorn, who had been recruited from a Swedish circus, where he had wrestled bears.

Kolbjorn was an imposing creature, weighing in at 625 pounds and visaged with a face that fairly bristled with needle-sharp teeth. Despite his monstrous appearance, he was a polite and thoughtful lad who spent his afternoons sipping chokecherry tea and reading the collected works of philosopher Axel Hägerström. Kolbjorn was blessed with enormous, indefatigable strength, and won a series of wrestling matches simply by outlasting his opponents, who would exhaust themselves trying to fell the mighty beast and find themselves unable to muster the energy to rally against the troll in the final rounds.

Kolbjorn always seemed a bit apologetic about his victories -- he often appeared in his opponent's locker at the end of a match, sheepishly offering chocolates and homemade mulled honey wine. He was known around the AWA for being an uncommonly good sport, although, when push came to shove, a little standoffish. There were trolls who could always be counted on to join human wrestlers for a post game round of beers at a local bar, such as the rock troll Magnus, who could consume six hundred gallons of beer in a single sitting and was notorious for having completely emptied Norfolk, Nebraska, of alcoholic beverages one chilly March evening.

But Kolbjorn wasn't social like that. He was shy around the other wrestlers and made nervous by their roughhousing. He kept a small but tidy apartment in Northeast Minneapolis, just behind a Russian Orthodox church. If he ventured out at all, it was to see matinee shows at a nearby art house theater -- he had a particular taste for the films of Vilgot Sjöman, and had been to see The Dress three times, brooding over the movie's dramatization of a late-blooming teenager's ambivalent relationship with her developing body.

Al Sparber was himself a thoughtful man, and he respected Kolbjorn -- It was Sparber who suggested a match with the troll, who he thought showed promise. The AWA champion had begun what would be a decades-long mission to train the next generation of professional wrestlers. His tutelage would influence the early careers of such notables as Ole and Lars Anderson, Baron Von Raschke, and his son Rex Sparber, my cousin. Al Sparber saw something in the shy, intellectual Swedish troll that intrigued him, and, while Sparber had been dismissive of interspecies wrestling in the past, he decided to make an exception for Kolbjorn. Explaining himself to the Minneapolis Star, Sparber said, "Other trolls I've seen have just been brutes, and if you're going to wrestle them you might as well just wrestle an elephant or a hippopotamus. But with this fella, well, there's some art."

It was true. While Kolbjorn was often a distracted wrestler, relying on sheer strength while pondering something unrelated, when he was engaged in a fight he could be a cautious, clever fighter. Sparber had ordered a series of super-8 reels of Kolbjorn grappling, and reviewed them with great interest in the basement of his sprawling lakefront house. He noticed that Kolbjorn was blessed with exceptional balance: More than one wrestler had been stymied in their attempts to unsettle the troll with sudden Russian leg sweeps or a schoolboy bump. Other trolls, because of their size, were prone to being toppled, and a good wrestler could use a troll's weight against him. More than one troll had found himself losing a match against a clever human wrestler who repeatedly tossed him to the ground. But not Kolbjorn.

Additionally, Kolbjorn had an unexpected facility for intricate holds. Most trolls simply lay on their opponents to end a match -- sometimes wrestlers would throw in the towel simply to avoid suffocation. But Kolbjorn could seize a wrestler's hands, spin them abruptly with a clever lariat, and place them in a sickle hold, or a head scissors armbar, or an Argentine leglock. These were moves that required practice, and intelligence, and Sparber saw in Kolbjorn the makings of a real wrestler. Additionally, Sparber was intrigued by the challenge of battling a troll, as Kolbjorn was more than 400 pounds heavier and two and a half feet taller than the largest human wrestler. Winning a match against such an opponent would require enormous skill, and Sparber prided himself on his skill. He was willing to test it against the troll, even if it meant losing his AWA Champion Belt.

Sparber scheduled the match for a brisk Saturday afternoon in April, and, as he sometimes liked to do, he invited the troll to his house for a supper of broiled lamb on the night before the match. The two spent an amiable evening sipping cognac and discussing Sweden, which Sparber had visited and whose amateur wrestlers he particularly respected. Those who argue that wrestling is a sport with fixed outcomes claim that Sparber and Kolbjorn also discussed the next day's match and agreed who would win, when, and using which move. Sparber and his cronies have never admitted to this practice, a policy of institutional silence regarding the inner-workings of professional wrestling dubbed "kayfabe," a carnival term reflecting pro wrestling's early roots as sideshow entertainment. I once made the mistake of asking my uncle about it. Al Sparber pinned me to the ground, and when I cried out for him to let me go, whispered in my ear. "Does this feel fake?" he asked.

It doesn't much matter whether the match between Sparber and Kolbjorn was fixed, seeing how it turned out. The St. Paul Civic Center sold out for the event, and the crowd was unusually hostile, carrying hand-painted banners reading "Moider the Monster" and "It's blood we wants!" Interviewed for broadcast on television, one audience member, an elderly man in sunglasses and a green corduroy suite jabbed a slim black pipe at the 16mm camera and said, "The AWA championship don't belong to no Swede and it don't belong to no troll. It belongs here in Minnesota, to Al Sparber. If the troll wins, I just don't know if I'm going to want to see no more matches."

The audience rose to their feet and cheered when Al Sparber entered the ring, and they hooted and blew raspberries when Kolbjorn was introduced. They shouted catcalls at the troll, telling him he was no good, slighting his appearance and his hygiene, and suggesting places the troll might consider going, including back to Sweden. The audience in the St. Paul civic center was deafening; wrestler Nick Bockwinkle, who witnessed the match, said that it was the loudest he had ever heard, and made his inner ears ache -- he watched much of the match with his hands pressed to his ears.

Sparber and the troll battled amiably for several rounds, and Sparber could occasionally be seen leaning in to whisper something to Kolbjorn, who responded by nodding soberly. Commentators noted that Sparber was in particularly fine form that day, and that Kolbjorn was wrestling with unusual sophistication for a troll. Some claim that had the two grapplers finished the match, it would be held up as one of the finest examples of scientific wrestling in the history of the sport. Kolbjorn was able to seize Sparber several times, but could not keep the champion pinned, as Sparber was extraordinarily skilled at breaking holds. Sparber's retorts were unusually brutal, but necessarily so, as even an aerial drop kick, launched from the top of the ropes, was not enough to unbalance the Swedish troll. With each beat of the fight, the audience grew more hysterical, rising to their feet and shaking their fists, hollering spittle-dampened obscenities.

Eventually, Sparber managed to maneuver Kolbjorn into a sleeper hold, which was the champion's signature finishing move. He wrapped his right arm around the troll's neck, pressing his bicep to one side of his opponent's neck and his forearm around the other. Sparber grasped his right hand with his left and pulled, applying pressure to the troll's carotid artery. The troll attempt an instep stomp, but Sparber deftly dodged it, and, after a few moments, Kolbjorn dropped to his knees.

At this moment, the audience spontaneously surged forward to the end of the wrestling mat, pressing their hands and faces up against the ropes. A sleeper hold generally only takes a matter of seconds, and applying pressure for more than a half-minute can have serious consequences -- wrestlers could die in the ring from sleeper holds, their brains suffocated from a lack of oxygen. But trolls are built differently that humans, and no matter how powerfully Sparber gripped at Kolbjorn's neck, the troll remained conscious, thrashing in his grip.

Seeing this, the audience spontaneously began booing. The sound swept through the Civic Center: a sound like the lowing of cattle, rising in volume. Sparber could hear the audience over Kolbjorn's labored breathing, and tightened his grip.

"Aw, you ain't even no champeen!" a voice cried from the ropes. Sparber looked over and saw a 10-year-old boy, held aloft by his father. The boy and the father were both dressed in drab brown suits, both bespectacled, and both grimaced, red-faced, at Sparber. "Whatsamatta," the boy continued, taunting. "Can't you even beat a Swede?"

The crowd roared with laughter at this. A fat man in a dented porkpie hat glanced at the boy and his father approvingly. "Them's right!" he declared eagerly, puffing his red cheeks out. "This ain't no straight up rassling match!"

"C'mon, Al!" cried out another man, unseen, at the back of the crowd. "Moiderize da bum!"

The crowd laughed at this too, and then took up the chant. "Moiderize da bum!" they said, and then louder: "Moiderize da bum!" And louder: "Moiderize da bum!"

And then a bottle flew through the air. Nobody ever claimed credit for it, and nobody could quite say where it came from, but it sailed above the crowd and into the ring, spinning with a force that caused it to whistle. Witnesses remembered that it was a bottle of Faygo Rock & Rye -- its distinctive red and yellow, cherry-shaped logo was visible in the lights above the ring. It was also still half-full, and its contents spilled from it in an arc, spattering the first row of onlookers with a sticky red liquid.

The bottle hit Kolbjorn square in the face, shattering on impact with an audible popping noise. The bottle's remaining fluid erupted onto the troll's face and Sparber's arm, viscous and sanguine. Startled, Sparber released Kolbjorn, and the troll slumped into a seated position, shoulders rounded, head down, red liquid pouring from his face,

The audience grew immediately quiet -- an unnatural, horrified silence, so complete that throughout the Civic Center it was possible to hear the troll's labored breathing. Kolbjorn's breath came hard and fast, coupled with thick, guttural noises. Kolbjorn pressed his hands to his eyes.

Kolbjorn was weeping.

Sparber reached forward and touched the troll's shoulder, but Kolbjorn shrank away from him, shaking his head. Sparber bit his lip, thinking, and then called the referee over. After a few words with the champion, the ref nodded and gestured for the microphone. It was lowered from the ceiling, and the referee handed it to Al Sparber.

"I have asked the referee to end this fight," Sparber told his audience. A few in the crowd hissed, and Sparber shook his head. When he spoke again, his voice boomed. "No, it's called. It's done," he said. "There will be no winner today."

Sparber moved to hand the microphone back to the referee, but paused, looking over at Kolbjorn. He took the microphone back. "Let me tell all of you something," he said, eyes roaming the audience. "I wanted to fight this wrestler. I didn't want to end this. I've seen him in action, and he can wrestle with the best of them. You all should have known that if I was willing to go against him in the ring, it was because he was a WRESTLER." Sparber spat out the last word, his face flushing. He paused a moment, working his jaw, and then continued. "He's a wrestler, and he deserves your respect for that. And I'll tell you something else. I'll tell you what else I know about Kolbjorn. He's a good egg. I had him up to my place for dinner last night, and we had us a fine talk."

Sparber crossed back to Kolbjorn, standing behind him. He stared down at the troll as he spoke. "We had us a fine talk, I tell you," Sparber said. "There's some in the ring who wrestles because they are brutes. They wrestle because they got nothing but fight in them, they got nothing but the need to show they're stronger or better than another man. Kolbjorn ain't like that."

Sparber swallowed hard. "Kolbjorn fights because he's good at it, and because there's honor in trying your strength against another man's, and you can do it without feeling anything but respect and sympathy for the man you are fighting. You know, Kolbjorn used to fight bears in Sweden! Bears! And do you know what he used to do with the bears when he was finished fighting them?"

Sparber stared at the audience, wide eyed. He waited for an answer, and when none came, he shrugged. "He used to wash them and feed them and sleep in the same bed with them, that's what he used to do. He used to read them stories and poetry, and they would play together, and they never felt malice for each other. They wrestled, but they loved each other."

Sparber exhaled. "That's the sort of wrestling there should be more of," he said quietly. "Wrestlers should meet as friends, and they should leave as friends. They should pat each other on the back and buy each other drinks and read each other poetry if they get the idea to."

The fat man in the front row snorted dismissively. Sparber glared at him. "You got something to say to that?" Sparber asked, eyes narrowing.

The fat man looked embarrassed. "C'mon, Al," the fat man stammered. "I mean -- poetry?"

"Yeah, poetry, so what?" Sparber answered sharply. "Poetry! Kolbjorn read me some last night! You want to make something of it."

"No," the fat man answered slowly, and then frowned, bewildered. "The troll was reading you poetry last night?" he asked.

"Yeah, he was." Sparber said, folding his arms. "A Swedish poet. I don't remember his name." Sparber leaned over and spoke softly to the troll. The troll wiped his eyes, and then whispered back. Sparber stood upright and returned his gaze to the fat man. "His name was Eric Geijer."

Sparber looked thoughtful a moment. "I tell you what," he said. "The lot of you could stand to hear the poem."

The crowd shuffled uncomfortably, and a few let out audible sounds of disappointment: "Aww," they said. "Aww."

"Cry all you want to, but you're gonna hear this poem," Sparber said firmly. "You're gonna hear it, and then I think you're gonna feel a little different about our guest here. Our guest who you have been so rude to."

Sparber knelt next to the troll and spoke softly to him. At first, Kolbjorn shook his head, but, with some encouragement, he took the microphone. In a quiet, almost inaudible voice, he said the following:

"Ensam i bräcklig farkost vågar
seglaren sig på det vida hav;
stjärnvalvet över honom lågar,
nedanför brusar hemskt hans grav.
Framåt! -- så är hans ödes bud;
och i djupen bo som uti himlen Gud."

Sparber patted the troll on his shoulder, and then drew in a heavy breath. He took back the microphone. "You see?" he asked the audience. "You see? This is how civilized people are. This is how people behave when they are civilized. Now go on home."

The audience stared back at Sparber in silence. Then, slowly, quietly, they began to collect their coats.

"I'll tell you something else," Sparber said, and the crowd paused. "The next fight I have, I'm not letting anyone in unless they bring a poem they have wrote."

This attracted the attention of the green suited boy, who looked up at Sparber, staring at the champion in astonishment through his spectacles. "Aw," he cried out. "Say you don't mean it!"

"Kid, I mean it," Sparber answered.

For a while after the Sparber/Kolbjorn, it was a regular practice for audiences to bring poems to fights; several wrestling magazines actually published better examples of these literary undertakings. Some fans got to liking it, and, to this day, you will find some old timers standing in line for a wrestling matched clutching a freshly penned rhyming couplet. These are generally not very sophisticated works of verse, often reading something like the following, published in American Wrestler in 1973:

If you tie him up and squeeze him right
Then you will win the danged old fight.

Here's another example, from Inside Wrestling Magazine, published in 1983:

I seen you wrestle and I seen you win
I seen you cheat and I seen you sin
I seen you injure and I seen you bruise
And today I want to seen you lose
Dog gone you

Kolbjorn returned to Sweden after the match, and soon afterward trolls were banned from professional wrestling. Sparber himself help draft the rules against interspecies wrestling, arguing that while some trolls have the skills for the ring, as a whole they did not have the temperament for it.

On and off, Sparber remained champion of the American Wrestling Association until 1981, when he retired the championship. As for Kolbjorn -- well, not much is known of what happened to the troll when he returned to Sweden, although there are some who say he is visible in the background of a scene in the 1967 film Jag är nyfiken -- en film i gult by his favorite director, Vilgot Sjöman. He may have worked for a circus in Stockholm through the Seventies and Eighties -- posters from the era show a troll bear trainer who greatly resembles Kolbjorn. A few say he is the groundskeeper at a nudist camp in Skåne, which is possible, as it is well known that trolls represent about 13 percent of the general population of Swedish naturists.

I have been to my uncle Al's house many times. Sometimes, the 83-year-old former champion receives late-night, long distance phone calls. He will not say who is calling, but instead excuses himself to go into another room, where he can have privacy. These calls often last for hours, and Uncle Al can usually be heard laughing well into the early morning. Also every Christmas Al Sparber receives an unsigned gift from abroad, and every year it is the same thing:

A bottle of mulled honey wine.

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

THIS WEEK, Bunny and Brandi tackle Dolemite, the first film to feature nightclub comedian Rudy Ray Moore's pimpified alter ego, the eponymous Dolemite. The film is artless and confusing, but quite memorable, in part thanks to some great dialogue ("Dolemite is my name and fucking up motherfuckers is my game!") and some outrageous characters, including, briefly, a junkie who goes by the name Hamburger Pimp, and is a sort of ghetto version of Wimpy from the Popeye cartoons, begging people to buy him burgers.

What little plot that is apparent in the film has Dolemite in prison, where he is serving a sentence after being framed by the police. He is released and given the chance to clear his name, which he does by murdering anyone who crosses him, running prostitutes, and taking back his old nightclub, which is now owned by a fellow named Willie Green (played by Dolemite's director, D'Urville Martin) with suspicious connections to the mayor. Dolemite's only assistance is his gang of karate-knowing prostitutes, an Afrocentric and completely crooked minister with a thing for heavier women, and a mysterious FBI man who shows up occasionally to rescue Rudy Ray Moore.

me: So what did you make of the movie?
Brandi: It raised so many more questions than I started with
Also, it seemed to make little sense, when you really thought about it
a lot of that stuff could have been solved in 15 minutes
but they just did crazy stuff
me: I love the fact that people would just wander in and try to shoot Dolemite.
Nobody ever said who they were.
They'd just show up and shoot people.
Brandi: And no one every caught on that people wanted to shoot him, so maybe they should keep his location on the DL
me: No. He'd just drive around in fancy cars, wearing the biggest outfits I've ever seen.
Brandi: Yes,
And he really must have been hot
because everyone else clearly was
me: He had one shirt in the movie that had, like, a seventeen inch collar.
Brandi: And he wore overalls with it!
Who does that?!
me: I know.
He was like a gay farmer.
Brandi: He did seem to be herding bitches.
me: He did not have a very attractive stable.
Although, in fairness, they may have been homely, but they knew karate.
And, in his life, that's something you need.
Brandi: The hot ones he seemed to ignore
It made no sense
It's like he didn't want anyone better looking than him.
Which really didn't take much
so that says a lot about his stable.
me: Well, he rarely opened his eyes all the way.
Rudy Ray Moore always seemed like he was just being roused from a nap.
Brandi: He seemed to have allergies
me: Maybe he didn't really see them.
He had weird friends too.
How the hell did he know Hamburger Pimp?
Who has that guy as a friend?
Brandi: I don't even know if he knew what that guy was saying half the time.
Like maybe Dolemite thought they were friends because of one thing
but it turned out Hamburger Pimp was saying something completely different
and had actually tried to sell him something
that relationship seemed full of lots of miscommunication opportunities
me: You think Dolemite was hearing him say, hey, you're a good guy, and you're really funny, and you have great taste in clothes and women?
But Hamburger Pimp was actually saying, buy me a hamburger?
Brandi: Maybe Dolemite thought Hamburger Pimp had some good info
but he just needed to sober up
and then Dolemite would be home free
but he didn't have the info
nor would he ever sober up
me: All Hamburger Pimp wanted was hamburgers and heroin!
It's a pretty simple life, really.
Brandi: Yeah.
Does heroin make people hungry though?
me: No. The opposite.
Brandi: So, that's strange
me: Maybe he was shooting something else.
Smack?
Whack?
Then he had a Mac Attack?
Brandi: I mean, really, I think Dolemite should have looked into selling what Hamber Pimp was on.
me: Here's the thing about Hamburger Pimp. They're talking, and guys rush in and start shooting, right?
From that moment on, I would always have made sure to lock the door behind me.
Dolemite doesn't.
And that's always the way he is attacked.
If he just learned to lock a door, he could have saved himself so much grief.
Brandi: Well, he can't see much
So maybe it was learned helplessness
me: But, in the start of the film, when they let hm out of jail, they forget to lock the cell behind him.
Maybe it's just an LA thing.
Hey, it's LA. We never lock doors.
Brandi: Yeah, it's like they're from small town MN.
me: They're country. That's why Dolemite dresses like a gay farmer.
Here's what I think is interesting about the movie: The way Rudy Ray Moore worked in his nightclub routines.
He's a pimp, a killer, and a club owner.
But on the side he dabbles in stand up comedy.
Kind of a renaissance man.
Brandi: I think he hoped to be poet laureate one day
me: Well, his nightclub routines was based on the tradition of toasting.
Prisoners used to tell each other long, rhyming boasts.
It was popular in Jamaica too.
There's elements of this film that's like an African-American prison folk art project.
And this film may have more dashikis in it than any film I have ever seen.
Brandi: About that minister
Why did he have a bed in the church
like right off the pulpit
That was strange.
I would think he'd put that in the basemet
with the baptismal pool
me: It was so he could have sex with fat women.
He was a weird character.
He looked like someone had surprised him when he was a litle boy, and the wind had changed, and his face just stayed that way.
He wasn't anywhere near as scary as the mayor, though.
What were they thinking?
Hey, let's find the ugliest man we can and have him naked for forty minutes.
Even better, let's get him to roll around on the floor.
Brandi: Oh man
It was like dennis franz and Ron Jeremy had a love child
and it wasn't pretty
me: He was naked more than Rudy Ray Moore, and Rudy Ray Moore LOVES TO TAKE OFF HIS CLOTHES.
The second Dolemite gets out of jail, he takes off one suit and puts on another.
Right in front of the guards and the other prisoners.
And then, in the car, his women take his clothes right back off again.
Brandi: Why did he get dressed to take off his clothes
what was up with that
and where did the white woman go
there were suddenly three black women in the car
but there was clearly one white woman when they started the drive
me: People would just appear and disappear throughout the movie.
Like the FBI guy in the hospital.
He says goodbye to Dolemite, but we never see him leave, and the room only has one door.
So, of course, some guys run through the door with guns.
And there's the FBI guy, back again.
What did he do, go hide behind the cameraman?
Brandi: Yeah, it was like someone was of camera going "dude, get back in the scene...and don't ad lib shit!"
me: Did you listen to Rudy Ray Moore's "Sensuous Black Man" MP3 I sent you?
Brandi: no, I am on a slow connection and got home late
I must listen at work
me: It's crazy. It's just the actress who played Queen Bee in the movie talking dirty.
And it's horrifying dirty talk.
Brandi: Strange
me: It's TOO DIRTY.
Brandi: where/how did you find it?
me: It's sort of legendary. There was a drag performer in New York, Lipsynca, who used to lip sync to it in her act.
Someone finally digitized it and put it online somewhere, so I downloaded it.
Brandi: I see
me: It's like, seven minutes of OH SHIT, MOTHERFUCKER! FUCK ME! FUCK ME!
Actually, it's pretty amazing.
Dolemite is like the king of making art out of homely middle aged people sexing it up.
I wonder if that's how he got the actor who played the mayor to take his clothes off so often.
The guy was, like, I look like a troll.
And Dolemite was like, oh, no, man, you're beautiful.
Brandi: I think he was just excited anyone would ask him to
so he did it
me: I kept expecting him to yell dialogue from The Princess Bride.
INCONTHIEVABLE!
NEVER MATCH WITS WITH A SICILIAN WHEN DEATH IS ON THE LINE!
You think he was just waiting for the opportunity to take his clothes off?
Could be. Could be.
Brandi: Yes.
Not so much waiting
as he never thought it was a possibility
me: He was just so flattered, how could he say no?
Brandi: Yes
and giddy
me: So your family had never heard of Dolemite?
Brandi: Nope
my mom isn't even that familiar with rudy ray moore
yet I cannot make her watch that
me: I wonder if he was an LA thing.
Although early rappers from New York used to reference him.
Brandi: I don't know
me: Well, he made a lot of movies, so we're not done with him yet.
Brandi: oh lord
me: And he takes off his clothes in almost all of them.
For EXTENDED time periods.
Brandi: nooooo!

MORE BLAXPLOITATION!

I WAS FOOLING AROUND on YouTube tonight and got to listening to some country blues songs, and was struck by how strange some of the instrumental bits were -- just these noisy, atonal riffs. So I thought I would try and create one of my own on my ukulele, did so, and scared myself with it. So I starting putting lyrics together, gluing together a series of themes and images that make me think of country blues, but also scare me, and wound up with this song. And, of course, when I recorded it, I put it through some filters in GarageBang to make it as noisy as possible, and this is what I wind up with. I can't really put my finger on what it's about, which is fine with me. There's a broken levee in the lyrics, which both puts me in mind of Hurricane Katrina and also the massive flooding going on just now along the Mississippi here in the Midwest, but I think it's mostly in there because it frightens me.

"A MAN IS COMING" LYRICS:

Hey boll weevil
How long you been here
Make a home in the cotton
Keep your children near
But the man is coming
He's coming down the row
And when the man is coming
You know you've got to go

Carry a razor
Keep a rifle near
Levees are breaking
He will soon be here
Because a man is coming
He's coming down the row
And when the man is coming
You know you've got to go

He's a widow maker
He's an orphan train
He wear a big black top hat
Carry a diamond cane
Because a man is coming
He's coming down the row
And when the man is coming
You know you've got to go

Hey boll weevil
How long you been here
Make a home in the cotton
Keep your children near
But the man is coming
He's coming down the row
And when the man is coming
You know you've got to go

LISTEN TO "A MAN IS COMING":



DOWNLOAD "A MAN IS COMING."

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IN 2002, alongside working as a theater critic at City Pages, I had somehow also managed to get myself a job as arts editor at the University of Minnesota's student newspaper, The Minnesota Daily. I was in my early 30s at the time, which made me about a decade older than most of the people I worked with, and I came into the job having already been editor-in-chief of a newsweekly in Omaha, so I was absurdly overqualified for the job. The rest of the paper seemed to view me as an amusing curiosity, and they let me write and assign pretty much anything I wanted to, and I took advantage of that to indulge in writing stories that amused me, but might not interest anyone else. I must have read about Alfred (sometimes spelled "Alferd") Packer, the Colorado Cannibal, during this time, because I got it into my head I would write a little bit of newspaper doggerel about the man, and so I did.

The next part of this story is sort of hard to explain, but I shall do my best. Walking along Lake Street in south Minneapolis, I passed a saddle and tack shop called Schatzlein's. Out of curiosity I wandered in, and there beheld a glorious red cowboy shirt emblazoned with gold musical notes. I put off buying it for a week, and then decided I must have it. Soon, I had bought myself two reproduction Colt revolvers and a leather belt, and taught myself how to twirl the guns like a movie cowboy. Then I taught myself how to yodel. A few months after purchasing the shirt, I had remade myself as a singing cowboy, and, when I moved back to Omaha during that time, I began to perform in this role at a local theater. That's just how things sometimes happen with me, and is why I must be very cautious when I go into new stores.

While I was doing my singing cowboy show, I got it into my head that I might turn my Alfred Packer poem into a song, and I did. Now that I listen to it, I realize that I borrowed some of the melody from "Song of the Cane Toad," which I had written more than a decade earlier, but, considering the subject of the song, a little bit of musical cannibalism seems appropriate.

There is a strange coda to this odd little tale. After I lived in Omaha, I moved to New Orleans, and while I was there I visited the Ripley's Museum in the French Quarter, just a few blocks from my apartment. While wandering through the museum, I spied a preserved human head in a case, and I went to examine it. It was Alfred Packer's head. I was flabbergasted. I had not known that Packer's head had been taken from his body, and nothing I read had mentioned the fact either. I contacted the museum, but they weren't sure quite how or when Robert Ripley had come into possession of the head. I visited the head often when I lived in the quarter, and stared at the thing's tiny teeth, which had once chewed the bodies of Packer's travel companions and inspired my song. I occasionally ran into, and even worked for, celebrities while I was in the Quarter, but Alfred Packer's severed head was the only thing that really felt like a celebrity, and was the only one who really impressed.

"ALFRED PACKER, A MAN WHO LIKED TO EAT" LYRICS:

Israel Swan he was a rugged trapping man
Until Alfred Packer cooked him in an iron frying pan
And few was tougher than Shannon Wilson Bell
Tough as salted leather; Packer salted this man well
Then there was Frank Miller, then there was George Noon
Packer et Frank with a fork and he et George with a spoon
And James Humphrey was the last one from Utah
And Packer's ax and mouth was the last thing Humphrey saw
There was six men started out with Packer as their guide
And Packer he came back with the other five inside
Packer couldn't lead a party and he couldn't hunt no meat
But give him an ax and a skillet and packer he could eat

Colorado folks wanted to give his neck a stretch
They gather at Lake City and said let us hang the wretch
Melville shook his gavel at Packer's matted head
And said "Hang him by the neck until he is dead, dead, dead"
But Packer pled his case and the Supreme Court set him free
O is it a crime for a man to eat when he is hungary
He was a cannibal and a murderer and a son of a wretched gun
But given an ax and an appetite, you might do what Packer done
There was six men started out with Packer as their guide
And Packer he came back with the other five inside
Packer couldn't lead a party and he couldn't hunt no meat
But give him an ax and a skillet and packer he could eat

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THE ODD INGESTER has never really gotten used to how many candies there are in the shape of insects. Who knew such a niche market existed, or that is was so huge? Apparently, there are millions of little children worldwide who start salivating and smacking their lips hungrily when they see an earthworm or a beetle, and would pop the little critters in their mouth were it not for societal disapproval.

Here we have a whole colony of ants, in a box that is meant to look like an ant farm. "Watch the Ant-incs, then eat the Candy Ants!" the box instructs us, which is certainly an instruction lacking on any of Uncle Milton's formicariums. But these "marshmallow" ants (mostly made out of sugar and corn syrup) don't look much like ants anyway, unless a colony's queen in a dull pink color and wears a yellow crown. There is also a cluster of young ants who stare up at you with wide, friendly eyes and huge smiles, which makes the act of eating them seem a little sinister. I still feel guilty about burning a few ants with magnifying glasses when I was a little boy; now I'm expected to chew on these friendly creatures?

Well, fear not. The candy is unpalatable -- it has a hard, rubbery texture, the sugar coating tastes dusty, and the bodies of the ants tastes like a marshmallow you might discover under a sofa and pop in your mouth, only to realize that it is 14 years old. These little candy ants have seemingly developed the same trick for survival many actual ants do in the wild: They taste bad.

More from the Odd Ingester!

I SUSPECT I must have been listening to A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector when I wrote this song, as it seems to me it really should be played with a full Wall of Sound behind it, and sung by somebody with as soulful a voice as can be mustered. Instead, it's just me strumming my ukulele and warbling, and that will have to do.

Since the song's lyrics are so tinged with regret, it's pretty obvious to me that it was written in the late 90s when I was in Omaha -- I'd say it was written about 1999. It's odd to me, in retrospect, that so many of my songs were written from the point of view of someone looking back on a failed relationship that ended years ago. I was then in a relationship, and, while it had its troubles and eventually ended, it was hardly the sort of thing that would have me imagining that sometime in the future, I would look back and feel a terrible ache of loss. Perhaps I was just being dramatic.

"A CHRISTMASTIME TOAST" LYRICS:

Is it already Christmastime
Christmastime again
This house is empty that once was full
Do you remember when
The stockings we hung
Gifts under the tree
Kisses under the mistletoe
One kiss for you and one kiss for me
Now all I have is a photograph
Of the Christmas we had then
Is it already Christmastime
Christmastime again

I still have that card you sent
Do you still have mine
This Christmas I will toast your health
With a single glass of wine
No stockings now
No gifts, no tree
I haven't hung the mistletoe
There will be no kisses for me
But I will walk down Steeple Lane
To hear the churchbells chime
And then return to an empty house
Again this Christmastime

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I PUT THIS MOMENT OFF for 40 years. There it is, in an envelope in front of me. Inside is the name of a my biological parents. All I have to do is open it.

I did not tell my adoptive parents that I was going to do this. I think they've dreaded it even more than I have. Although they never tried to hide the fact that I was adopted, they never seemed certain how to address the subject. Every so often, they would pull me aside and remind me that, even though I was the only of the three Sparber boys to be adopted, they never saw me as any less a part of the family, and that I should never feel that I am any less a Sparber than either of my brothers. The discussions had the opposite of the desired effect. I never had felt I was any different than either of my brothers. I rarely thought about the subject. But suddenly, when faced with parents who eagerly made me want to feel as normal as possible, I was reminded that I was not normal. That, of the three Sparber boys, I was the only one who was born with blue eyes, and pale skin. I was the tall one, and, when I was very young, the blond one. I was the one born to different parents.

There were times I thought about tracking down my biological parents, and then decided not to. There is always a tragedy behind adoption, whether a large one or a small one, and I was not sure I wanted to know the sad circumstances that led to my biological parents deciding the best thing would be to turn me over to another family to raise. I have friends who tracked down their biological parents, and there were some very strange stories that resulted. One woman had been adopted by a Jewish family, as I was. In the years since she was born, her mother, a former drug addict, had been born again. When they met, their entire discussion consists of the birth mother bewailing the fact that she did not insist her daughter be turned over to a Christian family, and her concerns that her daughter would be consigned to hell as a result.

Who needs to know such things? And there is the chance, as an adopted child, that you were the product of circumstances to terrible to consider. Perhaps your biological mother gave you up because your biological father went to prison, and she could not afford to raise you. Perhaps both died in some horrible accident. Perhaps there are worse things that might be discovered, and I dread to even consider them. Perhaps you were produced by rape, or incest. You risk such a discovery when you contact the adoption agency that placed you.

It's neither a cheap nor an easy process, either. The agency must contact the biological parents on your behalf and get their permission to pass along any information. They charge a fee for this service that I consider quite excessive. And, if your biological parents are hard to track down, they will ask you if you wish to hire a private investigator to find them. An adopted child can easily spend thousands of dollars finding their biological parents.

Despite my ambivalence, though, I felt it was time to confront the specter of my own unknown past and and seek to meet my biological parents. Whatever the circumstances of my birth, I have lived a good life, with loving adoptive parents who made sure I was well taken care of. I received an excellent education, and they have always been on hand to offer assistance, whatever I have needed. My life began the moment I was adopted, and anything that came before that is academic. The circumstances of my birth are no more important to who I now am than if I were to discover I had ancestors who owned slaves, or a great uncle who killed his family, or any of the multitude of tragedies that lurk in everyone's family tree.

There are many reasons why, at age 40, I might want to know who my biological parents are. If there is a familiar risk for heart disease, or stroke, or any other disease, it would be good to know that. I lost a lot of hair in my 20s, and that was quite a surprise to me; I do not care to have more serious genetic surprises in my future. But I would be lying if I claimed the reason for this is elusively practical. For whatever reason, I just feel it is time to know. It's time for me to face the circumstances of my birth, and to familiarize myself with the people who produced me. All I need to do is open the envelope.

Inside is one sheet of paper, with a name and an address. It is all that the detective could locate. He sent a letter, and received back a short message from the only member of my biological family that is still alive that, yes, he would be willing to be contacted by me. There is his name. Right there on the paper.

Sheldon Hitler.

I reread the name a few times.

Sheldon Hitler.

Sheldon Hitler.

I am not misreading it.

I get up and go to my computer. I do a quick Google search.

It's not bad enough that Sheldon Hitler is one of the last living relatives of Adolph Hitler. He also happens to share my adoptive father's name. But, then, this doesn't seem a crueler twist of fate than the fact that I was adopted, and raised, Jewish. There is so much to this that I can't wrap my mind around.

My God. I'm a Hitler.

* * *

Sheldon Hitler is a small, meek man. I meet him outside a low-income housing project for the elderly in St. Paul. He sits on a park bench, clutching a cane, his face gaunt and heavily lined underneath a wide-brimmed hat. He watches me approach, not smiling. He looks like me.

But there is something unmistakable in the furrow of his brow, and the set of his jaw, and his hair, which is fuller than mine; it hangs across his head in a manner that recalls old newsreel footage. My biological father looks like him.

We sit and talk for a long time. He is a gentle man, with a soft speaking voice. His father was one of Adolph Hitler's nephews, and an unfavored one, who fled Europe when the war began. Sheldon Hitler was raised in New York. He went by the name Sheldon Heigloff for most of his life, but was outed by activists in the early Sixties, and knew that there was no point maintaining the pseudonym. He was never mistreated, but, even now, gets a few phone calls every year from news reporters, asking him to tell his life story. He tells them that it is hard to be a Hitler. He was never mistreated, and managed to make friends, but nonetheless has spent his life under an unbearable burden. "I can't express it," he told me. "But it destroyed my father; he drank himself to death. And there were times I thought it would destroy me. It is very hard to be a Hitler."

He was never able to maintain friendships, even though he met quite a few people who were very kind to him. He never married, although he had a few girlfriends. "Ah," he told me, "it might last a year, two years. I didn't want to marry, I didn't want children. It always ended."

He's describing my life.

When he talks to reporters, he tells them that he, like the few other surviving Hitlers, promised themselves not to have children. He never tells the reporters that in the late Sixties he was dating an Irish girl, and, despite their best precautions, she became pregnant. She was Catholic, and had the child over his objections. But they agreed to give up the child. "It seemed like it would be for the best," Sheldon Hitler tells me.

"You look like her," he says, after a moment. "You look Irish."

We sit in silence for a moment. I think about what he has said. I suppose most adoptive children would think about their biological mothers at that moment. I'm not. I'm thinking that because I look Irish, I don't look Austrian. And, if I don't look Austrian ...

"No," Sheldon Hitler says. "You don't look like him."

He puts his hand on my shoulder. His eyes are very kind. They are not his eyes either.

"I don't know what happened to your mother," he says. "I could ask, if you want. Her family is still in St. Paul."

Yes, I would like that.

"I understand on your mother's side, you're related to presidents," Sheldon Hitler tells me.

I begin to cry.

* * *

I meet with Sheldon Hitler a few more times. He is a very nice man. He is also the loneliest man I have ever met, and prefers it that way. He is gracious and very civil, but, each time I leave him, he seems relieved. After a while, I stop calling on him. He never contacts me again.

I remember our last conversation, though. He asked me about being raised Jewish. I discussed the synagogue I went to, and the holidays, and he listened with some interest. I told him I find some irony in the fact that I was raised Jewish. He seemed surprised.

"My father was a great friend to the Jews," Sheldon Hitler told me. "He gave money to neighborhood synagogues. In Germany, he had many Jewish friends. It is part of the reason he left."

He stared at me, and pursed his lips, thinking about his words.

"We were not all like Adolph," he told me.

I asked him why he agreed to meet with me. He nodded.

"I thought you would find out on your own eventually," he said. "Your mother was smart. You couldn't keep anything from her. Better you meet me, and we talk, then maybe you find out after I'm dead."

He walked me to the door and shook my hand.

"I don't know why I thought it would help to meet me," he confessed. "Being a Hitler has been terrible for me. And my father was a good man, and I have tried to be a good man. But there is never a moment I don't know that I share his blood. And it has been bad for me to know this. It has made things harder for me than they should have been. But you are more removed from it than I am. Perhaps it will be easier for you."

As I left, he handed me a scrap of paper. "These are the families of your mother," he told me. "Talk to them. Forget being a Hitler. You also had a mother. They're story is also yours."

I walked away and glanced down at the sheet of paper. I stopped. Sheldon Hitler had written two names.

Nixon and Reagan.

I went to a nearby bus stop to wait for my bus back to Minneapolis. At the bus stop was a garbage can.

Just before I boarded the bus, I threw the handwritten note from Sheldon Hitler into the garbage can. Sitting on the bus, I took out my state issued ID and stared at my photo, and then looked at my name, printed next to it.

Max Sparber.

That's who I am. That's who I am.

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

RECORDING ALL of these old songs has put me in the mood to write some new songs, as I suspected it might. I'm gaining confidence in my own voice, which has been sadly underused, and my ukulele playing, which was once quite good. But what to write? I don't really want to write pop songs, as I have neither the voice nor the taste for it, but neither do I want to revisit the sorts of songs I wrote in the past.

Strangely, I find myself wanting to write country and blues numbers. I suspect its because these are two styles of music that have historically been written by adults and for adults. As a 40-year-old, these feel like the sorts of songs I should be writing, and seem well-suited to my voice. So these are the styles of music I shall be toying with.

Tonight's song is a murder ballad, with part of the melody obviously inspired by Jimmie Rogers, who I think I've been listening to for just about forever. As a result of my experiments in recording my older songs, I have come to realize that I really like the sound of lo-fi recording, and so this song is quite distorted and features a lot of reverb. I suspect most of my songs will sound like this. This evening, I was listening to a pop song on the radio at a gas station, and it sounded so artificial as to hardly be human. There was no character to it, probably because it was recorded piecemeal, and the teenage singer had her voice mechanically tuned to hit the right notes. I feel my approach to writing and singing is something of an antidote to this. And it's not that I feel there is any additional authenticity to my recording -- the idea of "authenticity" is one of the bugaboos of 20th century music. There is nothing authentic about music. It contains all the artificiality of any other art forms. Robert Johnson, as an example, never sold his soul to the devil to learn how to play guitar. But it's a great story, and songwriters are storytellers. And I like artificialtity.

So rather than attempting to create music that is somehow authentic, I am looking for something that is, instead, honest. This recording, along with all my other recordings on the blog, was done in a single take. Any flaws in my performance are preserved, but so is the act of creativity at the moment of creation, something that has been completely eliminated from mainstream recordings. I wrote this song at 12:15 this afternoon, and had a recording of it at 12:45. This recording is my third time singing the song straight through. With most popular music nowadays, the song has been orchestrated and rehearsed hundreds of times, and the recording, including the vocals, are an assemblage of the the very best moments from hundred of recordings, someimes grafter together in the middle of a music phrase. Jonathan Maier wrote about the appeal of lo-fi recordings in a 1999 essay, describing it in much the way I just did; a decade after he wrote the essay, I have independently come to the same conclusion.

"NO TIME TO CRY" LYRICS

The dog it do bark
The crows they do fly
There's a forty-ought-six
And a bottle of rye
But there ain't no time
Ain't no time for you to cry
Ain't never no
Ain't never no time to cry

Clothes on the bed
Glass on the floor
Smoke in the air
And a hole in the door
But there ain't no time
Ain't no time for you to cry
Ain't never no
Ain't never no time to cry

Friday at noon
Bail it is set
Judge coming down
But he ain't here yet
But there ain't no time
Ain't no time for you to cry
Ain't never no
Ain't never no time to cry

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YEAH, THEY'RE CRAZY ALL RIGHT.

Crazy for nurse-themed erotica.

More Vinyl Oddities.

THIS SONG is, to my ears, very obviously from around 1997, when I was very actively writing songs for the ukulele, and borrowing both the sounds and the content of my songs from the popular music of the 1930s. Some of these songs, such as this one, wind up sounding sort of generic to me as a result. I'm not sure why this is, because the song title comes from a phrase I have used for years and the song's attitude toward money is alarmingly close to what mine was back when I wrote the lyrics. I also like the melody quite a lot.

I think it's just that this isn't a song I would write now, were I to sit down and write something. It's written somewhere between pure fiction and pure confession, and I guess I now feel a song should be one thing or the other. But the point of this project is not to judge my old songs, but instead to find a home for them. Perhaps I shall start writing some new songs when this project is finished, and we'll see how happy I am with those a decade later.

"I WANT TO SPEND THE DO RE MI" LYRICS:

I got a wallet
I got a top hat
I'll buy you pearls
You'll be my queen, Marie
Let's turn all the heads
As we stroll down Main Street
I want to spend the do re mi

I'm not a rich man
But I'm not a pauper
I can take you dancing
We will dance till three
It's not much money
But what good is money
I want to spend the do re mi

Why should I save my money
I want to spend it on you
Why make the bankers happy
That's not what I'm planning to do

Let's get a carriage and
Drive to the bandstand
I'll bribe the band to play
Our melody
If I'm broke tomorrow
I will wake up smiling
I want to spend the do re mi

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FOR OUR FIRST FILM, Brandi and I watched Superfly, one of the landmark films of Blaxploitation. Directed by Gordon Parks Jr, son of Shaft director Gordon Parks, the film tells the story of a cocaine dealer in Harlem, Youngblood Priest, played by Ron O'Neal, who wants to make a break from the drug trade. Despite the fact that his partner Eddie ("He looks like Sammy Davis Jr.!" Brandi declared) wants to stay in the game, and their dealer Scatter ("He looks like Uncle Ben!" Brandi declared) won't provide them enough drugs for one last score, Priest is determined to make a better life for himself and his girlfriend Georgia ("She looks like the Medical Examiner from CSI: Miami!" Brandi declared).

Here out our thoughts on the movie.

me: First, I am interested in hearing what you think the plot of the movie was.
Since you talked all the way through it.
Just a summary.
Brandi: Um, there was a coked up gay pimp who was moving drugs
but then white people came and ruined everything
because a black man can't catch a break
but then it worked out because the black man hired white killers
and they are apparently quite good at what they do
Also, 5-0 was trying to kill him
but they were doing it secretly
Perhaps they wanted to control the drug trade
I don't know
me: That's pretty close. Except the part about Youngblood Priest being gay.
You seemed obsessed with that.
He's just dramatic.
Brandi: He was!
Also, he's Mario Van Peeple's dad
according to my mom
me: Nope. Sweet Sweetback is Mario Van Peeble's dad.
Brandi: Whatever
He's not gay
me: Melvin van Peebles wasn't gay, no.
He had a sweet, sweet back.
But that's a different film completely, and one we'll get to.
Superfly was Ron O'Neal.
I think the one thing I got out of watching the film with you was that every one in Harlem in 1970s had an apartment that looks like your mother's house.
Or was it your grandmother's?
Brandi: It was both
Except my grandma has more porcelain dolls
scattered about
And my mom has more african fabric in random places
me: Well, maybe Superfly had some porcelain dolls in a closet somewhere.
Brandi: In the closet he came out of?
me: I'm not sure why you think Superfly was gay.
Didn't you listen to the soundtrack?
Brandi: Because he just seemed really gay
I did listen to the soundtrack.
It didn't mean he wasn't on the DL.
me: He has the baddest bitches in the bed!
And, at one point, in a big tacky bath tub!
Brandi: Maybe he's bi
I will give you that.
me: I never thought of that.
I think. when you've used that much coke, you might be up for anything.
Why do you think he thought white killers were the best ones?
That line has always confused me.
Brandi: Oh, my mom explained that to me last night
she said the hallmark of blaxploitation is that black people fuck everything up
and they can't do anything right
so, white killers would be seen as good killers because they won't mess stuff up
But I also think that it is because they can get good loans to buy better weapons
and are less likely to get pulled over during the get away
me: Yeah. We'll watch a movie called Across 110th Street. There are some black guys who try and do a robbery at the start of that, and they mess it up horribly and kill everybody.
Then the white guys they robbed go after them, and they're just brutal.
So your mom might be right.
Brandi: That's why she's my mom
because she's smarter than me
me: You seemed awfully concerned that people might be overheating in the movie.
Brandi: Yes.
They were layering a lot of clothing and doing a lot of coke
I have never done coke but it is my understanding from watching that video of Brandon Davis on YouTube where he calls Lindsay Lohan "firecrotch" is that coked up people sweat a lot
So I figured that they'd be really hot
Also, I think that Superfly was wearing a cloak made of the same material of oven mitts
me: So you don't think there is any merit to Coco's theory that it's Harlem in winter in the 1970s, so nobody had their heat turned on?
Brandi: Well this might be true but he totes lived on Central Park West. Like that dude from American Gangster
me: When he's home, he's in the bath. He just wears all that stuff when he goes out to do business. The oven mitt outfit is his business wear.
Brandi: I suppose
It just seems like with the coke and all he'd be hot
He doesn't even have gloves
so it can't be that cold
me: Good point.
What's amazing to me is that people actually wore outfits like that.
They must have figured out some way to handle the heat.
Brandi: Perhaps
maybe he paid for heat
like public assistance
me: I liked the way the film was shot in Harlem on actual locations.
It was really tore up.
Garbage everywhere.
Just random dogs jumping out and barking at you.
No trees.
It was pretty bleak.
Brandi: I didn't find the dogs were that believable they were herding dogs of some sort
they weren't that scary
me: You think they were looking for sheep and just got lost?
They were, like, oh, shit. I had some sheep in the Cloisters, and I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere.
Brandi: Yes.
Someone on the UES is looking for their sheep dog to take to the Hamptons
me: So the only white people in the film were either cops or Italian gangsters, and the cops were running the drug trade.
I think that's interesting.
It's, like, how can we sympathize with a coke dealer in oven mitts?
Oh, I see, he lives in a Harlem that's nothing but broken glass and lost sheep dogs, and he's completely boxed in.
Even the cops are selling drugs, and they will kill him if he tries to get out.
Brandi: I'm just disappointed that no one was openly referred to as white mike
me: I thought you said we were going to call all the white guys in the film White Mike.
Brandi: Well, the first white guy in the scene
me: Even the ones who were obviously named Guido and Vinnie.
Brandi: No, no.
If there was more than one then the first was mike
and the rest had other stereotypical names
me: The best thing about the film is Curtis Mayfield's soundtrack.
"Freddy's Dead" is always playing in the background.
Brandi: It was pretty good
I wish there was a similar soundtrack for my life
me: When we meet Freddy, he's a goofball. His wife is stealing his money, he giggles when he gets high, and he's begging Superfly not to put his wife out on the street (I need my money TO-NIGHT!"),
But when he dies, BOOM, the Curtis Mayfield song kicks in, and it's like, wow, Curtis thought this guy's death was a ghetto tragedy.
It's really heartbreaking.
But you were probably talking over that.
Brandi: Wait, when did he die?
me: When the cops released him after beating hm up to get the info about Superfly.
He sort of randomly gets hit by a car.
Probably a driver out looking for his sheep dogs.
Brandi: Oh, I was not aware of that
me: It happens pretty quickly.
Brandi: I might have been kicking around that exercise ball
because I have ADD
me: Yes. When you left, we found cans of Coke all over the apartment, all with one sip taken out of them.
Brandi: Yeah, I confused about which was mine
I only had two!
me: We were, like, when was Brandi in our bedroom, and why is there a can of coke in the closet?
Brandi: I gots to have my Coke
TO-NIGHT!

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THERE ARE A LOT OF STORIES associated with this song, and there isn't room enough to tell them. Suffice it to say the song is the product of a half-decade in my early 20s spent as part of a rather large anarchist community in the Twin Cities, starting in about 1992; I reckon this song was written about 1993. It actually borrows from a poem published in a paper in 1901, published shortly after the assassination of President William McKinley at the hands of a self-proclaimed anarchist named Leon Frank Czolgosz, who shot our 25th president through the stomach, colon, and kidney. Czolgosz had seen anarchist theorist Emma Goldman speak a few months earlier, and had briefly spoken with her, leading to her arrest following the president's murder.

The poem, written by a child, forms the chorus of this song, and is as it was originally written, although I forget the original source. This is, I think, the first example of me borrowing from the public domain for inspiration, and directly weaving existing art into something that I was newly creating. I sing the song a cappella in this version, but it was originally written to be performed over a simple guitar part, with the melody, plucked on a single string, playing in unison behind the vocals. The song itself sounds to my ears like a civil war ballad, although I am not sure where I might have heard such a thing, although the Ken Burns documentary about the subject had already come out and perhaps I had heard the soundtrack. The song is a curiosity to me now, tinged with regrets, as my tenure in the Twin Cities anarchist scene did not end particularly well. One day, perhaps I will tell that story. Today, the story is about Bill McKinley, Emma Goldman, and an unlikely assassin.

"THE BALLAD OF EMMA GOLDMAN" LYRICS:
Leon Czolgosz's revolver
Was wrapped in a handkerchief
When he shot dead Bill McKinley
And my father wept with grief
The man who did this thing
Sits a-waiting behind bars
And they arrested Emma Goldman
While she was smoking her cigars

I am O so sorry
That our president is dead
And everybody's sorry
So my father said
And the horrid man who killed him
Is a-sitting in his cell
And I'm glad that Emma Goldman
Doesn't board at this hotel

My father was a-watching
When they broke down Emma's door
A crowd was gathered there
They would have her dead they swore
Several there they struck her
As she was led away to jail
And I hear that Emma Goldman
Cannot hope to make her ball

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DESPITE ITS DESIGN, which is intended to mimic the look of mid-20th century girlie magazines, and its content, which includes nude pictures Tina Louise and June Wilkinson, Cad actually came out in 1992. Subtitled "A Handbook for Heels" and featuring a top-hatted mascot named Cadwaller J. Cadd (illustrated by Dan Clowes and possibly inspired by The Little Black Book author Cadwaller), the book aims to bring back the winking, leering world of the sex-crazed bounder.

To give it the credit it deserves, the book is quite funny. Their advice column, "Ask the D.I.," is written from the point of view of a ranting, deliriously homophobic drill instructor that seems styled after R. Lee Ermey. Cartoonist Clowes contributes an illustrated version of the folk song "Frankie and Johnnie," which, as it turns out, was quite naughty in its original incarnation. In the meanwhile, illustrator Virgil Franklin Partch, whose strange line drawings appeared in hundreds of men's magazines during the 1950s and 60s under the name VIP, contributes a series of wry silhouettes of various styles of hangovers ("the shakes," "the nothing seems real").

The book also features a number of non-fiction pieces, featuring, most prominently, nudie cutie film auteur Russ Meyer (that's one of his famously bosomy wives, Eve, on the book's cover.) Also on hand are stories about cigars, nude tropical girls painted on velvet, former junkie jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, and bizarre fetishes, among many other wonderful and untoward topics.

The real pleasure of the book is that it recalls a time before the sexual revolution, when the experiences of adults, including sex, smoking, and drinking, were the subjects of winking, nudging, and hearty laughter. People seem to have lost their sense of humor about such things, and treat them either with disdain or with a somber seriousness that drains all the pleasure out of them. And it's a shame. None of these activities -- none of them -- are the exclusive domain of the connoisseurs. We can all afford to drink, smoke, and have sex, and we all get to enjoy it equally (unless our taste happens to be for Edwardian cognac, Cuban cigars, and $2000 per night prostitutes; I know those are my preferences.) And, while smoking has fallen out of favor, the other two activities remain something most adults do on a regular basis. There's just no point in being grim or scolding about them; they are great activities for humorous examination.

Now, I know, I know. The magazines that this book bases itself on come from the golden age of American sexism, and that would be a terrible thing to return to. But perhaps we're coming to a point where some of these old roles might be revisited, not because they are socially mandated, but because they are fun. Who doesn't want to get dressed up every so often, men in their evening coats, women in their cocktail dresses, and get well and truly smashed together on well-made cocktails, only to end the evening with some ass-slapping, some leering, and some salacious comments? It needn't bring down the end of feminism if it's done consensually, as an act of role playing.

At least, that what I tell myself as I endlessly make uncouth advanced toward my female friends, ply them with liquor, and slip my hands where they don't belong. And they seem to have as much fun making goo goo eyes back at me, sending me to the bar with more drinks, and finding places to put their own hands.

So, Cad, the next toast is to you. You taught me the pleasures of occasionally being very, very naughty.

More Dirty Books!

A RATHER NAUGHTY SONG, dating from around 2001. There isn't much of a story to this. All the songs I wrote at this time seemed to be based on sprightly ukulele parts and salacious lyrics. I guess it was just the mood I was in for that year. I was back in Minneapolis, writing theater reviews for City Pages, studying improv comedy at a local school, and generally getting myself into trouble, and it must have just had me feeling a little puckish. I still feel that way, which may explain Sailor Martin's various songs.

Yes, I'm aware that the name in the first verse rather sounds like James Lileks. I don't recall if that was deliberate or not. If so, well, sorry, Lileks. Sometimes you just wind up being a character in a naughty ditty, and that's just how it is.

There are some lyrics you'll hear in the song, at the end of each set of verses, that are not in the printed lyrics. I make these up on the spot.

"WOE IS ME" LYRICS:

Alas, alack
Mr. James Lillack
He loved a girl
She didn't love him back
He took her for a ride
On a river ferry
He tried to make her
But she made merry

For shame too bad
Dr. Steven Ladd
He chased a filly
Who drove him mad
He took her out
To a movie show
Who she left with
He still don't know

A pity, tough luck
Young Allan Ruck
There was a salesgirl
He wanted to wed
He parked his car
At lovers lane
And watched from afar
As she did the same

Too much, the end
For me my friend
I wooed a cutie
And my heart won't mend
I offered to be
Her only boy
I jumped for her
But she jumped for joy

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A LEAF OF THIS BOOK ...

A JUG OF WINE ...

AND THOU ... and you're all set to be the Bachelor Most Likely to Succeed. With the girls, that is. But there's much to learn:

What KIND of wine to put in that jug.

What cars are hardest for her to get out of.

How to use mood music -- and tattooing.

How to be fetching -- when you plan to be fleeting.

The list gets longer and more intriguing.

But revealing more would be a mistake. There are some things it's best to keep a secret for the brotherhood.

So --- read the book.

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WELL, OBVIOUSLY there was a time when I felt a need to sing about Bufo marinus, for some reason. That time was about 1988, if I recall right, and I had stumbled across a book that told the story of the Cane Toad's disastrous introduction to Australia. Back in those days, it seems, I just went ahead and wrote songs about whatever the hell I was reading at the time, and, looking back on the songs that emerged as a result, this actually seems a pretty good approach.

Apparently, I also thought a Roger Miller-styled uptempo country number would be the best way to tell this story. I'm not sure I was wrong, either -- Australian pop songs like "Pub With No Beer" and "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport" always sort of sounded like Roger Miller ditties to me.

Anyway, the lyrics actually are a pretty good representation of the experiences of Australians dealing with an imported and biodiversity-destroying alien species of enormous and mildly hallucinogenic toads.

"SONG OF THE CANE TOAD" LYRICS:

There was money in sugar so it was farmed in Brisbane
But the Grey Back Beetle could eat a thousand ton of cane
We picked beetles off of cane stalk till our buckets overlowed
Then we brought out to Queensland the Hawaiian Cane Toad

Mr. Bell said the toad would eat grub off the plant
But the Greyback can fly and the Bufo toad can't
And they're useless anyway because they won't go near the cane
And there's poison in their neck that drives a biting dog insane

The toads have been known to steal and swallow smokes
Which they snatch from the hands of New South Wales folks
And they're mean and they're hungry and they're always in the road
From the Gold Coast to the Round House it's the Hawaiian Cane Toad

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AGAIN WE HAVE a candy whose sole purpose it to allow someone to act out a pop music star fantasy. But while the candy bat seemed created for fans of heavy metal, this dollar-sign-shaped clear plastic container, filled with hard candies and flashing lights, and created to hang around from a strap like a necklace, is clearly intended for hip hop wannabes.

In fact, the flashing lights are pretty entertaining -- they're bright, come in multiple colors, and flash at an increasing rate. The candy, however, is unexpectedly sour, and not in a sour candy way. In a "this candy's manufacturer (Galerie, from China) didn't quite get the chemicals right, and so, rather than being sweet like the hard candy that comes out of a candy machine, it tastes like someone accidentally dropped this candy into a vat of MSG."

Nonetheless, the necklace is fun to wear, so mad props to that.



More from the Odd Ingester!

THIS SONG WAS WRITTEN in two parts. I wrote the lyrics in about 2001, when I was editing my weekly journal of bad poetry, Doggerel, and were published there. Several years later, in 2004, I had a small apartment in Omaha and an abundance of free time, thank to being unable to find frequent work, so I put the lyrics to music.

This is a grim little story, and I think the biggest influence was a zine I used to read back in the early '90s called Murder Can Be Fun. The author, John Marr, was and is an inveterate reader, with a taste for crime and disaster stories, and I recall him doing an issue dealing with children. He wrote about several children who had been put to death, and recounted the hideous crimes that had put them on death row. In every instance, the child had just pursued an amoral curiosity, with tragic results, and the children never demonstrated any real understanding of what had happened, or what was going to happen, even as they were headed to the gallows. These stories stuck with me, and, so, of course, I decided to write a rather upbeat and carnivalesque song about the subject.

"FOUR DETESTABLE CHILDREN" LYRICS:

Billy Murkin, sweet and mild
Once hacked to death an infant child
And then explained to officer Pruett
That he wanted to see if he could do it.

The Thomson boy had a great desire
To take a match and start a fire
All perished in the orphanage
As the wicked boy laughed and the fire raged.

The Lowells grew quite fond of tacks
Which they placed alone the railroad tracks
So they hoisted up a drum of tar
Killing all but one in the dining car.

Sammy Hawkins and his brother Pete
Thought they would catch fish to eat.
Sam set his rod down on the ground
And pushed in his brother to watch him drown.

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MANY STORIES ARE TOLD ABOUT MY SENSEI. All of them are true.

My sensei ranges in height between four foot one and sixteen feet tall.

My sensei fasts half the year, and, for the other half, eats the bark off elm trees.

My sensei was the inspiration for the character Lord Humungus in The Road Warrior.

My sensei makes origami swans to commemorate every man he kills; after one especially vicious battle, my sensei spent thirteen months doing nothing but making origami swans.

My sensei taught Axl Rose a form of Chinese voice control so powerful, it can kill a man with a single sound; this is why Axl Rose has not put out an album in 11 years.

My sensei is the world's best sushi chef, although he himself is a vegetarian.

My sensei has a pet hyena named Lord Shaka Zulu Wentworth III.

If my sensei ever goes to Jakarta, he will be arrested on the spot. He has committed no crime there, but Indonesia has made it illegal just to be my sensei.

My sensei deplores the use of guns, but, when he has no other options, he has resorted to defending himself with a 155mm howitzer he calls Harley Davidsboom.

My sensei has had many lovers, but, like most Taoists, he believes that spilling semen reduces a man's vital essence. This was the origin of his famous Flying Fingers Tongue Whip technique.

My sensei will destroy a Picasso the moment he sees one; he has never explained why.

There are all manner of strange and murderous weapons secreted in my sensei's beard, which is six feet long; he also hides his weed in there.

My sensei adopted me at age five from a Tuvan orphanage. My first 10 years with him, my only responsibility was to make cocktails and give him backrubs.

My sensei can emit a blast of urine that can travel over a mile; there is no real reason for this, except that it makes him laugh.

My sensei wrote "Louie Louie."

My sensei is one of the most celebrated men in Nepal, where they do not know him as a martial artist; instead, he is famous there as the author of a series of Hardy Boys-like adventure novels in which the Yeti is a recurring character.

Fire will not burn my sensei, due to an agreement made between the God of Fire and my sensei's parents.

My sensei used to write jokes for Rodney Dangerfield, who once said that if my sensei had not devoted his life to the deadly arts, he would have been one of the world's most successful stand-up comedians.

My sensei can pull out a man's heart and show it to him while it is still beating, but refuses to, saying that such a display of martial arts is gimmicky and disgraceful; he prefers to pull off a man's testicles and show them to him before eating them.

My sensei's only regret is that he didn't tell his father that he loved him before he broke the man's neck.

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

UNLIKE MOST OF MY SONGS, which I know I must have written at some point but don't recall precisely when, I know the exact details of the authorship of this song. In 1989, I was living in a small apartment in south Minneapolis, after having dropped out of college. I did not have a job nor money, and was feeding myself with meals from a food shelf. The former tenant of the apartment had died there, rolled off his bed, and quietly decomposed for a few weeks before being discovered -- the hard wood floors were scarred black from the heat of his decomposition. His family had come to collect his belongings, leaving behind everything that was too valueless or too bulky to take. So I slept in his bed, the same bed he had died in. One night I woke to find a figure sitting on the end of the bed, hands pressed to his face, as though he were weeping. The next morning I decided I had dreamed it. There was, however, one detail of the weeping man that stayed with me: His fingertips were black. Later I read that when people die, blood pools in their extremities, leading to blackened fingers.

This was a surprisingly fertile time for me, creatively. I began writing a play, which eventually turned into The Substitute Bride, and also wrote a few songs, including this one. I can't really say why I wrote this particular song, although I think the tale of the dead man, and the sense of being haunted by him, clearly influenced the lyrics.

"GOD DAMN YOU TOM BROWN" LYRICS:

He woke up one morning with a Los Angeles gal,
He married her money and then he buried it all
In guns and gambling and debt and champagne,
And love for Tom Brown is love spent in vain

He met up one evening with her father's ghost
Who asked Tom which he loved the most:
The touch of his wife or the sting of cocaine.
He said love for you, Tom, is love spent in vain

He was seen the next week with young Polly May;
He told her sweet things and then he bore her away.
Mention him now and she cries out in shame--
Because love for Tom Brown is love spent in vain

Her brother he insisted that Tom Brown would die
And he gathered his pistol and said his goodbyes;
He was beaten to death with a brass walking cane
And love for Tom Brown is love spent in vain.

Damn you, she cried, god damn you, Tom Brown!
She sickened and died and was buried in town;
He grieved and he mourned and made a show of his pain
But love for Tom Brown is love spent in vain

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THIS WAS, I think, the second song I ever wrote on the ukulele. I used to have big old baritone ukulele, which is pitched lower than my current tenor ukulele, and so a lot of these early songs I either sing very high or very low, which is tricky, as I already write songs either for the top or the bottom of my register. Nonetheless, the point of this project is to find a home for the old songs I wrote, and so I'll just go ahead and sing the songs as best I can, even when, as with this one, I wind up just growling through a lot of it.

"Serenade the Moon" was my first, and, I think, only attempt at writing using the classic structure of the pop song, including an intro and a middle bridge. The song was written in 1996, and, as with the other songs I wrote at that time, the lyrics are deliberately a little hokey -- I took pleasure in combining the more insipid qualities of Tin Pan Alley songwriting with a more beaten and world weary viewpoint, and so here we have what on first blush seems to be a a sweet if simpleminded romantic ditty, and then reveals itself to have a broke alcoholic as its narrator.

"SERENADE THE MOON" LYRICS:

I'm bewildered and I'm startled
Is it just the wine
Did I hear that you adore me
Could it be you're mine

We've both drunk a little too much
And won't be invited again any time soon
I've lost my hat and your purse string's broken
Now is a good time to serenade the moon

I've acted the fool, I act it often
My hair's a mess and I sing off tune
But if it makes you smile I'll act the fool, dear
If it makes you laugh I will serenade the moon

I'm a wreck and my money's all spent
I'm not the kind of guy for whom girls swoon
But drunk with you I feel like a king, dear
Drunk with you I will serenade the moon

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I HAVE COME TO the inexorable conclusion that in the years between 1996 and 2000, I was either quite depressed, or unexpectedly skilled at feigning it in song. Here we have yet another song from that period that deals with loneliness and regret as its theme. I can't say precisely what prompted the writing of this song, but I recall sitting down to play it just before I moved from Omaha back to my native Minneapolis, and the song seemed to sum up all the my feelings at that moment, which were quite complex, a mixture of melancholy and uncertainty and hope that was simply exhausting.

I have not played the ukulele much in the past few years, and, as a result, this particular song, despite being a simple arpeggio, breaks my hand to play it. Therefore the ukulele portion of this song is quite messy, and actually hurt quite a lot to play -- I just don't have the hand strength required to pinch the neck of the ukulele as hard as it needs to be pinched, or for as long, without just cramping up. I attempted to record this five or six times, and this was as close to successful as I got, and this is what prompted my little spoken word outburst at the start of the song.

"THE BAND WILL PLAY A MELODY" LYRICS:

There's a train somewhere
Bound to take me home
I hear its whistle sometimes
Echoing through my bones
Where is the girl I lost
Does she remember my face
How the hell did I wind up here
How did I find this place

I've roamed a long time now
A life of roads and trains
I forgot what I was looking for
I don't care to remember again
I look in mirrors now
And don't know the man I see
Perhaps I wanted forgetfulness
It's all that's left to me

I've bought a ticket now
To a town I don't recall
Strangers there they wait for me
And I girl I don't know at all
The band will play a melody
And I will weep and cheer
How do I get to the train I need
How did I wind up here

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THE FIRST SONG I ever learned to play on ukulele was "When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin Along," and I didn't so much learn to play it as I discovered that I could strum two chords on the instrument, both very similar to each other, and sing the song over it. This was in about 1990. Six years later, when I bought myself another ukulele and began to play in earnest, I revisited those two chords and wrote this song.

I think my feelings about the sweet popular jazz of the 1920s and 30s was permanently warped by having seen an episode of the BBC production of Pennies from Heaven when I was a boy, and later watching both the film version and the BBC miniseries The Singing Detective, all scripted by author Dennis Potter. In Potter's scripts, which were bleak and troubling, characters would spontaneously burst into song, as though it were a musical, but, unlike a musical, they were simply lip sync to the original recordings of maudlin and sometimes insipid music from the 20s and 30s. As a result, the music of the era has always sounded sinister to me.

I tried to write this song with that quality in mind. It is meant to sound as though some dapper man in a bowtie and straw hat were broadcasting a dreamlike love song from Venus. This is why I have put so much echo on the recording. Well, that and to partially cover for the poor quality of the recording. But mostly the former.

"THIS DREAM OF LOVE" LYRICS:

I could drown in this dream of love
I lie down and there's no hope of rising
I could drown in this dream of love
Of you of you of you

Clouds roll by and I start a falling
Will I sigh as I plummet past your window
Clouds roll by and I start a falling
For you for you for you

Flames they rise and I feel a burning
With moans and sighs I toss and I'm turning
Flames they rise and I feel a burning
For you for you for you

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THERE IS only one possible reason for this candy, made by a company called Flix. And that is so that you can act out your Ozzy Osbourne fantasies. Which I did.



How does it taste? Like grape-flavored rubber.

More from the Odd Ingester!

I DON'T RECALL when I wrote this song. I don't remember writing it at all. Lyrically, I would imagine it was written about 1998, as it is one of my most melancholy songs, and that was the time when, for whatever reason, my lyrics were saturated with sadness and regret. But it has a terribly complex ukulele arrangement -- so complex that I can barely play it now -- and that would date it to sometime after 2000, when my ukulele playing was at its most sophisticated. So this song is going to have to go undated, and so be it.

"STRUGGLING TO CATCH MY BREATH" LYRICS:

A garter, a photograph
And a postcard I never sent
I know that I should throw them away
There's a page gone from my diary
I don't know just where it went
It told, Maud, of our wedding day

I live out of suitcases
And sleep with my sock still on
In strange beds in room that are not mine
I wake in a panic
Struggling to catch my breath
This happens, Maud, time after time

I think that I'll call you
But I'm afraid of the telephone
I'm afraid that I will hear you are well
I know you've remarried
And I hear that you have children now
And that's swell, Maud, I tell you that's swell

But we had some times then
And you were my angel once
I remember all the fun that we had
How did it end like this
And how did I end up here
Well you're happy now
And I'm gad, Maud, I'm glad

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THIS SONG WAS WRITTEN sometime about 1996, and, as far as I can tell, it was composed in a fit of Brechtian depression after listening to an evening of Yiddish art songs. This is another song that felt appropriate to growl through when recording, and then, when I was preparing to convert it into an MP3, I sort of lost control of myself and the various filters GarageBand offers. Sometimes I'm in the mood for my songs to sound like they were sung through a bullhorn that had gone on the fritz. I can't say why, precisely, except I get in a noisy mood every so often, and tonight was one of those nights.

"BEGGAR'S SONG" LYRICS:

Where is the girl o that I once courted?
Where is the man o that I once was?
I buried him when? What was my reasoning then?
He did what I do what he does.

Am I a fool? And do fools deserve pity?
Am I the sap who gets stuck with the bill?
I dine with the best but I pay like the rest
And I will what I won't what I will.

Is there a beast more wretched than I am?
Is there a figure more deserving of fun?
Mock if you must my ambitions and lust --
I did what I do what I done.

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"New Orleans couple. 28 and 32. She is a good-looking redhead, 5'7", 36-24-38. He is 5'9", well-built. Attractive couple is main interest."

"Attractive 25-year-old single female desires to meet congenial couples."

"Bi-minded couple interested in meeting other experienced bi-minded couples"

These ads and thousands like them are written by very real men and women--people like Sam and Joyce, Jim and Charlotte, Frank and Sue, Marjorie, Thelma, Andrew, John, and many others you will meet in this book. Together they combine to vividly demonstrate the true and--to some--shocking nature of the explosively expanding American phenomenon that outsiders call "wife-swapping," insiders call "swinging," and the author simply terms --

GROUP SEX.

More Dirty Books!

THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST RECENT of my old songs, probably dating back to 2000 or 2001, when I was publishing my collection of vile poems, Doggerel. In fact, the lyrics first appeared in Doggerel as a naughty little poem, and, obviously, I got it into my head to adapt it into a song.

I don't listen to my own voice when I record -- I find it distracting. Instead, I put headphones on and just sort of strum and warble as best as I'm able; if the song seems suited for it, I tend to just bark the lyrics out. These one seemed sweeter, despite its inappropriate lyrics, and so I sang it softly and without my usual growl. Listening to the recording when I completed it, I was surprised at how sweet my voice sounded. Usually I am not a fan of prettiness in music, as I think singers fixate on making their voices as lovely and impressive as possible, never mind what they are singing; obviously, a lot of my influence comes from folk, vaudeville, and music hall, where character voices tended to be preferred to pretty ones. But singing this song prettily seems to work here, at least to comic effect, as the song itself is so blatantly a naughty joke that it can hardly be considered more than a single entendre.

"GREAT LONG STRUMMING THING" LYRICS:

I met her at a fairground;
Her great beauty did I see.
But what could I offer her?
O ugly, wretched me!
I am not a handsome man,
I do not work or sing.
The only thing that I could offer her
Was my great long strumming thing.

She introduced me to her girlfriends
And we agreed to meet for tea,
But I forgot the biscuits I'd bought
O stupid, thoughtless me!
I felt quite like a fool then,
As no cookies did I bring.
The only thing that would give them joy
Was my great long strumming thing.

We met then with her mother
And with her sisters three.
They peered then down their noses
And did not think much of me.
I did not have a dime to my name
And had not worked since spring,
And the only thing that impressed them
Was my great long strumming thing.

I took her to the garden
And dropped down on my knee
And begged her then to be my bride
And asked her to marry me.
I don't want to wed, she said,
And I don't want no ring.
All I want is another look
At your great long strumming thing!

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I MOVED TO HOLLYWOOD when I was 21, with $600 in my pocket and a 16-year-old runaway brother in tow. I also brought a small box full of books, mostly about Hollywood's underbelly. Chief among them was Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, which was useful to me in one very important way. I ran out of money very quickly and became homeless, living for six months in a shelter run by the Gay/Lesbian Community Services Center. Most of my fellow homeless in the shelter were male hustlers, who fascinated and terrified me with stories of sexual encounters with movie stars in the back of long black limousines. This might have been a bit much, except I had read Anger's book, and I responded to it all with equanimity. My experience seemed to me not to be an epic disaster, but instead simply another Hollywood story, and perfectly normal.

Kenneth Anger's sordid expose of Hollywood scandal, first published in Paris in 1959, is a strange book. It's not history, quite; at least, it's not good history. Instead, Anger raided the enormous back catalog of celebrity calumny and printed every rumor and innuendo that caught his fancy. But it's not quite a greatest hits of the tabloid scandal sheets either. Anger couldn't be bothered with the sort of petty vice such magazines obsessed over, from movie star affairs to jazz musician hop parties.

No, Anger was going for something grander. He set out, and mostly succeeded, in creating counter-mythology to the self-serving stories Hollywood told itself about starlets getting discovered at Schwab's. Anger had carefully cultivated a persona as a Hollywood outsider -- he had been a child actor who had gone to dance school with Shirley Temple, but had gone on to make gay- and occult-themed underground films -- and he brought this sensibility to his book. His taste for scandal was both epic and catty, and he gleefully walked his readers through tales of Rudolph Valentino's sexual peccadillos and rumors of murder upon William Randolph Hearst's yacht.

The resulting book was sleazy enough to inspire an 1972 X-rated film with its name, starring bosomy Swedish nude model Uschi Digard, among others, acting out Anger's depraved secret history. It was also popular enough to have remained constantly in print. Its sordid tales have even leaked into mainstream, from Chaplin's recounting of its eponymous character's marital disasters to The Cat's Meow's imaginative retelling of Thomas Ince's puzzling death aboard the Hearst yacht.

It's hard to put a finger on Anger's tone in the book. His writing is at times sensationalistic, at other times camp and cruel. But his isn't just the tone of the tabloids, which cynically exploited, and continues to exploit, its audience's jealous fascination, and accompanying epicaricacy, with celebrities and their foibles. There is that, but Anger also gives us something more. He gives us epic disasters. It's no accident that he takes his title from the massive set D.W. Griffith built for his 1919 film Intolerance, which then was left to fall apart for three years. Anger clearly saw Hollywood's gilded age as being a sort of a modern version of the tragic decadence of the ancient world. His is a Hollywood where celebrities act out there tragedies like the Roman ruling class of I, Claudius.

Hollywood's publicity machine had spent years creating hagiographies of its players. But Anger's book presents the the first 50 years of Hollywood as a place without saints. His Tinseltown is a land of tragic heroes, larger than life, and therefore possessing oversized sins. Anger is a strange narrator for these tales, giggly and venomous, with an undependable fidelity to history. But he's a great narrator anyway, at least in one sense: Kenneth Anger loves a great sin.

More from the Sparber Bookshelf.

THIS IS ANOTHER SONG from the mid-90s, when I was writing songs to be accompanied by the ukulele. I should note that, while I have played guitar since I was 10 years old, and have a fair grounding in music theory for the guitar, I never bothered to learn a goddamn thing about the ukulele. I have no idea what chords are what, and simply taught myself to play by sheer force of will, endlessly arranging and rearranging my fingers until the instrument started playing the sorts of noises I wanted to hear. Nonetheless, I consider myself a much better ukulele player than I ever was at the guitar, or, at least, I prefer the songs I composed on the instrument. For some reason, perhaps because I was unencumbered by any habits, such as chords I tended to strum or fingerpicking patterns I had memorized, I was much freer in composing for the ukulele, and produced a wider variety of songs on it.

This one, for example, is quite Mexican, and its lyrics draw from images from the Mexican Day of the Dead, which I've always fancied. Every so often, when I could afford it, I would buy some folk imagery from the holiday -- there's still some scattered around my apartment -- and I have owned several collections of photographs from the Day of the Dead. In particular, I like the small clay dioramas that show scenes of skeletons going about daily activities, such as getting haircuts or riding in cars, and it is those images that fueled this song.

LYRICS FOR "TIP YOUR HAT":

The bones they dance and sing a cappella,
Then take their guitarron and play;
So tip your hat for the dead mariachis:
"Ai yai yai yai yai yai," they say.

What bony hand is leading the carriage?
What ghostly man kneels down to pray?
So toss a coin to the dead mariachi:
"Ai yai yai yai yai yai," he say.

The skull he wears a big sombrero,
He's laughing loud and full and gay;
So have a dance with the dead mariachi:
"Ai yai yai yai yai yai," he say.

LISTEN TO "TIP YOUR HAT":



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MORE OF MAX "BUNNY" SPARBER'S OLD SONGS!

ALEXANDER KING was a dangerous man to want to be, and, unfortunately, when I first discovered his memoirs in my late teens, I wanted to be him. No, that's not precisely right; although he was an artist, a critic, and editor, and a playwright, and I have also been these things, and he was an inveterate storyteller and curmudgeon, and I have sometimes been these things, I didn't wish to follow in his exact footsteps. No, I wanted what King managed to produce in Mine Enemy Grows Older, written in 1958, and what he continued to produce in successive memoirs for the next few decades. I wanted an interesting autobiography.

I can't precisely remember which King anecdotes come from which of his books, but they spring to mind constantly. He worked as an associate editor at LIFE Magazine, where he was responsible for printing a life-sized image of the world's smallest man, which ran as a double truck image, with the man's head touching the verso end of one page and his toes ticking the outside edge of the recto page. He also wore pink neckties for decades, simply, if I recall correctly, because he was told he shouldn't. He had to have them specially made, and eventually discovered the tailor he went to, and old man with a failing business, had no other customers. It was Alexander King who offered the sage advice that there should be at least one freak at every party, which I have found to be true.

Alexander King was once hired to illustrate a book on venereal disease. While he was doing so, he came under the erotic attention of a woman he knew, and, when she forced herself on him, he brushed aside her bangs and saw her forehead marked with the very same venereal pox that he had been illustrating. That's a hell of a story, and, as King was old when he began writing, he had a lot of stories like them. He wasted a good chunk of his life as a morphine fiend, and had multiple marriages, and developed a persona that was at once stately and prickly. He became somewhat famous in his dotage, although, like many of the great oddballs of the 20th century, time has not been kind to his memory, and he is poorly remembered now. Well, no matter. I still read his books, and imagine the autobiography that I will one day write, and take strange comfort from it. My little creative activities have barely attracted much attention, but I've developed my share of wild anecdotes, and continue to. Whatever happens in my life, at least it's been satisfyingly interesting, and I have Alexander King to both thank and curse for that.

More from the Sparber Bookshelf.

I BOUGHT A UKULELE years ago, back in the early 90s, when I lived in Los Angeles, and puttered around with it for several years. In the late 90s, I started in earnest to write songs inspired by the sounds I was getting from the instrument, and I believe this was the first of those, composed sometime around 1996.

At the time, I had developed an interest for the small-combo popular jazz of the 1930s, some of which I found quite unearthly, and the songs I wrote at the time were intended to recapture that unearthliness, in part lyrically, with songs that featured maudlin and excessively melancholy lyrics. I've managed to produce a spectral warble on this recording of the song that's close to what I intended; when I wrote the song I wanted it to sound as though a ghost was singing a half-remembered love song.

LYRICS TO "TUT TUT NO NO":

Why do you tease me angel?
Why do you taunt me so?
There's a heaven waiting inside your arms
But you shake your head and say "tut tut no no."

How long will you refuse me?
How long will you tell me to go?
If I can't have you inside my arms
Then I'll be happy with "tut tut no no."

LISTEN TO "TUT TUT NO NO":



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MORE OF MAX "BUNNY" SPARBER'S OLD SONGS!

THIS GICLEE PRINT was a recent gift from Coco. The artist is Nelson Evergreen, a painter and cartoonist who lives on the southern coast of the United Kingdom. The print itself is available from BlueFlip Art, and sells for a very reasonable $17.95, with a portion of the sales cost going to Amnesty International.

Coco showed me the print before she bought it, and we both agreed that there was something very appealing about an image of a group of monsters sitting on rooftops. It wasn't until we received the full-sized print that we realized a delicious detail that we had missed in looking at a small jpeg on a Web page: The monsters are fishing. On the end of their fishing lines are stuffed toys, which they dangle before windows, from which several children are straining to grab the bait. There are red lunchboxes next to the monsters, open just a crack, and inside you can see the tiny and terrified faces of human children peering out.

More from The Sparber Gallery.

I'VE BEEN WRITING SONGS for a long time. Can't say precisely why. I never set out to be a singer, and, consequently, have never developed a singing voice beyond being able to bark or warble out a pretty basic melody. I have performed in public now and again, for a few years back in my 20s, at coffeehouse, but did not much enjoy the experience. Really I did it because I had written these songs, and what do you do with songs but perform them? Nowadays, when I get in the mood to write a song, I generally do so as part of my ongoing Sailor Martin project, and that seems to satisfy me.

Some of these old songs wound up in plays I wrote. Some of them have remained on paper, and nowadays I hardly remember how to play them, or what their melody was. Every so often I break out old pieces of paper with lyrics printed on them and sing through my old songs, and enjoy it. I've decided to record some of these and put them on this blog, so that they have an actual home. These won't be fancy recordings -- some will be a cappella. Some will have ukulele accompaniment. If I can borrow an acoustic guitar, some may have guitar playing. I'll jot down what I remember of them, if I remember anything.

The first one, "Photographing the Deceased Child," is one of my oldest. I figure I wrote it some time in my late teens, influenced by a book I had looked at in a book store that showed a number of funeral photographs of dead children, where they were posed as though they were sleeping, often with their parents around them. The song was written to sound like an old American religious hymn, and it strikes me as an unusually morbid and mournful composition.

"PHOTOGRAPHING THE DECEASED CHILD" LYRICS:

Many children died from the flu
O many died and were buried then
With parents grieving
Parents who
Dressed their loss
In coast and shoe
And paid to have them on film again
And brought from church clergymen
Who said a prayer
And said amen'
And then stood at the casket
To get photographed too

In a pine box laid
In a field of corn
Hands clasped or grasping
Sweet lilies
The parents mourn
It's clear hey mourn
This child they had
Desired born
But do so quiet
With dignity
Dressed in black
And finery
They pose along
For memory
They photograph the infant
In the clothes he'd once worn

LISTEN TO "PHOTOGRAPHING THE DECEASED CHILD":



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MORE OF MAX "BUNNY" SPARBER'S OLD SONGS!

DOES ANYONE ELSE look at this album cover and find their eyes drawn down toward Gary's unexpected shoe choice? Calf-high black patent leather? Really?

Gary wants more, all right. And, from his kinky boots, I would guess that involves a slave hood and several hours of rope bondage.

More Vinyl Oddities.

the dog is back

dog might be the wrong word. he's smaller
than me. he's a tiny, shivering mass of
tufted fur with little, terrified eyes and
a tail that points straight down.

he's an odd color, too. bright red.

that don't look to be a natural color,
the grasshoppers states, peering down
at the dog from a bookshelf above my
own.

it isn't, i tell him. he's dyed that color.

and who would want to paint a scrap
of a thing bright red like that, the
grasshopper demands.

i gesture to the check-out counter,
and the grasshopper looks.

a man stands there. he's a polite and
soft spoken man, but he wears a white
smock covered in red smears. his features
are cadaverous, with dark makeup added
to make his cheeks and eyes sunken.
his hair is a shock of thick gray curls
that point straight up, as though he had
been electrocuted very badly and had not
recovered from it yet.

the grasshopper shakes his head, then
glances down at me, silently demanding
an explanation.

he's a late-night horror show host, i tell
the grasshopper.

the grasshopper shakes his head, then
folds his arm. he's going to need more
of an explanation.

when they show old horror movies on
television, he introduces them, i say.

i know what a late-night horror show host
is, the grasshopper snaps. we do have
television in ireland.

but he ain't hosting a show just now, is he,
the grasshopper demands. why is he still
dressed like that.

he's always dressed like that, i say.
that's new orleans for you.

and so why does he have a bright red
rat, the grasshopper asks.

that's not a rat, i say. it's a little dog.

the grasshopper narrows his eyes, not
believing me.

you do have dogs in ireland, don't you,
i ask.

yes, we do. we also have rats. i t'ink i
know the difference, the grasshopper says,
irritably.

well, go down and ask him if he's a rat
or a dog, i suggest.

the grasshopper nods, seizes his matchstick,
and marches down to where the dog sits,
shivering. they speak for a few minutes.
then the grasshopper returns to his perch
on the bookshelf above me.

well, i ask.

dog, he says.

i told you, i say.

and poet, he says.

what, i ask.

the little thing writes poetry, the grasshopper
says. i t'ought that might interest you.

what sorts of poems, i ask.

he likes morbid subjects, the grasshopper tells
me. his owner often takes him to picnic in a
cemetery right outside the quarter. they set up
atop a tomb, and his master will eat crawfish
po-boys and work on his dialogue for his show,
and the dog will look around at the various graves
and try to get inspired to write a poem.

you learned all this from just now talking to him,
i ask.

yes. go ask him if you don't believe me.

i think about this for a minute. usually i don't go
near dogs. on the rare occasions i leave the library
and wander around the quarter, there are always a
few local dogs who have decided it is their jobs
to make my life miserable, and they howl and wail
at me. the quarter is for dogs, they tell me. cat's
ain't welcome here.

but this isn't really much of a dog. i look at him,
and, as i do, a father and child enter the library,
with a slam of a door and a shout from the child,
and the little dog yelps and turns a frightened
circle.

i don't think i have anything to worry about from
this dog.

i creep down and pull myself under the bookshelf,
and i look out at the dog, inches from me.

hey, i say.

the dog starts. he glances around, terrified.

who said that, he asks.

what's your name, i ask.

cerberus, the dog tells me.

you a poet, i ask.

yes, the dog says. are you.

yes, i say.

i don't often meet other poets, the dog says.
what do you write, he asks.

i've been trying my hand at the sestina, i say.

sestinas are hard, the dog says.

the door to the library slams again, and the
dog yelps and shivers.

i've seen you in here before, i say.

yes. the man likes to read, he says.

the man, i ask.

the man i live with, he dog says. and then, more
quietly, he tells me that the man is not a
poet.

he writes jokes, the dog says.

a book slips from a reader's hand, falling to the
ground with a thud. the dog shrieks.

nervous, aren't you, i say.

no, why, he says.

i let it go.

the dog stares under the bookshelf, trying to
see me. i inch further back.

are you still there, the dog asks.

tell me one of your poems, i say.

really, the dog asks.

really, i say.

he is quiet a long moment. then he clears
his throat and speaks, saying the following.

does it seem drafty
is the air stale
whose footfalls are those
whose throaty inhale
and when did it suddenly go
a few degrees uncomfortably low
on the fahrenheit scale

this lover's excursion
'neath a high dixie moon
seems badly considered
seems taken too soon
why did we stray away
to where the creoles say stay away
to both the dauntless and the poltroon

through the bayou and the brambles
something fetid this way shambles
something insatiate, something decayed
something that renders our composure unmade
what is that scraping; whose moaning is those's
we compose ourselves, but something else decomposes
what vast misfortune does our wanderings bring
we are all in the hall of the zombie king.

I sit quietly for a moment. the dog presses forward,
timidly, peering into the blackness under the
bookshelf.

are you there, he asks. are you still there.

i quietly turn and make my way up the bookshelf,
to my original perch, and look down at the bright
red scrap of hair, still staring under the bookshelf,
bewildered.

the grasshopper prods me from above with his
matchstick.

well, did you two make friends, he asks.

cats don't make friends with dogs, i tell him.

oh, come now, he answers. that really ain't
much of a dog, is it. and, truth be told, you
ain't that much of a cat.

i refuse to look at the grasshopper. he pokes
me with his matchstick again.

you have to overcome your racial prejudices
if you ever want to make a go of this life, the
grasshopper opines.

come on, tommy, me boyo, he says. you're
both poets. that must count for something.

maybe it does. the dog's meter is terrible and
his subject matter is inane. but his work isn't
completely without merit. at least he has a vocabulary.

i might have to keep my eye on the dog.

i do not tell the grasshopper this. given a chance,
he would want me to be friends with moths and
earthworms. look, he'd say, this moth was once
in the circus, like you, and this earthworm reads
decadent literature, like you. we should all be
bosom pals.

and then he would act disappointed when i ate
the moth or the worm. he's cross his arms and
say that he thought he had cured me of my
murderous ways, and he'd follow me for weeks
with his matchstick, beating my nose whenever
i pounced at anything.

perhaps the next time i see the dog, i will
follow him out. i will follow him to the
saint louis cemetery, and i will watch
as the owner eats and writes jokes, and the
dog peers around and looks for inspiration.
and perhaps, if the dog wanders far enough
away from his owner, he might hear a voice
coming from behind a tomb.

my voice.

i also don't often meet another poet.

MORE TALES OF TOM HOPPER!

HIS LAST LONG TRIP.

TACOMA, (Wash. (UPI) -- A railroad employee found a well-dressed body of a young man in a corner of an empty boxcar behind the Union Pacific depot.

In the jacket pockets were an empty pill bottle and a billfold identifying the youth as Richard Allen Hon, 20, son of a suburban Tacoma couple. His body was found about 9:30 p.m. Saturday.

When the body was moved, a suicide note was found. It said: "Dear Father:

"I think you know the reason I've done this. Dope ruined my life and took away my happiness forever. I could never live in the state of mind I was in.

"Please don't hate me too much for what I have done. I thought I found truth in what I was doing, experiencing life. But I found out it was death I was tripping on.

"Dad, I hope to find happiness now even though I know I destroyed my life and others with it.

"I hope to God people taking dope find what I found in it sooner than I did.

"Goodbye, Father ... your son, love, Ricky."

More from the Sparber Bookshelf.

I HAVE ALLUDED to other tales of my encounters with the world of adult filmmaking, but have not detailed them. They are limited, but worth mentioning. Althought Timeless is the only script I have had produced, I was in contact for several months, years before Timeless, with a former adult actor turned director named Paul Thomas, and sent him several scripts. Thomas is an interesting fellow, having started off as a legitimate actor (he played Peter in the film version of Jesus Christ Superstar), but crossed over into adult films for the notorious Mitchell Brothers, who were responsible for Behind the Green Door, and for whom things ended badly. One brother, Artie, killed the other, Jim, with a .22 rifle in 1991.

I was in contact with Paul Thomas in the late 90s -- about 1996, I reckon, when I had returned to Los Angeles briefly, for a period of about six months. I had dabbled in writing adult scripts, and sent him a few.

Now I should take a moment to say that I was monumentally ignorant about writing for production at that time. As far as I was concerned, anything I put on paper could be filmed, and my sample scripts were absurd and impossible to produce as a result. I will detail them in a little bit.

Thomas seemed to like me as a writer, though. We spoke on the phone a number of time as he patiently tried to explain to me what was required in an adult script. In one script, he pointed out, most of the characters were extras, and didn't have sex. Adult films simply did not make use of many extras, he informed me. Worse still, I required the actors to perform with accents. "We're lucky if our actresses can remember their dialogue," he told me. "They can't do accents!" He begged me to remember that many of the actors and actresses came from financially and educationally disadvantaged background, and to write movies they could perform in. He didn't phrase it as politely as I did. I recall the words "trailer trash" coming up with some frequency.

This was not to say there was no room for imagination or characterization in Anderson's films. The year after we communicated, as an example, he directed Nymph, in which a magical sprite who lives under an LA hotel magically causes people to have sex. Thomas had, and, presumably, has a taste for scripts that have a little more meat to them then a simple series of pornographic loops, structured around inane dialogue and impossible setups. He encouraged me to draw from my own experiences in writing my scripts, apparently under the mistaken impression that I was a man of the world.

Nothing ever come of this interaction, obviously. I still have the old scripts lying around somewhere, though, and occasionally dig them out, because they still amuse me. The first I ever wrote was called Red Hot Rompers, and told of a Parisian artist who believes his wife is cheating on him, and so follows her into a brothel, where he stumbles from one bedroom to another, and one sexual encounter after another. I had stolen the structure for the story from a public domain erotic tale, but all of the details were my own. In one scene, the male lead discovers his friend in the brothel. His friend, a wealthy man, has hired two prostitutes and plans to watch them engage in a tryst. He explains his reason: Years ago, he had married a professional ballerina, but, on their wedding night, she revealed she was a lesbian. He was aghast, and more so when she informed him that she thought the marriage was one of convenience, and he too was a homosexual. "I am not!" he told her.

"But your mannerisms!" she responded.

"These are the mannerisms of the idle rich," he cried out, distraught. "I know they seem very similar!"

This was he same script that Paul Thomas complained required too much acting and that the accents were impossible. (It was, in fact, a much older script -- I had originally written it as a softcore film in the early 90s, when I first lived in LA, and it was to be directed by a woman named Anita Rosenberg, who had previously directed a movie called Assault of the Killer Bimbos, and apparently never directed anything else since. I met with her to discuss the script, and she said "I love it, but can we change one thing? Can we set in in the future, on a space station?" Eventually she got cold feet and withdrew from the project.)

I had also written a script called Naughty Robot, which had a rather elaborate setup. It told of a young man who was building a robot as a hobby. This robot was intended to be able to teach itself -- for example, if you wanted it to cure cancer, you simply told it to do so and it set out to learn everything it could about the subject, and then started work on finding a cure. Unfortunately, this young man was supporting himself by duplicating pornographic video games and DVDs, and the robot's programming got contaminated with the smut. Even worse, the robot was activated during a marathon of Three's Company episodes. And just as Three's Company had a strange, bawdy genius for constructing scenes in which Mr. Roper would crash into a room at the exact moment Jack Tripper's pants were around his ankles while his two female roommates were, I don't know, throwing money at him, so the robot developed a genius for constructing equally unlikely sexual situations.

I don't know what I was thinking. The robot was small and round, like an egg, and I guess I thought it could be a puppet or computer animated. The script was quite long -- almost 50 pages, I think, which is more than twice as long as an average script. I'm not sure Paul Thomas even commented on this script, or, for that matter, bothered to read it.

The last script I wrote actually contains what I consider the funniest thing I have ever written. Called Shameless Students, it was set in a future in which pornography had become a popular art form, and schools had sprung up to teach it. These schools were very much like high schools -- in fact, the movies made by the school were supposed to be filmed in filmed in a typical gymnasium. One character, a young man, had a problem he needed to overcome. He considered it disrespectful to ejaculate on a woman, or, for that matter, anybody -- in one scene, he ejaculates on himself and burst into tears, crying out that he has disrespected his own stomach.

In an attempt to encourage him, the students band together in the gymnasium as he shoots an erotic scene, cheering him on as he makes love to another student, waving signs reading "Facials are fun!" and "No shame when you came!" As he builds toward orgasm, the other students cry out "Come on her! Come on her!"

But, at the last moment, he can't. He leaps up, tears streaming down his face, and flees for the door. As he reaches it and throws it open, he suddenly experiences a massive orgasm. As he climaxes, he realizes that below him, fixing the door handle, is the school janitor. He accidentally ejaculates on the janitor's face, then cries out in shame and flees.

The janitor watches him go, then reaches up and touches his bespattered cheek. His eyes widen, and he smiles. "He loves me," the janitor says.

I just don't think I'm ever going to write anything better than that.

MORE FROM MY PORN YEAR.

MY MOTHER, as you know, was quite a famous movie actress. And so the questions plagued me through my childhood, and plague me to this day. How thoroughly did she beat you? Did she do it when she was drunk? Could she do it when drunk, or was her alcoholism so heroic that she would simply crumple into intoxicated unconsciousness?

I have never spoken of it, because it it so embarrassing to the family, but circumstances compel me to do so now.

My mother was actually quite bad at abusing us, and she felt this fact hurt her career in Hollywood. She was often mocked for it at parties. Joan Crawford used to laugh at my mother at the Brown Derby. Then Joan would furiously admonish the bartender with his own leather belt, for no reason other than to belittle my mother.

But my mother just didn't have the temperament for it. She was a soft-spoken and big-hearted woman, and cruelty towards her children was unnatural to her. She was forever in trouble with the studios for it. Her contract, like all Hollywood contracts at the time, had a clause requiring frequent and severe beating of any and all children. Samuel Goldwyn once called her into his enormous office and berated her in no uncertain terms. There are very few things that are expected of actresses from our studio, he told her. They must be drunks, they must be occasionally suicidal, and they must thrash their children about.

When my mother began weeping, he wrapped his meaty arms around her and looked at her, his forehead folded with compassion. Oy, moja ukochana, he told her, using a Polish term of endearment. Oy, I know it pains you! But this is what the public expects, and this is what the studio expects, and what else can we do? They are who pays our salaries, and we must do as they wish.

At that time, the studio offered classes in the subject of mistreating children, along with classes in fencing, horseback riding, and accents. My mother furtively approached an instructor and hired him to tutor her. He came by twice a week to give her lessons in how to beat a child. He was excellent, too. He once thoroughly flogged me for mispronouncing the word hygiene. We viewed him with a combination of fear and hope. And, slowly, under his tutelage, my mother blossomed. She discovered an overdue library book in my room once, and called me a very nasty word. I looked at her, my eyes welling with tears of pride, and we embraced.

My sisters and I determined to be especially naughty to assist our mother. We regularly did things that displeased her. I would often put my leg before the widget in cricket, and my mother would make very disappointed faces from the sidelines, and sometimes shake her fist threateningly. My sister Margo would wait until mother watched her brushing her hair, and then would deliberately miscount, brushing only 99 times, rather than the 100 that my mother preferred. My mother would then take the hairbrush from Margo and threaten to beat her with it if she did not learn to take care of her hair properly. My youngest sister, Lizzie, who was only three months old at the time, nonetheless somehow prevented herself from teething. My mother would stand above Lizzie and shout at her, claiming the infant daughter was deliberately attempting to humiliate my mother with this ongoing and embarrassing display of toothlessness.

Nonetheless, mother simply couldn't bring herself to beat us, so we got in the habit of beating each other. There was seldom a weekday that Margo and I didn't go at each other, flinging heavy encyclopedias until we were horrifically bruised. Lizzie, in the meanwhile, took it upon herself to taunt the household cats, and was rewarded with grisly scratches on her arms and face. Our studio-appointed school tutors would come by for our daily seven and a half minutes of instruction in math, science, geography, and literature, and they would nod knowingly upon seeing the marks on our flesh. Then they would return to the studio to report. That was the year mother won the Oscar.

I know I shouldn't be writing these things, as it sullies my mother's reputation as a really first-rate monster to her children. But I discovered recently that a book will soon be coming out. This book has been written by a former childhood friend, and I shall not name her, except to say that her mother was also a movie star. This former friend is writing of her abuse at the hands of her mother, which I understand was really impressive. But she is including in the book a scoffing appraisal of my mother's skills as an abuser. She tells the entire tale of my mother hiring an instructor. When I was a child, I told this former friend how we caused our own bruises, and explained that my mother was not responsible. This story, which was told in confidence, will also be in the book.

I feel it is for the best to simply come clean. My mother was a warm, sweet, generous woman, and, as I have grown older, I have come to understand that she did not fail us by refusing to beat us. I was angry about it for many years, and, in fact, had a terrible fight with her just before she died, in which I foolishly accused her of not loving us enough. I look back on that argument with terrible guilt, and wish I could speak to her now, and tell her that I understand now why she didn't beat us. It just wasn't in her nature. And the fact that she tried so very hard to be cruel to us speaks well of her, even if her success was limited. When I think of her now, I think of seeing her in the distance, watching me fumble at cricket and waving her fist menacingly at me. I understand now how much of an effort it must have been, and I appreciate it more.

Also, for what it's worth, she used to kick the shit out of our poodle.

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

THIS IS THE ALBUM they listened to before they put the masks on, and the bullet proof vests, and made certain their clips were loaded, and their assault rifles were clean. They played MP3s of the songs off the album when they stormed the bank, and the Melachino Strings were still playing as the police brought them down in a hail of gunfire.

At the press conference, the Chief used words like "vicious" and "psychopathic" to describe the men. But everyone in the press knew he was just spinning the story. The words he should have used were "courageous" and "confident."

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BESSIE SMITH, the cloche-wearing, feather boa-clad blues singer whose lilting voice dominated the Twenties, recorded "Haunted House Blues" on January 8 of 1923. It's a saturnine ditty, penned by Ethel Waters' session pianist J.C. Johnson, that has singer Smith stalked by the spirits of her ex-lovers. "He moans when I'm sleeping," Smith sings, occasionally holding a note for a full four beats, her voice quavering. "He wakes me at 2 a.m. / And he makes me swear I'll have no other man but him."

While songwriter Johnson certainly wasn't the first to make this sort of metaphoric use of the spiritual world, in which bittersweet memories flit about like so many ghosts, he did so at a time when spiritualism was often maddeningly literal. The 20s were dominated by fraud psychics and elaborate, hoaxed seances, inspired by the Fox Sisters. These New York-born siblings had enthralled the United States during the mid-1800s by claiming to that the dead communicated through them through rapping noises. The sisters were repeatedly exposed as phonies, including a public chastisement by a racanting sister who demonstrated that they were creating the "spirit" sounds by cracking their toe joints, the remaining sisters nonetheless toured the country successfully until alcoholism brought their game to an end.

By the 1920s, America was filled with similar phony mediums, and their staged seances had developed an astonishing level of sophistication, with "spirit boxes" that could magically produce flickering lights and the sounds of musical instruments. Mediums in deep, faked trances would produce luminous, ill-formed globs of matter that would seem to float around their heads, which they dubbed "ectoplasm." Many psychic hucksters had elaborately doctored photographs taken of them, often with double exposures of costumed characters hovering nearby, which they would pass off as legitimate images of ghostly apparitions.

Far from being mere con artists, these fraud psychics were generally skilled performers and sleight-of-hand artists, which may help explain why they did so much business even when repeatedly exposed by the likes of Harry Houdini, who spent much of the 20s obsessively debunking the spiritualism movement. Frauds though they may have been, the mediums of the 20s were terrific entertainers, and drew enormous crowds of believers and skeptics alike.

Bessie Smith needed no sleight-of-hand for her musical haunting. In fact, but for a deliberately spooky opening featuring a pounding piano, clarinet, and blasting siren whistle, "Haunted House Blues" has a rather typical blues melody; it eschews the sort of novelty sound effects and minor chord progressions typical of supernaturally themed music. Nonetheless, Smith's song sounds the most legitimately haunted.

In Smith's song, her life is so filled with spirits of past lovers that she begins by crying out "Don't bring no ghosts in the front, hurry 'em round to the backdoor!" Her old flames bring unwelcome memories -- she calls one her "mistreating daddy," and he keeps her awake at night, moaning that he will never allow her to take another lover. The lyrics to the song have Smith exhausted and haggard, briefly ready to give in to the world of the dead. "Go tell the undertaker to fix that old coffin of mine," she declares.

In 1923, when thousands of Americans were paying fraud psychics to put them in touch with deceased loved ones, Smith just can't seem to get away from hers. Instead, she remains trapped in an oppressive house, menaced by her dead lovers, weary to the point of death -- a terrific metaphor, and one with an equally terrific resolution. Unable to escape her haunted house, Smith finds the only solution she can, singing "a feeling just tells me to burn this house on down."

LISTEN TO "HAUNTED HOUSE BLUES":



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SYNOPSIS: There will be Pud is a satire of the Academy Award-winning 2007 film There will be Blood in the form of an adult screenplay. The story tells of Daniel Pornview and his son BJ, a father and son adult filmmaking company who purchase a farm from a faith healer named Billy Somelay.

DOWNLOAD: Download a PDF of the 26-page script There will be Pud here. To read it, you must have Adobe's free PDF Reader, available here.

AVAILABILITY: There will be Pud is currently available for purchase. Contact the author.

SAMPLE DIALOGUE:

DANIEL PORNVIEW:
My name is Daniel Pornview and
this is my son and business
partner BJ. When I tell you I am a
porn man, you will believe me. I
currently have 25 productions
underway, from Campion Creek to
Rifle Valley, including an entire
studio that exclusively makes
gonzo pornography for the
Internet. I've traveled over half
the state to be here. I couldn't
be here sooner because I had a
production in Stone Arch, a film
titled DON'T CUM ON THE ZOHAN,
that was just about to wrap. It
will be in the can by tomorrow
morning and edited and available
for streaming digital video by
next week. The production was
written and directed by my son and
business partner, as this is a
family business. In fact, I
starred in it. We expect to make
thirty thousand dollars in the
first week alone, so you can see
what sort of company I run. This
is the sort of organization I can
bring here -- your town has a
wonderful opportunity to break
into the world of adult feature
filmmaking, but you must act fast,
or you might lose it.

COMMENTS: This past weekend saw Kung Fu Panda take the top spot in the box office, grossing $60.2 million. I was hoping Don't Mess with the Zohan would do better, primarily because I already had a name for my adult version, which was to be Do Have a Freaky Three-Way with the Zohan, but, alas, the Adam Sandler film came in second at $38.5 million. (I did manage to riff on the title in this script, however.) I don't adapt the second-most popular film of the week, and I don't adapt children's films -- and I especially don't adapt children's animated films. So that left me in a quandary. What to do?

I didn't want to have another week without a script, as happened for the two weeks following my first script, so I have decided to do my first Academy Award special, this time adapting last year's There will be Blood, a film I consider especially unsuited to adaptation as an adult script, and, therefore, quite entertaining to attempt. Unfortunately, the resulting script has far and away my most embarrassing title. One day, somebody will demand that I justify such a god-awful title, and I won't be able to.

MORE FROM MY PORN YEAR.

THE LANKY, POMPADOURED, NUDIE SUIT-BEDECKED Porter Wagoner was once a familiar sight. For starters, from 1960 to 1979 the country singer hosted a syndicated program, reaching an audience of millions. As a performer, his songs charted 81 times, and he debuted Dolly Parton to an initially unwelcoming public in 1967. Their duets together found their way into the top 10 on country music charts 14 times.

For a popular artist, Wagoner had a notably grim streak to him. His 1970 LP Skid Row Joe: Down in the Alley, as an example, featured a photo of the singer dressed as a bedraggled drunk, reaching out a battered, upturned hat to a passer by, an empty pint of alcohol behind him. The album featured songs such as his self-penned "The Silent Kind," a mournful first-person narrative about alcoholic indigents, and a stark rendition of Dolly Parton's "Bottle of Wine," an ode to the blissful forgetfulness that drunkenness brings. Wagoner had a sometimes unnerving habit of singing his most harrowing songs in first-person, such as his ballad of domestic violence, "The Cold Hard Facts of Life." "Lord you should've seen their frantic faces," Wagoner sings, telling of a man who has walked in on his cheating wife. "They screamed and cried please put away that knife."

Even knowing Wagoner's taste in downbeat songs, "The Rubber Room" is bizarre. This 1972 release is a relentlessly minor-key examination of madness, and, as is typical in a Wagoner song, is told in the first-person. Over stirring strings, a skittish electric guitar, and keening background singers, Wagoner dolefully describes life inside a mental institution -- and the lunacy that placed him there. "The man in the room right next to mine screams a woman's name, hits the wall in vain" Wagoner sings, sounding increasingly spooked by his own song. "A psycho in the rubber room," Wagoner adds later, in a stentorian near-whisper.

Wagoner's languid delivery of the song is terrifying: he genuinely sounds as though he were fighting the urge to gibber by phrasing his words with exaggerated care. As though this were not enough to indicate lunacy, the song offers some technological trickery -- at the end of certain phrases, Wagoner's voice is mechanically echoed. The effect is ridiculous -- it sounds as though Wagoner were singing into a fan -- but strangely effective. It's the aural equivalent of the hackneyed visual effects used to represent madness in films, coupling strobing colored lights with fish-eyed lenses to create a distorted sense of space. As inadvertently comical as these effects may be, they are nonetheless jarring; One gets the unsettling feeling that the filmmakers, or, in this case, the sound engineers, might have actually gone a little mad themselves.

LISTEN TO "THE RUBBER ROOM":



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HE WAS FROZEN in that position for almost two hours before anyone noticed he had suffered a stroke.

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SCREAMING LORD SUTCH must be rock and roll's strangest example of a performer's flirtation with politics. Singers such as Sting and Bono will agitate for causes that concern them, such as the depletion of the rainforests or the subject of Third-World debt -- but Sutch did them one better. The caped and top-hatted Sutch started his own political party and repeatedly ran for office in his native England.

Of course, Sutch isn't the only entertainer ever to seek election -- after all, California currently has an action film star as their governor and Minnesota once had a former professional wrestler in the same position. However, neither Governors Schwarzenegger nor Ventura ran on a platform like that of Sutch's party, including -- in its current incarnation -- taxing rich people for the printing of money ("they use most of it") and paying full school tuition for "people named Grant."

You see, Screaming Lord Sutch was the founder of the Monster Raving Loony Party. More on that later.

First, a few words about Sutch himself. He was born David Edward Sutch, but, in part inspired by his affection for American rhythm and blues singer Screamin' Jay Hawkins, he changed his name in the Sixties. (His inclusion of the title "Lord" in his new name, despite the fact that he was in no way connected to the peerage, suggests his future interest in politics). Sutch recorded a series of novelty songs, many of them horror-themed, such as "My Big Black Coffin," a song in which the singer casts himself as a maniacal killer. The tune was recorded by the legendary, tone-deaf producer Joe Meek, who was also behind the Tornadoes 1962 hit "Telstar," and was almost instantly banned from British airwaves, even when it was given a less threatening name, "Till the Following Night."

Despite this, Sutch was able to find an audience for his songs, in no small part thanks to a frenzied stage show with his band, The Savages. Sutch was usually seen in a Carnaby Street version of Victorian garb, with a cane, cape, and leopard-skin top hat. He would emerge from a coffin on a stage set with rubber snakes, bats, and skulls, and would howl his way through catchy rock songs with titles like "All Black and Hairy" and "The Hands of Jack the Ripper," as well as an assortment of Little Richard standards, such as "Long Tall Sally" and "Bony Maroni." Although he is never credited, Sutch, whose most famous recordings are from the early Sixties, was almost certainly an influence on top-hatted American shock rocker Alice Cooper, who essentially borrowed Sutch's entire stage show (Sutch, in turn, had based his stage performances on thos of Screamin' Jay Hawkins).

"Dracula's Daughter," our selection for today, is vintage Sutch, released in 1964. Starting with the sounds of thunder a gusting winds -- a sound effect that seemed to open 90 percent of all horror-themes novelty records -- the recording soon transitions into a blood-curdling scream and a stripped-down, jaunty guitar riff. Immediately, Sutch begins singing, and his voice -- thin, sardonic, and thick with a Northern London accent, including an unusually hard-tapped "r" sound -- spells out a supernatural romance. "Lip of blue of blue / eyes of red / a laugh like gurgling water," Sutch sings in the song's lilting chorus, "but I can't resist / that passionate kiss -- I'm in love with Dracula's daughter!

Sutch makes this romance sound like a hoot -- there is an audible mirth to his singing -- even if his lyrics point to the dangers of such a romantic pairing, including the very real likelihood that the object of his affections is simply preparing him to be his meal.

Sutch gained particular notoriety in his native England; In fact, his album Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends, which featured musical contributions from Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, was named the worst album of all time in a BBC poll -- in 1998, more than 30 years after its release! Sutch fled to the United States, but found it a nasty, brutish place and returned to England after getting shot during a mugging. It was during the Eighties that Sutch created the Monster Raving Loony Party, but it was hardly his first stab at politics. As far back as 1963 he had been a candidate for the National Teenage Party, agitating for teenage suffrage. Sutch's entire political career was marked by a carefully cultivated ridiculousness -- he ran for election again in 1964 on a campaign that battled discrimination against long hair and proposed knighthood for the Beatles (the latter of which would actually come to pass for Paul McCartney in 1997). "Vote for insanity," Sutch often declared, "you know it makes sense."

All told, Sutch ran for Parliament 39 times, never winning. But a number of his platforms, which were generally considered nonsensical when he presented them, have been passed into English law, including the 18-year-old voting age, passports for pets, and all-day pub openings.

Sutch, who was manic-depressive, took his own life in 1999 at age 58. But he left behind him dual legacies, both of them terrifically entertaining. His body of recorded music is among the best examples horror-themed rock and roll, featuring a uniquely malicious lyrical sensibility. And his Monster Raving Loony Party continues to this day, existing as a sort of ongoing satire of English electoral politics, including a series of internal feuds and splits that paralleled similar feuds and splits in mainstream politics. This splinters led to one notable success: The Rock'N'Roll Loony Party's primary member, Chris "Screwy" Driver, actually managed to get elected as Mayor of Queenborough in 2002.

LISTEN TO "DRACULA'S DAUGHTER":



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AMERICANS, rather stupidly, have decided it is funny to hate the French. They might look at this album, which looks to have been made in the 50s or 60s, and assumed it could be nothing but sounds of guns clattering to the ground as entire French battalions surrender, or the sounds of waiters being rude to American diners, or the sounds of socialists sucking on foul-smelling cigarettes while spending the remainder of their half-day of work shooting 16mm porn films of whores with smudged lipstick eating baguettes.

Alas, it is none of this, which is too bad, because, as stupid as these stereotypes might be, they would have made for some very entertaining listening. Instead, the record, which was produced by the French Government Tourist Office, purports to be real sounds recorded on the streets of Paris. In some cases, this is certainly true, and in others, instead we have an obvious studio forgery. Nonetheless, the point of the stereo record is self-evident. It is designed to aurally immerse the listener into the Parisian world, and therefore entice them to visit. Personally, I think my smeared-lipstick whore with baguette scheme might have worked better.

LISTEN TO "THE SONGS AND SOUNDS OF FRANCE":



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JAPANESE DIRECTOR KINJI FUKASAKU received an unexpected name-check in popular culture in 2003. Director Quentin Tarantino, whose all-engulfing diet of trash cinema included such Fukasaku films as 1968's camp spectacle-cum-Yakuza thriller Black Lizard (featuring a bit part by the gay, ultranationalist, and ultimately suicidal playwright Yukio Mishima) and 1973's gang war epic Battles Without Honor and Humanity. Tarantino had once invited the aging director to the set of Jackie Brown, and borrowed much of the director's cinematic flair (eventually including the theme song to Battles) for Kill Bill), as well as dedicating the film to Fukasaku.

Tarantino is a great popularizer of obscure and trash cinema, and fans of his films have picked through his references, which Tarantino gleefully wears on his sleeves. Kill Bill re-awakened interests in such diverse movies as 1968's Hayley Mill's psychopathology portrait Twisted Nerve (in Tarantino's film, the theme song is heard being whistled in a hospital) and the Swedish rape-revenge thriller They Call Her One Eye (from which one of Tarantino's characters gets her trademark eyepatch). He even references himself: One woman wears the same outfit that Uma Thurman wore in Pulp Fiction and Pam Grier wore in Jackie Brown. And all these filmic references relate to just one character, that of Elle Driver, Daryl Hannah's duplicitous assassin.

In a film this full of cinematic references (really, an annotated version should be made available), the dedication to Fukasaku has gone a long way toward generating interest in a director who, until recently, was known almost exclusively for directing the Japanese segments of the Pearl Harbor drama Tora! Tora! Tora!. 2004 saw the DVD releases of Battles Without Honor and Humanity, as well as many of the director's lesser-known titles, such as Street Mobster and Graveyard of Honor.

However, one Fukasaku film remains notably unavailable on DVD. In 1968, Fukasaku helmed an unusual collaboration between Japanese and American film companies -- Toei and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, specifically. The film was written by Americans and starred a cast made up mostly of American b-film actors, such as star Robert Horton, whose most frequent credits had been on the television show Wagon Train, where he was generally staked out and horsewhipped. But the film was shot in Japan and helmed by Fukasaku and a Japanese crew. The film was called Green Slime, and detailed a monumental battle between space explorers and the titular verdant jelly, which mutates into laughably bad costumed aliens with one eye, waggling tentacles, and the ability to fire deadly lightning bolts.

The movie was roundly dismissed as kitschy nonsense: The Saturday Review as an example, criticized the film for "looking like a paperback edition of 2001, with papier-mache models of space craft and warty green space monsters that are all too palpably little men in rubberized monkey suits." "The whole thing would be laughably naive," the reviewer decided, "if caught at a Saturday matinee." For years, the film was either ignored or enjoyed as camp, sometimes showing up on a triple bill with The Blob and Beware! The Blob, often marketed to children.

I am of the opinion that Green Slime is due for a critical re-evaluation. Admittedly, the film's script and dialogue are undeniably leaden, and the acting is generally wooden (to an extent that the movie sometimes seems like a deliberate parody), let's ignore these elements for a moment. Fukasaku was not responsible for the script, and he had some famous difficulties in communicating with his non-Japanese speaking cast. But what Fukasaku did have control over -- namely, the look and tone of the movie -- is tremendously enjoyable. The film has a terrifically cartoonish look to it, as though it were intended to look unreal. The sets are so unreal as to look like a puppet stage, and, in fact, greatly resembles the exquisitely mod environments in which Sylvia and Gerry Anderson had their adventure-loving marionettes act out such miniature television dramas as Supercar and Thunderbirds.

The Green Slime monsters themselves are delightfully unassuming examples of the sort of rubberized monsters that frequently terrorized Tokyo in Japanese movies -- were they not attacking spacemen in this film, they would certainly grow to enormous sizes to battle the giant turtle Gamera. They fail to generate the sort of morbid suspense the script would desire of them (the script reads like an idiot's version of Alien), but they succeed as marvelous artifacts of Japanese popular culture from the Sixties; their tentacles even come equipped with sparklers at the end. Seen side by side with such deliberately cartoonish examples of Sixties filmmaking, such as Mario Bava's Diabolik, in which some of the sets were literally cut out of paper, and Jean-Luc Goddard's Alphaville, in which another planet is represented by Sixties-era Paris (without any effort to disguise the fact), Green Slime compares quite favorably. Seen next to Fukasaku's Black Lizard the campy elements in Green Slime seem deliberate -- one imagines Fukasaku though it would be funny to have his monsters attack during a prototypically Sixties go-go scene aboard the space station, and gives us exactly that scene, and it is funny.

Best still, Green Slime boasts one of science fiction's greatest theme songs, a psychedelic soul number by former surf music drummer Richard Delvy (he cowrote the Bel Aires' "Mr. Moto.") Featuring a theremin-like moans, a sitar, and shrieking Jimmi Hendrix-style guitars, the theme also benefits from snarling, gravel-voiced vocals, sounding like the sort of music that would play behind an LSD freakout scene in a Roger Corman film, and not at all like the sort of thing you would find in a willfully naive space monster flick. "You'll believe it when you find /something screaming 'cross your mind," the singer informs us, growing hysterical. Perhaps this blast of groovy acid rock is intended to offer us an alternative interpretation of the film: It shouldn't be watched as an alien invasion horror film at all.

No. It's a brightly colored, mod-flavored, and sometimes deliberately ridiculous hallucination. And, as such, it is perfect.

LISTEN TO "GREEN SLIME":



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WOMEN ARE TROUBLE WHEN THEY ARE TURNED ON. I mean, not that I'm complaining, of course. But sometimes their animal nature takes over, and a man has to be on his guard. Especially when he's wearing Hai Karate, a cologne that turns women into such savage sexual beasts that they must physically be fought off.



So why wear it? Well, sometimes a man likes a little martial battle with a woman. We have our own animal nature, don't you know? They lunge, we parry; we lunge, they strike. It's all in good fun, although, frankly, after a few cocktails, a night of combat can leave a room looking an awful mess.

Hai Karate actually provided instruction in the war of the sexes, in the form of a cardboard disc with a plexidisc recording embedded in it, walking the intrepid male warrior through some essential moves. I have reproduced it in all its scratchy glory here. Listen in, boys, and then suit up for war. Do you want to live forever?

LISTEN TO "SOUNDS OF SELF-DEFENSE":



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JOIN THE SIX SIX SIX GENERATION.

His name was Mikael. His problem was women and how to turn them on. He found his answer in a book on the occult that gave him the formula for an elixir of lust guaranteed to far more than double every woman's pleasure and every man's chances for fun.

Mikael might have been sexually greedy, but he definitely wasn't selfish. He decided to share his discovery with the world. And that's how the soft drink with the hard-core kick was born ---

666.

("Try it, you'll like it!")

Uncensored from Sweden!

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IT'S MONKEY TIME AGAIN. King Kong has been in the news lately, as a result of a fire at Universal Studios, which destroyed an attraction dedicated to the giant ape. It wasn't too long ago that Kong was a headliner as a result of Peter Jackson's remake of the 1933 film.

Well, if we're going to speak of the beast of Skull Island, I would like to offer up The Jimmy Castor Bunch's "King Kong." This may not be the best song ever to address itself to Skull Island's giant gorilla (to my taste, that would have to be The Groovie Ghoulies' "The King Kong Stomp"), but it's certainly the funkiest.

Harlem-born Jimmy Castor specialized in novel Latin Soul songs -- not the sort of Latin Soul that Jennifer Lopez currently claims to make, but a percussive blend of traditional African-American soul music and the polyrhythmic sounds of Harlem's Puerto Rican population, circa 1966. Castor was primarily a saxophonist, but, inspired by the chart success of Latin rave-ups like Joe Cuba's "Bang Bang" and Ray Barreto's "El Watusi," Castor added cimbales and vibes to his lineup.

But while Joe Cuba and Ray Barreto were authentically Puerto Rican, and their music often sounded like a slightly funkier version of traditional salsa, Jimmy Castor's background was in doo-wop and soul (in fact, had replaced Frankie Lymon as a vocalist for The Teenagers). As a result, his first hit song, "Hey Leroy, Your Mama's Calling You," while based around a distinctly Latin rhythmic section and electric piano figure, nonetheless featured a uniquely African-American chorus (a taunting call of "Go to your mama!") and a soulful saxophone solo. It also included a cackling laugh and a notably goofy sensibility.

That same goofiness would define much of Castor's music. He had a taste for unlikely covers ("Stairway to Heaven" and "Whiter Shade of Pale" come to mind), and his original songs were, well, often downright bizarre. He enjoyed some success, for example, with the cheerfully sexist "Troglodyte (Cave Man)," a cartoonish fantasy of prehistoric seduction, and its sequel "Bertha Big Butt," detailing a Stone Age woman's distinctive dance -- featuring the hypnotic motion of her oversized derrière.

In "King Kong," Jimmy Castor does very little beyond simply retell the story of the gargantuan gorilla. However, he does so over an infectious disco rhythm, and, for unexplained reasons, refers to the monster as "kemo sabe" throughout the song, with a distinctive Jimmy Castor pronunciation: "koma sange"; it is entirely possible that Castor was attempting to recreate the calls of the Skull Island natives. The song opens with a gong -- presumably also inspired by the natives, who gonged to offer their human sacrifice to Kong -- and then Castor lets out with rapid-fire simian whooping noises. Castor narrates his tale, excitably chanting such lines as "From everyone he knew he got respect / whoever failed to give it, he'd correct!" Underneath this, Castor has orchestrated a forceful, chunky funk line, featuring a wah-wah guitar and high-speed Latin drumming.

It's when Castor reaches the song's chorus -- the only sung part of the song -- that he best sums up King Kong: "He didn't dance or party / he spoke at times, but hardly," Castor tells us. "One woman heard his love call / but he was too big and too tall."

It took Peter Jackson three hours to tell exactly that same tale, and it took a fire the better part of a day to destroy it.

LISTEN TO "KING KONG":



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AS REGULAR READERS KNOW, The Odd Ingester cannot resist a challenge from candy. So what could he do when he found a hard candy in a yellow container designed to look like an overflowing industrial yellow steel drum emblazoned with the words Toxic Waste -- and, further, one that identified itself as "Hazardously Sour Candy" and dared you to see how long you could keep in in your mouth?

Well, the answer is that The Odd Ingester challenged his girlfriend to see who could suck on the candy for the longest time.

The candy, made by Candy Dynamics in Carmel, IN, (and has it own Web page), consists of citric acid and malic acid, both of which the tongue senses as sourness. It comes in several flavors, including lemon, blue raspberry, and apple. The back of the container is printed with a time chart, mocking the eater if they only last 15 seconds ("Total wuss!") and celebrating them if they make it to a fill minute ("FULL TOXIE HEAD!").

How sour is it? Well, the different flavors have different levels of sourness, with the apple honestly being sour enough to cause a few seconds of wincing, but the other flavors barely raising an eyebrow. After a moment, the candy gets sweeter, and remains sweet until you work your way to the center, when it suddenly gets sour again.

It's actually a fairly entertaining candy if you lower your expectations. Of course, the packaging for the candy sets expectations sky high -- you honestly expect to be so pained by the sourness as to have to spit it out and, perhaps, call for a doctor. It's not that. And so your reactions might be similar to those expressed by the Odd Ingester and his girlfriend.



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NOT MUCH OF THE MEDIEVAL MINDSET remains with us. Contemporary drama, as an example, doesn't reflect the strange Middle Ages ideas of time and space, in which everything seems to be happening simultaneously and right next to each other, making it possible for 14th century English peasants to suddenly find themselves at the birth of Jesus, as happened in Mystery Plays. (It should be noted, though, that the terrific Hungarian film Büvös vadász, or Magic Hunter, allows for this: In one scene, a Medieval rabbit, chased by hunting dogs, leaps into a picture of the Virgin Mary only to emerge in contemporary times).

The idea that kings are the elect of God hasn't stuck, although the undemocratic and dynastic president the United States currently has seemingly believes otherwise. There isn't much discussion anymore of the "abominable fancy," the medieval idea that part of the pleasure of being in heaven will come from witnessing the torments of the damned (although the Left Behind series of books, which reeks of end-time schadenfreude, comes close.)

However, one medieval image remains with us, making infrequent appearance in popular culture, of all places. We still dance the Totentanz, also known as the Danse Macabre.

To the medieval artist, the spectre of death was always about -- especially at the time of the Black Plague, which killed about a third of all Europeans, and was followed by a succession of additional, albeit lesser known, plagues. There was, for example, the Italian Plague of 1629, the Great Plague of London in 1665, and the Great Plague of Vienna in 1679. Collectively, more than 35 million people died.

So the artists in the Middle Ages took the concept of Memento mori -- remembering your own mortality -- and literalized it. They illustrated a seemingly endless series of images in which the living were surrounded by beckoning skeletons, sometimes leading them in a dance to their own graves.

We're still dancing to our burial plots, for whatever reason. Ingmar Bergman had death lead his characters in a dance in The Seventh Seal, set in the Medieval period but lensed in 1957; Woody Allen later satirized this image in his Bergman pastiche Love and Death. The dead of the 20th century dance in the moody 1962 film Carnival of Souls, spinning nightmarishly fast circles around an abandoned Utah pavilion, calling to a living woman to join them. And the dead dance in Tim Burton's films -- most recently in The Corpse Bride, but jaunty, jigging corpses are a recurring motif in his work.

The Revels scored a minor hit in 1959 with a rhythm and blues version of a Totentanz, titled "Midnight Stroll." In fact, the song was originally titled "Dead Man's Stroll," which is a near-literal translation of Danse Macabre, if you remember that the stroll was a popular dance of the 50s. The title was reportedly revised after complaints, but the content of the song remains untouched, and it might as well simply be a description of a Medieval Memento mori illustration. Over a sharp, funereal drum percussion and echoing church bells, the Revels sing a repetitive, mournful descending motive, telling of witnessing a top hatted corpse pull himself out of his grave and shimmying down the street. By the end of the song, as is the tradition with the Danse Macabre, our narrator discovers the he has also joined in the dance, presumably headed toward his own coffin.

The song has no proper middle-eighth section, but includes a terrific break. A saxophone picks up the song's lolling riff, and one of the singers cackles wildly over the top of it. The laugh is maniacal, but merry. One imagines that this is the laugh of death itself, leading the midnight stroll, just as endless rows of laughing Medieval skeletons led previous processions of dying men and women on their inevitable dances to the cemetery.

LISTEN TO "DEAD MAN'S STROLL":



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BUNNY FLOATS BY the signature lamp and ball of the terrific animation studio Pixar.

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NEW ORLEANS MAY NO LONGER BE UNDERWATER, but the city is still sinking. But, then, it's always been sinking. The city was built on a swamp, and its buildings have tended to slip a few inches into the soft Louisiana soil at a rate of a few inches every decade or so, as though they were acting out, in extreme slow motion, a quicksand scene from a 1930s action film.

That's just the way things are in the City that Care Forgot. It has always been a town that has seemed on the verge of destruction, and it has weathered its share of fires, plagues, and, most recently, hurricanes. The city will pulls itself together over time, get back to its usual business of slowly sinking into the ground, a patiently await the next doomsday.

What, one wonders, does Dr. Momus Alexander Morgus think of this all? After all, he has a taste for epic disaster. Morgus hosted late night screenings of horror films on television starting in 1959 and continuing, intermittently, until this past year. Played by former deejay Sidney Noel Rideau, Morgus appeared in a white lab coat, a fright wig of grey hair, heavily-lidded eyes, and a demonic smile, generally accompanied by his silent, menacing, hooded assistant Chopsley.

Morgus claimed to film his television show from inside his laboratory in the Old City Icehouse in the French Quarter, where he engaged in perverse and potentially earth-destroying experiments. In fact, in his 1961 feature-length film The Wacky World of Dr. Morgus, we saw him enter his attic apartment through a fire escape in Pirate's Alley, and where we witnessed his diabolical experiments. The most unsettling of these involved keeping a young woman -- the object of his unwanted affections -- in a constant state of unconsciousness. Rideau played Morgus as a broadly comic character, but there were hints of sexual deviance in his performance, not the least of which was the fact that Chopsley seems, to modern eyes, to be a leather clad erotic slave, an early version of Pulp Fiction's The Gimp.

Perhaps Rideau didn't intend for his character to give off such a pervy vibe, but, then, he had the sexual rhythms of rock and roll playing behind him, so perhaps he couldn't help it. After all, Morgus was responsible for a theme song that calls to mind the sort of music a hopped-up juvenile delinquent might listen to in a Sixties b-movie just before a night of ogling high school girls, drinking fortified wine, and getting into knife fights.

With its attacking saxophone intro, pounding piano, and adenoidal vocals, "Morgus the Magnificent" sounds like a professionally crafted version of the belligerent rock and roll that was starting to pour out of suburban garages across America. The song doesn't simply address Morgus, it celebrates him, spinning a yarn of a young couple who won't do anything but obsessively wait to watch the horror movie host. "We get our kicks at the House of Shock," the singer tells us; it's a bit of songwriting that would sound right at home coming from the mouth of our 1960s movie juvenile delinquent.

There's a reason the song sounds as professional as it does, by the way. The Ghouls heard on the recording include none other than Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, then a much-in-demand New Orleans studio musician, and Frankie Ford, who enjoyed national chart success with a recording of "Sea Cruise." Both are New Orleans musical legends, and its appropriate that they lent their talents to creating a theme for Morgus, another local legend. He's still kicking around New Orleans, too: Post Katrina, Morgus produced showed up on local radio to confirm that he had survived the hurricane and was back to his old tricks. And he really was -- a number of his old episodes began showing up on local television, much to the delight of old fans. While residents of the city set about the business of rebuilding their city, suddenly Morgus was back, and with them his many insane experiments, which may destroy the city yet.

LISTEN TO "MORGUS THE MAGNIFICENT":



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I CAN'T STOP staring at this album cover. It obsesses me. In my dreams, I see six men in identical burgundy three-piece suits, clumped uncomfortably close to a little boy in funeral garb. They all grin at me. I wake and look at the album. My mind floods with questions. What's the deal with their hair? Are they all sitting on each other's laps? Does the boy actually have silver rings around both his third finger and his pinky, like some 60-year-old bluesman?

But it's the faces that haunt me the most. Oh, god, the faces.



More Vinyl Oddities.

BUNNY PUTTERS down Haight-Ashbury, one of San Francisco's most famous neighborhoods. Once home to the 60s counterculture, the street is now a very pleasant collection of hipster boutique shops, used clothing stores, and inexpensive restaurants.

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WE'VE ALREADY LOOKED AT the growing cliché of vampires stalking nightclubs, and wondered why an ancient, undead creature might be so gauche as to spend eternity surrounded by bad music and unpleasant scenesters. The Bollock Brothers, as it turns out, have their own answer in the song "Drac's Back." Nightclubs, they point out, might very well be a vampire buffet table.

Fronted by Jock McDonald, a friend of the Sex Pistols’ singer Johnny Rotten, and Jim Lydon, Rotten’s brother, the Bollock Brothers have somehow managed to attract scant attention in their 30 years of intermittently releasing albums. This, despite such gimmicks as releasing an entire album of Sex Pistol’s covers in 1983, titled, unsurprisingly, Never Mind the Bollocks. In their early years, though, the band displayed a taste for humorous horror-themed songs, to such an extent that their compilation CDs feature classic movie monsters: Elsa Lanchester’s Bride of the Monster graces one, while Lon Chaney’s Phantom glares out from another.

Punks have tended to view the Bollock Brothers rather dismissively — probably, in part, because of their habit of milking their Johnny Rotten connection, and in part because their songs feature electric pianos and hammy synthesizer-created, discotheque-styled drum patterns, making the Brothers sound more New Wave than punk. To their credit, though, the Brothers’ songs demonstrate a hint of wit. “Drac’s Back,” as an example, has the caped Romanian count prowling a typical Eighties setting — a nightclub filled with druggy, oblivious dancers, which, as we have noted, has become a near universal cliché about vampires. The music sounds just like one of the thousands of anonymous early electronic songs that filled discotheques in the Eighties, and, for the vampire, the environment is ideal. “You know, they wake up all wasted,” singer McDonald informs us, speaking the lyrics in a sort of bland cheerful patter, “and they never ever check those two small holes that are leaving their neck.”

LISTEN TO "DRAC'S BACK":



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SYNOPSIS: Sex and the Titty is a satire of Sex and the City in the form of an adult script. The script tells the story of Carrie Gladjaw, a sex columnist in a big city, writes about the various relationship problems of her three best friends, and her on-again-off-again relationship with her boyfriend, Mr. Massive.





DOWNLOAD: Download a PDF of the 23-page script Sex and the Titty here. To read it, you must have Adobe's free PDF Reader, available here.

AVAILABILITY: Sex and the Titty is currently available for purchase. Contact the author.

SAMPLE DIALOGUE:

Carrie lies in bed, and MR. MASSIVE, a handsome middle-aged
man, climbs into bed with her.

MR. MASSIVE
Oh boy! Do we get to have sex now?

CARRIE GLADJAW
No!

MR. MASSIVE
But all your other friends did in
their introductions.

CARRIE GLADJAW
I have a no nudity clause in my
contract! A NO NUDITY CLAUSE.

She whips out a piece of paper, waves it in front of his
nose.

MR. MASSIVE
I know about your no nudity
clause. So if we're not going to
have sex, what do you want to do?

CARRIE GLADJAW
Complain.

MR. MASSIVE
Great! I never get sick of that!

COMMENTS: Sex and the City grossed $56.8 million this weekend, much to my horror. It was the top grossing film, and I was going to have to see it. I did, and have groused about it ever since. When I was chatting with a friend about the Sex and the City movie today, I began to huff and puff about the dreadful costumes on display in the film. Especially the belts. Oh God, the belts! After I had worked myself into enough of a frenzy, she stopped me. "Are you okay?" she asked.

"I'm working out my fashion rage by composing an especially vicious porn satire," I responded. And immediately realized that this sentence has probably never before been uttered in the history of human language. Which I think is one of the reasons I like this project. I mean, yes, it's a highly questionable undertaking. But it forces a strange sort of creativity that I have found myself enjoying very much. Additionally, it gives me the opportunity to mock something popular, and, in this instance, terrible. I don't think I will give too much away when I say that most of the drama hinges on the fact that the character Big is about five minutes later to an event that the main character Carrie Bradshaw, and briefly gets panicked and hurries away, and then instantly whips around an apologizes.

Honestly. This sustains a two and a half hour movie, and it is about as low-stakes as a plot can get. It's impossible to feel any compassion for Carrie, because she overreacts so hideously, and Chris Noth, who plays Big and is a very likable actor, pretty much disappears for the rest of the movie. So who are we supposed to care about? The other characters? Their plots are given such short shrift that they seem to be an afterthought, and barely register. So the result are that the actual film is two and a half hours of costumes, which I presume were by Patricia Field, and are so bad that I have started to assume that Ms. Field was blinded in a childhood accident and designs her costumes based on texture.

Anyway, there is nothing like an aesthetic tizzy to encourage satire, and so Sex and the Titty was written in a single day. I don't know what to tell you about my title. Yes, I'm a little embarrassed by it. But this is not a subtle art, and there is something about the sheer idiotic bluntness Sex and the Titty that makes me laugh. And so it stays, even though it means, for the rest of my life, I may have to admit to having authored it. I feel this way about all my titles so far: It's a queer feeling of pride and shame, which I have started to interpret as meaning that I am on the right track.

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THIS GHOULISH LITTLE MOVIE, made in 1964 by exploitation auteur Jack Hill (who enjoyed a late-career revival thanks to Quentin Tarantino re-releasing Hill’s berserk Switchblade Sisters under Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder imprimatur), features so many ghastly pleasures it is hard to know where to start. There’s the story, which tells of the decaying Merrye family, whose entire clan is stricken with a degenerative brain disorder that leaves them murderous and infantile in their Gothic mansion. There’s a young Sid Haig, the character actor of recent notoriety for his role as the murderous clown Captain Spaulding in Rob Zombie’s films, playing one of the Merrye children, dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy as envisioned by Edward Gorey. There’s Carol Ohmart, the former Miss Utah who had enjoyed some minor success as a platinum blond movie starlet before her career wound down. Here she appears as the gloriously bitchy heir to the Merrye fortune, and director Hill wisely has her spend the final third of the film running about in a partial state of undress, sporting an ungainly merrywidow lingerie ensemble.

To my taste, the real triumph of the film was in that Hill managed to cast the aging, alcoholic Lon Chaney Jr. as Bruno, the chauffeur and weary caretaker of the diseased Merrye children. Chaney, making the most of his thick features and compassionate eyes, is simply terrific in the role, chastising the Merryes for their misbehavior with ponderous patience and affection, even when they’re guilty of such offenses as attacking a delivery man with a pair of steak knives. Spider Baby, which is sometimes subtitled “The Maddest Story Ever Told,” often plays like a demented comedy, and Chaney is sublimely funny in the film. When one of the other characters in the film makes a brief reference to her love for 1941’s The wolf Man, in which Chaney starred, he flashes her a brief, surprised glance that is marvelously silly.

Chaney also voiced the theme song, written by Ronald Stein, and it is the only time in the film when Chaney lets loose with any real dementia. Playing over a roughly animated series of cartoons (that themselves are perfectly period, looking like the sorts of caricatured doodles that would accompany jokes on 1960s cocktail napkins), the theme is insistent, pounded out on a piano with occasional interjections by a horn section, sounding like the music to a particularly nerve-wracking radio detective show. Chaney cackles wildly over the music and speaks the lyrics at a frenetic pace, keeping his deep baritone at its lowest register, to the point that he simply growls some of his lines. The theme itself has very little to do with the actual movie, instead serving as an assemblage of rather traditional horror images: “Frankenstein, Dracula, and even the Mummy are sure to end up in somebody’s tummy!” Laney informs us, giggling with a lunatic glee.

Sometimes, looking back on Chaney’s career, it is hard to know if he had any real affinity for the horror film that provided his bread and butter. Even as Larry Talbot, the Wolf Man, he was an unwilling monster driven to despair and suicidal thoughts by his wretched fate, and in later films, such as Face of the Screaming Werewolf (in which he played “The Mummified Werewolf”) and Dr. Terror’s Gallery of Horrors, he actually looked embarrassed to be participating in the films. However, with his keen, affectionate performance in Spider Baby and with his high-energy, ferocious performance of the film’s theme, the embarrassment is gone. At least here, with this film, Chaney perfectly displayed how he felt about horror films: He loved them.

LISTEN TO "SONG FROM SPIDER BABY":



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MAX "BUNNY" SPARBER effortless glides by the Dragon Gate on Grant Avenue at Bush Street that marks the entrance to San Francisco's Chinatown, one of the largest in North America and the oldest, having been established in the 1850s.

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ELLAS OTHA BATES died today, June 2, 2008, and with him died a legend. The legend was mostly of his own making, of course, as Bates renamed himself Bo Diddley sometime back around 1951 and began singing self-composed odes about his own amazingness. Long before rap music, with its stylized braggadocio, Bo Diddley was standing before the world and proclaiming his legend, most famously in the song "Who Do You Love," in which he declared "I walked forty-seven miles of barbed wire / I got a cobra snake for a necktie." Bo Diddley was a heavyset, myopic man with hangdog features and, at the start of his career, a tendency to wear a checkered jacket and nerdy bow tie, but he played a unique, square guitar with a propulsive rhythm that has come to be associated with his name (and is one of the defining sounds of rock and roll), and when he told you that his was a figure of legend, man, you believed it.

Let me start out by telling of my own experience with Bo Diddley, which is suitably ghoulish for the Essential Ghoul's Guide. I went to see him in concert years ago, sometime in the early 90s, at a small bar in the Cedar Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis. I arrived quite early, so I went to the back of the bar and began to play a video game. Some of you will remember the game, which was called Rampage. In it, you played a giant monster -- you had a choice of being King Kong, Godzilla, or, unaccountably, a giant werewolf. You spent the game smashing buildings, attacking soldiers, and eating things. I played for a short while, and then a figure in black, wearing a massive black cowboy hat, sidled up next to me and joined the game.

It was Bo Diddley.

He and I played in silence for a while, and then he turned to look at me.

"Say," he said. "Do you get more points if you eat the women?"

"Yes you do, Mr. Diddley," I answered.

We returned to the game and played quietly for a half an hour. He ate quite a few women.

About a year ago, I sent this story in to Joel Orff, a cartoonist who illustrated the wonderful Great Moments in Rock 'n' Roll. Joel immediately illustrated it, and I am reproducing his cartoon below.



Click image to enlarge.

In the meanwhile, let me discuss "Bo Meets the Monster." As much as he might have been associated with the chugging rhythm guitar part that bears his name, and formed the basis for songs such as "I Want Candy" by The Strangeloves and "Willie and the hand Jive" by Johnny Otis, Bo Diddley enjoyed exploring a diversity of musical styles, and was a guitarist whose style was rooted in the Chicago blues of John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. His version, though, tended to strip the blues structure down to its barest core -- he might have been the first rock and roller to base entire songs around tight, repeated riffs. This is certainly why so many garage bands gravitated toward Bo Diddley's songs, and tended to perform excellent covers of his material. Bo Diddley and fuzzed-out guitar rock are just natural couplings, and Bo Diddley provided a wealth of extraordinary riffs.

Additionally, his lyrics tended to borrow from folk tunes, such a nursery rhymes -- his "Hey Bo Diddley" is a rewrite of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm," except on Bo's farm are women, while his similarly named "Bo Diddley" rewrights "Hush Little Baby." But if the source material was sometimes juvenile, Bo Diddley's revision of it never was. His lyrics are generally associated with the African-American tradition of the "toast," a poetic oral form that generally contains boastful tales, but I suspect he was also acquainted with the tall takes of the American frontier, in which fights often began with long and highly stylized bragging.

"Bo Meets the Monster" was clearly inspired by the success of Sheb Wooley's 1958 hit "Flying Purple People Eater" -- the monster's voice is identical in both songs, created by speeding up the recording, and when Bo Diddley recorded his version, he initially titled it "Purple People," and the monster in Bo's song is actually referred to as a "Purple People Eater." The early days of rock and roll were filled with this sort of answer song, in which characters from a hit song would appear in other songs, and Bo Diddley, whose famous riff had been stolen a thousand times, probably had more right to borrow from another songwriter as anyone. It's hard to imagine such a thing happening nowadays, though, without record company lawyers calling foul and instantly retiring to a back room with a hundred lawyers to prepare a lawsuit.

And that's a shame, because "Bo Meets the Monster" is "Puprle People Eater" as seen through Bo Diddley's huge lenses, and the results are hysterical. Sheb Woolley's response to the monster is abject terror, but Bo responds in the manner a legend should -- he leaps into his airplane and takes off flying after it. It ends badly for Bo, as you shouldn't leave your girlfriend alone in a house, even one made of rattlesnake hide, when there is an airborne and predatory alien beast about. But nonetheless, the song leaves us with an excellent image, and it is the way I like to imagine Bo Diddley going. He might have died in bed in his hometown of Archer, Florida, but I like to image Bo Diddley leaping out of bed, grabbing his square metal guitar, tossing his black cowboy hat on, and running to his airplane to take to the skies after a rock and roll monster. That's the way a legend should go.

LISTEN TO "BO MEETS THE MONSTER":



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MAX "BUNNY" SPARBER jet packs past one of San Francisco -- and the world's -- most famous book stores, cofounded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

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Directed by: Rowland V. Lee
Starring: Charles Laughton, Randolph Scott, Barbara Britton, John Carradine

IN CONTRAST to the swashbuckling epics that preceded it, Captain Kidd is a cramped, drab affair. It was reportedly underfunded, which might explain why this pirate tale boasts only one sword fight, scrimps on sea battles, and, unlike in films such as The Sea Hawk, in which hundreds of men crowded the decks of pirate ships, on Captain Kidd's 300-ton Adventure Galley there seems to be a crew of only about 20. The whole of it feels as though it were done on the cheap -- most of the action is set below deck, where the film's ahistoric Captain Kidd, played by Charles Laughton, quietly, merrily plots to kill his compatriots.

There is little of the real William Kidd here, who, despite his notoriety as a pirate, was rather a bungler in life. He wasn't even a pirate at first, but instead received a quasi-legal commission from William III as a privateer, with instructions to attack pirates in the Indian Ocean. Kidd was not much of a captain, though, and was given to fits of ill-temper, which caused his crew to simmer in a condition of near-mutiny, Kidd showed little evidence of having made much effort to fulfill his mission as privateer. He quickly abandoned the task in favor of pure piracy, although he didn't show much aptitude for it. In his few attempts at hoisting the black flag, Kidd usually came out the worse for it; at the first sign of trouble, he tended to turn tail and run. When one of his demoralized crew confronted him, a tantruming Kidd struck the man with a bucket, killing him. Kidd eventually sought a pardon from the governor of Massachusetts, who instead shipped him back to London to stand trial for piracy -- and for the murder of a crewman. Even Kidd's execution was a travesty: the captain, drunk, maintained his innocence while a preacher beseeches him to confess, and when Kidd was finally shoved of the platform with a rope around his neck, the rope snapped. Kidd had to be lugged up to be hanged a second time, with the preacher still pleading him to clear his conscience.

Little of this made it into the film version of Kidd's life, and it is sort of a pity, as there were both elements of a strange tragedy and a black comedy in Kidd's miserable career. And the film had the right actor to play this role, in the person of Laughton, who had previously essayed one of history's great nautical villains in the person of Captain William Bligh in the 1935 adaption of Mutiny on the Bounty. Laughton's performance as Bligh garnered him a well-earned Oscar nomination, as his malicious, bile-filled characterization is one of the silver screen's greatest sadists. But the script for Captain Kidd, written by Robert N. Lee (brother to director Rowland V. Lee) and Norman Reilly Raine (who penned the considerably more robust The Adventures of Robin Hood) does not concern itself with history. This version of Kidd isn't the mix of hotheadedness and incompetent that helmed the Adventure Galley at the end of the 16th century, and who, we suspect, Laughton could have done a bang-up job playing.

No. Instead, the eponymous lead in Captain Kidd is an avaricious schemer, played by Laughton with a mixture of mock-innocent eye-rolling and insinuating, almost flirty, mannerisms. The plot is pure invention, loosely based on the fact that Kidd is one of the few pirates in history who actually buried his treasure. The film's Kidd is eager to un-bury his booty, preferably with as few of his fellow pirates as possible. The film returns repeatedly to Kidd's captain's quarters, below deck, where he sits at a desk and jots down the names of those he wishes to kill in a secret notebook. Director Lee tends to light Laughton from below in these scenes, presumably to give him a sinister appearance, but to the opposite effect. Laughton, with his corpulent chin, thick lips, raised eyebrows, and his fright wig of brushlike hair, seems more comical than menacing. The actor obviously took no small delight in the film's dialogue -- some of which, in all fairness, is quite clever. But when shipmate John Carradine, in a goat's beard and black tri-cornered hat, glares at Laughton and accuses of his of being a "cold gutted shark," Laughton responds by dropping his eyes demurely. "A flatterer," he says, and the effect is girlish and ridiculous. It's no wonder Laughton later revived this role as burlesque in an Abbott and Costello movie in 1952.

None of this is helped by the presence of Randolph Scott and Barbara Britton, ostensibly the film's heroes. They seem about as heroic as they seem British -- despite the fact that both play high-mannered English gentry (Scott is slumming as a pirate), both actors maintain their native accents: Scott was a Virginian and Britton hailed from California. In fact, Scott's career consisted almost entirely of Westerns, where his stony, humorless mannerisms were well-placed. In Captain Kidd, however, he virtually doesn't register. Scott spends much of the movie looking grim and glancing nervously offscreen, and he is upstaged at every turn by the remainder of the cast, which is mostly filled out with British character actors. These castmembers, such as Reginal Owen in the role of a put-upon valet, seem to look upon this production as something of a jest, and play their roles with a welcome twinkle. In the meanwhile, Scott only seems to show much enthusiasm in a strange scene in which he bathes with his own servant, a smallish, obsequious character played by John Qualen. The two merrily scrub each other, and, later, when shaving, exchange happy glances. In fact, in a later scene that must have been the result of an error in continuity, we see Qualen helping Scott into his clothes, and they are the very same clothes that Scott had been wearing the previous scene. We are given no indication as to why Scott would have undressed, although it is possible to suppose that he and his servant simply wanted to wash each other again. When the blandly pretty Britton is introduced as Scott's love interest, he stares past her, nervous and uninterested, again looking offscreen. We can't help but assume that Scott is looking at his servant, who must be off to the side somewhere, fuming like Betty does in the Archie comics whenever Veronica is in the vicinity.

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SOMETIMES, FILMS ABOUT VAMPIRES give the sense that the undead have nothing better to do with their eternal lives than malinger around discotheques. Vampires are so often presented as self-absorbed monsters with few interests outside fashion and music: Consider, for example, David Bowie and Catherine Deneauve in The Hunger preening in a discotheque as Peter Murphy sings “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” Or the slaughterhouse rave of leather-clad nosferatu that opens Blade. Or George Hamilton in Love at First Bite, flinging aside his cape to reveal a white polyester three-piece suit, a la Saturday Night Live.

One would suppose that a creature that had lived through a few fads might avoid getting entangled in new ones — after all, vampires have long enough memories not merely to be embarrassed by the bell bottoms of the Sixties, but by the codpieces of the 15th century. Nonetheless, there they are: Chris Sarandon, with a foppish scarf tied around his neck, seduces Amanda Bierce in a dance club in Fright Night while Nicolas Cage, in an Armani suit, chases his victim through a different club in Vampire’s Kiss.

One would expect that, with all these vampires prowling through all these discotheques, sooner or later Hot Blood’s “Soul Dracula” from 1977 would end up booming out of the speakers. After all, the song itself is a perfect example of a once-popular trend that now seems notably embarrassing: synthesizer-laden European disco. Were it not for a hammy male voice cackling and calling out the song’s title, the Latin percussion, soaring vocals, wah-wah guitar, and tinny electric piano could belong to virtually any disco instrumental of the era. By 1977, it seems, disco had become so uniform in sound and so anonymous that the only way to distinguish one song from another was to attach novelty themes to the music (the album that produced this song, “Disco Dracula,” also featured songs titled “Baby Frankie Stein” and “Even Vampires Fall in Love.”)

The song was a minor club hit when it was released, and I must assume we have vampires to blame for that. After all, it is easy to imagine legions of the undead lounging around the VIP area of Studio 54, dressed in tight pink pants and polyester shirts with flyaway collars, their noses caked with cocaine, obsessing over their bleached and fathered hair and requesting “Disco Dracula” again and again. Years later, they might look back on the fact with a little embarrassment, but, hey, by then there was always dance remixes of Marilyn Manson to keep them distracted.

LISTEN TO "SOUL DRACULA":



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ON AN UNUSUALLY unfoggy day in San Francisco, Bunny jetpacks past the Golden Gate Bridge, and then across it. Surprisingly, the bridge has a jet pack lane.



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