Max "Bunny" Sparber

I'VE BEEN ASKED to speak before this assembly to tell you not to drink and drive. I'm supposed to tell you that you're young, and you have your whole lives ahead of you, and one single accident can leave you dead or crippled for life. I'm supposed to be your example. Look at me. I was once the world's biggest badass. You all know me. You've seen my movies. I could once leap into the air and kick a man 30 times before hitting the ground. Once upon a time, I could jump over a speeding car. In my movie Anaconda Force, I leaped off a rooftop of a high rise apartment building, down 13 stories, and crashed through a window, kicking the head off a waiting ninja. And that scene was done without wires. I really leaped off that building, and I really crashed through the window. The ninja was a special effect, of course, but, had he been a real ninja, I really could have kicked his head off.

Now you're supposed to look at me, here before you, a shattered shell of the man I once was. You know the story. It started with a night of binge drinking and a ride along the Pacific Coast Highway in my bitching Camaro. I struck another Camaro, driven by another drunk action film star. We both flew out of our windshields, threw a few Praying Mantis-styled Kung Fu kicks at each other as we passed in the air, and then landed in each others' cars, which simultaneously exploded. Now I'm strapped to this wheelchair, unable to even move so much as my pinkies. You're supposed to learn a lesson from this, which is, don't be like me.

Well, that is a lesson I cannot teach you. You should be like me. I'm as much of a badass now as I ever was, even in this wheelchair. You don't believe me? I dare any of you to come up on this stage and try to take me. Hell, bring a weapon if you like. Some kid at the last high school tried to take me with a sawed off shotgun he happened to have in his locker. It will be another month before the wire comes off of his jaw. Some come on, which of you thinks you're tough enough to try me?

None of you? Smart. I have no compunctions about killing someone, even a teenager. I've already been cleared by the Santa Barbara Sheriff's Department for three fatalities per yer. Three. That's how many people I can kill before they will open an investigation. You know why? Because they know me, and they know I wouldn't kill someone without provocation. I could kill a baby and they wouldn't think twice about it. They'd just assume the baby pulled a gun on me or something.

So I'm here to tell you, go ahead and drink and drive. That night was the greatest night of my life. First of all, the car crash was awesome. We're trying to recreate it for my next movie, Anaconda Fury, except, of course, the other driver will be a ninja. I never felt more alive then when I was sailing through the air, and Commando Jim Luger was flying toward me. For a moment, our eyes locked, and we both knew we were going to have to duke it out in midair. That was just the sort of man Commando Jim was, and I respected the hell out of him. He died that night a proud man. I saw him as he burned in the wreck of my Camaro, and he was pumping his fists in the air, celebrating.

Secondly, my life has never been better that it is now. Some of you might think that becoming a quadriplegic as the result of an auto accident must be terrible. After all, I can't even bathe myself. But I tell you this: All I did was retrain my private army of female security guards. They all have nurse's licenses now. And you've seen these girls. They all appeared in the Female Hit Squad movies. Well, now they give me sponge baths. Every day. Twice a day, if I've had to fight a ninja or, I don't know, a baby with a gun, and I've gotten sweaty. I can't tell you any more details, as this is a PG-13 audience, and these stories are NC-17, but one day you'll be old enough to know what I'm talking about.

Additionally, I've gotten myself all sorts of helper animals. The rehabilitation clinic wanted to give me a dog to help me with things, but I figured I could do better. So I have helper snakes. It's not easy to train a snake to do things like answer the door or dial a telephone, but it can be done. Snakes are smarter than people think. I've been training them for years. Mostly, up until now, I have been using them as deadly living booby traps, but the same techniques you use to train a snake to recognize a ninja can be used to teach him how to microwave popcorn.

And this wheelchair? Custom made, by the same cats who used to customize my choppers. Yeah, this little baby will go from zero to 60-MPH in under 10 seconds. There are blades hidden in it. There are guns hidden in it. I can lay down an oil slick, or a smoke cloud, or caltrops if I need to. And it's all controlled by minute muscle movements at the back of my neck. It took me three solid years to master this wheelchair, in order to train my neck muscles to do everything that needs to be done. But now this wheelchair, which looks, at first glance, to be perfectly normal, can kill a man in 68 ways, and can outrun a cheetah.

This is why I don't mind the accident. I had become pretty complacent with my life. I'm not ashamed to admit it. I had mastered every martial art known to man, and I had pushed myself to the limits of physical perfection. I had more money than I could spend, and I spent my days just lying about the pool, getting massages from my bodyguards and drinking Crystal champagne. I was bored and I needed a challenge. Maybe that's why I drank so much that night. Maybe that's why I wasn't as cautious as I might have been behind the wheel. Maybe that why, when I saw Commando Jim's Camaro coming toward me, I nudged the wheel so that we were in a collision course. I needed excitement again. I needed a challenge. And losing the use of my limbs was just that challenge.

I am a better man today than I was then. I'm more of badass than I have ever been. On a good week, in my prime, I could take on 30 ninjas at once. Just last week, on my way to Ralphs for some groceries, I was attacked by a hundred ninjas. All fell under the whirling tornado that is my souped up wheelchair. You've never seen so many severed limbs in your entire life. The parking lot of that Ralphs was a killing zone, and, just a few years ago, before my accident, it would have been a killing zone in which I would have died. But now I'm unstoppable. There is no challenge too great for me. I am no longer a mere man. With the loss of my limbs, I was freed from the limitations of my body, and became a god.

So, I say, go ahead and drink and drive. It's the best thing that ever happened to me. And to prove it, I have a brand new Camaro waiting for me outside this school. I will now drink an entire bottle of bourbon. Then I will go out to that Camaro , pull myself into the drivers seat, and drive myself back home -- USING JUST MY LIPS.

I don't know if I'll make it, kids. But it will be a hell of a ride.

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

A MASSIVE POINTING FINGER menaces a red silhouette of a man on the cover of Frederick Seelig's book, and it's a great graphic, but, really, it's the book's subtitle that caught my eye. Oh, Frederick Seelig, you had me at "Federal homo power exposed."

Poor Mr. Seelig was mad. He's identified as a former journalist, and I believe it, as, in this book, he documents his own madness with a sort of artful, rigorous dependence on documentary evidence that is the hallmark of the journalist. Unfortunately, because he was mad, the evidence points to a different conclusion that he thought it did. He thought that he was making a case that his diagnosis was fraudulent, and, further, he was a victim of a homosexual conspiracy that reached as high as the Executive Branch, and was using Communist brainwashing techniques to attempt to dissuade him from reclaiming his two children from their foster parents, both perverts. But there's scant evidence that any of this is true, no matter how forcefully Seelig makes his case in the book, or how many documents he reproduces. All the documentary evidence leads to a different, inescapable conclusion: Seelig was just as his doctors described him, a paranoiac who was fixated on homosexuals, seeing them everywhere.

Anyone who has had any encounters with the insane, particularly with paranoid schizophrenics, will feel a flush a familiarity upon looking at this book. From its strangely grotesque chapter titles (including "Kremlin Psychiatry Tyranny" and "Pavlovian Torture Drain Holes") to his relentless, obsessive need to document his own experience, the book is the sort of thing that sometimes shows up at newspapers, if you are an editor, hand-written at an obviously rushed pace and making the case that black helicopters keep circling, and this must be investigated NOW. You'll sometimes pass houses covered with handmade cardboard signs accusing other family members of crimes, or claiming television newspeople are attempting to hypnotize the house's occupants. The only thing that is missing from Seelig's book is the distinctive typographical decisions of the mad, which tend to involve excessive capitalization, underlining, and switching font colors. Perhaps the original document looked that way, or perhaps Seelig retained enough of his discipline as a journalist not to go haywire with the typefaces. But here are some excerpts from the book, and who could read them and not recognize that it is the writing of a deranged mind?

"President Johnson's letter did not have the usual initials that identifies the Presidential office typist. At this time, homosexual Walter Jenkins handled the Vice President's correspondence -- did Jenkins use the the rubber stamp signature of Lyndon B Johnson and then notify perverts in Federal agencies to take action against me?"

"That testimony substantiated the charges made by Senator Joseph McCarthy for which he was vilified by the Communists, homosexuals and pseudo-Americans posing as 'liberals.'"

"It wasn't long before I established the existence of the nationwide homosexual society, with headquarters in Washington, and members in government offices, including the White House, and United Nations; their roles in tax-exempt foundations, and their international headquarters in Amsterdam, Holland!"

Derangement like this usually doesn't get much attention, much less published, so what happened? Who took Seelig's charges as being anything other that the ravings of a sick mind. Well, the book has commentary by one Dr. Revilo P. Oliver, a white nationalist who wrote books with titles like The Yellow Peril and The Jewish Strategy, and who is still regularly quoted in racist publications. Destroy the Accuser has a forward by Westbook Pegler, an American journalist who deteriorated into pathological anticommunism in his later years, writing for the John Bitch society. The book's back cover contains quotes extolling its virtues by former congressman John Dowdy, who resigned following a bribery scandal, and former Congressman John R. Rarick, cofounder of the Council of Conservative Citizens, an organization that has been accused of being tied to segregationist and white nationalist causes. So, as to the question of who would take Seelig's charges seriously, I guess the answer is people who are in some way corrupt themselves, although, in their cases, I suspect their corruption is one of ideology, rather than mental illness.

The book was written in 1966 and published the next year, and it is interesting to look back at a time in history when certain groups were so thoroughly vilified that the babbling of a madman could be taken seriously by congressmen and award-winning journalists, simply because the madman raved against the people they mutually despised. Thank goodness such a thing is 40 years in our past, and politicians no longer attempt to demonize and disenfranchise unpopular groups for the sake of clinging to political power, to the point that their political behavior becomes indistinguishable from lunacy. What a relief that those days are behind us.

More from the Sparber Bookshelf.

JOEY THE DIGGER, with little regard,
Would dig up his parents' yard.
He carried a shovel and a spade
And he dug in sunshine and in shade.
He dug up the flowers and the grass --
The tulips, the roses, the iris, alas!
He dug them all up and threw them away
And what Joey dug for, no one could say.
Some said dinosaurs, some said treasure;
Some said neither, Joey just digs for pleasure.
But Joey the Digger simply dug on
In deepening holes,
And one day was gone.
Some say that Joey dug his own grave
and some say he dug into an underground cave;
Some say he dug to the center of the planet
Where ancient beasts swim in deep molten granite.
Some say Joey dug through to the opposite side
Where millions of upside down people reside.
I think that Joey the Digger digs on
Wherever that Joey the Digger has gone.
One day in the future a rocket will land
On a distant world of shifting red sand;
A billion miles away, untouched by mankind.
An astronaut will be amazed at the thing that he finds:
"My gosh, it's full of holes," the astronaut will declare
And we'll know that Joey the Digger was there

MORE FROM THE GARDEN OF VERSES!

FOR SOME REASON, for the past week or so, I have been thinking that after I have written and recorded, say, 10 or so of these country and blues inspired new songs, maybe I would try my hand at doing a handful of melodies that borrow from Irish folk traditions. After all, ballads from the British Isles are one of the main influences in early country, and, as far as I can tell, I'm an Irish-American.

Well, I'm not very good at holding off on trying something once I've got it into my head, and, last night, when I was writing "A Widow's Prayer," I also wound up noodling with this melody. Today, over the course of the day, I found myself hanging lyrics onto it.

It's a war song, and, in fact, references and older war song called "No More Soldiering For Me." I didn't set out to write a political song, but simply to try to tell a wartime story -- specifically, a tale of the death of a number of Irish soldiers in North Africa during World War II. Despite the fact that I reference real places, this story is fiction. Really, what got me to writing it was a sense I have had for a long time that there are few deaths lonelier than going someplace strange, very far from your home, when you are very young, and being killed by someone you have never met and perhaps never even see.

"THE BOYS OF THE 10TH" LYRICS:

He was a good soldier once
He could speak of Tripoli
He marched across the Sahara
And to the Barbari
The bells they all were ringing
When he returned to Offaly
The boys of the Tenth started singing
"No More Soldiering for Me"

He lost his eye in Tunisia
He carries shrapnel from Mizdah
There were fourteen boys from Moneygall
And six died on the road to Nismah
The bells they all were ringing
When he returned to Offaly
The boys of the Tenth started singing
"No More Soldiering for Me"

Billy fell in Quaryat
And Pat he fell in Birzar
They lost three more in the next two days
Only three went home to Tullamore
The bells they all were ringing
When he returned to Offaly
The boys of the Tenth started singing
"No More Soldiering for Me"

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IT'S EXACTLY what it looks like: A fish, made out of gelatin and glucose syrup, that has scales you peel back to reveal its skeleton. Although this seems more like a dissection lab project than a candy, the Odd Ingester nonetheless finds the anatomy a little suspect. Skinless, the fish looks like something you might find in a cartoon, fished out of a garbage can by a hungry cat; all it's missing is the letter "x" across each eye.

It doesn't taste like fish, of course. It tastes like Gummi Bears, leading the Odd Ingester to wonder why other candy animals cannot likewise be stripped of their flesh to reveal their bones. The Odd Ingester imagines an army of skeletal gummy animals, ready to do his bidding. The Odd Ingester should not eat candy before breakfast. It gives him strange ideas and a stomach ache.

More from the Odd Ingester!

MONDAY, Monday, Monday,
Is hot dog on a bun day;
Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday,
Is casseroles and stews day;
Wednesday, Wednesday, Wednesday,
Is Cornish game hen's day;
Thursday, Thursday, Thursday,
Is fries and hamburgers day;
But Friday, Friday, Oh Friday,
Friday it is pie day!
Meat pie for dinner, and afterwards! Hoo hoo!
Apple pie, cherry pie, peach pie too!
Rhubarb, sweet potato, pineapple sometimes!
Pies made of blueberries, strawberries, key limes!
So many different toppings! Cinnamon! Ice cream!
We eat pies until our trousers are busting at the seams!
There are many days of the week, but only one is my day:
From Monday through Thursday? No!
Friday it is pie day.

MORE FROM THE GARDEN OF VERSES!

ANOTHER MURDER BALLAD. I wrote it tonight after fooling around on my ukulele until I came up with a riff that sounded old-timey and mournful, and then I started pasting lyrics across it. Pretty quickly, I realized it was going to be about someone's death. I've been thinking a lot about those folks that you meet every now and then for whom violence seems to be a sort of first language for them: You look at them at the wrong moment and they push you up against a wall, and you can just tell they're hoping you'll take a swing at them. I don't meet people like this often, and, when I do, I stay as far away from them as I can. I suppose I'm a drinker rather than a fighter. It's been quite a long time since I got into any sort of fight at all.

In fact, the last one I remember was in about 1996. I was walking around behind St. Anthony Main late one night, just minding my own business, when I saw a car stopped in the middle of the street, headlights still on. Behind it were two figures, one slumped on the ground, the other standing. As I got closer, I realized that the figure on the ground was a woman, and the figure above her was a man holding a hammer. The woman did not seem conscious, and I knew I wasn't going to be able to leave until I was sure that woman was safe.

I began shouting at the man, hoping to frighten him away, cursing and telling him to get back into his car. He stared at me, shrugged, and then walked toward me, grinning and holding the hammer up. As he got close to me, I reached out and grabbed both his wrists and pulled him close to me. He had wild eyes and a small beard, and we struggled. "This is what I want," he said.

I decided I needed to knock him out. Somehow I got one hand free, and so I punched him in the forehead. His head snapped back, and then rolled back up. He was still grinning. I struck him again, and then again, each time with the same result. Later, reading about bare-knuckle boxing, I found out that gloveless matches could go on for sixty rounds or more. The head can absorb an astounding amount of impact, encased, as it is, in thick bone. I was about as likely to punch him into unconsciousness by hitting his forehead as I was to crack a walnut by blowing on it. And, each time I struck him, he said "This is what I want."

Eventually, I just pulled him as close as I could, hugging him, and I whispered in his ear. "This isn't what I want," I said. "This isn't what I want at all. All I want is for you to get in your car and drive away and leave me alone."

With that, his shoulders slumped. He stepped away from me, and I let go of his arms. With a defeated look, he turned, walked to his car, threw the hammer in the back seat, and drove away. I later found out that he had just been released from prison. He had picked up his girlfriend, filled suitcases with her possessions, accused her of cheating on him, and drove around the city, flinging her belongings out of the car window. Then he had stopped the car and proceeded to beat her, until I had intervened.

When I got home that evening, I looked at my arms. I had not noticed when it was happening, but the claw end of the hammer had made hideous scratches along my forearms.

I suppose this song is what I think happens to men like that.

"A WIDOW'S PRAYER" LYRICS:

She wore a long black dress then
She said a widow's prayer
She brought a bouquet to him
It's been three years since she buried him there

He was a fighting man once
With rough and rowdy ways
He had a pistol with him
He would have been thirty in just seventeen days

He had a knife put in him
When he shot Billy Mae
He did not die till morning
Billy he then died the next day

And now she mourns him Monday
Oh with a small bouquet
And there's more flowers Tuesday
Which she leaves on the grave of Billy Mae

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IOWA NATIVE Terry Teene, born Terence Blaine Knutson, created the makeup for Ronald McDonald. Now, that's not the sort of thing you would usually read in an essay about a rockabilly performer. You don't glance through Jerry Lee Lewis's biography and discover that, at some point, he was the Marleboro Man, or read that Roy Orbison moonlighted writing bawdy jokes for Playboy. But, there it is, unexpected though it may be: Terry Teene and a fellow named George Voorhees created the makeup, costume, and name of what would eventually become on one of the world's best-known advertising icons.

How did this happen? Well, here's another biographical detail you don't generally find in the lives of rockabillies. When the first wave of American rock and roll was pushed aside by the British invasion and the dawn of folk rock, some rockabilly performers turned country, some tried their hand at the new sound, and some just watched their careers evaporate. Terry Teene became a professional clown, performing with such touring outfits as Circus Vargas and the Mexican International Circus, and eventually becoming president of an association of professional clowns called The Cavalcade of Clowns.

With a biography as eccentric as this, perhaps we should not be surprised that Terry Teene was responsible for what must be the most explicitly morbid song ever to find radio play, a tune from the early 60s, as best as I can tell, that has long been a staple of the Dr. Demento Halloween show.

The subject is death, and, more specifically, decomposition. Over a driving backbeat and a a rhyhtmic electric guitar, Teene half sings and half chants, describing, in loving detail, the manner in which a body becomes food for insects. "Little green bugs of eyes of red go through your liver and out your head," Teene helpfully informs us.

Teene is not the first person to investigate the lyrical possibilities of death in this way -- in fact, his song contains a line that dates back quite a while: "The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout." This ryhmed couplet has been kicking around schoolyards for at least a century, often sung to the melody "The Funeral March of a Marionette" by Charles Gounod, which Alfred Hitchcock took as his theme. In fact, a similar ryhme dates back all the way to 1796, appearing in the book The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis, a gothic novel about a religious man brought down by a web of deception. The book contains a poem called "Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine," and includes these lines: "The worms, They crept in, and the worms, They crept out, And sported his eyes and his temples about."

In fact, it seems as though Terry Teene might have pilfered most of the lyrics in "Curse of the Hearse" in this way, borrowing them from schoolyard songs -- at one point, he interjects "and me without a spoon" when describing a particularly hideous decomposition; this interjection is the climax of the song "Great Green Gobs of Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts." As a result, despite it's rock and roll backbeat, "Curse of the Hearse" is arguably a folk song, and one which finds its inspiration in the blunt satire of songs sung by children. It's no wonder Teene eventually became a clown.

There is one very interesting element to Teene's song. At the very end of his lyrics, he welds in a couplet from a Bahamanian folk song called "All My Trials," which became popular among socially conscious folk singers in the United States in the 50s and 60s: "If life was a thing that money could buy," Teene sings, "the rich would live and the poor would die." It's a strange way to end a gleefully morbid meditation on decomposition; One doesn't expect the narrator to suddenly want to discuss how death is a great equalizer, turning rich and poor alike into food for worms. But, then, it is a song by Terry Teene, and the man obviously had a talent for doing the unexpected.

LISTEN TO "CURSE OF THE HEARSE":



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THE GIRLS in the dressing room of the Black Cave were tired. Most of them had been out all night and only a few had managed to get any sleep during the day.

"I'll give the slob a thrill," one girl said and stepped, naked, before a large mirror at the end of the room. She gave a wiggle and her curves bounced. "Rotten crumb," she added. "Always watching when he's here."

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DIRECTOR JACK HILL is a man who liked to direct the same people over and over again. He had spent years laboring in the trenches of exploitation, making films with titles like The Wasp Woman (for which he wasn't credited) and The Terror. Along the way he picked up cast members he liked, and he worked with them again and again. From a student film Hill directed at UCLA, he got Sid Haig, a lanky actor with a jackal smile, a bald pate, and a bushy beard; Hill would cast Haig in almost every film he made.

Hill made a pair of almost identical women in prison films in 1971 and 1972, The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage, both featuring an Amazonian actress named Pam Grier, cousin of All-Pro Defensive Tackle Rosey Grier, who transcended her inexperience as an actress with a willingness to take off her clothes and a capacity for realistic looking catfighting -- two prerequisites for an actress in a Jack Hill film. Hill wrote Coffy for Grier. The film is a straightforward tale of revenge in which Grier plays a nurse (with a strip-club owning politician for a boyfriend!) with a young sister who is recovering from a bad dose of drugs. Grier takes it upon herself to enact bloody vengeance on the gangsters who were responsible, cutting and shotgunning a bloody path up the criminal pecking order, including taking on a gang of ruthless Italian mobsters that features Sid Haig as their psychopathic enforcer.

Me: There are two things about Pam Grier I want to talk about.
Her Afro and her breasts.
So, um, three things.
Brandi: Yes, her Afro was well maintained.
It is the gold standard of Afros.
me: She could hide things in her Afro.
Weapons.
Brandi: I wondered how often she injured herself in the morning when she forgot to take a weapon out of her hair
although they didn't address that in the movie, I can't help but think it happened monthly given her propensity for sticking sharp objects in her hair.
me: Yes. She put razor blades in her hair and a needle sharp piece of wire in her hair.
Also, I think it is strongly implied at the start of the film that she hid a sawed off shotgun up there.
Because where else did it come from?
She's shirtless and is wearing short shorts.
And yet suddenly she has a shotgun.
It was in her Afro.
Brandi: I don't know.
It's not like it could have belonged to the dude she killed.
She couldn't have planned to show up and, hey, he's got a shotgun.
It was quite odd.
Also, that dude had a horrible wig.
His fro was so fake
me: Yes.
The worst Afro wig ever.
Brandi: but I did appreciate that he was wearing all purple under his clothes.
me: Yes. He was coordinated, even if he had black yarn taped to his head.
Okay. Let's talk about Pam's tendency to take off her clothes.
She kills a lot of people, and her scheme is always the same:
She takes of her clothes, then she kills them.
Brandi: Yeah, I think she was using crime fighting to cover her nymphomania.
me: She was combining the two things she loved most into one activity.
Showing her boobies, and stabbing people with weapons from her hair.
It's so nice when you can blend two hobbies into a brand new one.
Brandi: Yes. It is.
me: And her boobies are spectacular. I kept expecting the people she killed to fall over and call out "At least I die happy!"
Brandi: I kept having to remember that they couldn't have been fake back then.
Because they looked fake.
But not in a bad way.
me: No. They have a very nice shape.
To Blaxploitation's credit, it seems equally eager to get men to take their clothes off.
And, considering some of the clothes in this movie, it really is for the best.
I'm thinking specifically of King George, the drug dealing pimp.
What is his outfit? It's, like, a yellow jump suit with a cape?
Brandi: The yellow one was the worst!
He looked like the Hamburglar.
me: I know. You kept calling out "robble robble" when he would show up.
Brandi: I called that out once!
And he had a shoulder coat!
Like a coat that was just meant to be worn on one shoulder. There's no way the neck would fit if he tried to wear it any other way.
me: It did look like a little coat. Like he had hung a baby coat over one arm.
I think it even had buttons and little sleeves.
Maybe he robbed a Little Lord Fauntleroy doll and stuck its coat in his arm.
There's a scene when he takes off his jumpsuit, and you realize it had one zipper, and he has unzipped it all the way down to his groinal area.
Terrifying.
Brandi: That was disturbing.
And his little robin hood hat didn't help
I would not let him smack me around dressed like that.
me: King George died pretty badly.
Brandi: How did he die again?
I'm blanking on it since it was a bit ago and there were so many deaths
me: Sid Haig tied a noose around his neck and dragged him behind his own car.
For, like, an hour and a half.
They were just driving around looking for places that had, like, oil drums and hunks of wood they could smack him into.
Brandi: Of course, how could I forget!
That was insane.
But the thing is, he totally could have undid that noose and run off.
But he didn't.
I also love how he goes from "being afraid" to "laughing with the guys" to "being afraid" again.
me: Yeah. It's a great scene.
(Afraid) "Where you guys taking me?"
(Happy) "A birthday party?"
(Afraid) "Why you pointing a gun at me?"
(Happy) "Is it for the piñata?"
That guy was in a serious state of denial.
Brandi: yeah, you could see the cognitive dissonance gears turning rapidly in his head.
me: That's probably why he didn't take the noose off. He thought it was a party game.
Brandi: Let's talk about King George's drug supply.
All throughout the movie they were talking about where he kept his drugs and I was lead to believe that he had a sizable stash
me: Yep.
Brandi: that needed to be hidden.
me: Buried in his fireplace.
Brandi: Then we come to find out that it's just a tiny bottle of heroin.
me: Yep.
Brandi: and he hides it like it's a kilo.
That just made no sense.
He would have kept that in his nightstand.
It's not like the cops would care about that much since he's obviously doing other illegal things out in the open.
me: And Coffy's plan was to swap the heroin out with powdered sugar which, presumably, she had hidden in her hair.
How did she know how much heroin he had?
I would have come with, like, a pound of the stuff.
She whips out, like, one sugar packet.
Brandi: I think coffy is psychic
but they accidentally cut the part of the script that explains that
me: We need to know that!
Brandi: Because she does seem to have a lot of set up in her killings that would require prior knowledge.
Also, how'd she get up to the pimp's room without being busted?
if the pimp is having a huge house party, I'd think his room would be guarded.
me: I thought it was funny that she stuck a gun inside a stuffed tiger.
first of all, what?
Who is not going to check the tiny stuffed tiger that weighs 2.55 pounds and has a a 9mm bore diameter?
Secondly, why didn't she just hide the gun in her hair?
Brandi: Yeah, a tiger?
Really?
I wonder if she actually had a cover story ready to go just in case
me: Nah. Her plans consisted entirely of showing her nay nays and then whipping out a weapon.
It always worked, so why try to get fancy?
Brandi: Also, am I to believe that Coffy cuddled with a stuff animal at night?
me: We must assume she did.
Brandi: Because that's just strange given the size of the tiger and the lack of wear.
That would mean she just got it.
me: Did we ever see her bedroom? Maybe it was just filled with little stuffed animals.
I guess another possibility is that she stole it from some sick kid at work.
After all, she was a nurse.
Brandi: Speaking of sick kids
Let's talk about the rehabilitation center
it was so sad
that all those kids were hooked on heroin AND had cancer
me: None of them had cancer.
Brandi: Well it looked like they did.
me: You keep insisting they did.
Living in a beautiful hacienda that was full of beds.
They were just junkies.
Brandi: Like they were given morphine to ease the pain and then when they got better they were addicted.
Why were they bedridden?
me: Because it's hard being a junkie.
Brandi: They weren't going through withdrawal.
Or they'd be sweatier and in more pain.
me: Who knows, it's California. Maybe they just like taking a lot of naps.
Brandi: Perhaps.
Lazy heroin addicts.
How'd they fuel their addiction if they were that lazy?
me: You got a beautiful hacienda full of beds, you're going to want to nap a lot.
You know what surprised me?
That there were, like, a hundred kids there.
Brandi: Yeah.
me: Where did they find that many pre-teen junkies?
Kids don't have any money.
Or maybe they were just buying heroin from King George.
Brandi: He lured them in by pretending to be the hamburglar?
me: Because he has so very little.
Brandi: Yeah, who was his supplier?
me: I think they said he got his stuff from Turkey.
Brandi: Maybe that was just his sample heroin and he kept most of it elsewhere.
me: Maybe Cleopatra Jones blew up the heroin that belonged to his supplier, and that's why he has so little.
She does blow up a Turkish poppy field at the start of her movie.
Brandi: Perhaps
otherwise, Coffy didn't complete her mission
me: Yes. She planned to kill everyone who had anything to do with her sister getting addicted.
Brandi: Can we talk about the lack of a plot
This was a movie that I thought had a plot as I watched it
but then when it was over, I realized it didn't have a plot
me: What do you mean? I just described the plot!
Brandi: It's like she went from having a mission, to just becoming a vigilante.
but then suddenly quit being a vigilante.
It was strange.
me: When did she quit being a vigilante?
I mean, she had second thoughts, but there was never a moment when she didn't have something sharp in her Afro.
Brandi: Right but the congressman really didn't have much to do with making her sister sick. Did he?
me: From what I can tell, her sister was messed up from getting bad junk.
She got the bad junk because Italians were taking over the business, and were giving bad junk to the black dealers, to muscle them out.
And the congressman was helping the Italians.
Brandi: But then the first killing makes no sense.
Because the guy who got her sister hooked on smack
she killed him for introducing her to it
me: She killed the dealer who gave her sister the bad junk and then started working her way up the chain.
It makes perfect sense.
Brandi: Hmm ... I guess that does makes sense.
Let's talk set design
me: Yes.
Brandi: Namely at the lesbians' house
me: Yes.
Brandi: There were an awful lot of bad paintings in this movie
Like really, really bad paintings
me: It's one of those things that doesn't make sense at first, and then makes sense.
You've got this white prostitute, and her house is full of paintings of huge naked black women riding zebras and horses.
And then you meet the prostitute's girlfriend, and she's a huge black lesbian.
They were idealized images of her girlfriend.
I assume she painted them herself.
Brandi: Hmm...strange
I mean, the zebra being ideal.
me: I wish someone would paint a picture of me, naked, riding a zebra.
You have to really love someone to think of them that way.
Brandi: Coco won't paint that?
me: Nobody has ever loved me enough to do a painting of me with my clothes off riding some magnificent jungle beast.
Brandi: I thought Coco loved to do arts and crafts.
That's sad.
me: I know.
Brandi: You'll probably die never being painted on a zebra.
Which is almost as bad as dying alone.
me: Maybe I'll hire someone to paint it.
Here's the interesting thing about this movie for me.
It was done by Jack Hill, who had done a series of films of women in Filipino prisons. They had Pam Grier in them, and she always took her clothes off.
And I think he was, like, why do I keep going to the Philippines? I can have Pam Grier take her clothes off in LA.
So he makes this Blaxpolitation film.
And it becomes the first one with a really strong female lead.
Brandi: Does she always take off her clothes in movies?
me: Oh yes.
And she fights a lot.
At least, in Jack Hill movies.
Here's the interesting thing about the plot.
In theory, the further she got away from the drug dealer, as she worked her way up the chain, it would be people she doesn't know who are further and further removed from the bad drugs.,
Instead, right there at the top, boom, it's her boyfriend.
Jack Hill was actually a big fan of Shakespeare, so all of his films have this very elaborate theatrical structure.
In this case, it's a classic revenge narrative. And he wasn't a great filmmaker, so sometimes it gets confusing, but if you dig in, it all makes sense.
At least, dramatically.
In the real world, there is no way Coffy would take her clothes off and THEN kill the pushers.
She'd just kill them.
But if you have a chance to get Pam Grier naked, man, you take that opportunity.
Brandi: I'm still working on the "she's a nympho" plot line
me: That does solve a lot of problems.
Brandi: You know what else I'm curious about?
How she ended up doing so well in life while her siblings got hooked.
I mean, if the epidemic was so bad that even boat loads of 9 year olds are getting addicted.
You'd think that she would have been as well.
me: That is a good question. Maybe she had some sort of phobia about hamburglar.
The way some kids are afraid of vacuum cleaners or aunts with mustaches.
So when King George tried to sell her heroin, she just ran away.
We never see her eating McDonald's in the movie either.
I think I'm right about this.
Brandi: But King George wouldn't be selling her the heroin!
At least not according to her chain of killing.
me: That's true, but he might have seen him lurking in the background.
After all, Hamburglar doesn't sell Big Macs.
But he's always behind Ronald McDonald somewhere.
Brandi: Hmm ... I'm still skeptical.
That's all I'm saying.
Oh, the fish tank
me: Yes.
Brandi: Let's talk about that scene!
The most unnecessary scene in the movie
by far
me: Okay. We see an entire scene through a fish tank.
And it is Coffy and her congressman boyfriend walking around naked and talking about the fact that they just did it.
They she throws alcohol on his junk and goes down on him while the fish watch.
What part of this scene did you find unnecessary?
Brandi: It really had no point.
Except to give us women a little taste of nakedness involving a dude
or give gay guys.
me: Well, here's the thing.
If you think the film was about watching Pam Grier kick some butt, yeah, it makes no sense,
but if you think the film is about Pam Grier taking her clothes off, well, it's one of the most important scenes in the film.
Brandi: She was so aggressive in killing the men who ruined her sister's life
but so passive in relationships
I mean, she actually believed that congressman until the hooker came down the stairs.
And she gave him a bj even when he was like, "I can't go on vacation, I'm busy"
And even after I yelled, "Girl, he don't love you!"
me: I know.
It's a problem.
She's supposed to be killing people because they messed up her sister.
But, in the end, she kills the congressman because he cheated on her.
It violates the plot and makes her just a scorned woman, instead of someone taking their revenge in a world in which cops and politicians won't give her justice.
Brandi: It's like killing is the only way that she can assert herself because she's insecure with herself on the inside even though she is beautiful on the outside.
Very beautiful
And she's probably insecure because she was teased for being a bookworm in school
but in the end that saved her life
because no one even bothered to try to get her hooked on drugs.
me: That might be the case.
You do have to study a lot to get to be a nurse.
You think she was a nerd and a late bloomer?
Brandi: Yeah.
One of those awkward beauties in high school.
At the reunion guys would be chatting her up, not knowing that she was the same girl they taunted.
me: And then she'd get them in a back room, take off her clothes, and kill them with a steak knife she had hidden in her hair.
Brandi: Yeah, because she never found an outlet for her range until it was too late
and she justifies her killing tendencies because she also helps people as a nurse.
me: You see, the more you dig, the more sense the movie makes.
Brandi: Yes.
me: Anyway, what did you learn from this movie?
Brandi: 1. You should probably figure out the hierarchy of bad guys before you go on your killing spree. 2. Smack is wack! 3. Taking your clothes off is not the answer to all your problems, in fact, it probably makes them worse. 4. Proper hair maintenance is not only necessary to look good, it might be necessary to save your life.
me: All good points.
I learned that if you have a fish tank, your fish are probably going to watch you when you're doing it.
Also, if people have come to kill you, don't try to convince yourself that they are, instead, taking you out to a surprise party, because you're not going to like the surprise.

MORE BLAXPLOITATION!

GRANDPA Horatio Henry Wong
Tells us stories that are very long;
His storytelling is brisk and zealous
But it takes him more than a month to tell us
The story of when he fetched some water
And the story takes longer than it oughter;
His tale of playing cards with friends
Takes a fortnight to tell before it ends
And when his fishing story's begun
It takes six months until it's done;
He once spent a year telling a tale
About the afternoon he followed a snail;
He told us once of a dog he met
And he hasn't stop telling that story yet.
Is it so terrible, is it so wrong
That I don't want to listen to Grandpa Wong?
I should be fascinated by his every story
But instead I find they tend to bore me.
He speaks for hours in a dull monotone
And spins out tales in a deep baritone
And as I listen to this endless drone
I think: He's telling his stories,
But I should be living my own.

MORE FROM THE GARDEN OF VERSES!

THE LARGEST COLLECTION of art by an individual artist that I possess I don't have to do anything at all to acquire. I don't have to seek it out. I don't have to pay for it. All I do is regularly check my mail and, every so often, without warning, in my mailbox, there it is: art.

The artist is Tim Siragusa, a longtime friend from Omaha who I met through his work as a playwright and actor. Year's ago, when I first moved to Omaha, I started asking around about local theaters. A fellow I met told me about the Blue Barn Theatre, but, he warned, I should not go see the current play they had, title Reform School Timmy! So, of course, I went. The play was a satire of A Christmas Carol, scripted by Siragusa, in which a deeply closeted millionaire is visited by ghosts representing various elements of the homosexual underworld. They play drew from, and satirized, gay porn, and was one of the naughtiest things I had ever seen in my life. It was also exquisitely produced and actor by a team of artists, including Siragusa, who I am very privileged now to call my friends, and who have appeared in my plays as performers.

This is no accident. Upon seeing Reform School Timmy!, I decided to actively stalk the cast and crew. I began by writing a letter to the theater to express how impressed I was by their work, and to offer to help in whatever way they needed. The next day, when the letter arrived, the play's director called to invite me to a post-play party. I went, and Tim Siragusa was the first person I met.

Quite a few years ago, Tim began apply his talent to mail art. Without warning, I started to receive carefully constructed postcards, often created by a process of collage and built out of old magazine, pulp novels, and comic books. Later, Siragusa began to incorporate photography into his art, and the postcards he sent me started to feature semi- to completely nude young men, inspired by beefcake photography, but without the genres formal bodybuilding poses. Instead, Siragusa's images were often of men in informal, unposed shots, sometimes in masks.

Siragusa visited me this past weekend, and I took the opportunity to interview him about his postcards, his interest in beefcake photography, and why, after having been a playwright for years, he began working in the visual arts.



More from The Sparber Gallery.

FROM CHAPTER ONE:

Now, I make myself a drink and sit back and relax.

But don't get me wrong.

This doesn't mean that I'm relaxing. I don't consider a night of audition to be something I do on my time off.

I'll tell you more about my time off and what I do with it a little further on down.

But for now, I checked my watch. One minute to seven.

I like my girls to be on time.

Lateness in any business is not good.

In my business, it's positively deadly.

Now, as I sipped, I heard the knock at the door.

Good.

Punctuation is important.

More Dirty Books!

THERE WAS a brief window of gainful employment for me in the spring of 1990. I had moved out of the haunted apartment I described in the story behind "God Damn You Tom Brown," and had found work as a dance instructor for the Arthur Murray Dance Studio in Minnetonka. I taught advanced ballroom dancing, with particular focus on Latin dances, such as the mambo and the rhumba, which I can still do with a basic level of proficiency. I wrote this song about that time.

I was living in a house in the Bryn Mawr neighborhood near downtown Minneapolis with a young woman who wrote poetry. She and I had a troubled relationship, sometimes quite affectionate, sometimes quite difficult, and much of this was my fault, as I sometimes behaved in a romantic manner toward her, and sometimes was adamant that we should just be friends. I suspect this is pretty typical behavior for a 21-year-old, but that fact embarrasses me, as most 21-year-old boys are pretty wretched romantic partners. But she wasn't entirely blameless either, and so we went for four months or thereabouts, sometimes behaving like the best of friends and sometimes launching into noisy, nasty fights about nonsense. When she was angriest at me, she would write poems about me and leave them out for me to see, but she tended to write in a welter of emotion and so the exact points of her poems were often unclear. I would show them to friends, and ask what they thought the poems meant. "Don't know," my friends would answer. "But she's obviously angry at you."

She could also be quite cruel about my own attempts at creativity, such as this song, which she never heard sung but saw as lyrics on a piece of paper. "You sound like a rich kid trying to sound street smart," she said, which didn't seem fair to me. After all, the narrator of this song is obviously middle class, as was I. I was, instead, a boy trying to sound middle aged. I am middle aged now, so it is sort of strange to actually be the age of the intended narrator for this song when I wrote it. It seems, at worst, a little purple to me. Like a lot of my songs, I wrote it as though it had come from earlier in the 20th century, and, in this instance, placed it in a world where people play a card game called sheepshead and date recent Polish transplants. So the song was a fiction when I wrote it, but that doesn't seem deserving of the criticism she leveled against it. I still think the melody is appealing, and the story it tells, about a wife's fear that her husband will leave her, to be a story worth telling. But, then, I wrote the thing, so I suppose it is natural I might feel some affection for it, even if it has been almost two decades since I have tried to sing it.

I only worked at Arthur Murray for a few months, and then the business started failing and they let me go. I moved out to Los Angeles, had a few adventures there, and then returned to Minneapolis and became part of a rather active anarchist scene out here. One afternoon I ran into a fellow anarchist, a young woman, at the Hard Times Cafe in Cedar-Riverside, and we got to talking. It tuned out she knew the poet I had lived with, and she told a story about her. It seems this poet had organized a number of poetry readings around Minneapolis, and had been responsible for one that was especially notorious. She had read one of her own poems, a rather gloomy piece in which she repeatedly intoned "so empty inside, so empty inside." To hear the anarchist tell it, every time she read these lines, the audience laughed explosively.

There was one fellow in the audience who was quite taken with that phrase, and began to write it as a graffiti tag everywhere he went. In fact, I had seen those tags, all around the Twin Cities, written on walls in bathrooms and the side of bridges. So empty inside. So empty inside.

It was one of the poems that had been written about me.

I guess as a 21-year-old I had seemed like a pretty empty fellow. It was, after all, her criticism of my song: That it was an invention by someone without the experience to tell the story I was trying to tell. It was a fabrication by someone who was trying to sound more experienced than he was. I don't know. Maybe I was empty inside back then. She also claimed I had a tendency to try and sound like I knew more than I did, and, when I was in the company of people who actually did know what they were talking about, I tended to sound like an idiot.

Well, I'm 40 now, and I think, with this particular song, I now am the person who knows what he's talking about. I've both left people badly and been left badly, and know what it feels like to be afraid of that. And, honestly, though it may have been fiction when I wrote the song, I think I nailed how awful that feeling is.

"I'M GONNA MISS YOU WHEN I'M GONE" LYRICS:

Tomorrow ain't no tickertape
just another goddamn day.
We've got that schaffskopf game to look forward to --
The Valentes want us to play.
What with the strike in Hollycrest
and business in Oxborough,
I'm packed and my best shoes are on.
But I'm gonna miss you when I'm gone.

I've been seen around with that Polish girl.
You know she's caught my eye.
You should pinch up your painted lips
and kiss your wedded man goodbye.
I've got photographs of the other girl.
They don't invite comparison.
But I'm gonna miss you when I'm gone.

We were never a match that heaven made,
You were always afraid of me;
Not that I'd ever raise my hand to you
But I'd lie and I'd leave secretly.
We've reached the end of this particular story
And we're well into denouement;
But I'm gonna miss you when I'm gone

LISTEN TO "I'M GONNA MISS YOU WHEN I'M GONE":



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

THERE HAS ALWAYS been a sort of democratic myth to rock and roll. Get yourself a guitar and learn a few chords, and that's all you need, the myth goes. Rock and Roll is supposed to be a poor man's art, the sort of thing you can beat out on thrift shop instruments into an old tape recorder with a bare minimum of competence and nonetheless find an audience. Of course, there isn't really much to that myth. Most of the history of rock and roll is a history of corporate behemoths investing millions of dollars into highly polished acts in order to create hugely overproduced albums that made their way onto the charts thanks to an expensive system of payola.

But that doesn't mean the myth is entirely untrue. Take Beat Happening, as an example. When they started as a band, back in 1983 at Evergreen State College, the only instruments they had were a pair of maracas and an actual thrift shop guitar. They sang their songs in untrained, occasionally out-of-tune voices, and recorded their songs directly to audiocassettes. They refused to rehearse. They didn't have a bass player, and borrowed drum kits from friends for gigs. The songs they wrote, which recalled the songs children might improvise, seemed to some to be overly twee and affected. Critic Robert Christgau rankled at the band, writing that he found their "their neoprimitivist shtick a tired bohemian fantasy."

Nonetheless, the members of Beat Happening were, for a time, the darlings of the indie scene, and remain influential in the lo-fi movement nowadays. And while the band was capable of generating aesthetic revulsion, such as that expressed by Christgau, their studio recordings reveal more craft that they pretended. Beat Happening songs often feature melodies with a fine ear for pop hooks and cleverly tooled lyrics. They weren't nearly as primitive as Christgau made them out to be, either: songs often featured arch guitar lines that sounded borrowed from surf music, and their lyrics weren't so much childlike as dredged up from childhood memories. And, often, what they seemed to be remembering were old horror movies. Much of their 1989 album Black Candy consists of spooky little songs over menacing guitar riffs, and the album included songs with menacing titles like "Grave Digger Blues" and "bonfire."

Their fullest exploration of this theme is their song "Pajama Part in a Haunted Hive," also from Black Candy, which actually sounds like the title to a 1950s b-movie. Opening with howling feedback and an urgent electric guitar riff, the song soon introduces vocalist Calvin Johnson muttering and groaning in a deep baritone, which has been given so much reverb that is sounds like the growling of an animal. The song's actual lyrics, when they appear, are sung in Johnson's typical semi-monotone, and are among the band's most hallucinogenic, seemingly telling of an attack by ghostly bees, but told in a series of brief and highly repetitive rhymed lines: "Sting me queen bee queen sting dream me dream queen sting me sting queen," Johnson chants. He almost seems to be pleading to be attacked by the spectral insects, and, later, his voice becomes more insinuating, and more sexual. "Leave some honey, drippy runny, on your tummy, rich and yummy," Johnson purrs.

It is in the last stanza of the song that Johnson reveals the real horror of his encounter with the queen bee, and it has the shock of the climactic image from the sort of cheap horror film that seemed to inspire the song: "Bee hive in a haunted house, laying eggs inside my mouth," Johnson sings, and soon the song devolves into the same feedback and unearthly muttering that began it.

LISTEN TO "PAJAMA PARTY IN A HAUNTED HIVE":



MORE FROM THE ESSENTIAL GHOUL'S RECORD SHELF!

SAY, is there something you want me to see?
Have you brought something to show to me?
You've got a surprise, and I just know it;
Don't be shy now, go ahead, show it.
Is it a gift? That's the last thing I'd thought!
When we've so often quarreled and shouted and fought!
A box! With a ribbon! And intended for me?
I should open it now, don't you agree?
Why do you run, capering and kicking?
And your gift to me -- say, why is it ticking?

MORE FROM THE GARDEN OF VERSES!

FOR ALL TRUE LOVERS OF WINE, WOMEN, AND SONG --

here is a unique collection of boisterous ballads and zesty lyrics from yesteryear. Long out of print, this fun-filled volume contains naughty ditties and your favorite army songs, drinking songs, and ballads of the sea.

Remember "Dirty Gerie from Bizerte"? Well, here she is, along with "Frankie and Johnnie," "Casey Jones," and some lesser-known but unforgettable personalities like "Poor Polly the Mad Girl," and "The Amsterdam Maid" -- who was "mistress of her trade!"

All in all, this grab bag of clever rhymes will keep you entertained from beginning to end.

THREE SAMPLES FROM THE BOOK:

He is not drunk who, from the floor,
Can rise again and drink some more;
But he is drunk who prostrate lies,
And cannot drink or cannot rise.
--Eugene Field

It Has Happened, We Understand

In Atlanta it was Mabel,
In Mobile her name was Flo.
Cincinnati it was Dollie,
Betty Jo in Buffalo,
In old Philly it was Mary,
Down in Tampa it was Jen,
But on his expense account sheet,
It was "Meals and Gasoline."

A Taking Girl

She took my hand in sheltered nooks,
She took my candy and my books,
She took that lustrous wrap of fur,
She took those gloves I bought for her.
She took my words of love and care,
She took my flowers, rich and rare,
She took my time for quite awhile,
She took my kisses, maid so shy --
She took, I must confess, my eye,
She took whatever I would buy,
And then she took another guy.

More Dirty Books!

WELL, HERE IS something I wasn't expecting to find myself doing when I started this project: Singing in Hebrew. There's a long story to this, and a short story, and I'll stick to the short one, as the long one is too long.

I went to a Jewish high school in Minneapolis for two years, Maiminonides High School, which was a relatively short-lived school, but, I must say, offered quite a good education. Even to this day, my head swims with Talmud, and, sometimes, in my dreams, I will find myself speaking fluent Hebrew, something I am incapable of doing in my waking life, despite having studied the language for a decade. It's accurate Hebrew in my dreams as well -- I wake remembering snippets of it, and the vocabulary and syntax is correct, even though I would not have constructed such a sentence when awake, and had often forgotten the words.

So, for a while, I was also a Jewish Studies major in college. It wasn't a very hard subject for me, and the program wasn't terribly sophisticated. Mostly I was left alone to study whatever interested me, which was Yiddish culture in Europe, but included such side-trails as the strange history of false Jewish messiahs and the questionable origins of many Kabbalistic. I poured most of what I learned into my play Kishinev, but with whatever leftover creative energy, I wrote a number of songs. In the intervening years, I forgot them all, until tonight.

Tonight I was just goofing off on my ukulele when I played a little melody that sounded awfully familiar to me. And then it all came back to me at once -- melody, lyrics, everything. I didn't write the lyrics, which come from the Book of Ruth, but I put it to music. Looking at it now, there's a bad break in the lyrics -- I sort of cleave a sentence in half. But I still think the melody is lovely. I wrote it back in 1994, during my years as a Jewish Studies major.

The Hebrew, from Ruth 1:16, translates as follows: For whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.

I chose this passage because it has always interested me. It is now part of the Jewish wedding ceremony, but, when uttered, were the words of one women, Ruth, to another, Orpah. There has been some speculation that Ruth's words were the text to an early conversion ceremony; Ruth herself was not Jewish, but King David and King Solomon are among her descendants, and the Messiah is also supposed to be from her bloodline. Aside from the considerable scholarship that has gone into the Book of Ruth, I suspect I was attracted to the lines just because I find them to be quite romantic.

LISTEN TO "RUTH":



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

I DON'T KNOW that Stacey Vett
Oughta have a lion for a pet
Each time they go to visit the park
There are sounds of screaming in the dark
Every time they take a walk
They leave an outline made of chalk
Do not ask Stacey about her school
The stories she tells are just too cruel
But every class that they attended
Badly began and badly ended
Her friends have started to avoid her
When previously they had enjoyed her
She showers her friends with hugs and kissing
But each day another friend goes missing
But she loves her lion and says that she needs him
And the lion adores her
As long as she feeds him

MORE FROM THE GARDEN OF VERSES!

I BOUGHT THIS BOOK a few months ago at Big Brain Comics in downtown Minneapolis, and, when I did so, the shop's owner, Michael Drivas, stared at the book for a long moment when he rang it up. "I've never seen a book better matched to its target audience," he said.

"Ah," I thought. "You've been reading my blog."

He was right. If there was ever anyone likely to buy a collection of risque illustrations by Sunday morning funny pages illustrators, it is I. And not simply because of the obvious pleasure of looking at drawings of shapely females in various degrees of undress, but also because I love a secret. I can't quite explain why it makes me happy to discover that Superman creator Joe Shuster later did fetish drawings for cheap paperbacks, but it does. The illustrations are great fun as well, looking, as they do, like a panel from early Superman comics, except that Shuster's dastardly villains have not simply kidnapped women, but are parading them around in frilly nightclothes. One illustration shows a woman who looks very much like Lois Lane on her knees, head very close to the lap of a fellow who looks uncomfortably like Clark Kent. Near them, on the floor, is a riding crop.

I always suspected I wasn't the only one who beheld Sunday comics with a certain amount of curiosity. Some of the female characters were drawn with a taste for pulchritude, and I often wondered if the illustrators ever illustrated them sans clothes, simply because they could. Mort Walker, for instance, seemed to have indulged an erotic impulse in creating Miss Buxley for Beetle Bailey, and, as this book demonstrates, he wasn't above stripping her down to her bare essentials when the mood struck him. Dennis the Menace's mother always seemed to me -- somewhat uncomfortably -- like she was created by a man with an eye toward erotic possibilities. This book points out that Hank Ketcham had an early career drawing racier cartoons for mens magazines, and the printed samples are quite funny, including an image of a sailor pouring a glass of wine for a pert brunette and telling her "I like a little port in every girl."

Editor Craig Yoe seems to be striving to be as comprehensive as possible, and so has included a few cartoonists who seem to ever have only drawn one risque cartoon in their entire life. But they are given rather detailed biographies, leading me to wonder if this book isn't some clever scheme to familiarize perverts with the work of the 20th century's great cartoonists. But, then, some entries, like the ones for Steve Canyon creator Milton Caniff, Spider Man illustrator Steve Ditko, and Mad Magazine great Wally Wood, show them to be artists who seemed to be longing for the world of underground comix years before such a thing existed. Caniff frequently drew images of ravished women, lying about in a post-orgasmic state, identified by Caniff as being recent conquests of his adventuring comic book hero. Ditko is represented by something called Battling Bondage Babes, a full-fledged fetish magazine that was illustrated by a fellow named Eric Stanton, with whom Ditko shared a studio and, based on the panels printed in this book, for whose comic Ditko sometimes provided art. Minnesota native Wally Wood, in the meanwhile, actually dove into the counterculture headfirst, most notoriously illustrating a double-truck spread for Paul Krassner's countercultural magazine The Realist showing Disney characters in an eye-popping assortment of lurid situations, including bestiality, drug abuse, and prostitution (one image has Goofy mounting Minnie Mouse on a filthy mattress, a few dollars flung onto the ground behind him, while Mickey Mouse's nephews look on, grinning.)

And, returning to the subject of Superman, Wood illustrated a one-panel cartoon in which the man of steel exits a city park, buttoning up his tights and leaving behind a statue of a naked women whose crotch has been jackhammered away. Prior to reading this book, I might have thought such an image to be disrespectful to Joe Shuster; now I suspect he might have approved.

More Dirty Books!

FANS WHO ENJOY the original Star Trek for its kitsch value are, in general, mad for the few recordings made by William Shatner, in which the actor emotes, rather than sings, such popular hits as "Rocket Man" over a bombastic orchestral rock arrangement. There is plenty to be said about the pleasures of Shatner, and I have said a lot of it right here on this blog, but while fans obsess over the recording career of Captain Kirk, they tend to neglect that the Enterprise's First Officer also put out a series of albums.

Looking back on the show now, Leonard Nimoy's performance is one of the few elements of Star Trek that isn't accidentally laced with camp. His Spock was at once solemn and yet unexpectedly catty. Although we are repeatedly reminded that Spock is a Vulcan, and, therefore, devoid of emotion, Nimoy gives his character a palpable joy in verbal jousting, and often allows the alien a hint of a smirk when he lobs a really smart zinger at his nemesis, ship's doctor "Bones" McCoy. It's a great characterization -- I would argue one of the best in the history of television. Author Neal Stephenson recently discussed Nimoy's performance, pointing out that Nimoy was so good that no other actor has ever really seemed believable as a Vulcan afterward. (I would argue that Mark Lenard, who played Spock's father Sarek with a sort of weary and irritable intelligence, came close.)

But after Star Trek ended, Nimoy seemed to have ambivalent feelings about the subject. He put out an autobiography in 1977 called I Am Not Spock, although the book itself contains many affectionate memories of the character (and even a few invented dialogues between Nimoy and Spock!) He later followed this up with I Am Spock in 1995. (The Simpsons also credited him with authoring a book titled I Am Also Scotty.)

Nimoy had a surprisingly active recording career, releasing five albums on a label called Dot, one of them, Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy from 1968, directly addressing his bifurcated identity as Nimoy and Spock -- the album features two photos of him on the cover, one as the Vulcan, one as himself. The first side of the album featured songs that Spock might have sung, were he so inclined, including compositions titled "Spock Thoughts" and "Highly Illogical." The second side, presumably, featured Nimoy being himself, including the folk-rock classics "If I Were a Carpenter" and "Love of the Common People." (No relation to "Common People," the stupendous cover of the Pulp song that featured William Shatner and Joe Jackson and appeared on the Ben Folds-produced Has Been.) This side of the album also features a song that has become one of Nimoy's most notorious, "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins," which retells the story of The Hobbit as an insipid children's song.

The song we are looking at today is called "Alien," and is from an album that doesn't bother to attempt to separate Nimoy from Spock: 1967's Leonard Nimoy presents Mr. Spock's Music from Outer Space. The cover shows Nimoy dressed as Spock and holding a model of the Enterprise, and all of the songs are exclusively those Mr. Spock might have sung, were he to have chosen a career as a lounge entertainer rather than a science officer. On hand are "Music to Watch Space Girls By," "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Earth," and, for some reason, "Where is Love" from the musical Oliver!

"Alien" is the second song from the album, and is the one written most explicitly from Spock's point of view. It is not so much a song as a dramatic reading of a poem, spoken in a careful enunciation that is instantly recognizable as the voice of Nimoy's Star Trek character. "Am I the you before, the you you were when the world was new?" Nimoy asks, rather confusingly. "Or am I the you that you will be tomorrow?"

"No heart or feelings show in me," Nimoy tells us in another tortured sentence. "Perhaps I'm better off than you, for I see things without emotion, as they are. Some may envy me, but I pay a price to be from human feelings free."

The song's arrangement is rather schizophrenic, starting with bombastic kettle drums and a military snare rhythm that segues into stabbing pizzicato violins and howling Moog sounds that are, one suspects, meant to recall the Star Trek theme. But occasionally, the strings take over and grow morose, sounding like a lament played by a klezmer band. Perhaps this too is meant to represent the struggle between Nimoy and Spock -- sometimes the soaring spaceman, sometimes a Jewish actor from Canada. I find it helps when listening to this song to shout "I am Spock!" when he seems to be in one mood, and "I'm not Spock" when he is in another.

LISTEN TO "ALIEN":



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I DIDN'T MEAN for it to happen. But there it is, all over the Internet.

My penis.

Sometimes you make a bad choice when it comes to eveningwear. You pick a skirt that is too short, and, of course, you don't want visible panty lines, and so you go without underwear. And there it is, on a gossip site the next day, images of you climbing out of the limo, your member hanging below the hem of your skirt like the knocker of a bell.

I know what people are saying. I planned it. It was some cheap gimmick to get attention. After all, why did I wear that particular skirt? Why did I even wear a skirt at all? Well, say what you will. Sometimes a man just likes to feel fancy, especially at a gala opening, like the one this past week. And, after all, I wasn't the only man there in a skirt. Chef Gordon Ramsey wore a sultry number from Marc Jacobs, while Harrison Ford pranced around the red carpet in a sporty design by Alexander McQueen.

I'm terribly embarrassed about the whole thing. Not that I am ashamed of my penis. Oh, no. In fact, it looked especially fine in the photo -- bold and curious, if a little disheveled. But it's not the sort of thing you want to wave about in public, and certainly not at a formal affair. I have already written a formal letter of apology to the Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as a generalized apology to my fellow guests at the event, which will be published in the Los Angeles Times on Monday as a full-page ad. There is a lot of damage control that must be done when something like this happens, and it is expensive, and I think the people who claim I did it on purpose should be aware of the fact.

I know there are rumors that I shouted "Hey, fellas, get a load of this!" to the paparazzi before deliberately hiking up my skirt. Digital videos taken from the scene show me shouting something, but it is garbled. I don't quite recall what I shouted, but I think it was a cheery shout of hello to Paris Hilton, who, I should point out, was also photographed with her skirt shoved aside to reveal her genitalia that evening, which I am certain was also an accident.

I am not as certain about what happened with the Olsen Twins. It seems unlikely that both of their tops would happen to come off at the exact same moment, and that they would not notice for over an hour as they paraded back and forth in front of photographers. They claim they were both suffering exhaustion from their busy work schedules, and, while this is not much of an excuse, I suppose it will have to do. Courtney Love has offered no excuse at all for her behavior, or tried to suggest that it was accidental, but, then, she is Courtney Love, and if you don't want urine in your soup tureen, you don't invite her.

As to the reasons why the entire cast of CSI: Miami launched into a naked brawl, with Emily Procter menacing Adam Rodriguez with a balisong knife while David Caruso, wearing nothing but his signature sunglasses, attacked Khandi Alexander with a qiang spear -- well, I hesitate to speculate, although I have heard that there has been a lot of personality conflict on the CSI set.

In retrospect, the small cameo appearance by penis doesn't seem like it should have attracted as much attention as it did last night. You'd think the press would have made a much bigger fuss about the moment when the last 13 Miss Americas marched in front of them, hoisted up their dresses, and set fire to their pubic hair. But, instead, today it is me that writes the letter of apology and must pay for a full-page ad in the Times.

Oh well. Lesson learned. Now, if you will excuse me, my agent tells me that the phone has been ringing off the hook this morning with offers from the studios. Just a coincidence, I'm sure, but, still, next time I'm on the red carpet, I shall have to remember to schedule an appointment with my esthetician. I can't have my little fellow looking like something out of seventies adult film. Not again.

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

SUBTITLED "The obsessions of John Waters," this book is one of a handful I took with me out to Los Angeles when I moved there in 1990, in part because of an essay called "John Waters' Tour of L.A." that features such little-known sites as adult filmmaker Russ Meyer's house/museum and the Pet Haven Cemetery-Crematory. But I also brought the book because the essays by trash filmmaker Waters neatly list his various interests, sometimes in numerical order, such as his "Puff Piece (101 Things I Love)." This list includes author James Purdy and Farrah Fawcett "you-do-the-hairdos" busts, the latter of which he has given Sixties' hairstyles (they are visible behind him on the book's cover).

Years after I bought this book, I was in Minneapolis volunteering at radio station KFAI, where I did occasional news bits. I got word that John Waters was going to be speaking at the University of Minnesota that evening, and I called on behalf of the station and arranged to attend. Then I grabbed a field recording kit and headed across campus. I arrived just in time to find a seat for his lecture. Afterward, I made my way out to the hallway, where Waters was signing autographs, and spoke to the fellow who organized the show. I asked him if I could interview Waters, and he seemed put-off by the notion. "I don't know," he said. "We have to get Mr. Waters to the airport in 45 minutes, and the people who actually did the work to get this show set up are hoping for a little time with him."

"If it helps," I said, "I only have three questions."

The fellow nodded. "I'll ask Mr. Waters if he minds," he said.

A few moments later, John Waters and I sat across from each other at an outdoor table while a group of volunteers, all of whom were waiting to meet John Waters, sat a few tables over and watched me jealously. I set my portable recorder between myself and the filmmaker, set up the microphone, and switched it on. Waters, in his usual uniform of natty suit and thin tie, watched me curiously, grinning slightly. "So," he said. "You have three questions."

"Actually, I don't," I said. "But you mentioned during your lecture that you had been to the trial of Ramona Africa."

"Yes," he said. "I also went when she was released from prison. She was fabulous. She left the prison in a white stretch limo, and stood up through the sun roof, and waved at everybody."

"As it happens," I said, "I spent the day with Ramona Africa yesterday."

Ramona Africa, for those of you who don't know it, was the lone adult survivor of a bomb the Philadelphia police dropped on a collectively owned house run by MOVE, a mostly black revolutionary group in which each member adopted the surname Africa. Ramona had been in Minneapolis the previous day to speak to local lefty groups, and myself and my friend Jeff, as members of the local lefty community, had been tasked with driving her around. Jeff and I were planning to start a zine, and we took this opportunity to have an extended interview with Ramona Africa in her hotel room, where she gave us a first-person account of the MOVE house conflagration that was utterly harrowing.

I told John Waters this, and his eyes widened. He was starstruck. He has long been a fan of high-profile trials, and made it a habit for years to sit in the audience for them.

45 minutes later, when John Waters had to leave for the airport, we were still talking. I could see the people at the other table, the people who had labored to set up the lecture by John Waters, and now weren't going to have a moment to talk with him. They were not happy.

But my talk with Waters had been great. We discussed zine culture, which he loved. "Most of it is terrible," he told me. "But there are a few people out there who are really writing about what they love." He told me that when he made Pink Flamingos, he titled the film after several plastic flamingos actress Divine had purchased to decorate the mobile home that was to serve as her character's main set. Waters had realized that Divine had not bought the decorative birds because they were trashy, or kitschy, but because she really thought they were pretty. That's the sort of thing that interested Waters, he explained. Young people enjoy things for their ironic value too much, he complained, but he preferred it when people really adored and valued the things that others would sneer at. Some zines do that, he said, and those were the zines he read.

As we got ready to say goodbye, John Waters told me the he had always wondered about one of the members of MOVE, Sue Africa, who was one of the organizations only white members. I told him I could probably find out, and he handed me a business card with his home address and phone number on it. "Don't give this information out to anyone else," he told me, rather sternly.

I had his card for years. Eventually, all of my contacts were stolen from me when I forgot my dayplanner in a Vegas Greyhound station bathroom, and his card with it. I never got back to him about Sue Africa, and, for some reason, KFAI did not run my interview with him. I kept the tape for years, but it, like Waters card, eventually disappeared.

Well, Mr. Waters, if you're reading this, as far as I can tell Sue Africa was still with MOVE as recently as 2005, working in landscaping and newspaper delivery, while Ramona Africa was still touring the country giving speeches to leftist organizations.

In the meanwhile, I still have Waters' book on my shelf, and still glance through it when I'm looking for ideas for a little adventure. I've looked at almost every recommendation he lists in his book in the 20 years I've owned it, but rereading his writing reminds me that there is a lot out there that other people might sneer at, but, if given half a chance, is worth adoring.

More from the Sparber Bookshelf.

THIS SONG, written in 1997, was based on a little ragtime riff that I had first learned on guitar years earlier, perhaps as far back as when I was 18. I later cannibalized the song for the Sailor Martin film "The Big One with Sailor Martin." The song in its original form appears in my play The Older Gentleman, along with a number of my other early songs.

"WHEN YOU'RE MY MRS" LYRICS:

Will there be love
Will there be kisses
What will there be
When you're my mrs
Will you greet me
With kisses and tea
Or will you lock up
And throw out the key
It has been said
That we are to wed
What will it be
What will it be

Is this sweet joy
Is this what bliss is
Is this our life
When you're my mrs
Say will you sing
When I bring my ring
Or will you just scowl
And toss out the thing
It has been said
That we are to wed
What will it bring
What will it bring

LISTEN TO "WHEN YOU'RE MY MRS":



DOWNLOAD "WHEN YOU'RE MY MRS."

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

"SQUEEZE THE FREEZE." So says the wrapper, which is really more of a plastic pouch with a cartoon image of a boy in a striped shirt and beanie, beads of sweat flying from his forehead, or perhaps they are tears pouring from his eyes, while his mouth puckers grotesquely. Who could resist such a treat?

As with most sour treats, this disappoints, in the sense that it doesn't leave you wanting to spit it out and rush yourself to a nearby emergency room. That being said, this is a tasty dessert. It's a little like one of those sno-cones you get on a hot summer day (they call them snowballs in New Orleans, and eat them by the millions), but more syrupy, and somewhat more sour, and less artificial tasting. According to the pouch's list of ingredients, the Tear Jerker contains that rarest of ingredients: something from the natural world, in this instance, concentrated cherry juice. The Odd Ingester briefly was actually tempted to weep upon eating the Tear Jerker, but not tears of agony from its mild sourness. Instead, it was tears of pleasure upon eating something that actually tastes like food.

More from the Odd Ingester!

LAKE CHARLES, LOUISIANA, isn't precisely known for straight rhythm and blues. The southwest city instead gave the world zydeco, a creole music in every sense of the word -- the genre, with its driving rhythm and push button accordion, is one of Louisiana's indigenous musical forms, produced by its Creole people, and created by blending together an astounding variety of musical influences. The first Zydeco hit record, Boozoo Chavis's "Paper in My Shoe," was recorded in Lake Charles in 1954, and while the song shares a certain melodic similarity to the rhythm and blues of the era, its also sounds a little like folk music, and a little like Cajun music, and a little like country, in the way that zydeco does.

But there was a studio near Lake Charles called Crowley, owned by a man named J. D. Miller, who often released his recordings through a Nashville label called Excello Records, and Miller recorded more than zydeco. It was Miller that released much of Slim Harpo's work, as well as other artists who have come to be identified as "swamp blues" (such as Lightnin' Slim) and "swamp pop" (such as King Karl and Guitar Gable). Miller's story has a disquieting little coda: Although he was a fan of the blues, recording blues and R&B artists, used integrated bands, and even wrote blues songs under a pseudonym, he was also an unapologetic segregationist and produced a number of astoundingly racist records by an artist named Johnny Rebel.

Miller was obviously a conflicted man, but his appreciation for African-American musical genres was legitimate, and he discovered a briefly recorded a fellow named Charles Sheffield, a blues artist from Beaumont, Texas who occasionally recorded under the name Mad Dog Sheffield, after a song, titled "Mad Dog," he had recorded for another Lake Charles studio, Goldband. Sheffield's career was abbreviated -- this song seems to have been something of a regional hit, but his follow up records reportedly had trouble finding an audience, and Sheffield is supposed to have gotten sick of the music business and dropped out. As far as I can tell, this story is far from official -- the careers of obscure regional R&B artists from the 50s and 60s are rarely well-documented, and Sheffield's tale is particularly is especially poorly known.

Whatever happened to him, "It's Your Voodoo Working" is superb, and deserved to be better known. Starting with a hammering rhythm featuring fine use of claves and a sputtering bass saxophone, Sheffield's song featuring a rolling melody. Sheffield had an expressive R&B voice: He alternates between stabbing at melody and sustaining on certain words, often those that tip into the "worried" note -- the moment, typical in blues-based music, in which the performer lets his voice dip a semitone below the major scale. Sheffield wrote the song, and the lyrics are great. He tells of how his everyday experience has been made unfamiliar by a woman: "My sugar says tastes sour and my salt tastes sweet / I wanna lay down but I just can't sleep," Sheffield sings. "It's your voodoo working!"

Between the verses, there is a brief interstitial riff, and this is the moment that Sheffield and producer Miller took to make the song sound utterly unworldly: Sheffield launches into a high, quavering falsetto while a tenor saxophone plays a nervous counterpoint, sounding, for just two bars, like some swamp banshee had begun wailing.

LISTEN TO "IT'S YOU VOODOO WORKING":



MORE FROM THE ESSENTIAL GHOUL'S RECORD SHELF!

STRAIGHT FROM THE HOOKERS ...

From the madame to the hardline hustler, the ins and outs of the professional prostitute are explored in the fascinating personal study of today's hookers. Nine prostitutes tell their own stories--how they got started in "the world's oldest profession," what, besides money, they get out of it, who the "johns" are.

Meet Wendy: "What I'd really like to do is start a school--to teach women how to be good lays."

And British Valerie: "Personally, I'm out for myself--to get what I can and all I can out of the men. Maybe one of these days I'll meet one I love and respect ..."

There's Adele and Evelyn: "Ev is the only person who means anything to me--and she means everything!" "I couldn't live without Adele."

These are the hookers, in their rare moments of candor, speaking with total honesty and ironic wit.

More Dirty Books!

IN 1972, AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL PICTURES, an independent outfit that specialized in low-budget teen and horror films, combined Blaxploitation with the vampire movie to come up with Blackula. They smartly cast William Marshall in the title role -- Marshall was an imposing actor, tall and gaunt, with a majestic, theatrical presence and a booming voice. The film starts at Castle Dracula in Transylvania, where Marshall first appears as an African prince to demand help from Dracula in ending the slave trade. Dracula, it turns out, is something of a racist, and attacks the prince, burying him in a coffin and leaving his wife to starve to death alongside him.

Two hundred years later, two sterotypoically gay interior decorators purchase the coffin and bring it to Los Angeles, accidentally releasing Marshall, now a vampire called Blackula. The vampire discovers a woman who appears to be the reincanation of his wife, but as he attempts to woo her, a local doctor discovers his vampirism and enlists the police to help him hunt down Blackula.

me: Let's get in on with Blackula, or, as I like to call it, for colored ghouls who have considered suicide when the vein flow is enuff.
Brandi: Hee!
me: Perhaps we should start with Blackula himself.
Because he was awesome.
Brandi: Yes.
He was.
me: Could William Marshall be cooler?
I mean, not only was he Blackula, but also the King of Cartoons on Pee Wee Herman.
And he's obviously Shakespearean trained.
He treats Blackula like Shakespeare.
Brandi: Yes, my mom mentioned that he was shakespearean trained
me: So here's what I am thinking.
The whole storyline about Blackula getting cursed to be a vampire, and his wife dying, and him discovering her reincarnated, and that being the whole plot line?
Completely ripped off by Francis Ford Coppola for his Dracula movie.
Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula is a remake of Blackula.
Brandi: Wait, that's why he fell in love with that woman?
me: Yes.
Brandi: How did I miss that entire thing.
I was paying attention, I swear!
me: I don't know how you missed it.
The actress who plays his African wife?
Vonetta McGee.
Brandi: Yeah, the one who escaped from the set of Cleopatra.
me: The actress who plays his American girlfriend?
Vonetta McGee
Brandi: Huh.
Yeah, okay.
That explains that.
me: And then he has, like, three discussions about the fact that she is his reincarnated girlfriend.
That's why he chases her around Los Angeles.
Brandi: Let's back up
and and talk about the opening credits
me: Oh yes.
Brandi: Coco was right, it totally was a Tampax commercial.
me: It was a bat chasing a little red dot around.
Animated.
It did look like a commercial for a feminine hygene product.
Brandi: That was not a happy period.
me: That's why women need tampons.
Otherwise, they attract bats.
Brandi: Hmm...someone should really start marketing tampons using that angle
I think they could really convince some tampon hold-outs to switch over
me: The commerical is already made!
Brandi: I know!
me: Nobody wants to be bloated and also be chased by vampire bats!
Brandi: No, but back to the main movie
I think in blaxploitation movies there is always one clothing change that doesn't make sense.
me: AT LEAST one.
Brandi: In this movie, how did Blacula get a new outfit when he was in the coffin the entire time.
me: He must have changed in the coffin.
Brandi: That coffin was already too small for him!
me: All I know is, every time someone was turned into a vampire in this movie, they then showed up in vampire-appropriate attire.
So I must assume that vampires are pretty fashion conscious.
Brandi: I don't know. His cape was awesome but he was just wearing a blue button down.
I think people in jail wear those
me: Yeah. It was pretty cheap.
When he went to the night club, he was the worst dressed guy there.
I think that's why nobody made a fuss about him being dressed like a vampire.
They didn't want to embarrass him about his shabby vines.
Speaking of which, am I crazy, or are club scenes in Blaxploitation films always the best scenes in the film?
Brandi: I asked my mom about that and she said "black people love to get down"
This week in obvious, mom.
But that club scene was especially fun.
me: I want to find that clubs!
Brandi: Like the rest of the clubs were okay but this club was off both the hook and the chain.
me: Truly.
Brandi: About Blacula at the club.
I love how they were willing to asking him "subtle" questions about him possibly being a vampire
but no one seemed to take issue with the fact that dude was foreign AND dressed like a vampire.
Maybe they could ask him a bit about his background.
me: That's true. His antagonist, Dr. Gordon Thomas, was all up in his grill about vampires.
Brandi: He was all up in his nut and crackin' it.
me: But it's much later on that the doctor is, like, HOLY SHIT, I think THAT GUY is the vampire!
Really, you're just figuring that out now?
Then why were you bothering him about vampires at the club?
Just making conversation?
Brandi: Also, Dr. Thomas didn't seem to share all of the information he discovered
Like maybe you want to let people know that their gun won't really work
I mean, I know budgets were tight back then but I'm sure they could get hooked up with some crosses, garlic or holy water
Crosses - they're not expensive.
me: I know.
For a while I was okay with it.
I mean, you're a black doctor in the Seventies. You don't want to go running into a white police station screaming VAMPIRES!
They'll lock you up for that and take away your license.
But once you and the police detective have spent an hour setting fire to the undead, maybe it is time to let the reast of the police force know that the pistols are not going to do the trick.
Brandi: Exactly!
Yeah, there was a lot of poor decision making going on
now I understand why homeland security can't get anything right
me: If we ever get attacked by terrorist vampires, we are screwed.
Back to the club.
The band was GREAT.
Brandi: They were and that woman in the blue, she really broke it down!
me: The Hues Corporation.
I want to track down some of their music.
And they had white people playing the instruments.
And half of the people in the club were white.
Brandi: They were quite integrated.
me: I'm guessing the filmmakers just couldn't round up enough extras.
But it was like a vision of racial harmony.
Even the gay couple was interracial!
Brandi: And so very gay!
me: Oh my God. Blaxploitation films hate gay people so very much.
Gay people are so hideously stereotyped in these films.
Although, in fairness, Blackula didn't seem to care whether they were gay or not.
To him, they were just a snack.
Brandi: They were horribly stereotyped
and not even well.
I mean their decorating sense was horrible
me: I can't leave the club alone.
I want to talk about Skillet.
His only purpose was to show up at the table when Blackula was there, drink his champagne, and talk crazy.
"That is one ... WEIRD ... dude."
I loved Skillet.
Brandi: He was the Jazz of that club
I expected Uncle Phil to show up and throw him out
He was also the slowest talker ever.
me: He was played by Ji-Tu Cumbuka.
As far as I can tell, that guy was the best known actor in the film when they started filming it.
He was in Brian's Song!
He was like a walk on cameo.
The whole film should have taken place at the club, and Skillet should have narrated.
If I ever do a stage version of Blackula, that's how I'm going to do it.
"The Hues Corporation were just starting their hit 'Don't rock the Boat' when one ... WEIRD ... dude ... came in."
Brandi: I was going to mention a stage version of blackula
Has there been one?
me: No, no stage versions yet.
AIP Pictures, call me.
Brandi: That's surprising.
me: AIP was really in the business of making Beach Movies.
Beach Blanket Bingo.
Also Edgar Allen Poe movies.
I don't think they had really mastered Blaxploitation when they made this film.
Some of it seemed a little forced, and some of it should have been MORE outrageous.
Like Cleoptara Jones has all these little vignettes that are like, snapshots of a community. This didn't feel as authentic.
Brandi: Yeah, the fight scenes were too realistic.
me: There were no drug dealers.
Brandi: None at all.
me: The costumes could have been MUCH crazier.
Brandi: Yes, everyone was so conservatively dress
and considering how ridiculous the plot was, that just didn't make sense.
me: And the dialogue seemed forced.
There was no jive talking.
I WANT JIVE TALKING.
Skillet talked a little jive, but I'm convinced he improvised all of his own dialogue.
At least the film had a white, overworked detective who was sort of sympathetic.
I'm, surprised how often that character shows up in Blaxploitation.
He was played by Thalmus Rasulala, who played almost the same character in New Jack City.I got beat up in Los Angeles the day New Jack City opened.
There was a race riot in Westwood.
But I don't blame Thalmus Rasulala.
Brandi: Wow, you've been in a real race riot?
me: Oh yes.
Brandi: Did you tell people to get along?
me: Yes. There were a group of black kids trying to set fire to a car, and I went up and tapped them on the shoulder and said, hey, can't we all get along.
Then they beat me up.
Brandi: Hmm...that's poor decision making on your part
me: I was just trying to help.
Brandi: #102 in Stuff White People Like
me: Race riots?
Or just getting along?
Brandi: Helping in situations that you're more than likely not going to help but rather get your ass kicked in.
me: Well, the truth is I was just trying to get home.
Those guys jumped me.
But they were trying to set fire to a car.
I don't know what their plans were once it caught fire.
Make smores, maybe.
Brandi: Perhaps.
They probably ran out of fire wood for their bonfire but needed to keep the party going
because, as we've learned, black people love to get down.
Let's talk about some of the unexpected stars
me: Yes. You mean actors in the film that you think look like other celebrities?
Brandi: Yes. There was Tracy Morgan as the black cop
me: You mean Dr. Gordon Thomas! He wasn't a cop! He's the doctor!
Brandi: Oh, well, he was working for the cops
and Stacy Dash/Mya as the sassy waitress.
me: She wasn't a waitress!
She was the doctor's assistant!
Brandi: Oh right, I got her confused with someone else
Yes.
My bad.
me: You never really know who anybody is in a film, do you?
Brandi: Not really, I didn't take notes on it.
me: If they're near a cop, they must be a cop.
Brandi: Yes.
me: If they're in a club, they must be a waitress.
Brandi: Also, Andy Griffith was in the film as the medical examiner.
I did know about the ME
probably because I saw one outside your apt
me: That's true. Another night when Brandi comes by and someone in my apartment building dies.
Like the last time.
When that guy was dead in his shower for a week.
And we smelled him in the hall.
Brandi: I thought it was 2 weeks.
me: However long it takes to decompose in the shower so much that the smell gets into the hall.
At least last night there was no smell.
Brandi: Eww
me: Elisha Cook Jr. was the ME by the way, and he looks nothing like Andy Griffith.
Not all white people look alike, you know.
Brandi: Let me see Elisha Cook, hold on
Okay, maybe he actually looks like himself.
and that's why he looked familar
me: You've seen him in a zillion films.
Great character actor. Totally wasted in this film.
For some reason, he had a hook for a hand.
No reason at all.
Maybe the filmmakers knew he was a boring character, and were, like, how do we make him interesting?
Maybe if we add a hook!
Brandi: Yeah, the hook served no purpose.
And he enjoyed scratching his head with the hook.
me: Yeah. He was trying to make the most of the hook.
Brandi: He really is a good actor!
me: Elisha Cook Jr.'s death scene was the only scary moment in the entire films.
Brandi: I was scared about how ash-y the vampires were
It's like, damn, get some lotion.
me: I know! I think they were supposed to look dead, but they just looked like Ashy Larry.
Some hot oil will take care of that problem, vampires!
If vampires can get themselves a whole new wardrobe, they can also stop by the beauty store and get some African Pride Hair Scalp & Skin Oil Mist.
Brandi: Or even some vasoline
I mean, in a pinch.
You just can't let your skin get that dry
even Ashy Larry was embarassed for them.
me: At least the worst thing that happened to Blackula was that he got weird facial hair.
No problems with being ashy.
Brandi: Yeah, he had a weird reverse muttonchop thing going
like his eyebrows connected to his hair
and then he got a cheekstache
It was all very strange.
I enjoyed yelling "Girl, he don't love you!" when Blacula tried to woo his woman again.
I've been waiting to yell that during a movie
me: Yes. That was excellent.
Brandi: and I'm glad I got the opportunity to.
Let's talk about Bobby McCoy, the interior decorator.
He had a horrible afro
It was not well maintained.
It was like he was going to hang out at Block E after he left the set.
me: It was pretty raggedy.
Brandi: I'm surprised the stylist didn't deal with that.
The stylish gay's hair was lookin' to' up!
me: Yeah, for a gay interior decorator vampire, his hair was a hot mess.
I like how we see him wandering around the streets of Hollywood after he's been turned into a vampire.
Where you going?
Shopping for a hood and a cape, I presume.
Brandi: He was probably cruising.
I mean, he'd be in a position to easily get the blood he needs.
me: True.
That's the movie they should have made.
Brandi: Let's talk about the sassy cabbie
me: Yes. The one who accidentally hit Blackula with her cab.
Brandi: she was dressed like the dude from the Village People
As were the cops.
me: This was a film where people, like the cabbie, don't turn and run when they get attacked by vampires.
They just smile uncomfortably and make jokes.
Or try and hit him with a hunk of wood.
That cab driver had, like, seven minutes to get away from Blackula.
Brandi: Yeah, what kind of movie has black people who don't get the hell out of there when something like a vampire attack is going down.
me: I know! I thought black people were like Mantan Moreland in movies.
Something scary happens, their eyes bug out, and they shout FEETS DON'T FAIL ME NOW!
Not in this movie.
Brandi: No
And I actually took notes on that
because it happened so often.
But that cabbie was so annoying.
I'm glad blacula killed her to shut her up
And she was unnecessarily sassy
me: She did call him "Boy."
Do black people actually call each other "boy"?
I've never seen that before.
Brandi: Only if you're trying to put someone in their place.
But she was telling it like it is and keeping it real, even when there was no need to do that.
me: Yeah! She had just hit him with her cab!
There's no need to sass!
Brandi: I know and even when she realized she was screwed, she still kept being sassy.
It's like, "Woman, shut yo' mouth!"
"Girl, he don't like you!"
me: I wish she was still dressed like a Village People version of a can driver when she turned into a vampire. Instead, she just got ashy.
Brandi: The vampires were weird looking. Some were blue or green.
They looked like they were wearing mud masks.
How come all the vampires were wearing mud masks?
Were they trying to shrink their pores?
me: I'm guessing the mud masks were mositurizing.
Brandi: It would have been better if they were wearing bathrobes.
me: Like they were at a spa?
Brandi: Yeah, they could have perhaps lured more people in
by offering free spa treatments.
in the film seemed gullible enough
like, "Oooh, a spa in an abandoned warehouse - how quaint!"
me: The film did make vampirism sort of attractive.
get to hit on cute chicks, get mud masks, cruise Hollywood Boulevard, and hang out at clubs with Skillet.
I would enjoy such a life.
Except the cruising.
Brandi: I think Blackula let Skillet live because he was even amused by him.
The thing is, I'll bet Skillet would always need a place to "crash"
just for a couple of days
or so he'd say
me: Oh yes.
You'd let him sleep on your sofa, and, a week later, all your liquor would be gone and you'd have $200 in long-distance phone calls.
Brandi: Exactly!
me: Additionally, his friends would be coming over at all times of the day, and he'd be hitting on your girlfriend.
Brandi: Or my boyfriend.
He seemed like he might be a swinger
me: Skillet don't care! Sometimes Skillet just got to ... BUST ... a ... nut.
You don't want a guy like that as a vampire.
You'd kill someone, and he's show up and be like, hey, can I get just a taste?
Skillet! Don't mooch my victim! Kill your own!
Brandi: But we should probably wrap this up
What are your big take aways?
me: Okay. First, if you buy a coffin from Castle Dracula, don't be surprised if you open it and there's a vampire inside.
Second, if a guy in a vampire cape and a cheek mustache starts walking toward you, RUN AWAY.
And, most importantly, if you are a vampire and you get buried for two hundred years, when you get let out of the coffin, the first girl you see will be your reincanated bride.
What did you take away from the film?
Brandi: Once you go Blacula, you never go backula (not even for Scott).

MORE BLAXPLOITATION!

I SUPPOSE this song, written in a sort of pop country idiom, is a very belated response to Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love" -- one of the lyrics directly references the earlier song. But only in the sense that I got to thinking: What would it be like if the character Bo Diddley describes in the song ever were to just show up someplace? I imagine he would be a pretty scary man. I also imagine he would steal my girlfriend.

My friend Steve McPherson tells a story about two guys in a bar discussing music, and someone at the bar next to them suddenly interrupts them, saying "There are only two songs: Boy meets girl and a stranger comes to town." Upon completing this ejaculation, the fellow at the bar then stands up and walks out without another word.

This is a stranger comes to town song.

"MY FRESH PIE" LYRICS:

You got a noisy car and a money clip
You got a leering look and a curled lip
You got an evil grin and a winking eye
You got your dirty fingers in my fresh pie

You got a darting tongue and three gold teeth
You got a razor blade in a leather sheath
You got a rattlesnake for a bolo tie
You got your dirty fingers in my fresh pie

You got a tattoo of a bandoleer
You got a broken nose and a missing ear
You got a red stain that just won't dry
You got your dirty fingers in my fresh pie

You got a hotel room and a fifth of rye
I got a woman with a roaming eye
I got a woman with a roaming eye
You got your dirty fingers in my fresh pie

LISTEN TO "MY FRESH PIE":



DOWNLOAD "MY FRESH PIE."

MORE NEW SONGS!

NOW I MUST CONFESS to something that embarrasses me somewhat. The Catalog of Cool, published in 1985 and edited by former Creem contributor Gene Sculatti, is the single most influential book in my life. I stumbled upon it in the downtown Minneapolis library sometime back in high school and read it from cover to cover in one sitting. A few weeks later, I went back to the library, checked the book out, and, at home, began making lists of the book's recommendations for music, literature, comic books, cocktails, old television shows, and whatever else the various writers of the book had deemed cool enough to include. Eventually I purchased the book, and its sequel, Too Cool, published in 1993. I obsessively hunted down the items on my lists, haunting used book and record stores. On trips out to New York, I would swing by the Museum of Television and Radio on 52nd street and request a booth and several videotapes of old television shows, unavailable anywhere, but recommended by the books. In the early days of cable, which my family did not have, I would sometimes show up at friends' houses, if they had cable. I would do this late at night, without warning, because I had noticed that a film recommended by The Catalog of Cool was playing.

I expect my embarrassment about this stems from the book's title, in part. "Cool" is a devalued term. It's just something people blurt out now to describe anything they feel okay about. It no longer has a sense of describing something subterranean, neither does it describe a knowing aesthetic. It has become, in this generation, what "keen" was to a previous generation: a bland, empty adjective. And, honestly, while the Catalog of Cool does have something of a beatniky quality to it, I'm not sure "cool" is the right adjective to describe the items that show up in the book's many lists.

The Catalog's "Sounds" section, as an example, mentions Sam Cooke and Ella Ftzgerald, and, yes, these are two performers who fit a traditional description of "cool." But the books also recommend zydeco accordionist Iry LeJuene, the obscuro Garage Band The Beachnuts, and redneck maniac Johnny Buckett, who sang a song called "Hippie in a Blender." The Catalog's taste in film tends toward cult and trash, tossing out Paul Bartel's cannibalism comedy Eating Raoul as one of the 50 coolest movies ever made. Also on the list: Ed Wood's transvestite travesty Glen or Glenda, the gossip column noir The Sweet Smell of Success, and the haywire western Winchester '73. This isn't some cliched compilation of the sort of things Fonzie might enjoy; these lists contain obscure and forgotten treasures.

The Catalog's list of books is even more expansive. Alongside The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men, an early compilation that could legitimately be defined as having a "cool" outlook, there is Reyner Banham's book of essays about the landscape of LA, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Also recommended: Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen's satire of Gothic horror; The Stars my Destination, a mind-warping science fiction novel by Alfred Bester in which humanity has learned to spontaneously teleport wherever they want to go; and old issues of the ultra-sleazy Confidential Magazine, which made modern tabloids seem timid.

I'm not sure why I responded to this book in the way that I did. I suspect it's because I was bored and had as great a desire for novelty then as I do now. I also suspect it's because it showed me something that, as a teenager, I had just started to discover on my own: That underneath the monolith of corporate radio, hidden in the stacks of bookstores, and tucked away into the early hours of UHF television, there was real weirdness lurking about. I had a blast tracking down the Catalog's hundreds of recommendations, and, while searching, found quite a lot of my own that I'm not sure I would ever have stumbled across. The books showed me the wild edges of culture -- stuff that had tried for popular success but missed the mark, and stuff that had never cared about popular success at all. I discovered that people were making things just for the simple pleasure of making them, and indulging in their own idiosyncratic tastes. I also discovered that these creations hung around long after they were made. Even if you had to really dig to find them, such as the book Mister Justice by Doris Piserchia, which I started looking for in 1983 and just found and purchased last year, they're out there, waiting to be discovered.

And as someone who has moved on to making my own idiosyncratic things, and just shoved them out into the blogosphere for people to stumble across at some time or another, the Catalog of Cool is still one of the most influential books in my life, for exactly this reason. Not everything ever made is meant to be a blockbuster. Some things may simply be too personal, or out of fashion, or just plain weird, ever to find a large audience. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. I've never had a better time than when I was tracking down the cultural artifacts recommended by the Catalog, and everything it recommended was a blast to watch, or read, or listen to, or eat, or however it was meant to be consumed. These pleasures are real and long-lasting, even if they are only shared by a few people. And that's all right.

More from the Sparber Bookshelf.

INTRODUCTION | PLOT | OUTLINE | SAMPLE SCENE | NOTES | DOWNLOAD

INTRODUCTION: I WROTE THIS SCREENPLAY last year in a fit of jealousy over Diablo Cody's success. It's not simply that I found Juno to be a flawed film -- I did, but that's neither here nor there. It's that Diablo came out of Minneapolis, out of blogging, and out of City Pages, and so did I, and where am I? I had and have nothing against the young woman personally, and have had nice conversations with her online, but her success put my lack of success into sharp relief.

Of course, I quickly realized there was one important difference between Diablo and me. When opportunity came knocking, she already had enough material to pitch a book. When Hollywood rang, she sat down and wrote a screenplay. I had written no book, and had not tried my hand at screenwriting in a decade. I was a little like the man in the old Jewish joke who stands on his roof every day, calling out to God to help him win the lottery. After years of this, finally God replies in a booming voice, saying "At least meet me half way! Go and buy a ticket!"

So I sat down to write, and I am still writing, and this blog is a sort of an extended product of that jealous fit. As long as I keep adding content to it, I move toward having the material I will need, should opportunity ever come knocking at my door. I will have enough short stories for a collection, or enough reviews of supernaturally themed music for a book, or enough songs for an album, or enough whatever for something else. And, if opportunity never knocks, well, at least it's all here, in one place, available for whoever stumbles across this site and wants to read it.

Jealous fits are pretty useful in my life, as you can see. I just hope that one day I can be successful enough to cause someone else to fly into a pique, curse my undeserved good fortune, and set about to make their own fortune in order to show up mine.

HERE IS THE LOW-CONCEPT CONCEIT OF THE SCRIPT:

I Only Sleep with Celebrities is almost totally autobiographical, detailing my own experiences with homelessness in Hollywood in the early 90s, culminating in the Los Angeles Riots. I have, however, engaged in a bit of literary transvestism, in that I have made my main character female, and some of the events described have been slightly fictionalized -- and, in one instance, in which I have my main character travel by bus into the heart of the riots, wholly manufactured. Nonetheless, the script hews closely to my actual experiences, borrowing characters, dialogue, and events from my memories in every single scene.

OUTLINE (WARNING: SPOILERS):

MAGGIE, a 17-year-old from Omaha, flees to Hollywood with her two friends, EMMA and LANIE, both speed freaks and high school dropouts. The girls briefly inhabit a residence hotel in east Hollwyood, but when their money runs out, they part ways. Maggie remains in Hollywood, moving into the Citrus House, a homeless shelter run by the Gay/Lesbian Community Services Center of Los Angeles.

She spends a few months in the shelter, getting to know the ever-changing and motley collection of teenage runaways who make up the shelter's residents, including SUZIE, a young Asian-American girl. At a Halloween parade, the two girls participate in a counter protest against religious extremists, where same-sex couples kiss in front of Bible-quoting protesters. Maggie and Suzie kiss, and Maggie realizes she has developed a terrible crush on the other girl. Unfortunately, Suzie is soon forced to leave the shelter, and the two girls lose contact.

Maggie finds work at a movie theater and moves into a transitional living program in an old Hollywood apartment building called The Nirvana, into an apartment that is rumored to be haunted. She meets two of the young women who live in the building, Sammy and Saji, who both work for a private dance club. Sammy is having problems with her jealous boyfriend, and, as they watch, he attempts to kill himself by flinging himself down the apartment's stairwell.

Due to chronic lateness, Maggie loses her job, but rediscovers Suzie, who is now living in a squat established in a burned out building. Maggie is terrified by Suzie's living situation, and by the violence and drug use of the others in the squat. Maggie and Suzie take a day off to go to Westwood together, to visit the grave of Marilyn Monroe. While out there, a riot breaks out outside a movie theater: It is the day after the Rodney King beating, and a large group of black youths have assembled in Westwood for the opening of New Jack City. Maggie and Suzie hide in a video store while the youths tear the neighborhood apart. When they try to make their way home later, a violent group of teenagers attack them.

Injured and frightened, Maggie and Suzie catch a bus home. Maggie suggests that Suzie move in to the apartment with her. It's against the rules, and she is out of work, but Maggie is determined to find work and create a safe environment for the two girls.

Maggie goes to work at the private dance club with Sammy and Saji, and quickly discovers it to be very similar to a strip club, but without the nudity. Women are expected to grind against men and talk them into private dances, which are similar to lap dances. Maggie find this distasteful, but can't resist the appeal of easy money, or the pills of Ecstasy that Sammy and Saji provide her. Her experiences both exhaust and elate Maggie, and leave her emotionally jagged and certain she is hearing ghosts in her apartment.

On a free day, Maggie goes with Sammy and Saji to the Hollywood Wax museum, where they nearly get into trouble after throwing pennies at a wax statue of Jesus. Spilling out into the street, they are informed by a police officer that the Rodney King verdict was just read, and riots have started in downtown Los Angeles. The girls return to the Nirvana to watch the news on television, and Maggie realizes that the riot has spread to a part of Los Angeles where SUzie was interviewing for a job. She exits the apartment in a panic, and, not knowing what else to do, catches a bus to Western and Wilshire to try and find Suzie. When she arrives, rioters are just beginning to smash windows and set fire to buildings, and Suzie is nowhere to be found. Maggie hails a cab, and, as the cab pulls up, it is attacked. Maggie escapes in the cab.

Returning to the Nirvana, Maggie finds Suzie, who had taken an unexpected route home. The two girls go to the rood of the Nirvana, and from that vantage point are able to watch Los Angeles as it burns -- a thousand buildings by the end of the night. Maggie suggest to Suzie that they leave Los Angeles for Omaha, and Suzie agrees. The script closes with scenes in Omaha, as Maggie and Suzie struggle to find a place for themselves, and Maggie confesses that every night, when she goes to sleep, she dreams of Los Angeles.

SAMPLE SCENE:

INT. JACK IN THE BOX - DAY

A group of four TEENAGERS, including Maggie, are gathered around a table. All are young men, but for Maggie, and all sip Cokes. The young men are all quite obviously gay, in their own way. There is Omar. He is carefully doing his nails.

There is a VERY TALL BLACK YOUTH in bicycle shorts, PHILLIP. There is a SOMEWHAT OVERWEIGHT HISPANIC man with his bangs dyed blond, RAUL. And there is a HEAVYSET BLACK MAN in his early 20s, dressed in a floral shirt, CONNIE. The heavyset black man bellows.

CONNIE
He PISSED in your MOUTH?

The group explodes into laughter. Two well-dressed women at a nearby table glance over, startled.

RAUL
Shhhh!

CONNIE
Oh, no, girl. I’m going to ask this so loud that everyone can hear. Did you just tell me that you let another man piss in your mouth? Is that what you just told me, Raul?

RAUL
(nodding and grinning)
Yes!

CONNIE
Oh, Lord. I hope you made bank for that. There are a lot of things that I would do, but gargle urine is not one of them. That is off my menu.

A MANAGER crosses to the table. The group looks up at him.

MANAGER
I’m going to have to ask you all to lower your voices. There are other customers.

CONNIE
And we paid just like they did. We bought our Cokes. We have a right to sit and talk if we want.

MANAGER
Just, please, keep it down a little.

The manager leaves. The heavyset black man watches him go, frowning. He turns to look at the group.

CONNIE
Do you believe that? Like our money isn’t as good as everyone else’s.

Maggie turns and faces the camera.

MAGGIE
I was only ever with someone when they tested positive for HIV once. Just that one time. He was gone the next day. You can’t stay in the Citrus House Shelter if you’re HIV positive. I heard they transferred him to another program or something.
Anyway, I was going to talk about the things you might see on a typical day at the Citrus House shelter. This is it. We all went to Jack in the Box every day. It was just a few blocks from the shelter.

OMAR
(thoughtfully)
I don’t think I could have a man pee in my mouth.

PHILLIP
There’s a surprise.

OMAR
What does that mean, Phillip?

PHILLIP
I mean if you won’t do anal, Omar, you probably won’t get peed on.

RAUL
You won’t do anal?

OMAR
It hurts too much. I tried to get ready for it once by putting a candle up there, but that hurt too.

CONNIE
I don’t blame you. Ain’t nobody putting nothing up my ass either.

PHILLIP
Connie! You don’t do anal either?

CONNIE
Did I say that? Oh, I do anal. Just ain’t nobody do anal to me.

PHILLIP
Selfish.

CONNIE
Damn right I’m selfish. It don’t feel good to have someone stick something up there. And if it don’t feel good, I don’t do it.

OMAR
What about you, Maggie?

MAGGIE
What?

OMAR
You ever do anal?

MAGGIE
(Looks at the camera)
This is where it gets awkward. I’ve never done anything but kiss Tommy Prentiss at a dance last year. He tried to touch my breast, but I told him I wasn’t ready. Actually, I was ready. Just not for Tommy Prentiss.

CONNIE
What kind of question is that? Of course she don’t do anal! What kind of dyke you ever hear of who does anal? The question is, would you ever let somebody piss in your mouth?

The manager storms over, livid.

MANAGER
I am going to have to ask you to keep your voice down or leave!

CONNIE
What? Did we not spend enough to be able to have a conversation together? Do I need to buy another Coke?

SOME NOTES ABOUT THE SCRIPT:

I don't have too much to add to what I said above. The Nirvana is a real building -- it's pictured at the top of this page -- that is located around the corner from the Mann Chinese Theater. It was reputed to be haunted, and filled with prostitutes and junkies, and was quite a depressing place to live (it has since been renovated and looks to be quite nice). This is where I actually stood on the roof and watched Los Angeles burn, an experience that will stay with me forever. And like Maggie in the script, every night when I go to sleep, I dream of LA.

DOWNLOAD:

DOWNLOAD I ONLY SLEEP WITH CELEBRITIES (332KB PDF)

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MORE LOW-CONCEPT SCRIPTS!

THIS TREAT comes in a plastic container illustrated with a white outline drawing of a pencil. When you eat the stuff, you snip off the tip right where the pencil's lead would be, and then squeeze the purple gelatinous content out as though you were writing on your tongue. Big and Big Fruit Jelly Carrageenan hails from Thailand, and the Odd Ingester has been to Thailand, and can safely say this is not the oddest thing to come out of the Southeast Asian country. The Odd Ingester recalls sitting in his hotel room in Bangcock, obsessively watching soap operas about kickboxers. He remembers visiting the mummified remains of a Buddhist monk on the island of Ko Samui, where he also found himself fighting to remove an overly affectionate monkey from his head. He remembers just randomly running into a childhood friend from a Minneapolis synagogue, who was just passing through Thailand's capitol on his way to Jerusalem. Thailand is a wondrous and fascinating place, and Big and Big's fruit candy is just pleasant.

Which, to be fair, is better than many of the candies the Odd Ingester eats from the Orient, which often taste unnatural at best, and sometimes quite unpleasant. By contrast, Fruit Jelly Carrageenan tastes like a very subtle, sweet grape jelly. It is, in fact, tastier than many American candies, which are frequently too-sweet and waxy. But the Odd Ingester has seen elephants from Thailand paint portraits of Thai elephants, and has seen feral dogs racing around enormous gold Buddhas, and a pleasant candy just doesn't seem to capture the character of Thailand.

Oh well. At least it has a weird name. Carrageenan isn't some sort of brand name, you see. Its a kind of a family of linear sulphated polysaccharides extracted from red seaweeds. The stuff is used as a thickening agent in foods and toothpastes and shampoos and shoe polishes, and also, apparently, makes a dandy sexual lubricant.

Come to think of it, the Odd Ingester is not entirely certain he was supposed to eat this item.

More from the Odd Ingester!

FOR MOST MINNESOTANS, our musical history begins in the Eighties, with Prince. There is scant knowledge of anything that preceded His Royal Badness's explosion onto the national pop charts. Some Minnesotans will point out Bob Dylan, who hails from Duluth, and very few Minnesotans, with very long memories, will also recall that "Surfin' Bird," a national hit in 1963, was recorded by a local band called The Trashmen.

But the Trashmen were just the tip of a garage band iceberg in the 60s, most of it unavailable except from semi-legal Europeans garage band compilations, often released on LP form in the 80s and 90s. These were bands made up of surly teenagers, rehearsing in their parents' garages, often offering a playlist that consisted mostly of Bo Diddley and Rolling Stones covers, often with heavily distorted vocals and fuzzed out guitars. When they recorded, the quality of the recording was often slapdash, quickly done on three-track systems and recorded through a few badly placed microphones. The resulting recordings tend to sound terrible. And, by that, I mean they sound terrific. Garage band music is one of the few musical forms that really benefits from amateurishness -- it is the American musical form that evolved to turn three chords, cheap guitars, guttural vocals, and poor sound reproduction into an asset.

The Pagans were a band out of Rochester, Minn., with an unfortunate name -- there were about a dozen garage bands also named The Pagans who sprung up in the 60s, one as close as Des Moines. There is scant information about this group to be found, but we know they recorded this jagged dose of guitar-drenched garage rock in 1965. The tale they tell is one of “a nightmare woman out of Russian myth,” as the lyrics helpfully inform us: Baba Yaga is a witch from Eastern European folklore, and the song manages to tell us just about everything we need to know about this obscure character. She rides through the sky in an oversized mortar, for example, and has a cabin that stands and walks on chicken legs. But most of the song is dedicated, as it should be, to swirling guitars and terrified howling.

It's a noisy song from a noisy genre, about as chaotic as anything ever put to vinyl. It's a storm of noise that nearly buries the lyrics. And it's perfect. I hear the song and imagine Baba Yaga herself buried in their somewhere, flying through the Russian night in her mortar in the middle of a howling tempest, cackling with fiendish glee as Russians huddle in terror in their peasant's huts. It seems a little surprising that a Minnesota band could represent a folkloric Russian witch so well, but, then, all they really needed to do was make a lot of noise to do it, and Garage music was exceptionally good at making noise.

LISTEN TO "BABA YAGA":



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I'VE TRIED MY HAND at screenwriting, now and again, for my entire adult life. I moved out to Los Angeles in the early 1990s to pursue the profession, without much success, and every few years I come back to it, with equal lack of success. But, then, success isn't everything. It's a hard field to break into, especially when you don't know anybody. Even moreso, it's hard to break into when you write the lowest-concept movies ever.

Let me explain the idea of a high-concept film. It's something that can be summarized in one sentence, preferably by referring back to previous films that were successful. So a film like Snakes on a Plane can be summarized in this way: Deadly snakes get loose on an airplane. Snakes on a Plane is sometimes credited as being the highest concept film ever made, in that its title actually describes the entire film, but I don't think that this gives enough credit to films such as Barn of the Naked Dead or Green Slime from Outer Space, both of which also summarize their plots in their title. I saw Barn of the Naked Dead when I lived in Hollywood, and dragged a friend along. He left after about 20 minutes, completely disgusted. "They're in a barn and they're naked!" he shouted. "What do you think the odds are that they're gonna be dead soon?"

I love high-concept films, and am a fan of the gimmick. Not only did I see Snakes on a Plane, but I enjoyed it very much, and appreciated that the filmmakers went back to shoot additional scenes that involved even more snakes doing terrible things on the airplane. The critical community did not agree with me, but I am always happy when a film provides exactly what it promises. Quest for Fire, for example, is about cavemen looking for fire. Eventually they find it. Then they go home. In my book, that's a perfect plot.

So I don't set out to write low-concept movies. I really want to write gimmicky films that can be summarized in one sentence. But my idea of a high-concept film, I have come to realize, is pretty idiosyncratic. I was once tasked with writing a sequel to Bachelor Party, if you can believe it. Some producers were looking for a spec script. I wrote 30 pages and showed it to them. They passed. My idea? The film is set in Las Vegas, and the main character, the spoiled scion of a casino magnate, accidentally kills his bride-to-be. As it happens, the young man, during his layabout college years, pursued a degree in folk dance, and has populated his father's casino with Haitians who he met while studying in their tiny Caribbean country. They help him bring the bride back to life, but soon realize they have not brought back the finacee, but instead a murderous demon who kidnaps his bachelor party and leads them from casino to casino, spreading madness and ticking the whole of Las Vegas closer to a mathematically improbability made possible by the expanding chaos -- the moment when every game of chance turns against the casinos, and Vegas is bankrupted.

There is no way to sum that up in a sentence. It's even harder to get across the tone of the script, which was quite mad. For instance, I decided that Pauly Shore should star in it, and included a scene in which he stares at himself in disgust in a mirror in one of the casino's bathrooms. He snarls at himself, saying "Who said you could ever make anything of yourself. You're a failure and people pity you, if they're not disgusted by you."

Just then, he hears a flush behind him. A stall opens, and Don Rickles emerges, belt in hand. "I don't care who you are kid, or who your father is," Don Rickles says. "NOBODY TALKS TO DON RICKLES THAT WAY!" He then beats Pauly Shore with the belt.

The only reason I wrote that scene was because I thought it would be funny to have a scene in which Don Rickles beats Pauly Shore with a belt. I still find it funny. Apparently, the producers didn't.

I've come to terms with my idiosyncratic writing style, my tendency toward outrageous plots, and the fact that producers and agents respond to my queries with polite "thanks but no thanks" letters, if they respond at all. Nonetheless, I wrote my scripts for an audience, and I might as well post them to my blog, where at least a few people might read them. And, who knows? Maybe my approach to scriptwriting is simply out of favor now, and the world will one day be a place where low-concept films are in vogue. And, in that world, I will be king.

MORE LOW-CONCEPT SCRIPTS!

INTRODUCTION | PLOT | OUTLINE | SAMPLE SCENE | NOTES | DOWNLOAD

INTRODUCTION: THIS IS A SCREENPLAY I wrote a scant six months ago, or thereabouts. I was determined to make my own movie, and sat down to write the least expensive genre script I could come up with, using as few characters and locations as I could manage. The result was Baba Yaga, written in about two weeks. I had hopes to begin preproduction this spring and go into production in the fall. Unfortunately, I busied up. More than that, I realized that I don't want to do the work required to make my own film. I enjoy writing, and that's what I want to do. I could dedicate a year to making a microbudget movie, with the attendant problems of microbudget filmmaking, including amateurish cast members, poor quality lighting and digital recording, awkward editing, and unlikely distribution. Or, I could post a PDF of the script to my Web page, hope that someone eventually wants to make it into a film, and get on with the business of my life, which is doing more writing.

HERE IS THE LOW-CONCEPT CONCEIT OF THE SCRIPT: Two college-age Jewish boys from Minneapolis stumble into a strange wedding party at a Russian vodka bar. They begin to suffer strange dreams, and events in their lives seem to unravel moments after they experience them. They start to suspect they have accidentally discovered a witch from Russian folklore named Baba Yaga. Eventually, they return to the vodka bar to uncover a terrible bargain.

OUTLINE (WARNING: SPOILERS): Quarrelsome and somewhat geeky college students MARK SANGER and BOBBY GOLD find themselves lost while driving to a Halloween party. They stop in a Russian vodka bar to get directions, and witness a strange Russian wedding party, presided over by a stern old Russian woman in military garb. The bride is obviously pregnant, and the groom seems quite upset by the circumstances. As the ceremony proceeds, Sanger witnesses the old woman eat what appears to be a tiny human hand.

They are led away from the party by GLEB, an amiable Russian man who offers them vodka. The two boys get drunk with the man, but panic upon seeing a LITTLE GIRL who looks as though she has been beaten. They leave the party, but not before Gleb whispers words of warning into their ears.

The boys go to the Halloween party, but don't stay long. Gold has a strange experience in which the other partygoers insist he has told him the story of the evening's events, when he has no memory of doing so. He and Sanger return to their dorm room and discuss the bruised child they saw. They reluctantly agree to call social services and report what they have seen.

That night, Gold dreams of an EYELESS COSSACK, who takes a CHILD from the arms of a WEEPING WOMAN, and then bites into the child. Gold wakes to a phone call from the social services organization, telling the boys that their message from the previous evening was not recorded. They repeat the story, then go out for breakfast.

At a diner, their waitress repeatedly forgets their order. They are accosted by a strange GRINNING MAN, who, in oblique language, warns them that they have met a Russian woman named BABA YAGA, and she is not happy that they are attempting to report what they have witnessed. Frightened, the boys call the police on the grinning man, but moments later get a call back from the police, telling them that 911 operators received a call from their number, but no message. The grinning man informs the boys that anything they do, Baba Yaga can undo.

The boys drive to Gold's uncle's house, in the meanwhile using their computer to research Baba Yaga. They discover she is a witch from Russian folklore, famous for living in a house on chicken legs and for eating children. The boys reject this story as being ridiculous, but worry they may have crossed the Russian mafia. Gold goes into his uncle's house and retrieves a gun.

They return to their friends apartment from the previous evening. Finding the door open, the enter and witness a bloodied, eyeless woman crawling in reverse across the floor. They flee the apartment, and run into one of the FRIENDS. He enters the apartment and finds nothing, but, as he speaks to Sanger and Gold, informs the boys that he has no memory of them ever attending the party from the previous evening. Soon, he begins to forget Sanger and Gold are talking with him even as they speak to each other. Panicked, the boys return to their car.

Inside, they discuss their options. They concede that they must entertain the notion that they are, in fact, dealing with the Russian witch. Gold opines that she must want something of them, or she would have killed them already. Sanger has a darker theory: He thinks they are already dead, and this is why everything they do ceases to have happened the moment they do it. They agree that the only option they have is to return to the vodka bar and get some answers.

At the vodka bar, Gold pulls his gun on Gleb, forcing the man to take them to Baba Yaga. Upstairs, they find themselves at the same wedding from Halloween night, with one important difference -- the bride is no longer pregnant. Gold demands that Baba Yaga let them be, and shoots Gleb to demonstrate his seriousness. But Gleb reappears as a member of the party, and tells them that they have no choice. They must make a deal with Baba Yaga, or they will not survive the night. Further, he lets them know that it is once again Halloween night -- the events they experienced since they left the vodka bar have ceased to exist.

Gleb tells the boys the deal they must make: They must pledge an unborn child to Baba Yaga. It will be as though the child never existed, Gleb explains, and tells them that he too made this deal once. Gold refuses the deal and leaves, going to the car. Once he is in the car, he discovers his head is bleeding. Sanger enters the car, also injured, and tells Gold that they were in a car accident. Gold realizes that he is mortally injured, and the Sanger is not. Gold accuses Sanger of having accepted the deal with Baba Yaga, but Sanger stares at him blankly, not knowing what he is talking about. Gold dies, and the camera pulls back to reveal the driver of the other car, also killed in the accident: The grinning man from the diner.

SAMPLE SCENE:

INT. DORM ROOM - NIGHT

Gold lies asleep in his bed, Sanger asleep on the bunk above. There is the SOUND OF SKITTERING, as though many small animals were moving around the room. Gold SNORES. A hand comes up, prods him. He rolls away from the hand.

GOLD
(blearily)
Sleeping, Sanger.

The hand comes up and prods him again. He turns, angrily.

GOLD
Sanger!

He opens his eyes, then sits up very suddenly.

GOLD
Oh, fuck.

Across the room from Gold, seated in a chair, is a COSSACK DRESSED IN RED. He is eyeless, with gaping holes where his eyes should be. His head is positioned in such a way that, if he had eyes, he would be staring at Gold. Next to him, in a second chair, is a VERY YOUNG GIRL in white, her face covered by a veil, holding an INFANT IN SWADDLING CLOTHES.

GOLD
Okay, that’s messed up.

Gold reaches up, pounds on the bottom of Sanger’s bunk, above him.

GOLD
Sanger. SANGER!
(Sanger does not stir)
No, of course you’re not going to wake up, you asshole.

Gold sits upright on his bed, looks over the bunk. Sanger is not there.

GOLD
Well, that’s fair. He gives me this fucking nightmare and can’t even be here to share it with me.

Gold sits back down. He stares at the Cossack.

GOLD
Listen, I know this is a nightmare. I know I’m fucking asleep, okay? So why don’t you disappear, or turn into me being naked in high school, or whatever, okay?

The cossack reaches out suddenly, snatching the hand of the baby in the bantling. She SQUEALS, piglike, terrified. He draws her hand up to his mouth, bites off fingers. The mother begins to WEEP, WAILING. Blood pours down the Cossack’s chin and beard. Gold watches, mouth open with horror.

GOLD
Well, thanks for that hideous image. Jesus FUCK, man.

SOME NOTES ABOUT THE SCRIPT: The real inspiration for the script came from a song from a Minnesota garage rock band called The Pagans. The song, quite naturally, was called "Baba Yaga," which I have written about for my Essential Ghoul's Record Shelf project; you can listen to the song there.

I have been a fan of horror for quite a long time, and think it is also one of the most democratic film genres, in that it seems to be a relatively open genre for new filmmakers to break into. Film is an excellent medium for generating fear, and most of us are familiar with the cinematic techniques used to build suspense -- cliched though many of them may be, they are nonetheless endlessly effective.

If I have a complaint, it is that we are running out of monsters. The most recent trend in horror films has been the vogue for extended scenes of torture, and this just seems like an extension of the masked slasher films from the 80s. In the meanwhile, American horror films borrowed from Japanese movies tend to feature little gray ghosts who make a habit of popping up at unexpected times. With the exception of Guillermo del Toro, who has an almost baroque imagination for fairy tale monsters, most modern horror filmmakers seem to reflexively reach for Romero-styled zombies, muscular werewolves, or tortured and beautiful vampires. Sometimes several of these creatures will inhabit a single film, and fight each other.

I wanted to try something else. There hasn't been an American film made about Baba Yaga, although she sometimes shows up in Russian fantasies. And I wanted to write a script in which most of the horror is generated by the characters having a sense that control over their destinies was slipping away -- that there was nothing they could do that couldn't be undone, which is inspired by the broom that the folkloric Baba Yaga carries with her, to sweep away her trail behind her.

DOWNLOAD: DOWNLOAD BABA YAGA (255KB PDF)

To read Baba Yaga, you will need Adobe's free PDF reader, available for download here.

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PUBLISHED IN 1971 by Billygoat Books in Minneapolis, All the Cake I Want is the prison memoirs of Jim Adams, who, in a brief introductory statement, informs us "Why did I write this book? For money; what else!" He then goes on to write one of the most startling first paragraphs I have ever read in a book:

At St. Cloud Reformatory, as in every prison and reformatory throughout the world, a great many inmates begin masturbating as soon as the lights go out. The night of December 2, 1957 was no exception. I lay on my bunk and listened to the heavy breathing, the squeaking springs, and the gasps of fury and frustration as dozens, then hundreds of healthy young sperm swollen animals spewed out their wild hatred into the futile river of rage.

More of the Sparber Guide to the Twin Cities!

A COUNTRYPOLITAN SONG. I've recorded this without distortion, despite the fact that I tend to like things to sound raucous and poorly recorded; it just didn't seem appropriate for a song that meant to sounds haunted and lovely.

The title borrows from a book by teenage author Pamela Moore, Chocolates for Breakfast, which was published in 1956 and tells the story of a young girl's misadventures and sexual awakening in Hollywood and Manhattan. Of course, the song I have written is a country song, and, therefore, details loneliness and regret and other depressing themes that country music handles so well. Drawing inspiration from an obscure 50s novel about cosmopolitan youth might be a little odd when you're writing a country song, but Ms. Moore was no stranger to the dark moods that inhabit the genre -- she killed herself at the age 26.

"CHAMPAGNE FOR BREAKFAST" LYRICS:

I dreamed of champagne for breakfast
And chocolates when we were still in bed
And then I woke up
in the same place
I laid my head
You whispered sweet words in my ear once
While I was sleeping in the bed we knew
But now I wake up
In the same place
That's empty of you

I dreamed of kisses to wake me
And champagne on the bedroom floor
But then I woke up
All alone dear
O once more
Now I drink coffee in the morning
In one cup all on its own
And in the evening
I go to bed
All alone

Two pillows for one head
And a bed big enough for two
Once it was full of the both of us
Now it is empty of you

I dreamed of kisses to wake me
And champagne on the bedroom floor
But then I woke up
All alone dear
O once more
Now I drink coffee in the morning
In one cup all on its own
And in the evening
I go to bed
All alone

LISTEN TO "CHAMPAGNE FOR BREAKFAST":



DOWNLOAD "CHAMPAGNE FOR BREAKFAST."

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STARRING THE STATUESQUE Tamara Dobson, Cleopatra Jones combines Blaxploitation with the spy film genre, featuring a lead character who is an international superagent who returns to Los Angeles to battle a heroin dealer named Mother (Shelley Winters). Director Jack Starrett is sometimes a little clunky in staging the film's action scenes, most notoriously in a scene in which assassins attempt to kill Cleopatra Jones at an airport, and she manages to sneak up on them by riding a luggage return carousel behind them, but the action scenes are somewhat beside the point in this film. Instead, the film's real pleasures come from Cleopatra's unusual fashion sense (drag performer RuPaul has admitted that she is one of his primary sources of inspiration), and the film's witty, streetwise dialogue, scripted by Max Julien. Cleopatra Jones is overripe with outrageous characters, including a standout performance by Antonio Fargas, best known as Huggy Bear from Starsky & Hutch.

Brandi: Okay, so I mentioned the scene with at the airport to my mom
specifically about the bad guys not being able to see that giant woman
And my mom asked when it was made
and I said, "sometime in the 70s"
Her take on it was that back then blacks were still seen as invisible people, and so it wasn't surprising that the white dudes wouldn't be able to see the black woman - even though she was gi-normous.
But my mom granted this wasn't intentional
She just considered it interesting.
I pointed out that it was a good thing for her not to be able to be seen in this case because she was an agent but maybe whoever she worked for shouldn't have banked on poor race relations to serve as her main form of camouflage and instead went with a shorter black woman
a much shorter one
who didn't need a special car that had a hydraulic roof
That too cost money
Cleopatra Jones was such an expensive agent.
me: Okay, let me parse this.
Brandi: ok
me: Your mother's thesis is that Shelley Winters' killers, who went to the airport specifically to kill Cleopatra Jones, couldn't see her because, as a black woman, and one who is 6'2" tall and wears furs in the summer, she was nonetheless socially invisible?
Brandi: No, no.
My mom thought the real reason was that the killers were dense
But she thought the bullshit overreaching analysis was about race.
That argument was a joke
Sort of
she really thinks its just because the killers were stupid.
me: Well, her theory does explain a lot.
Like why Cleo was a spy, but didn't bother to hide her identity.
And why she felt comfortable wearing a complete wolf when she walked around.
Brandi: You'd think she'd learn something from Shaft
and wear earth tones
Was this before or after Shaft?
me: After. 1973.
Brandi: okay, so there was enough time to learn.
me: It also explains a lot about Dolemite.
Why he never locked his door.
It's because he assumed he was invisible.
Brandi: Anyway, about Cleo
I liked how she had a license plate with her name on it
And that said "US Government"
me: Yeah. You have to be pretty confident as a spy to have that license plate.
Or to wear a feather headdress.
Brandi: I wonder if she had another car that said SPY
Let's talk about her wardrobe
I liked that weird neon suit she was wearing...the one that looked like a power suit from the 90s
I liked how it had breakaway pants.
I'm glad her cracked out attire was practical.
me: I liked her silver spacewoman outfit.
Brandi: Oh yes, that was nice. But then Huggy Bear's girlfriend one uped her at the club with that shimmering silver number
me: The best part of the movie was Huggy bear!
His crew was hilarious.
And, honestly, he dressed at least as outrageously as Cleo.
Brandi: Yeah.
What about the green/white dude
There was a lot of green, pink and purple in that movie
And those two dudes in the beginning were both wearing green turtlenecks, which was weird because no one else was.
me: The outfits were outrageous.
Brandi: I'm sure they were embarrassed when they both showed up at the club wearing the same green mock-turtle neck.
me: There were a LOT of outrageous characters in this film.
Brandi: And a lot of great extras!
Like that dude who was walking down the street
And his arms were swinging back and forth wildly
I thought he was going to hurt his hand on a building or wall
or knock someone out
me: That guy was great! And the drunks during the car chase!
Brandi: Yeah, they were pretty agile for drunk people
me: They nearly get run down by Shelley Winters' men, and so one of them lunges at one of the cars like he's going to fight it!
And the kids in the film were hilarious.
Every time Cleo would pass, they would talk jive about how hot she was.
Brandi: I liked the kid who was a middle man
But I'm not sure why he was consulting his crew about how much to charge her
He was like a little black Jimmy Hoffa
me: No. He wasn't the middle man.
He was IN CHARGE.
Brandi: Yeah, good point.
He was in charge
me: He, was, like, a foot taller than all his friends.
He was like the Cleopatra Jones of little boys.
You get to be the boss when you're that tall.
Brandi: Indeed.
But about the jive.
There was a lot of jive in this movie
more so than in other movies we've seen.
me: Well, it was written by Max Julien.
he had already done The Mack, which is like a fictionalized documentary about pimps.
He had a real love for street culture.
Here's my favorite line of dialogue, from Huggy Bear:
"Hair's like a woman. You treat it good and it treats you good. Ain't that right honey? You hear what I'm saying? Yeah, you got to hold it, caress it, and love it. And if your hair gets out of line you take a scissor and say, "'Hair I'm going to cut you.'
But I also like it when Cleo says "See you around, Super Honkie!"
Brandi: Yeah, I liked the afros in the movie
They were well maintained
me: Truly.
Brandi: Kids these days don't maintain their afros as well as they should
me: It's a lot of work.
I hear.
Brandi: It is.
I didn't ever grow my hair into one because it's a lot of maintenance. It needs to be trimmed all the time.
Block E has a lot of people who need to watch that movie and learn how to take care of their afros.
me: Well, now we can never go back to Block E.
Brandi: Never.
me: Somebody with a nappy afro is going to shoot us with a pistol.
Brandi: I'll go armed with a hair pick and scissors
I liked the part with huggy bear threatening his "yes man"
the one who always said "that's right."
me: I don't remember his name.
Huggy Bear's other assistant was named Pickle.
Everybody in Blaxploitation has ridiculous names.
Brandi: Yeah well black people do love unique names.
me: Huggy Bear was called Doodlebug in the film.
Like he was a member of Digable Planets.
Brandi: poor black people and rich white people name their kids ridiculously.
Often.
Not always
because that's stereotyping.
me: That's true.
Cleo's boyfriends was named Reuben.
That's not a very crazy name.
He was played by Bernie Casey.
Also known as UN Jefferson from Revenge of the Nerds.
Brandi: He looked like he'd soon be wearing a jheri curl
At least in about 10 years
He had that 80s look about him
me: I love the fact that he had, like, a drug rehab halfway house, but, if you peeked into the wrong door, there would be black people cleaning guns.
That says "70s" to me.
Brandi: The hiding of guns in this movie was creative
like Cleo's car
me: Oh yes.
Brandi: That shit was bananas!
me: She could just pop her door open and assemble a mini-machine gun!
I want her car.
Brandi: I know!
me: Also, I want her little hand-printed card that tells you she's a spy.
You would think spies wouldn't carry that, but, no, you would be wrong.
Brandi: I don't think she was in the clandestine spy program
I also wonder which agencies she worked for
because she was doing too much shit in the US to be the CIA and she didn't seem to be a part of the Feds.
me: She says her jurisdiction stretched from Turkey to Watts.
That's a pretty strange wedge of the map.
As far as I can tell, she burned up opium in Turkey, and fought Shelley Winters in LA, and those were her only jobs.
Brandi: Yeah, I think she was a freelance spy
Which totally sucks because she probably didn't have good insurance.
me: I want to talk about Shelley Winters for a moment.
Because, as you know, I knew her.
Brandi: Yes, and I had a prof. in a class I took at Metro State who knew her
He told a story involving him, Shelley, a golf cart and drugs.
It was strange.
But what were your experiences?
me: She was a strange woman.
Well, I took acting classes from her when I was homeless in Hollywood.
She always called me Mac, because it was the name of an ex-husband.
Nobody thought she was alive.
I would walk down Hollywood Boulevard with her, and people would run up to her and say "I thought you were dead!"
I think it's because she died in every movie she was ever in.
People just assumed she had to be dead.
She's in a few Blaxploaitation films as the villain.
I think it's because she was willing to incredibly screechy and crazy,
Brandi: People would actually say that to her? I thought you were dead?
me: Oh yes.
"I can't believe it's you! It's you! I thought you were dead!"
She would clutch my arm in terror.
She did not like to have people run up to her.
Brandi: Wow. I couldn't imagine saying that to someone.
Except Jesse Helms
because when he died I was surprised
I thought he was dead
Then again, I often thought he and strom thurmond were the same person
me: They all look the same to me.
I wish I had asked Shelley about these movies.
Now she actually is dead.
So is Cleo.
Huggy Bear is still around, though.
We should try to be friends with him.
Brandi: He seems like he'd be an agreeable guy
Unless you said, "that's right!"
He would probably cut you over that.
me: He has a pretty gruesome death in this film.
Especially since he'd been comic relief right up until he died.
I can't believe they killed his butler too!
His Butler's name was Hedley Mattingly.
He was played by an actor named Hedley Mattingly.
Brandi: That butler was great
he walked really weird
me: He always seemed like he was about to tip over.
Brandi: like he pooed his pants
And he seemed a bit afraid of Huggy
Almost like he beat him previously
like Naomi Campbell would
me: When Huggy Bear sent him to get a drink, he was, like, just need to get ice.
And then he just fled the room and never came back.
So, yeah, I think Huggy Bear beat him.
Brandi: But to be fair, huggy probably already told him stuff twice
So, really, he was left with few options
me: He should have gotten beaten for not coming back with the ice.
That shit's not funny.
You say you're getting ice, get ice, or Huggy is going to have to take a scissors to you.
I'll tell you who was surprising to see in this film.
Esther Rolle.
She acts the same in everything she does.
So all of a sudden Florida Evans is talking to Cleopatra Jones.
And trying to hide the fact that she's running an illegal gambling operation.
Ain't she lucky she got them!
GOOD TIMES!
Brandi: Yeah, Esther Rolle really did play the same character in every movie
and TV show
me: Also, the cameo by Don Cornelius was a bit of a shock.
As Don Cornelius.
It's like 70s era black television suddenly took over the movie.
Brandi: Don Cornelius....what was he in again?
In the movie?
me: He's, like, the emcee at the club where Huggy Bear's girlfriend sings.
He's in the film for about three seconds.
But three seconds of Don Cornelius is like a lifetime of most men.
Brandi: Oh okay, I remember him
I have a non-movie question quickly
me: Yes?
Brandi: You know how women's measurements are bust, waist, hips
me: Yes.
Brandi: What are men's measurements.
me: Mine is about eight and a half inches.
Brandi: hee!
okay, back to our discussion
me: Yes. Although I'm leaving the penis joke in.
So who do you think would benefit from dressing like Cleopatra Jones?
I feel like Grace Jones did.
And RuPaul.
Who nowadays?
Brandi: You better work!
Hmm...a lot of female athletes
like all the WNBA
me: Have them all dressed in furs and feather?
Brandi: And Dennis Rodman
me: I think Rodman sort of does already.
Brandi: Well, yeah, for press conferences and stuff
You know how the NBA cracked down on it's players wearing casual clothes?
David Stern made them look nice
So, perhaps the WNBA could jazz themselves up a bit more
me: I think hair metal bands should dress like Cleo.
They already wear makeup and have long hair.
All they need are some capes and glittery leggings.
The genre could make a real comeback.
All right. Let's wrap it up.
What did you learn from Cleopatra Jones?
Brandi: I learned that, as a black woman in America, you need to be assertive if you want to get ahead.
And that PETA is crazy
because furs are classy.
And that you can be stylish
and practical
me: I learned that if you want to kill Huggy Bear, don't even bother hitting him with trucks, because you're just going to have to machine gun him in the end anyway.
And I learned that even white cops can give the black power salute.
Brandi: Oh yeah.
But they'll get strange looks
As they should.
me: I think we should end with you saying "See you around, Super Honkie!"
Brandi: No!
I'm not saying that!
me: You must!
Brandi: Also, it's spelled with a "Y"
No!
me: SAY IT!
Brandi: Good day, my caucasian brother.
me: Now you sound like the butler.
Brandi: At least I'm not racist, so I feel good about that
Barack Obama would be proud.
me: I don't know about you, but I'm filled with hopes and dreams.
Brandi: This movie gave me a lot of hope
I think I'm going to make it as a black woman in America
I should watch the CNN series "Black in America" just to check though
me: You go, soul sister.
Brandi: [holding up fist in solidarity]
me: [Holds up fist]

MORE BLAXPLOITATION!

I STILL EAT Soviet-era cookies. They sell them at the Russian grocery store in St. Louis Park, and I presume they have been there for a very long time.

Why do I eat them? Well, most people don't remember this, but for a while Soviet Jews were escaping Mother Russia by hiding in cookies. So far I have discovered 13 different families, most from around Moscow, including one chess Grandmaster. All had been sitting inside their respective cookies, working on math equations and studying English and reading Samizdat publications. All have been shocked to discover that the Cold War is long over.

Have you been to that tailor shop on Excelsior and Grand? The owner is one of the Jews I found in a cookie. Also, that dealer in Turkish rugs? Also a Jew I rescued from a cookie.

I'm glad to be continuing the good work the rest of the Jewish community has forgotten about. Although, I must say, the cookies are terrible.

I think they are a little sick of me at the JCC in St. Louis Park. At least a few times per month, I come in with a family in tow, generally dressed in white cotton shirts, blue jackets, and long blue trousers, the children often wearing a red pioneer neckerchief. The staff at the JCC are unfailingly polite, and they have been very good about finding these new immigrants temporary homes and jobs. They put the Russians in touch with immigration lawyers and introduce them around the Jewish community. But each time I enter the JCC , the staff greets me with strained smiles and weary eyes. I know that I am creating a lot of work for them. I know they haven't budgeted for this sort of work since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and don't really have the staff for it. But, until they actively start turning me down, I will keep returning. I can't, in good conscience, let my fellow Jews continue to live in a dessert pastry.

Every Thursday I go to a vodka bar in St. Louis Park, where the Jews I have rescued meet to share drinks and stories. They call themselves the
Десерт евреев, which, as I understand it, means the "dessert Jews," and they talk of the lives they left in Soviet Russia, and the families they left behind, and their years in the cookies. One fellow, a tall,goateed man named Anton Zaslavsky, taught himself how to play the Kolyosnaya Lira, a sort of Russian hurdy gurdy, during his years in the cookie, and he plays the strange instrument and sings mournful songs by Vladimir Vysotsky.

There is also a girl at these meetings. Larissa Kats. She was a baby when she went into the cookie. She is 21 now. She has lived her entire life inside a teacake cookie. She is pretty, with long black hair and almond shaped eyes, and she speaks phrasebook English, like the rest of the Dessert Jews. She is very good at asking directions, and locating bathrooms, and ordering food in restaurants, but, beyond that, she's a bit lost. While in the teacake cookie, she worked her way through a series of Russian scientific textbooks. When she gets nervous, she takes apart spare electronics and reassembles them. I once tried to have a conversation with her, which was awkward and stilted, and, while we talked, I watched her dissemble a broken transistor radio and an old watch, and then turn the parts into a clandestine listening device. She held it up for me to see. "What you call this?" she asked.

I told her. She wrinkled her nose, confused. "A bug?" she asked, disbelieving.

I am in love with her.

She does not know much about love. When you've spent your entire life in a mixture of flour, walnuts, and confectioners sugar, all you learn is what you read in books and what you see from your parents. There is not much room for books in a cookie, so her reading material consisted entirely of educational manuals. One was about family planning, but I understand it treated lovemaking as a plumbing issue whose only function was to produce children for the good of the State. Some families brought small radios with them into their cookies, and so, at the very least, had some exposure to American culture. Larissa did not. The Dessert Jews who had radios are the ones who have adapted fastest to their new homes. They speak English well, although strangely: They often throw in little noises when they speak, such as honks or boinging noises, the result of listening to drive-time morning deejays, I presume. Nonetheless, they are eager Americans, and many of them have found work as car salesmen, where they dazzle their bosses with high-speed sales pitches that warn that THANKS TO A TEMPORARY OVERSTOCK, NO REASONABLE OFFER WILL BE REFUSED.

Larissa is not like this. Without books, without radio, she had only her parents to look to. They are sullen, argumentative people, and so she assumes that lovers must fight. We have gamely attempted to bicker, but her English is so limited that we haven't been able to do much more than heatedly discuss what might be the best route to the public gymnasium. This argument interested neither of us, so we lapsed into silence, and she turned her attention to converting an old toaster into a makeshift spy camera.

I have decided to take responsibility for her romantic education. Tonight, there is a showing of the most romantic film I have ever seen, Breakfast at Tiffany's, at an art house theater near the University of Minnesota campus. I have asked her to go with me. I know she won't be able to follow much of the dialogue, but it's not too hard to suss out the blossoming affection between Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard. The long middle section of the film, in which Hepburn and Peppard spend a day together exploring New York and indulging in impromptu pranks, such as shoplifting from a dollar store, is filmed almost entirely without dialogue. I don't expect that this one film will fill in the blanks left by a lifetime in a confection, but perhaps it will be a start.

She laughs at Mickey Rooney's performance as Mr. Yunioshi, a performance that hasn't inspired mirth since the film was first released, if it did then. Otherwise, she is quiet throughout the movie, unconsciously fiddling with a series of electrical wires that I fear she may be turning into some sort of a detonator. Occasionally, during the movie, I glance over at her and catch her staring at me, her brow furrowed, lost in thought. She quickly glances away. Midway through the movie, she takes my hand. Her grip is too strong, and my hand falls asleep in hers, but I don't want to discourage her, and so I ignore the tingling in my palm until my hand goes numb.

After the movie, we go out for Chinese food. She eats quietly, eyes cast downward. Occasionally, she sighs very heavily. At the end of the meal, the waiter places two fortune cookies in front of us. I open mine and show her my fortune. Interested, she breaks open her cookie and takes out her fortune. She looks at it for a minute. Then she looks up at me.

"What is this called?" she asks.

"A fortune," I tell her.

"Do you think the fortune ever asks directions back into the cookie?" she asks.

I don't know what to say. She stares at me, searching my face. Then, after a long pause, she grins.

"A joke," she says, then widens her eyes and raises her eyebrows conspiratorially.

It's not a very funny joke, but I laugh anyway. If she can awkwardly hold my hand, I can awkwardly feign some mirth. Perhaps we can do it like this, step-by-step, a forced gesture of affection here, a badly understood compliment there. These gestures may be too sweet and artificial, but, you know, that seems somehow right when you're romancing a girl who lived in a cookie.

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

THE FIRST FOUR LINES from this song are all I remember from a very old song I wrote, just before I moved out to Los Angeles in 1990. The melody is new, as are the rest of the lyrics, which, obviously, actually borrow from my experience of moving to LA. In a nutshell, I sold almost everything I owned and left without telling anyone, and with barely enough money to support me for more than two weeks. In fact, it wasn't the last time in my life I have packed up and moved without letting anyone know, and my mother still panics if she hasn't heard from me for more that a few weeks, worried that I will call from a homeless shelter in Hollywood, or from an attic apartment in Omaha, or wherever, even though I haven't done this for years.

"GONE" LYRICS:

Caught a bus for the Hillcrest
On the Nicollet side
I paid a half-buck for the transfer
And three for the ride
Going to the west coast
Going to LA
I ain't told you but
I'm going today
And I'm gone
Man I'm gone

Ain't got much money
I won't need it there
Just enough for my meals
And enough for my fare
I'll send you a postcard
From the Hollwyood sign
I'll send you another
From Hollywood and Vine
But I'm gone
Man I'm gone

Don't cry now tears now
Ain't no regrets
You knew I was leaving
From the moment we met
I don't say no goodbyes now
I don't take the time
I'm packed and I'm leaving
For Hollywood and Vine
And I'm gone
Man I'm gone

LISTEN TO "GONE":



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MORE NEW SONGS!

ONE MORE CHANCE was all he needed. Then the world would again be his oyster--a glittering place of hit shows. Ravishing women, showers of brilliance at opening nights.

John Alcott Rawlie got that chance. It was the night before the opening of his newest show--the first after the downhill years. But Rawlie was drunk. Now he had to take stock, or write his epitaph in neon lights.

From the book's first page:

An exciting novel of love and lust in the tinsel world of the theater.

What do you do when your name is John Alcott Rawlie, and you have two weaknesses?

Booze.

Women.

You've tried to reform and you've made it.

Maybe.

But now they're casting your new play and they want you to pick the female lead ...

Will you be caught once again in the heady whirl of easy women and endless nights?

More Dirty Books!

HERE IT IS, the first song I ever wrote. There's not much too it -- three chords, a very simple melody line, and rather unambiguously pop lyrics. I don't expect I sang it in the high, twee falsetto I have adopted for this recording, but I don't know that I didn't -- I tended to sing at the very top of my range when I was a boy of 18, in 1986, when this song was written.

I wrote this in my dorm room at the University of Minnesota late one night, and it's about a real Cindy, who I had a terrible crush on. I knew her from high school, and occasionally hung out with her, but doing so was uncommonly awkward for me. I believe we went out for dinner together a few times, and we went to a Tom Waits performance at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Minneapolis, which was then much as Waits described it in his song 9th & Hennepin. She was always friendly to me, and had written me a very nice note in my yearbook, and I thought she was one of the prettiest girls I had ever met. So I guess I got to noodling with my guitar one night, and this song came out.

Cindy was a year younger than me, and so entered the University the following year. It turned out that our paths crossed once during the day, at Coffman Union, and I would malinger there and make small talk with her. I was probably obvious about having a terrible crush on her, and I don't expect our conversations ever got any less awkward, although I don't remember them now. One day, when I was waiting for her at the Union, I saw her at the other end of the building, walking at a fast clip. I called out to her, and she speeded up, and I was suddenly flooded with embarrassment. Suddenly it seemed to me that I had been a terrible pest, and I felt that I must have been forcing my company on her. I never tried to talk to her at Coffman after that, and quickly lost contact with her.

Years later, in the mid-90s, I participated in a number of anarchist activities in the Twin Cities, mostly centering around environmental issues and running an infoshop called the Emma Center. For the first few weeks, when I first got involved in the anarchist scene, I saw Cindy here and there; she had obviously been involved with this group for a while. Before I could screw up the nerve to say hello to her, she moved out of state. I later discovered a zine she wrote and illustrated called Doris, and I occasionally picked up issues. Her writing was often autobiographical, and I read the zine with a certain amount of dread, worried that my experiences with Cindy might show up, and worried about how they might be represented. I'm not sure why I worried about that -- Cindy's zine was about a lot of things, including sexual abuse and incest. I was just another fidgety teenage boy.

22 years later, I look back on this whole experience, and on my first song, with some embarrassment. Although, the truth is, this story is filtered through the undependable interpretive skills of a very young and immature boy. I saw a girl walk away from me, and immediately responded with a youthful shame and awkwardness.

It's a little strange the revisit this memory, and I don't think I would have were it not for this project. Usually, I keep it tucked away in the corner of my brain reserved for the very small handful of memories that I don't particularly want to revisit, although, thinking back on it now, it doesn't seem like something I should have felt so odd and awkward about. It's puzzling what sticks with us, and how it sticks. I look back on my entire experience of homelessness with a sort of fascination, as though it were simply a terrific adventure, but a teenage crush that had an ambiguous, puzzling moment has remained a sore spot for two decades.

Also -- and this may be a minor point, but I might as well admit it -- I'm not convinced I ever actually saw Cindy dance.

"BUT WHEN CINDY DANCES" LYRICS:

She don't wear no perfume
She don't wear diamond rings
But when Cindy dances
She dances the sweetest I've ever seen

She don't wear fancy jewelry
She don't wear designer jeans
But when Cindy dances
She dances the sweetest I've ever seen

She don't go for the rich and famous
She's only sweet 16
But when Cindy dances
She dances the sweetest I've ever seen

LISTEN TO "BUT WHEN CINDY DANCES":



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

SHE KNEW SHE SHOULDN'T get in, but she just couldn't resist his face.

More Vinyl Oddities.

THIS WEEK, Bunny and Brandi watch Shaft, one of the most successful early Blaxploitation films. Aided by an Academy Award-winning and justly famous score by Isaac Hayes (who was briefly considered for the title role), Shaft tells the story of an African-American private eye caught in a turf war between a black crime boss in Harlem and the mob that has stolen his daughter. Richard Roundtree stars as Shaft, and he brings to the role a dogged persistence and a willingness to put up with punishment that recalls 1940s crime detectives; indeed, Roundtree does a surprising amount of footwork, chasing down leads and interviewing sources, including, briefly, Antonio Fargas (a name we will see pop up constantly in Blaxploitation, although he is probably most famous for playing Huggy Bear on Starsky and Hutch.) But when the climax comes, Shaft turns into a man of action, staging a daring raid on a hotel on which an entire floor is staffed exclusively by mafiosos.

me: I've been thinking about Shaft as a detective movie.
It's sort of like a 40's crime film.
The Italian mobsters all wear trenchcoats and carry Tommy guns.
Brandi: Yeah, I got that impression as well.
I did enjoy the old-timey weapons
They were the best
I wish more gangsters used them today. I'd feel so much better about living in North Minneapolis if it had an old-timey feeling.
me: Nothing like a good tommy-gunning to make a neighborhood feel old-fashioned!
Brandi: For reals! Even better if they'd switch to muskets.
me: Now you're talking.
I knew a bartender in New Orleans. He worked at the Pirate's Alley bar.
He dressed like a pirate.
And he went to work with blackpowder pistols and muskets.
Loaded.
He got word he was going to get robbed one night.
He set up a row of loaded muskets behind the bar.
Nobody bothered him.
Brandi: Let's talk about wallpaper.
I found the movie's wallpaper choices to be oddly mesmerizing.
me: Yes. They were huge, 1970s colored op art patterns.
It was like the set was trying to hypnotize us.
Shaft didn't have wallpaper like that. You know why?
Because he was a 1940s detective.
Brandi: Oh yeah, his office was sparse
me: And his East Village apartment was pure Beatnik.
It even had a Harlequin painting above his bed.
And he seemed to sleep with a lot of Swedish girls.
Thanks to his friend, the gay bartender.
Brandi: Yes, I found Shaft comfortable with his sexuality
which was quite refreshing
me: Yeah. Shaft didn't mind having his butt patted by a gay bartender.
Brandi: Although, he seemed a little to permissive about letting his boss not only touch his ass, but squeeze it.
Then again, I guess employment law didn't exist in blaxploitation movies in the 70s.
So...
me: That wasn't his boss! It was his bartender!
Shaft was a PI!
He was just pretending to work at the bar in order to buddy up to some Mafia guys.
What, do you think Shaft had a part time gig tending bar?
Brandi: Yeah. You know how rich people like to do "common-folk" gigs just because they can.
Like that hockey player who interned at Vogue recently
me: You think Shaft was a hobby bartender?
Brandi: Yeah, because he probably entertained a lot
and it was good practice
He seems like he really would care about being a good host.
me: It did give the opportunity to meet Swedish chicks and take them back to his place and shower them.
That was obviously important to him.
Brandi: And given NYC at that time, it seems like a good idea.
me: I think Shaft's drink of choice was a tall glass filled up with Scotch.
That's what he kept giving the gangsters.
Before he hit them with the bottle.
Brandi: I'm sure it wasn't good scotch though
So, it was probably a bottle of something they'd been trying to get rid of anyway.
me: Phillips brand.
Let's talk about the black crime boss for a moment.
His name was Bumpy.
That just doesn't inspire terror.
Brandi: Yeah, that's always a sign that they are really bad people
See: Baby Doc
me: True.
Brandi: Anyway, I thought bumpy dressed well
but he had a horrible balding pattern
But maybe he didn't shave it all off because his head was bumpy ... hence the nickname.
me: He had once of the nicest offices I have ever seen in a Blaxploitation film.
It was very modern.
But, for some reason, he had a 1920s telephone.
Brandi: Yeah, that was just strange
maybe it was really a modern phone
but he bought it from hammacher Schlemmer
were they around then?
They always make modern shit that looks old-timey.
me: Yes. And I'm sure he had it because he was like, well, I'm a crime boss.
Tommy guns and old phones for me!
So I liked the way Shaft dressed.
It was always brown pants, brown turtleneck, and brown leather jacket with the collar popped.
When Issac Hayes sang the theme, he should have sung "Who's the brown private dick," because Shaft was one of the brownest dressed men I have ever seen.
Sometimes he'd change out of a brown outfit and into another brown outfit.
Brandi: He does love earth tones
He seems like he'd be really into the "green movement"
with his love of earth tones and walking everywhere.
me: It's true. He doesn't own a car!
Shaft takes the subway and taxis everywhere!
He's a real New Yorker. I'm sure he sits around in the bar, with his gay bartender, and says, you know, it's New York. who needs a car?
In the meanwhile, Superfly is driving past in total disgust.
Brandi: He didn't seem to take the train all that often
Like there were several times where I wondered if he could have gotten off at a closer stop
me: He liked to walk!
So I think I told you that Superfly was directed by the son of the director of Shaft.
Gordon Parks and Gordon Parks Jr.
Brandi: Yes, you did tell me about the directing of both movies.
I thought that this movie was so much better than Superfly.
Mainly because everyone was dressed appropriately for the weather
me: That's true. Shaft wore gloves.
They were going to cast Superfly himself as Shaft.
Ron O'Neal.
But they thought he was too light.
I hope they didn't tell him directly. He hits people for calling him "White looking."
Brandi: I was sad that there wasn't a catch phrase like, "I need my money TO-NIGHT!"
Well, there was for that Jewish guy
But I forgot what it was.
me: What do I look like, some kind of a SCHMUCK?
Something like that.
Brandi: Just last night I told my mom that I needed something "TO-NIGHT"
Anyway.
Bumpy's daughter looked like the black chick from the Bloodhound Gang on 3-2-1 Contact
me: Yeah. You would think she could have solved her own case.
I kept expecting her to yell "If you've got the crime, we got the time!"
Brandi: Totally.
I can't find a picture of her on the web
but I did find the lyrics to their theme, which you seem to have committed to memory.
me: I'm a bad mother-
Brandi: shut yo mouth!
me: I'm just talking about Bunny!
Brandi: Let's talk about the police chief.
Who worked in the basement of the station, like he was Melvin from Office Space
me: I liked him.
I don't know why Shaft was so mean to him.
Brandi: I did too.
He seemed very reasonable.
Just overworked
Like he worked at Sonic in St. Paul.
me: He was played by Charles Cioffi.
He's a charter member of the Guthrie here in town.
And he taught at the University of Minnesota.
Brandi: Huh. I didn't know that
Why didn't you mention that during the movie?
Had you forgotten because you were enjoying your Purple Drank.
me: I just learned it! From the interwebs!
Brandi: Oh!
me: Yes. We drank a lot of Purple Drank.
Brandi: Well, think how much more I would have appreciated the movie if I'd know that while watching.
me: I know! Me too!
I'm a U of M alum!
Brandi: We should clarify that we were not drinking Purple Drank aka cough syrup.
me: Oh no.
Brandi: We were drinking vodka and Welch's.
And it should be noted that I was very unhappy that the Target in Brooklyn Center didn't sell grape pop.
What kind of large retailer that sells pop in Brooklyn Center doesn't carry grape or orange pop?
I had to go to Cub Foods across the town and get it
me: Cubs?
Brandi: I mean Cubs.
me: It definitely helps the Blaxploitation experience to drink some grape drank.
Brandi: Yes and it does serve to slow one's roll
which is what is supposed to occur on Sunday afternoons.
Let's talk about Shaft's crew
Like that one dude who always wore the same shirt
He had nice mutton chops
but he was creepy
He was always lurking and he didn't seem to blink.
But then at times he seemed like a gentle giant
I just didn't know how to read him.
me: He was a Black Power dude.
He seemed to have a problem with Shaft for some reason.
Maybe he didn't get Shaft's sense of humor.
Which, frankly, I didn't either.
He'd just burst out laughing.
Brandi: Yeah, he guffawed an awful lot
me: "Where you going?"
"I'm going to get laid WAHOO HA HA HA HOO!"
Brandi: Shaft kinda laughed like my grandpa did.
I never heard a punchline to a joke from my grandpa
because he'd start guffawing like that half-way through
And sometimes I think the fact that he couldn't finish a damn joke annoyed my grandma but other times, she'd insist he tell a joke because she knew he couldn't get through it
me: My grandfather also used to prevent himself from telling a joke by laughing too hard.
He would actually be crying and gasping for air when he got to the punch line.
Brandi: Mine too!
me: Wow.
A moment of racial harmony.
Brandi: This was my grandpa who was in the rodeo
was your grandpa in the rodeo?
me: No.
Brandi: Oh.
But speaking of racial harmony
I thought that the white killers in that movie were not, in fact, the very best kind.
me: No. They had the Tommy gun advantage, but Shaft was just better at putting a man down.
He tore up that room full of gangsters.
Brandi: I believe you mean "to' up"
Me: One of the gangsters was draped over the coffee table in an unnatural position.
Brandi: Yeah, that was great
I was trying to figure out how one falls and lands in that position
It was almost like he was putting his feet up because he sprained his ankle before shaft arrived but then he got shot and died like that.
Me: That's what happens when you take on a man who won't cop out when there's danger all about.
He'd risk his neck for his brother man.
SHAFT!
Can ya dig it?
Brandi: Yeah, I suppose that I can dig it.
me: That wasn't very enthusiastic.
Brandi: I'm tired for some reason.
Eating Peanut Butter from the jar at work does that.
But I will dig it
TO-NIGHT!
There's nothing going on but I'll be energized after going outside
And I needed a reason to say "TO-NIGHT!"

MORE BLAXPLOITATION!

IT'S MADE IN CHINA, as regular readers of the Odd Ingester might already have guessed. It is, after all, a gummy candy designed to look like another food, and, for some reason, China has taken it upon itself to create an astounding selection of such treats.

That being said, unlike a lot of the weird Chinese candy that has found its way into the Odd Ingester's gullet over the past few months, which mostly has tended to taste like a science experiment gone wrong, this Gummy Bacon actually tastes pretty good -- it has a mellow strawberry flavor that doesn't taste especially artificial, although it is. Well, perhaps the Odd Ingester should amend that statement. It tastes like strawberry soda, which doesn't precisely taste like real strawberries, but it's a flavor most people will find familiar.

Why doesn't it taste like bacon? The Odd Ingester does not know, although the candy looks convincingly like the meat. The distributor, a Seattle-based company called Accoutrements, who specializes in novel toys and foods, seem aware of this fact, as the box they ship the candy in comes with a warning not to fry or microwave their Gummy bacon.

The Odd Ingester does not take orders from candy, so he went ahead and fried one piece of Gummy Bacon and then went ahead and microwaved another.



More from the Odd Ingester!

IT'S NOT CLEAR in this song that Jamaican singer Desmond Dekker is singing about English author Sax Rohmer's pulp supervillain. But for the chorus, in which Dekker repeatedly intones, in a high, sweet near-falsetto, "This is the face of Fu Manchu," the song isn't really about the satanic Chinese master criminal. Instead, Dekker moralizes, as he sometimes did in his lyrics. His first hit, after all, was a song called "Honour Your Father and Mother," which simply took the text of Exodus 20:12 and set it to music.

In this instance, Dekker informs us that it makes no sense to brag about employment, or earnings. After all, according to Dekker, it's "not what you earn that make you a man, but is what you keep that make you a man," presumably making a point about the value of thrift and the importance of maintaining a healthy savings account.

Never mind the moralizing. The song, produced by Chinese Jamaican Leslie Kong, who owned Beverley's record company (and gave the world Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley), is genuinely spooky, featuring a serpentine organ part that creeps around a typically biting ska guitar rhythm. Behind this, several voices occasionally join in with a ghostly wail. Dekker had an ethereal, gentle tenor voice that slipped easily into falsetto, and he tended to sing with very little effort, making full use of the microphone's amplifying power, producing an uneasily intimate sound, as though he were whispering directly in your ear. As a result, as he sang, his verses tended to end in a soft vibrato, as though something had stolen the breath from him.

The resulting song is wonderfully strange. It is as though Dekker were warning that when you've gone into the antechamber of the Si-Fan criminal empire, at the moment you face the catlike visage of certain death, don't even bother discussing your annual income, because, man, Fu Manchu is just not going to care.

LISTEN TO "FU MANCHU":



MORE FROM THE ESSENTIAL GHOUL'S RECORD SHELF!

PEREZ HILTON, who is half-albino, has been calling me out. On his popular gossip blog, he prints every photo he can find of me, scrawled with nasty images and comments. With other celebrities, he is content to simply smear a few white smudges onto their photograph, usually around their mouth, as though the celebrity had just been caught having completed an especially pornographic act. With me, he completely whites out my face, causing my images to resemble a photo negative of a minstrel performer.

Perez is angry because he believes that I am in denial about my albino heritage. He particularly likes to point out a 2006 interview I did with People Magazine where I said "I am not an albino."

I am not certain whether I was misquoted or simply phrased my thoughts poorly, but Perez conveniently leaves out the remainder of my comment, where I point out that I was adopted by albinos, and consider myself culturally albino, even though I have the usual amount of melanin pigment in my skin, or, at least, as much as most Irish people have. Perez also neglects the many interviews I have given in which I discuss my upbringing in a small albino village in North Omaha, on the outskirts of Hummel Park. I was raised in a despised and feared community, the subject of endless urban legends about Satanism and child sacrifice. As a result, the community was sometimes the victims of hate crimes. I vividly remember one incident from my childhood in which gangs of high school students drove by and flung Edgar Winter records out the windows of their cars at us. One community elder was very badly bruised when one of the albums struck him -- there was a long, narrow bruise that ran along his face, made by the spine of the album, and, very faintly, the bruises blotched in the form of letters, spelling out the name of the album: White Trash.

Despite my ruddy complexion, dark hair, and gray eyes, I was still a pariah in the public school I attended, as were the other albinos. We were easily recognized, as albino culture has adopted a distinctive style of dress, in the way that Hasidic Jews and the Amish have. Ever since I was a baby, I was dressed in the folk costume of the albino: Ray Ban sunglasses, porkpie hat, and heavy black suits with three or more buttons in the front. We were also quickly identified by the smell of coconut, which, of course, comes from our heavy reliance on sunscreen. In my instance, I was also known for my white lips. Like all albinos, I wore a lot of medicated lip gloss; on most, who already have white lips, this is invisible. On me, the medicated gloss looked as though I wore white lipstick.

Perez Hilton likes to point out that I don't wear the albino folk costume anymore, which, honestly, is only partially true. I still wear the Ray Bans and the porkpie hats, but I just don't need the excessive sunscreen or lip gloss. Perez's attacks on me are often unfair like this. He once printed a list of my past romantic partners, and noted that none of them were albino. But the list was culled from gossip sites, and I had never met -- much less dated -- at least half the women on the list. And Amy Smart is one-eighth albino, and Perez would have known that had he bothered to do any research. He could simply have called the Albino Association of America, where she is a member in good standing.

I don't blame Perez Hilton, not really. There are albinos who try to pass. Some use thick cream makeup, which generally gives them an unreal, mannikin-like appearance. Others have ocular albinism, which only effects the color of their eyes, and can pass easily in the broader population merely by wearing tinted contact lenses. Albinism is so poorly understood among non-albinos that there have been stories of marriages in which one partner did not know the other was albino for years. In fact, there are quite a few figures from history who were part or fully albino, but hid it from the general public. Truman Capote is believed to have been one-eighth albino. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one-sixteenth albino. Jazz trumpeter Lester Young had an albino mother, which has never been mentioned in any of his official biographies, but his albino heritage is no surprise to anyone in the albino community. After all, he was rarely seen in public without sunglasses and porkpie hat.

So I understand Perez's complaints, but he's simply wrong about me, and his attacks on me are damaging my reputation, at least within the albino community. We had a very brief series of terse and quite angry exchanges via email, which only seemed to add to his resentment. He read one of my emails aloud on a video he uploaded to YouTube , mocking it quite severely. The mainstream media picked up the story, with The National Enquirer running an unsympathetic piece on me titled "Film Star Bunny Sparber: A Whiter Shade of Pale?"

Tonight it ends. I have taken a booth at the White Room on Hollywood Boulevard, one of the oldest Albino Bars in Los Angeles. It is a small saloon that is always kept very dark, and it was begun in the 1940s by albinos in the film colony, who often worked in studio's story department, but were occasionally recruited to play villains onscreen, a shameful cinematic stereotyping of albinos that continues to this day. The bar has become popular with young Hollywood, who don't know its history but are attracted by its decor, which hasn't been changed much since the bar was first built. The bar is dark enough that the albinos who still frequent it can do so in relative privacy, tucked into booths, as I am. Over there, toward the back, is someone I know -- a 75-year-old screenwriter with an Oscar nomination to his name, dutifully peering at Variety from under his porkpie hat. Near him, two actors from a popular television melodrama about an inner-city high school play pool. Neither are aware of the screenwriter near them, and neither are albinos.

Perez Hilton has gotten my invitation, which was sent to him via a mutual friend. I sat opposite this friend as he called Perez, and, after much hemming and hawing, the gossip blogger agreed to meet. He is late, or I am early. I sip a Beefeater martini, a drink that was the favorite of the psychic Criswell, who was himself one-quarter albino and frequented this bar with Maila Nurmi, better known as Vampira, who was long thought to be albino, but wasn't. There is a lot of Hollywood history in this bar, if you cared to dig a little.

Perez come in with three friends, all wearing porkpie hats. The gossip blogger wears a button with a stylized pink eye on a black background, a symbol that briefly came into vogue in the Sixties, when Albino Pride organizations sprung up across America. He is in asubdued, conciliatory mood. He and his friends sit around me, and all tell me how much they enjoyed my latest film, Street Butcher. Perez, in particular, was impressed by a scene that was done in a single tracking shot, in which my character, Butcher Tom, cuts a swath of destruction through a heavily armed triad gang. Perez has heard that no digital effects were used in that scene, and wants to know how it was done. I let him in on the secret: We cast amputees in the roles, and I severed prosthetic attachments to their missing limbs. I promised the studios I would not tell anyone how this scene was done, and also promised that makeup artist responsible; the latter is a personal friend of mine, and I feel badly about betraying his trust. But I tell Perez anyway, so he will know that I am also in a conciliatory mood.

We don't speak long. I show him a scar on the back of my neck, left over from a schoolyard fight from when I was a boy. I had been taunted by a boy I did not know. He was not from my school district, and was older and bigger than me. Nonetheless, I rushed at him, fists flying, and was rewarded with a concussion. Perez listens quietly, then nods. He asks about Amy Smart. I tell him I have not spoken to Amy in months. He wants to interview her. I tell him I will pass the message along the next time I speak to her. He thanks me. He and his three friends shake my hands, and then rise from the booth. They exit, leaving me behind to drink my martini alone.

I look down. Perez has left something behind on the table. An Albino Power button.

I rise and cross the bar. I speak with the 75-year-old screenwriter, and he invites me to join him. He is full-blooded albino, and, in the darkness of the bar, his skin looks ghostly, and, occasionally, over the top of his Ray-Bans, I see a glimpse of his pink eyes. We make small talk for a few minutes, the sort that you usually make in Hollywood. He asks about my latest project, and then tells me about the television episode he recently wrote, and how it was ruined by the studio writing staff. I order myself another martini, and order the screenwriter his drink of choice, an Old Fashioned. We drink them and talk about old days, and, when I finish my cocktail, I pay my bill and say goodbye.

It is still light outside. As I open the door, the Hollywood sun pours in, suddenly flooding the bar with light. The television actors at the pool table don't notice, but a half-dozen men at the booths reflexively turn away and lower their porkpie hats to shield their eyes. I take out my cell phone and look up Amy Smart's number. I don't know that she wants to hear from me -- the last time we spoke, we fought. But I promised to call.

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

NOTE: This is a satire by Max "Bunny" Sparber, and is not intended maliciously. Max "Bunny" Sparber has invented all names and situations in its stories, except in cases when public figures are being satirized. Any other use of real names is accidental and coincidental, or used as a fictional depiction or personality parody (permitted under Hustler Magazine v. Fallwell, 485 US 46, 108 S.Ct 876, 99 L.Ed.2d 41 (1988)).

WRITTEN ABOUT 2001, obviously in a mood that was a bit saccharine. There is no story to this song, except that I forgot how to play it and retaught myself this morning, and was a little disappointed at how simple it is. I think this is one of those instances where I had a melody in my head, worked it out on the ukulele, and realized that what seemed like a very sophisticated piece of songwriting when I hummed it to myself was based on the same chord structure as "Louie, Louie."

I think I wrote this song in a jealous fit over "September Song," which is melancholy and bleak and lovely, and I sometimes write things because I wish I had written something else.

"ONE KISS FROM YOU" LYRICS:

My eyes grow dim as I grow old
My hearing fails me and my skin it grows cold
I'm easily wearied if I stay up past 10
But one kiss from you
I'd be a young man again

Those boys who love you, what do they know
I see them trailing behind you wherever you go
It's the affections of children not the passion of men
And one kiss from you
I'd be a young man again

My hand they tremble -- that's what they do
My knees grow weak -- but still I love you
I'm frail and silly and I've got pains in my heart
And I fear if you won't love me it will all fall apart

My nurses tell me that I'm an old fool
Flirting and fussing like I'm back in high school
If it's a fool who loves you, well, I'm a fool then
But one kiss from you
I'd be a young man again.

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15 NIGHTTIME CONVERSATIONS with women I have slept with in the past two weeks

I.
Me: God, we totally just did it.
Her: I'm already regretting it.
Me: Why?
Her: Because you're transcribing everything I say.

II.
Me: So, I've never slept with a black chick before.
Her: I'm not black.
Me: I know. I'm wondering if you know any black chicks you could hook me up with?

III.
Me: I hope you don't think I'm using you.
Her: Why would I think that?
Me: Because I stole your credit card.

IV.
Me: So I thought we might get a little kinky tonight.
Her: Yes?
Me: I got masks.
Her: Okay.
Me: And these leather outfits.
Her: Those are kinky!
Me: And this shotgun.
Her: Where are you going with this?
Me: Also, the landlord is tied up in the bathroom.
Her: Okay, I'm not comfortable with this.
Me: Square.

V.
Me: I love to do it with the blinds drawn and the windows open.
Her: Yeah?
Me: Yeah, I love for people to see us when I do you.
Her: You're a bit of an exhibitionist, huh?
Me: No. They pay me to watch.

VI.
Me: You're the prettiest girl I've ever slept with.
Her: Thank you!
Me: Wait. I'm sorry. I just remembered something. You're not the prettiest. But you're in the top five.

VII.
Me: How many lovers have you had?
Her: Do you really want to know?
Me: Yes.
Her: 60.
Me: Really?
Her: Does that seem like a lot?
Me: Not if you're a prostitute.
Her: What? Jesus! Maybe I should go.
Me: Maybe you should.
Her: But you're still going to have to pay me $50 for my time.

VIII.
Her: I don't know if I would have done this if it wasn't for all the coke.
Me: That's not very nice.
Her: Well, coke makes me say things that aren't very nice.
Me: But it also makes you horny?
Her: Yes.
Me: Well, I can live with it then.
Her: Also, I can't believe how ugly you are.
Me: But you want to screw?
Her: Yes. Go ahead and sex me up, ugly.

IX.
Her: I want you to meet my parents?
Me: Even though we're just having a one-night stand?
Her: Yes.
Me: Why?
Her: So they can see what I might wind up dating if I didn't end it after one night.

X.
Me: How do you feel about three-ways?
Her: Naughty! Who do you have in mind?
Me: Me, and two chicks who aren't you.

XI.
Her: Have you been in the bathroom using cocaine?
Me: Why would you ask that?
Her: Because you were in there shouting "I'm in the bathroom using cocaine!"

XII.
Me: Now that I have seen you naked, I worry you might be bulimic.
Her: But you asked for a bulimic in your personals ad.
Me: Oh! That's right!

XIII.
Her: What did you just write down?
Me: I jotted down what we just said. I thought it was funny.
Her: But I was telling you how my dad beat me.
Me: So?
Her: Well, that doesn't seem very funny
Me: Don't worry. When I put it on my blog, I'll toss in a few jokes.

XIV.
Me: Someone called me an asshole in the street today.
Her: Was it someone you knew?
Me: No! I total stranger.
Her: Well, they must have heard about it from someone.

XV.
Me: I feel like I keep going from one girl to another, and there's nothing to these relationships but tawdry sex and cruel banter.
Her: And you want something different?
Me: No. I was just bragging.

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

I BELIEVE I originally wrote this song around 2000, but I don't remember precisely when. I do remember the circumstances that led to me writing the song, though: I was reading about old gangsters and their nicknames, and discovered that quite a few were called "So and So the Jew." "Lenny the Jew." "Vinnie the Jew." So I wrote a song called "Jimmy the Jew" about a menacing underworld figure, and it stayed that was for a while. In fact, I remember performing it at Balls Cabaret in the Twin Cities on one of the very few occasions when I performed my own music in public.

A few years later, in 2004, when I had moved to Omaha and was writing my Tales of Tom Hopper, I got the idea to include a character who basically served the same function as a protection racket. Since this was in the world of animals, I called him Jimmy the Shrew, changed the lyrics to the song, and made it his theme song. So, in the story, when the shrew sings about himself, this is what he's singing.

"JIMMY THE SHREW" LYRICS:

There's a snarl under my waxed mustache
And a strange stain on my shoe
I carry with me a bottle of vitriol
They call me Jimmy the Shrew
They call me Jimmy the Shrew

There's not a dollar I don't own a piece of
Or a cruelty I don't do
Every scar here bears my name dear
They call me Jimmy the Shrew
They call me Jimmy the Shrew

There's a block on Delancey
That is where I hang my hat
The streets here they are slick with blood
And I'm the reason for that

Run your hands through my silky hair dear
I got a smile for you
They'll find nothing but your shredded stocking
They call me Jimmy the Shrew
They call me Jimmy the Shrew

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OF ALL THE BOOKS I OWN, this may be the most explicitly and unremittingly pornographic. There is more that is morally reprehensible on a single page of this book that can be found in the entirety of many of the sleazy paperbacks I own; worse, because the contents of Tijuana Bibles consist almost exclusively of crude illustrations, each scene is presented with a sort of explicitness that language could never match. What might take a paragraph to inexactly describe in a pulp novel, a few scrawled lines perfectly represent here.

So it's a bit surprising that, of all the smut I own, this is the book published by Simon & Schuster Editions, the craft and fine arts imprimatur of the famous publishing house. This work of unforgivably coarse sexuality is the one edited by Bob Adelman, an art scholar and renowned photojournalist, and introduced by Art Spiegelman, the artist and editor who won a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for his graphic representation of the Holocaust experiences of his father, titled Maus.

But, then, the subject of this book, the Tijuana bible, is something more than just crudely drawn pornographic spectacles. Because Tijuana bibles, which were cheaply and anonymously published throughout the middle part of the 20th century, didn't simply invent cartoonish characters and have them engage in vigorous, exaggerated coitus. No, the characters in the Tijuana bible were generally rather well known. Movie stars were drawn frolicking, their naughty bits exposed and turgid. Cartoon characters dropped the innocence of their official existence to engage in diabolical orgies. The scant dialogue was rich with coarse and ribald jokes, and the erotic scenes themselves were explicit to a degree that wouldn't be seen by most middle Americans until the sexual revolution of the 60s brought Triple-X movies into theaters in every American downtown. And even by today's standards, many of these funny books are still shocking. You just don't expect to see a fairly well-made caricature of Benny Goodman, sans pants, thrusting at a brunette while she cries out "What a agony pipe you have!"

In fact, if you were even vaguely famous back in the 30s and 40s, you were likely to find yourself illustrated into a sexual misadventure. Bonnie Parker, bank robber and lover of Clyde Barrow, is illustrated demanding sexual satisfaction and then castrating the man who provides it, while gangster Al Capone is drawn spilling mob secrets while In flagrante delicto, leading to his arrest. Each of these adult fables is lovingly reproduced in this book -- 100 Tijuana Bibles in all, along with an unexpectedly detailed guide to the terminology found in the books (testicles, for example, are sometimes, and hilariously, called testicules; if described with a penis, they're called a three-piece set.)

One could point to all this, I suppose, and mount a defense that studying the Tijuana bible gives us a glimpse into the underground culture of our collective past, in which forgotten characters from once-popular cartoons (Flapper Fanny?), political figures (in one, Joe Stalin!), obscure sports stars (heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan), and stars of popular broadcasts (Amos and Andy! Laurel and Hardy! Zeppo Marx!) all get it on. I suspect that was the case that was made when this book was pitched, along with a few others (Spiegelman discusses the importance of Tijuana bibles in the history of comic books, and sees them as a precursor to underground comix of the Sixties.)

I'll leave those arguments for others to make. I enjoy the book because it is both the weirdest and the dirtiest book I own.

More Dirty Books!

I SUSPECT I wrote this song because I liked the title, which has been used before, in songs dating back to the 30s or before. Bands playing music pops up in my lyrics now and then, particularly from my songs written in the late 90s, which is when I wrote this (1999 would be my guess). And, again, it's a tale of loss and regret, although, in this instance, set right at the terminus of a relationship. I don't have much else to say about the song, except that I have always been weirdly self-satisfied that I used the word "prithee" in the lyrics.

"LET THE BAND PLAY ON" LYRICS:

The band is in the streets
They're playing a sad melody
Let the band play on, my angel
Let them play I prithee
Pay them for the song they're playing
Ask them to play it again
A fitting end to this affair we're having
It needs a fitting end

We seemed so young when we began this
And no we seem so frail
The lies I fear have aged us angel
The capers and wassail
You were never mine to have, my angel
And soon you will be gone
So let's listen to this mournful song, dear
And let the band play on

LISTEN TO "LET THE BAND PLAY ON":



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I GREW UP, as most Americans in the late 20th century did, with Brooklyn-born writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak. Where the Wild Things Are, his tale of oversized monsters and wild rumpuses, was one of the earliest books I read, and my parents hung in my room a print from In the Night Kitchen, Sendak's contentious fantasia about naked children and bakers who look like Oliver Hardy. I was a frequent and eager reader of his book Higglety Pigglety Pop!, Or: There Must be More to Life, in which a sheepdog causes chaos. I don't think there was a Sendak book I didn't read in my childhood, but I only own one book by the author nowadays, and it is one I he authored in 1983, and I did not discover until I was 18 or so.

We're All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy is a pretty simply conceit. Sendak took two poems from Mother Goose and wedded them together, and then illustrated them. Neither of the poems have self-evident meanings, and both are so short that I can reprint them in entirety here. This is the first:

We are all in the dumps
For diamonds are trumps
The kittens have gone to St. Paul's!
The baby is bit
The moon's in a fit
And the houses are built
Without walls.

And the second:

Jack and Guy
Went out in the rye
And they found a little boy
With one black eye
Come says Jack let's knock him
On the head
No says guy
Let's buy him a loaf a bread
You buy one loaf
And I'll buy two
And we'll bring him up
As other folks do.

Typical of nursery rhymes, these bits of doggerel are evocative and somewhat brutal, but whatever they might have once referred to is lost; perhaps they were political satires, or perhaps they were subtle topical jokes, or perhaps they were never meant to mean much of anything at all.

Whatever the case, when Sendak set out to illustrating them, he was obviously filled with black thoughts. He sets his story in what seems to be nothing but back lots of the 1930s homeless encampments, populated by nobody but children dressed in rags. They huddle together under newspaper for shelter and warmth (an ingenious and heartbreaking use of the "houses are built without walls" line), and the newspaper feature ironic banner headlines, sometimes boasting of a glut in cheap housing, sometimes warning of dire news ("Leaner Times, Meaner Times" one says.)

Sendak constructs a nightmarish scenario around these ragamuffins, in which a starving and nearly naked child is kidnapped by giant rats and taken off to a combination orphanage and bakery (called St. Paul's) with a cartful of kittens, who, we suspect, are intended as ingredients. The eponymous Jack and Guy, dressed in shredded dress suits, follow and attempt a rescue. The book ends on a note that may be the most ambivalent in the history of children's literature: a double-truck image of children, huddled together in a shanty town, clutched together for warmth in empty cardboard boxes, their only beds in a chilly full-mooned night. ""These are difficult times for children." Sendak told the LA Times in 1993. "Children have to be brave to survive what the world does to them. And this world is scrungier and rougher and dangerouser than it ever was before ... "

I can't say just why this is the Sendak book that has affected me the most, and why it is the only one I now own. In part, I appreciate its lush illustrations, typical of Sendak, in which images are rendered in trembling ink caricature and then saturated with watercolor, and there is something about this book that seems more blunt and and forthright than much of Sendak's other books. All of the images spread across two pages, the children's book equivalent of a widescreen film, and so the story feels epic in its telling, and the images are very carefully crafted. The homeless children are almost always shown in a clump, making emotive gestures that echo each other, wrapped in newspapers, a little island against which the world has declared war. And the world, represented by monstrous gray rats that cheat at cards and steal helpless creatures, is uncaring and dangerous. The only support these children have is each other, and even that is suspect: When Sendak illustrates Jack's demand to do violence against a little boy, Sendak renders his face as twisted with incomprehensible rage.

It's a very sad, very pessimistic book, and it's no wonder it is one of the least remembered of Sendak's writing; unlike his most popular works, which have often been targets for thickheaded controversy, this one simply did not find a large enough audience to generate protests. But Sendak was right when he wrote it -- it is a hard world for children, and it doesn't seem to be getting much easier.

More from the Sparber Bookshelf.

THIS IS ANOTHER SONG I don't recall writing. I suspect it was sometime in the late 90s, so I'm going to place it at 1999. It's another tale of loss and regret, and I seemed to be telling a lot of them then, but the melody is unusual, with a distinctly Mexican flavor caused by the fact that the ukulele part is played on two strings and sounds vaguely like a ragtime song played south of the border. I've always been fond of this song -- find enough that I included it in my play Cruelties, as a song sung by one of the main characters, so it is one of the only songs I have ever written that I have heard sung by someone else.

"WASN'T WE A PAIR" LYRICS:

Wasn't I your man
Wasn't you my gal
I was lucky then
I had it all
What did I say
To make you cry like that
You showed me the door
You handed me my hat

What can I say
I ain't already said
I miss your voice
I miss our bed
Wasn't we in love
Wasn't we a pair
I reach in the dark
And find you ain't there

What am I now
Not much of a man
I sleep where I lie down
I work where I can
I wait for the day
When you call me home
Ain't half what I used to be
But I'm twice as alone

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THE DEVIL STARED at me, eyes heavily lidded and sleepy. I had not expected him to look so cartoonish. He sat on the rock, seemingly made of bright red geometric shapes, his head a cluster of triangles: pointed ears, arched eyebrows, goatee. A tail flicked behind him, also red, also ending in a triangle. Finally, he spoke.

"Well?" he asked.

"I was told to come to the crossroads," I responded, and he rolled his eyes.

"Yes, yes," he said curtly. "The crossroads. There's a devil. So you want something from me, man?"

I lifted my guitar case. He eyed it suspiciously.

"What is that, a guitar?" he asked.

I nodded, and he shook his head.

"No, man," he said. "I don't do no guitars."

I didn't know what to say. "I was told--" I began, and he cut me off.

"You were told what? Go to the crossroads and the devil will teach you guitar?"

I nodded.

He shook his head. "Wrong crossroads, man. Wrong devil. Did you ask for specifics?"

I had to admit that I hadn't.

He nodded. "Yeah, there's your problem. You got to know what crossroads to go to."

I asked if he knew.

The devil shook his head. "Once, maybe, I could tell you," he said. "I know Levine used to do it. But he got sick of all the schmucks who just wanted to learn Heavy Metal riffs. I think he teaches Jews harp now. I got a postcard from him, but it's been, like, a year. Nowadays, who knows? I know a hell of a banjo teacher, though, if that's what you want."

I did not want that.

"Well, sorry kid. I don't know what to tell you." The devil shrugged and averted his eyes.

I set my guitar case down and sat on it, defeated.

"What do you teach?" I asked.

The devil looked back at me. He tilted his chin up, an unconscious gesture of defiance. "You want to know what I teach, man?" he asked. "I teach VCR repair."

I laughed, and he crossed his arms. "What?" he demanded.

"Is there much call for that nowadays?" I asked.

He sighed. "Not so much. Back in the Eighties, you could make a good living at it. Times change."

He kicked at the ground. "I should have taught myself to fix DVD machines when they came out. I was gun shy, man." He sighed. "I had wasted so much time learning Beta and Laserdisc. I thought, why waste time on this crap? It's just going to be another new technology that's here today, gone next week. By the time I realized my mistake, some asshole named Hinkle already had staked a claim. He's at some crossroads near Memphis, and I hear he's doing gangbusters."

"Maybe Blu-Ray?" I suggested, but he waved dismissively.

"Nah, kid, it will all be out of date in a few years. I can't just keep teaching myself technologies that are out of date before they even hit the market. Who is going to sell their soul for that? It used to be a real trick. They'd come to you and say, teach me the 8-Track, and sign a contract in blood, and then, a few years later, they would come back and say they were ripped off. And we would cackle at them and drag them off to hell, and part of their eternal torment was the knowledge that they had been fooled into learning something useless."

The devil shook his head: "Nowadays, well, people are too savvy, man. They want a guarantee in writing that if the current hardware becomes outmoded, they will receive free tech support as they train in on the next generation of electronics. Where's the fun in that?"

The devil exhaled a long, rattling sigh. "I tell you, man," he said. "It's depressing. Sometimes I actually think about just giving away my lessons in VCR repair, just to have something to do."

He caught a look on my face. It only lasted a moment, but it startled him. "What?" he asked.

I thought very hard before I spoke next.

Of course, eventually I did find the devil who teaches guitar. That's the legend you already know. His name was Bernard, and he was at a crossroads outside Waco, Texas. I signed a contract in blood, and he promised me 20 years at the top of the charts, and then he would come for me. I was gone for a month, and when I came back I could play guitar in a manner that had never been heard before.

Soon I was signed to a contract with Columbia Records, and I produced an unbroken string of hits. An unauthorized book about me printed every legend, every scrap of gossip, and every rumor. It listed the amount of money I was supposed to be worth, which was in the hundreds of millions. It listed every property I was said to own, including a 16-room mansion in the Hollywood Hills. It told of wild nights on my private Lear Jet, and in my stretch limo, and on my tour bus. It tallied up the damage I had done to hotel rooms, which amounted to almost $130 thousand. The book estimated how many groupies I had been with, and that number was almost 12,000. And the book mentioned a strange scar on the back on my right knee, which is said to be where the devil took the blood from me for me to sign my contract. Finally, the book guessed at the date when I would have to forfeit my soul.

The book was wrong about a lot of things. For instance, it overestimated the amount of damage I had done to hotel rooms, but understimated the number of groupies I had been with. But the book got the date of the devil's return right. May 8, 2006.

Bernard the devil was tall and caped, with long, curving horns that arched off his head like those of longhorn steer. He wore a blue spangled jumpsuit and wore a guitar strapped over his shoulder, and, wherever he walked, smoke poured around him, filling the air with the scent of incense. He came into my Hollywood mansion at midnight on the eigth of May and stood before my enormous bed, where I lay surrounded by 30 naked groupies.

"Bunny," he said, and then flipped his long hair with his right hand, an unexpectedly girlish gesture. "Your time has come."

I stood before him on the bed, the groupies cowering behind me, pressed up against the gilded headboard and crying in terror. "Bernard," I said, "I challenge you."

Bernard the devil smiled, revealing gold teeth. "I thought you might be so foolish," he answered. "Do you forget that I was your teacher? Do you think 20 years of playing on earth can beat an eternity in hell?" He unlsung his guitar from around his back, and then, cocking his shoulders back and spreading his legs, he played the most wicked riff I had ever heard.

"You want a challenge, then, boy, a challenge you shall have!" he roared. "I will make you my personal plaything in the underworld when I win. I will dine on your entrails every night."

I nodded.

He stared at me, and stroked his guitar, and waited. Finally, he seemed confused. "Where is your guitar?" he asked.

"Who said anything about guitars?" I asked, and then clapped my hands. Two servants entered the room, carrying a small table with them. They set the table before Bernard, who stared at it, and its contents, dumbfounded.

"What is this?" he asked.

"It's our challenge," I answered, and then set about repairing the first of the two VCRs on the table before me.

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

LET'S SEE: A ukulele song with a spooky, absurdly melancholy melody that seems to borrow from the sweet jazz of the 20s and 30s? Yep, must be a song I wrote in the late 90s. I would place the song at about 1998, and it has about the bitterest lyrics I have ever written -- in fact, the song references how bitter it is. I recall playing this for my girlfriend at the time, which now seems inconceivable to me, as the song's narrator is looking forward to a time when a romantic relationship has ended disastrously; The narrator then describes his anger and remorse. This just doesn't seem like something you should sing to someone you're dating, even if you see the song as a work of fiction unrelated to your own life, as I did.

Oh well. She once wrote a song about me that contains the lyrics "When you say goodbye, you really mean it," which is not too far from this song's "I'm easily injured and I don't often forgive," so at least we were talking about the same guy. None of these statements are true, by the way, except, perhaps, the part about being easily injured. I am sometimes quite surprised to find myself with hurt feelings, and a little embarrassed by the fact. I am, however, quite a lot more forgiving than the fictional narrator of this song. But, still, I shouldn't have sung this to my girlfriend at the time.

I wasn't going to record this, as I had forgotten the melody to it. I just found myself humming it tonight, though, without warning. Songs have been coming back to me like that since I started this project. Were I to write it now, I think I would add a bridge and some fancier ukulele playing, instead of the incessant repetition of the essential melody. But I am not here to fix my old songs, but instead to document them. As with other songs of the time, this was written on a baritone ukulele, and I now play a soprano, so it is pitched higher than when I wrote it. I am singing at the very top of my range, before my voice breaks into falsetto, and am also using just a spoonful of breath to sing. It's not my most sophisticated singing voice, but it sounds fragile in a way that I think suits the song.

"I'M THE SAME MAN" LYRICS:

There was a time when you adored me
At the thought of me you'd sigh and moan
I'm no different
So you must have changed
I'm the same man you followed
And you now leave alone

I'm too tired to confront you
And too proud to ask you why
If I fought for you
It's a fight I would lose
I've been beaten so often
That I don't think I'll try

My love for you it will grow bitter
If I speak at all, I'll speak with spite
I'm easily injured
And I don't often forgive
I doubt you'll be bothered
But I hope that you might

I'm the same man who once thrilled you
And who you now could take or leave
I grew accustomed to your constant affections
And discover now that it's
Its absence I grieve

I'm the same man who once thrilled you
And who you now could leave or take
I grew accustomed to your constant affections
And discover now that it's
Its absence that aches

LISTEN TO "I'M THE SAME MAN":



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