Blog | Liam McEneaney: Comedian, Writer, Producer

0 LIFE IN THESE UNITED STATES

August 19, 2020
by Liam
· Blog · Uncategorized

My name is Billy McCutcheon. I red that you pay god mony for peoples funy storeys for your Life In This Here Untied Stats. I got a few good uns for you and I guess I would of writen sooner if Id of none you was gone ta pay for them.

Im not the story teller in the famly. Thats my cousin Luther, and if you ever get a chance to swing through town you got to here him tell his storys becaus when he does the voices, you would sware you was their.

Me, Im the writer – Im the one who everyone gets to make all the sines when we go to the Trump rallies. You might of seed my work it gets put up on the Hufingtown Post a lot on account of the news papers always send there pictures of the best signs there.

Im not hear to talk politics tho. As Jay Leno says its a word what means “many blodsuckers.” LOL. Besids their is only won reason we al voted for the man and that was to bring our coal jobs back. We herd its only them DAMNeocrots and there safty regulations that been the hold up now and we all know nothin can stop King Coal when he got the mind to it, so thatll change soon.

Anyhow. This hear is a story about me and my cousin Luther, back when we was younger. Okay. One day when we was like 15, me and Luther hes my cousin, we was waked up by my dad and by Luthers Uncle Carl. Uncle Carl wasnt really his Uncle, but Luthers mom is a single women with needs. We all call her frends his Uncls to spare his feelings cause Luther aint never been what youd call 100 percent, even before the axdent from when we seen the aliens in his Ford F160 pickup.

See, when me and Luther was a little older, we was driving in his Ford F160 pickup. It was a clear nite and our shift at the lace factory didnt start until midnite, on account of after the axdents on the flor the forman said the only job we was fit to do was security.

I axed “What do we do if someone brakes in?”

He said “Then wake up because clearly your dreaming if you think someone gone to brake into a lace factory.” Only he said it with a lot more swears. But I wont repeat them cause I know your a family magazine.

Seeing as it was a worknight we only had a sixer of Bud each and then off we drove down Toluca Road in Luthers Ford F160 as I sayed. So were driving and shooting the shit and smoking a little somethin when all the sudden we saw a brite lite on the road acompnied by an unearthly sound like a HWAAAAAAAAANK!!!! That dont come across so good on the paper and you really got to here Luther mimic it.

Luther swervd the Ford F160 off the road and the aliens must of wiped our memories because when we woke up, the ship was gone and the Ford F160 was lying on its back like a dead gazell.

Luthers still loking for them aliens because the insurance company refused to cover damages when they got the results of the breath test.

So I started to say the storey of when we was yunger. Its early morning and Daddy and Uncle Carl shake us awake.

“Cmon boys todays the day. We gone take you for your first hunting trip.” And we get into Uncle Carls Ford F160 that he gave to Luther after on account of he didnt want Luthers mom sending him to prison where he was gone to make frends with a 450 pund man name of Bubba. LOL. Bubbas actually a pretty good guy but when he drinks he got a temper on him!

In the gray purple lite of the dawn, we was crouchng there in the bushs. And I am hear to tell you, first thing in the morn them bushs is wet. And Daddy and Uncle Carl let us have a sip of there beers evry time they open one. So after twelve or so bers I was fit to burst. But I held it in and thank God I did.

We were out there a couple hours and didn’t see no buck deer and if they was out hunting the wood for some tail, they was staying the hell away from us. Like the wood was one big niteclub and we was crouching in a dumster in the alley out back.

All the sudden, we here a sound in the bushes of a big animal, crashing through noisy as hell. Can I say hell in Readers Digest? If not you have my permshun to delete it. Anyway, this animal was noisy as all heck, and if it was a buck coming through, that ol boy sounded big enough to have more points then the NBA all stars game.

Quick as anything, Uncle Carl points his shot gun at the in coming creasher. Which aint no deer but my cousin Luther! Luckly, Uncle Carl cant shoot for shit and misses Luther mostly and only gets him in the meet of his leg. Now I tell this story its funny, but back then we was all scared as shit and Luther went down and hes crying and holding his leg and asking us if he gone die. Of corse I say I dont know on account of nobody but God can answer that.

Then Daddy lays out Luther on the grass and also Uncle Carl becus a mans got to let it be known that this mite be funy but it aint right. So were driving to the hospital, Carl keeping Luther company in the flatbed of the Ford F160, Luther crying on account of the pain and Carl crying on account of he shot a kid and then got punched.

In the hospital a cop has some questions and says, “So what the hell done happen here?” And Uncle Carl, and I sware this is true, he looks at the trooper all innocent and says “Why officer, I thought hunting children was in season?”

Well. We all laffed fit to bust a gut including them cops and thank god because Luthers Uncle Carl mite still be roommates with Bubba until Bubba got out for good behavior mostly.

Luckly Aunt Margret didn’t press charges like I said which is how Luther got his Ford F160 that he held on to til them dam aliens came for him. Uncle Carl man, he was a riot and it was a shame when he died of the black lung.

If you like this storey I got tons of them, and pleas pay me my mony in cash on account of I dont want to lose my disability.

Sincrly
Billy M.

Wheeling, WV

0 ODE de TOILET: Being A Study of The Life and Works of Edgar Allen Adgar-Allan, “America’s Dirtbag Laureate”

July 31, 2020
by Liam
· Blog · From the Files of Liam McEneaney · Uncategorized

by Liam McEneaney
liam@heyitsliam.com
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It was a warm spring evening in the blue-collar city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the year of 1983. The factories had shut their doors, and the saloons had opened theirs. The paychecks had been passed out, and soon the drunks would be, too. On East Reservoir Avenue, in the neighborhood of Brewer’s Hill, at a run-down McDonald’s franchise, literary history was about to be made.

At a booth by the door, three classmates from Shorty Barr High School sit teasing a fourth. His clothes are shabby, his greasy hair combed across a greasier scalp, his breath reeking lightly of cheap beer. The only thing that would distinguish him from any other male adolescent American of the time is that, although he is few years older than his peers, he is also notably shorter.

Sixteen year-old Barry O’Neill, flush with cash from a part-time job at Donkey Cong[1], bets his diminutive classmate that he can’t eat fifteen dollars worth of Big Mac hamburgers. Although history does not record who won the bet, it can be assumed that the young man’s lower intestine lost handily.

So it was that he found himself walking through an ordinary men’s room door and into the ranks of such literary immortals as Shelley, Wordsworth, and Fagen/Becker.

This is the kind of moment on which history pivots, and we ask “What if?” What if this small fellow had not been perceived as the class dimwit, and teased as such? What if his habit of sniffing markers hadn’t led to his compulsively carrying one on his person at all times? What if an excess consumption of cheap greasy hamburgers hadn’t left him sitting in the bathroom of his local McDonald’s for so long that the manager called the police, afraid of yet another overdose death?

As it is, there is now a commemorative plaque permanently attached to that McDonald’s Drive Thru speaker, despite the franchise owner’s many requests that we remove it. For it was here, in this restaurant, in this men’s room, on the wall of this stall, that this young man first composed this immortal verse:

Here I sit,

Broken hearted.

Tried to shit,

But only farted.

These are the four lines that, to our modern eyes, are so commonplace that they’re probably embroidered and hung in a place of pride in the reader’s own home. So it’s easy to forget that in that year of 1983, they signaled a revolutionary shift in the way we look at literature and launched one of the most unlikely careers in the history of American letters. And this young man, Edgar Allen Adgar-Allan, rose overnight from the ignominy of near-high school dropout to international fame as a literary superstar.

He was born to Syliva[2] Adgar, a temp at the Paralegal Aid Society of Janesville, Wisconsin, and Michael Allan, a town drunk. In a city known for turning out some of the all-time great drunken reprobates, Allan is still considered by many to be one of the best ever to pick up a bottle and throw it at passing cars

His career often intersected with Adgar’s and soon they began seeing each other, until it was during the Great Janesville Blackout of 1964[3] that they nearly simultaneously married and conceived. Although he would later be branded with the label by an assortment of bartenders, bookies, and bouncers, young Edgar Allen Adgar-Allan missed being born a bastard by a full 90 seconds.

Adgar-Allan’s parents were to later claim that they had never heard of the author and poet for whom it is generally assumed that he was named. Certainly, even the most cursory examination of the Janesville public school system’s curriculum and average test scores will lend credence to the claim. It’s also true that a carelessness of naming by Syliva’s own parents[4] resulted in a school career filled with teasing which led to an understandable disinterest in the naming of anything that ultimately led to several family dogs dying of terminal confusion.

In any case, this combination of poor education, untreated alcoholism, and parental disinterest makes it easy to believe the Adgar-Allans’ claim that they chose little baby Edgar Allen’s name because “it would be easy to remember.” In such seemingly haphazard ways are destinies formed.

Later that year, a major career opportunity was to bring the newlyweds to Milwaukee[5], and, eventually, their young son came with them. In an otherwise unremarkable early educational career, one incident stands out in clear foreshadowing. During his primary school’s Christmas pageant, a fourth-grader stepped forward to deliver an impromptu solo:

Jingle Bells, Batman smells

Robin laid an egg.

Batmobile lost its wheel,

And the Joker got away. Hey!

Although only 11 years old, Adgar-Allan had spontaneously penned a classic piece of what the Norton’s Anthology of American Poetry was to term “the most pure example of American doggerel with which one can hope to be presented.“ This was not to be his last such acclaim in the pages of academia, as his poetic style, much like his liver, was destined to continue expanding and developing new facets.

Two decades later, in the fourth grade, this author was first presented by a particularly hungover substitute teacher with the information that against all odds, this (to my then young mind) hilarious bit of satire did not spring from the Earth whole, but had come from the mind of an ordinary, even pedestrian, young child, not unlike myself.

That Christmas presented to me the gift of a copy that of A Young Person’s Guide To Great American Bathroom Poetry. This led to an obsession with both the works of Adgar-Allan and the general idea that even the greatest, most wide-ranging works could still be done with the minimum of research or effort.

In any event, the impact of Here I Sit…, as the poem came to be known, can not be overstated. That is, unless one wishes to write an academic monograph that will allow them to live off of a corporate grant for years. Thus, having seen the amount of money your average liberal arts professor doesn’t make, one is prepared to give overstating the poem’s impact a real shot.

It is often said that there is great genius in moronic simplicity, and so it is agreed upon by most scholars that Adgar-Allan’s Here I Sit accomplishes more in four lines than John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn does in ten stanzas for two important reasons:

Firstly, because it is much easier to read, grasp, and dissect, allowing even the laziest graduate student to crank out an 80-page Master’s thesis on the subject with enough time to catch the best part of the Poetry Department’s annual Rimbaud-themed debauch[6].

Secondly, and of only slightly less importance, Adgar-Allan’s is easier to memorize, contains far fewer multisyllabic words, and can be written in big drunken letters on a bathroom wall by even the most uneducated ape[7]. Whereas Keats’ work requires the tiniest, soberest, most disciplined handwriting to squeeze in its entirety on your typical Grecian urn, assuming a minimum of space has been given over to decoration, which your average Mycenaean potter was inclined to overindulge in.

This also led to the poem’s spreading through the city of Milwaukee from bathroom to bathroom, concurrent with a particularly virulent strain of herpes, which led to the coining of the phrase “going viral” several years before the dawn of the Internet Age. It wasn’t long before Here I Sit… spread nationally, followed soon by international sightings.

There was even a report of a Latin translation of the poem[8] in the omnium sanctorum thermarum at the Vatican. However, this was reported by a visiting chapter of the Jewish Defense League who were subsequently deported after a night of drinking and nightclubbing led to an impromptu performance of select scenes from The Merchant of Venice atop the bar at a four-star restaurant in Travestere, using tablecloths as togas. So their account may be considered suspect.

For Adgar-Allan, there followed a period of attention, curiosity, and respect to a degree[9] that up that point was unprecedented. There were print interviews that ranged from the disastrous[10] to the triumphant[11]. The late night talk show circuit came calling, although he was unable to take on any bookings as the shows all filmed in Los Angeles and, due to various legal setbacks, he was at that point unable to leave the city by car[12], by plane[13], by train[14], or by interstate bus[15].

As the publicity ramped up, so did the pressure. In interviews, “How did you come up with that?” was quickly followed by, “And what do you plan to write next?”

It’s good to stop and remember that, although Edgar Allen Adgar-Allan had achieved so much so quickly, he was still a junior in high school and, thus, subject to all the pressures and insecurities faced by any average nineteen year-old. And Adgar-Allan was as average as they come. Thus, he soon found himself creatively blocked.

In hindsight, it’s easy to see that it was only a matter of time before an idea was to pass, and when it did it would be big and messy. But would its release arrive as a solid victory? Or was Adgar-Allan running on fumes, doomed to bathe in the bitter stench of defeat? The world could only hold its breath and wait.

On October 17^th, 1983, while reeling from an all-night Arby’s binge, and drinking directly from an industrial-size bottle of generic pink stomach liquid, Edgar Allen Adgar-Allan found himself stumbling into a men’s room in the lobby of the Beverly Sills Hotel[16]. Straining and sniffing a laundry marker, inspiration struck and he composed these immortal lines:

Those who write on bathroom walls,

Will roll their shit in little balls.

And those who read these words of wit,

Will eat those little balls of shit.

Two generations removed from the debut of this major work, we may marvel at its simplicity and ingenuity, and perhaps, if we are up for an adjunct professorship, compose a twenty-page academic dissection of its self-referential self-loathing. If competition in the liberal arts field were particularly fierce that semester, one might even toss in a phrase like “metatextual narrative,” to both confuse and intimidate the reader.

Again, context is key here. This was still a full decade before the irony-rich 1990s, before TV shows like Seinfeld and Twin Peaks became cultural touchstones for the brain-dead moron masses[17]. And while the theater and arts worlds had been experimenting with postmodernism for decades at that point, consumers of popular culture had most likely never seen anything that was on its surface so simple, and yet when more closely examined, still a masterstroke of complex, layered poesy. It dropped into the mainstream like an atom bomb, and one thing could no longer be denied: Edgar Allen Adgar-Allan could no longer be considered anything but a major artist.

But fame led to questions, and with Adgar-Allan, questions led to incoherent mumbling. Interview asked in the headline on the cover of the November, 1983, issue: “Who Is This Douchebag And Why Do We Know His Name?” Was Adgar-Allan a genius who found expression through verse for his tortured soul? Or was he merely, as the comic strip Doonesbury posited in a week-long series on the subject, a dirtbag savant? The closest thing to an answer we can find is in this fragment of the Q&A that Interview published:

INTERVIEW: I guess it boils down to that age-old question, “Why do you write?”

ADGAR-ALLAN: I mean, why does anyone write? Like, why are you writing down everything I say?

INTERVIEW: I see. So it’s about creative expression.

ADGAR-ALLAN: No, seriously, why are you writing down everything I say? It’s freaking me out.

INTERVIEW: Because… this is an interview. Did you really not know?

ADGAR-ALLAN: Where are the naked ladies?

INTERVIEW: For the last time, this isn’t that kind of magazine.

Success in media not involving bathroom walls eluded Adgar-Allen. In 1984, Simon and Schuster published an anthology of his major works, Reflections on a Toilet Waking. While it peaked at a respectable Number 3 on the New York Times Bestseller List (Novelty Publications and Religious Pamphlets)[18], sales were disappointing.

Lack of interest in the book was ultimately chalked up to its contents, which consisted of a children’s parody of Jingle Bells, two poems that were widely available for free in the bathroom of almost every bar[19] around the world, and a 162-page introduction by Adgar-Allan expert Professor Rupert Birtwhistle of Oxford, which the New York Review of Books described as “Stunning in its disregard for the reader’s enjoyment,” and which the Paris Review described as, “So dull that it could have been written by anyone, and probably was.”

In the winter of 1984, Adgar-Allan was nominated as a candidate for post of Official Poet Laureate of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His only competition being Rudolph Espinoza, composer of the infamous “Drink Schlitz or Die” jingle, he was elected easily, 10 votes to 2, in a record turnout for Milwaukee’s Poet Laureate elections.

Adgar-Allan’s reign was to be short-lived, however, as he was stripped of his title during his first and only public appearance in the role, at the Opening Day ceremonies for Wisconsin’s Drunk Driving Season. He got one line in to the poem he’d written especially for the occasion when he was yanked from the podium for “performing a public duty while intoxicated.” Considering Milwaukee’s municipal government at that time, this was an accomplishment in and of itself.

While the rest of the poem was lost to posterity, thanks to a live broadcast on the local news the first line lives on in literary immortality:

I’m not as think as you drunk I am…

Known as “The Line That Launched A Thousand T-Shirt Empires,” scholars have argued for decades on its place in the canon. Can it truly be considered a Fragment of a Great Poem? Or does it fall into the pantheon of American Aphorisms? The one thing all sides can agree on is that arguments like these beat working for a living.

June of 1985 saw the first decline in Adgar-Allan’s personal life, when he was booked by Shorty Barr High School do deliver a commencement speech to the graduating class, the first active junior in the school’s history to be so engaged. However, when he arrived, he found himself grabbed by security guards, dragged to the stage, handed a diploma, and physically kicked off the stage in the posterior by the principal. Thus was he graduated and thrust into the real world, much against his will.

What followed was a period of steep decline, as a string of failed relationships came hand-in-fist with a series of demeaning janitorial jobs, where on many days he was ironically tasked with painting over the very words that had first brought him so much fame. He developed a serious drinking problem, sometimes barely able to make it through a single beer. It got so bad that his regular bartender called the police after a three-week absence, worried that his most dependable customer might be dead, or even worse, sober.

Adgar-Allan’s final work came on October 13^th, 1988, a little over five years after his first. This was on the heels of his short-lived marriage in Las Vegas to long-time girlfriend and favorite stripper Linda Cappollano[20], in a chapter known to literary historians as “The 12-Hour Elvis Wedding Chapel/Roy Orbison Divorce Court Spree[21].”

So it was, as if closing the loop on a cycle, that Edgar Allen Adgar-Allan found himself one last time at the same East Reservoir Street McDonald’s where his story had begun. Was he a moth circling the dwindling the flame of lost glory? Was he searching for a missing muse? Or was it simply that he’d never moved out of his parents’ home and still lived three blocks away?

We do know that Adgar-Allan was found in that same stall, sitting on that same toilet, with a laundry marker under his nose and a brand new poem next to his head. The coroner pronounced him dead of multiple clogged arteries at the age of 24, having died the way he lived; greasy, unhealthy, full of crap.

The poem produced that day on the battered metal wall of that toilet stall was removed with a blowtorch and a set of bolt-cutters and sits proudly on display to this day in an unsold eBay auction.

And perhaps we literary historians are, as one lawyer for the McDonald’s corporation so memorably put it in a deposition, “Nothing more than an insane group of mentally disturbed individuals hellbent on destroying my client’s property.”

Or perhaps we’re simply detectives, sifting through the meager scraps of the work of a genius cut down in what could generously be called his prime, looking for clues as to who he was, why he wrote, and, were he to live, where his poetry was to take him next.

Edgar Allen Adgar-Allan remains, to this day, an enigma. A literary cypher. A question mark at the end of a short and incoherent sentence fragment that could very well not even be a question.

There’s the famous Rolling Stone cover story[22], in which David Fricke, who had drawn the short straw in the story assignment pool that would send him to the cold hell that is Wisconsin in February, spent a day in Adgar-Allan’s life. He described the experience in the opening paragraph as “akin to wading into the shallow end of the pool hoping to find sunken treasure.”

Perhaps Adgar-Allan truly was nothing more than a dirtbag-savant. Perhaps it is foolishness to dig into his life and works in the hopes of finding anything like a deeper meaning. And perhaps we are projecting our own fears, hopes, and desires onto a slate so blank it could be called a void.

But what can’t be questioned is that this study has officially passed the minimum 3000-word count required for submission to a serious academic journal, the kind of article upon which tenured professor tracks are built.

Here, then, is the final, most personal, most mature, and most accomplished work of a guarded, childish man who accomplished anything almost against his will. This, then, is the legendary “Death Poem of Edgar Allen Adgar-Allan,” America’s dirtbag laureate:

The first time that she met him,

She found his habits strange.

And made a mental laundry list

of things that she would change.

Five months on she left him,

Having tasted of defeat.

Vowing twice as many changes

On the next man she should meet.

Fuck Linda, everyone else has.

[1] an Apocalypse Now-themed arcade

[2] pronounced səˈlīvə

[3] over 750,000 Janesville residents got blackout drunk on the same night, marking the second-largest such event in the city’s history that year

[4] wooziness from the drugs both her parents had been administered during her birth, combined with a hurry to sign all necessary forms and leave before the hospital bill arrived, led to a misspelling of Syliva Adgar’s first name on the birth certificate, as well as her legal classification as an “appendix (removed)”

[5] a resurgent citywide temperance movement of the early 1960s led to a disruption in Milwaukee’s town drunk development program. Allan was traded from Janesville for three prostitutes and a pack of stray dogs to be named later

[6] as explained in exhaustive, and quite frankly, exhausting detail by Rupert Birtwhistle, Oxford University’s Professor American Limericks and “Funny” Haiku, in his collection, Late-Night Drunken E-mails to an Ex-Girlfriend Named Cheryl (Oxford University Press, 2014)

[7] an affectionate term that graduate students use to refer to those who have spent less than 16 years pursuing a higher education

[8] “Ecce ego sit, contritos corde.

Aureus ex denario solvit, transierunt gas et solum.”

[9] any at all

[10] Playboy, September 1983, where he asked the interviewer, “Where are the naked girls?” 57 times, breaking a record set in 1974 by fellow literary lion Norman Mailer

[11] The Milwaukee Journal, July 15, 1983, where he asked the interviewer, “Where are the naked girls?” 38 times, less than half the number as Milwaukee Brewers legend Rollie Fingers the week before

[12] due to a drunk-driving incident that year, when his blood alcohol level tested at 1.2, nearly 0.2 above the legal state limit

[13] after being forcibly removed from a Pan Am flight that year for attempting to join the Mile High Club alone, in his seat, while the plane was still parked at the gate

[14] he didn’t like them

[15] removed from a Greyhound after getting into a fistfight with a transient who lived on the bus and bathed in the sink and complained to the driver about Adgar-Allan’s body odor

[16] a byproduct of America’s obsession with operatic soprano. The business was so unsuccessful that it filed for Chapters 11 and 12, as well as a Glossary

[17] another affectionate graduate student term

[18] behind Pong: The Compleat Strategy Guide for the Serious Gamer, and the number 1 bestselling novelty book of the decade, The Owner’s Manual for the Care and Feeding of Your Rubik’s Cube

[19] Bemelmans Bar in New York, ever the upscale traditionalist holdout, commissioned Shel Silverstein to write a series of dirty sonnets over their urinals

[20] stage name, Barbwire Bush

[21] as dramatized in the 1992 Lifetime Original Movie, “If These Stalls Could Talk”

[22] June, 1984, headlined, “Edgar Allen Poo: 12 Hours In The Life of America’s Dirtbag Laureate”

0 TRUMP AS THE MAYOR FROM JAWS

May 17, 2020
by Liam
· Blog · Jokes About The News · Liam's Notebook

When I submitted to write for Saturday Night Live last year, I wrote a sketch where Donald Trump was the mayor of Amity in the movie Jaws.

SPOILER ALERT, they didn’t hire me, but I was rereading the sketch today and I still like it. And somehow, it’s gotten a thousand times more current than it was last year. So I figured I’d share it with all you lovely Internet folks:

Jaws The Reboot - Rewrite 5 WATERMARK page 1

0 2019 – The Tell Your Friends! podcast returns!

February 16, 2019
by Liam
· Blog · Uncategorized

hero slide Liam Gilbert Lewis sm

After a 5-year hiatus, new and classic episodes drop soon.

Past guests include comedians like Lewis Black, Gilbert Gottfried, and Janeane Garofalo; musicians including Mike Doughty, Kaki King, and Catherine Popper; bestselling authors including Jon Ronson, Lawrence Block, and Baratunde Thurston.

Production started this week so no set return date yet but stay tuned.

0 LA STORIES

June 12, 2018
by Liam
· Blog · Liam's Notebook · Uncategorized

Greetings friends, frenemies, comedy fans, comedy fanemies, and anyone else who checks their Spam folders on a regular enough basis to have found, opened, and read this e-mail.

As you who had been fans of the late, lamented, and forgotten Hollywood Hotel edition of my Tell Your Friends! show, I thought you might be interested in two free – FREE! – events coming up in the next couple of weeks.

And if you aren’t, here’s a live feed of a Kitten Rescue nursery you can look at instead:

No matter how cool and above-it-all you think you are, I dare you – literally, dare you – to watch for more than three minutes without getting completely sucked into these cats’ lives. Only, watch it with a safety buddy who can pull you out when you start commenting with baby talk.

As for shows:

One is a new FREE MONTHLY SHOW (where I will be buying FREE BEER and SODA for the audience – and it will be soda and beer of the FREEest possible quality) called “LIAM McENEANEY’S RED HOT INDUSTRY SHOWCASE. This happens THIS THURSDAY, June 14th, at 9:30pm, with Aparna Nacherla (Netflix, Corporate), comedy magician El Ropo (The Magic Castle), and The Comedy Store’s own Luke Schwartz (The Improv).

The other show is a FREE SCREENING of Tell Your Friends! The Concert Film! On June 22nd, 2010, I threw a super-sized concert version of my TYF! show in Brooklyn and invited some of my very best comedian friends to perform. Comedians like Reggie Watts, Kurt Braunohler & Kristen Schaal, Christian Finnegan, Rob Paravonian, and Leo Allen. On June 22nd, we’ll commemorate the eighth anniversary by having a little outdoor screening in Highland Park. Learn more by clicking on that picture above.

As for everything else, I still live in H’wood, CA. I’ve officially passed the honeymoon phase, and have transitioned into being a full-time resident. I think it’s tough to explain to people who don’t live here exactly how unglamorous Hollywood life is. As a rule, there aren’t too many celebrities on Hollywood Boulevard. In fact, if you see someone you recognize in Hollywood, first be sure that they aren’t the out-of-shape posing-for-money-in-front-of-the-Grauman’s-Chinese-Theater equivalent of that celebrity. It’s pretty easy to tell the difference; if you take their picture, and they try to punch you when you refuse to pay them twenty bucks for it, they’re either a fugazi look-a-like or the real Sean Penn.

I live in a pretty nice section of Hollywood, but if you see a celebrity where I live something has gone drastically wrong in their life. Like, I feel very fortunate that I live in a great apartment in a happening neighborhood exactly where I want to be. But if I saw Adam Sandler shopping at my Ralphs, I’d think, “Poor guy, I hope things pick up for him.”

To be fair, I’ve been told that celebrities shop at my local Gelson’s (for New Yorkers, Gelson’s is a supermarket chain that sits on the quality scale about halfway between D’Agostino’s and Fairway – it’s not that nice, but out here in the land of the goyim…). But I’m actually not tremendously good at recognizing people, in person, that I only know from the TV or movies.

Also, I find that it really grounds me to do all of my grocery shopping at Ralphs at 1:30 in the morning. It’s where you realize that the opening scene of The Big Lebowski is pretty much a documentary:

Sure, Gelson’s caters to the “we might as well close at midnight because our customers are responsible adults whose careers demand they show up at the same time every morning, preferably with a minimum of face tattoos and brightly colored outfits that make them look like what a Marvel supervillain thinks a circus clown should be” crowd.

But what will profit a man doing his grocery shopping at 8:00 so he can be up for his job designing Adult Swim billboards, if it costs him his soul? Not to mention that there’s a tremendous sense of gratitude and equanimity to be gained in surrounding yourself with people who have made way worse life decisions than your own. Be honest: Buying your ten dollar bag of grapes in line behind the second lead from Supergirl will never fill you with an immense and lasting feeling of gratitude for the fact that you decided to say no to trying meth.

Maybe the Gelson’s-at-10pm crowd has “control” over things like “the amount of controlled substances one should ingest at any given time.” But there’s something tremendously bourgeois about the fact that when you hear an announcement over the in-store PA, that’s a voice you can be 100% sure that everyone else is hearing, too.

At 1:30 in the morning, Ralph’s becomes a true egalitarian paradise – nobody is better than anybody else, everybody is equal in the understanding that there’s more to life than conforming to society’s traditional standards of success, or hygiene, or acceptable public behavior. Everybody is gathered together in celebrating all that is freezable, microwaveable, and filled with enough salt to mask the chemical compounds that make up your dinner’s basic ingredients.

Much like worker paradises like the former Soviet Union or the current North Korea, you may find yourself standing in line for far longer than one would expect, living in the civilized West, to buy toilet paper. But the people there have character. They have rich inner lives. They’ve lived, and lived fully, and every minute of every year is written across their faces. Sometimes literally, with the tattoos, and sometimes metaphorically, with everything else.

And that, kids, is how I met your mother.

0 It Makes Me Really Uncomfortable When People Write Nice Things About Me (BUT DON’T STOP)

May 9, 2018
by Liam
· Blog · Liam's Notebook · Uncategorized

Reading what Mandy Stadtmiller had to say about me in her new memoir “Unwifeable” (best part of the book) reminded me that I’ve appeared in several other memoirs that I’ve never read. I found one on Amazon, called “Stand Up or Die,” written by Andy de la Tour. Andy was part of the vanguard of British “alternative” standup comedians of the 1980s.

They’re called “alternative,” because American-style solo standup was a big left turn from the British sketch and musical hall tradition that dominated their comedy scene for so long. He came to NYC when I ran my Tell Your Friends! show in the basement of Lolita, and when he told me that he was coming to NYC to get back to his standup roots after a multi-decade absence, I booked him immediately.

Andy wrote “Stand Up or Die” about his months in the New York indie comedy scene, and turned it into a one-man show at the Edinburgh Fringe.

He has some wry and almost complimentary things to say about the New York comedy scene as a whole, and a lot of nice things to say about my show, where I tried to make comedians who were a little more obscure feel as important and wanted as the big names I had like Jim Gaffigan, Janeane Garofalo, Lewis Black.

PS: If you know any other books I’m mentioned in, please message me. I can’t remember any more.

0 From the archives: COUNT DRINKULA

In 2003, I wrote this sketch for my personal blog. An AA group in the Midwest asked permission to perform it. I wish I could have seen that.

March 1, 2018
by Liam
· Blog · From the Files of Liam McEneaney · Liam's Notebook · Uncategorized

Fifteen years ago, back when I had a fairly popular blog (Mark Vonnegut once commented on it!), I published the following goof of a sketch. I had started making fun of a bad sketch group I had watched at an improv theatre, and it quickly turned into a goof on the sort of earnest entertainment-with-a-message groups that would come around to the NYC public schools I attended as a child, in the hopes of making a difference, or at least civilizing us. It’s a thing I enjoy doing quite a bit.

A few months after I published it, I got an e-mail from an AA group in the midwest, asking for permission to perform it. I was as baffled then as I am now. Of course, I gave them permission. I had asked for a video of the sketch, but I guess as the second “A” stands for “Anonymous,” that wouldn’t have been okay.

I would give anything to have seen a live production of “Count Drinkula.” If time travel technology is ever developed and perfected, I’m going to go and sit front row center. Multiple time.

SEVENTEEN YOUNG MEN AND ONE WOMAN, in matching red shirts, take the stage. All have that slightly-manic wide grin that sketch performers wear in the hopes that the audience doesn’t hate them.

THE LEADER OF THE SKETCH GROUP stands in front and addresses the audience.

LEADER: Ladies and gentlemen, we’re Skit Row, and we’re here at your college/community center/rehab clinic to impart a sense of positivity – through comedy!

BLOND WOMAN: Save the negatives for the photo lab.

LEADER: Exactly, Sheila! You know, I think that we’ve all been overcome by temptation in our pasts. Addiction.

TOO CHEERFUL TALL GUY WHO TOOK A LOT OF IMPROV CLASSES AND IS OVERLY PHYSICAL: I might as well face it, I’m addicted to love.

Skit Row laughs.

The Leader laughs for exactly five seconds, then cuts himself off with a “serious” look again.

LEADER: But seriously, battling addiction is no joke. It can turn you into a Dr. Jeckyl –

SHORT FAT GUY : And Mr. Heckyl.

LEADER: Right. That’s why our first sketch is an attempt to educate, and entertain. You might say we’re about to edutain you. It’s called, “Count Drinkula.” We take you now to an alley outside a bar.

LIGHTS DOWN, THEN UP

The Tall Guy weaves across STAGE RIGHT. “How Dry I am” plays in the background.

TALL GUY: Now that was some good booze. Now all I have to do is find my car and drive home.

He peers at nothing.

TALL GUY: Hey Mr. Pink Elephant, who are you looking at?

He takes a swing at thing air and ends up spinning around a couple of times. He falls down and scratches his head.

The Leader, now dressed as DRACULA, steps in STAGE LEFT. “How Dry I Am” plays again.

LEADER (to audience, in bad Bela Lugosi accent): Ah, the children of the night, what beautiful music they make.

(to the Tall Guy)

Blah blah blah. I vant to suck your –

TALL GUY: Hey, I’m not that drunk!

LEADER: Blood. I was going to say blood.

TALL GUY: Who are you?

LEADER: I am Count Drinkula, and I suck the blood of alcoholics.

TALL GUY: It sounds like you have a drinking problem.

DRINKULA: I don’t have a drinking problem. I can drink okay.

TALL GUY: No, I mean it sounds like you’re an alcoholic.

DRINKULA: But I only drink the blood of alcoholics.

TALL GUY: Hey, if you can be a second-hand smoker, why not a second-hand drinker?

DRINKULA: But what can I do?

TALL GUY: Well, you’ve accomplished the first step – admitting that you have a problem. How about an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting?

DRINKULA: Are there meetings for monsters like me?

TALL GUY: Please, there are no monsters n the world – except the Jews.

DRINKULA: Thanks. I think I will find an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

BLACKOUT

Much muffled swearing and scraping of chairs.

Lights up on a circle of a half-dozen chairs. The Leader is standing CENTER STAGE

LEADER: Now, we’re in the basement of a church.

Exeunt.

Enter the BLOND WOMAN, a FAT GUY WRAPPED IN TOILET PAPER, A SKINNY GUY with bolts coming out of his neck scratching himself, and a GUY WH OSAYS HE ISN’T GAY AND THEN HE DOES IMPROV AND ALL HIS CHARACTERS END UP TRYING TO HAVE SEX WITH THE OTHER GUYS ONSTAGE (in a wig and fathered boa), and a couple of other people.

BLOND: Well, I’d like to welcome you to this week’s meeting. We have a guest – where is he?

She makes a big show of looking around, walks offstage and drags the Leader onstage.

BLOND WOMAN: Why don’t we all introduce ourselves?

DRINKULA: My name is Count Drinkula, and I’m – an alcoholic.

ALL: Hi Count Drinkula.

The SKINNY GUY stands.

SKINNY GUY: Me name am Crack-enstein. Me am addicted to crack. And love. Which me am sell for more crack.

ALL: Hi, Crack-enstein.

Skinny Guy sits. The Short Fat Guy stands.

FAT GUY: I’m the Mumm-eats. I’m an overeater. I am wrapped in toilet paper because i’m a mummy – and I tend to be a blogger.

ALL: Hi, Mumm-eats.

He sits. The Gay Guy stands.

THE NOT-GAY-I-SWEAR GUY: I’m a Cher-wolf. Every full moon I turn into Cher.
(doing the worst Cher impression I’ve ever heard)
I’ve got you to walk with me, I’ve got you to talk with me. I’ve got you to hold my hand –

ALL make a big show of putting their hands over their ears.

BLOND WOMAN: Now that’s monstrous!

LEADER: You know, I thought I was a freak because I had a drinking problem. But after hearing THAT, I feel normal.

BLOND WOMAN: Yes, over sixteen million Americans have a degree of a drinking problem.

LEADER: It turns out I’m only a horrible freak because I’m a vampire.

CRACKENSTEIN: That am spirit!

He slaps the LEADER on the back, knocking him down.

LEADER: Thanks. And I have someone else to thank.

He stands up, puts his cape over his face, and runs off.

BLACK OUT

More scraping of chairs as the stage is reset.

LIGHTS UP

The Tall Guy is back, lying Stage Right. The Leader is center stage.

LEADER: Now we’re back outside the bar.

He turns to the Tall Guy.

LEADER: I guess I owe you a debt of gratitude. You really saved my life. Or I guess, unlife. Is there any way I could repay you?

Tall Guy makes a big show of thinking, so does the Leader. At the same time, they both make a show of having “inspiration” strike. They raise their forefingers.

BLACK OUT

Scraping of chairs.

LIGHTS UP

All are sitting in the same positions.

The Leader is standing in the middle of the group.

LEADER:(to the audience) We’re back in the church basement.

(to the group)

I have a newcomer –

He makes a big show of looking around, and runs offstage and drags the Tall Guy back onstage.

CRACKENSTEIN: What am that?

LEADER: That’s a human. And an alcoholic.

BLOND WOMAN: Let’s all introduce ourselves.

ATOM BOMB FALLS ON THE THEATER.

THE END

0 Twelve Movies I Enjoyed In 2017

January 1, 2018
by Liam
· Blog · Liam Nerds Out · Uncategorized

What kind of blog would this be if I didn’t do an end of year “here are the movies I enjoyed” entry? Certainly not a blog I’ve ever heard of. And while there’s something to be said for scarcity increasing value, nobody has ever read a website because it refused to put up content.

While it would be a fun challenge to list and rank the ten very best movies I saw, I don’t find that tremendously interesting. What can I say about a movie like Darkest Hour that hasn’t been said by any critic? Well, actually: “The 1990s are back, and they brought middlebrow ‘prestige’ Oscar Bait®-brand acting showcases with them!”

So these may not be the twelve best movies released this year. In fact, my placing Bright at the end (SPOILER!) tells you all you need to know about my agenda going into writing this list. But these are the ones that I most enjoyed watching, and that I still think about from time to time.

One more note: I have friends who made or starred in movies this year, and for the most part I’ve avoided listing them here. That’s because a movie like The Big Sick is great, and I highly recommend checking it out, but at the end of the day I’m less a movie critic and more of an asshole comedy professional who don’t enjoy watching his friends succeed.

(PS: Speaking of me and comedy, if you’re in Los Angeles January 11th, come check out my show.)

Colossal

I consider myself lucky that I was able to go into watching Colossal completely blind, having read no reviews or having seen no trailers. My buddy Tim and I were hanging out one afternoon, and we went to a movie theatre to see what was playing.

I don’t tend to see Anne Hathaway movies because, quite frankly, until I watched this movie; I figured her for a lightweight who’s pleasant enough, and stars as the romantic lead in movies like “Bride Wars” and “Rachel Getting Married.” But between this film and Interstellar (I know, I know, she won an Oscar brand® film award for Les Miserables, but this is a musical that does not exist in my world), I’m starting to think that maybe I need to admit that I’m wrong and pay better attention.

And believe me… I hate admitting I’m wrong.

In any event, Colossal is a great movie-going experience, a film that takes the convention of classic Japanese rubber monster movies like Godzilla and Gamera, and interpolates them into a film that starts as a typical Anne Hathaway romantic comedy, and halfway through turns into a dark meditation on alcoholism and addiction, and how they foster and encourage destructive relationships.

We may not all literally possess a spiritual link to a six-story monster, the movie says, but there is a tendency for people give in to their worst impulses. Not because we’re bad people, but because it’s the easiest thing to do.

Jason Sudeikis gives a scene-stealing performance as the typical rom-com “secretly great guy in a cocky asshole’s body” pulled inside out, exposing the toxic guts of those kinds of characters.

Birdboy: The Forgotten Children//Coco

If Colossal is a genre exploration of the cycle of spiritual decay and addiction, Birdboy: The Forgotten Children is about metaphoric demons of addiction and mental illness made literal, and how they can tear apart even the best of us. In a post-apocalyptic animated fairy tale land, where society has been destroyed and rebuilt, Dinki is a mouse, and a teenage girl, who lives with her parents who barely tolerate her, and her stepbrother, a dog in a luchador mask.

Dinki and her friend, a multi-species group of teens, decide that they are going to skip school and find a way to buy their way off of the island on which they live, on which they feel trapped. And from which, we find over and over, there seems no escape. In fact, the only proof there is even life beyond the island ate are the constantly-refilling mountains of garbage, in which hordes of nomad junkie rats forage for copper.

Birdboy of the title is an elusive figure on the island, seen as a mence to society, and a fugitive from a trigger-happy police force. He’s a tragic figure, though, a drug addict self-medicating over childhood trauma, and who we come to learn through a late religious experience, has possibly the most important job on the island.

This is a feature-length animated picture, but it’s relentlessly dark in a way that those more used to brightly-lit American cartoons will find off-putting, depressing, and possibly even unwatchably sad. I recommend giving it a fair viewing; what it has to say about what the realities of adulthood can be are fairly upsetting but rewarding. And the animation style (adapted directly from the director’s comic series Psiconautus) can be heartrendingly beautiful in its simplicity.

If Birdboy is scary and sad in its unpredictability and unrelentingly grim view of humanity, Coco somehow pulls off the balancing trick of being dark (and it is a dark story, make no mistake), scary, sad, and upbeat, sometimes all in the same shot. And that’s the genius of Pixar.

Toy Story 3, a movie from which I expected very little in terms of emotional engagement, had one of the saddest, scariest moments I’ve ever seen in a studio film. As these toys you’ve grown to root for over the course of the three movies are riding into an incinerator and, holding hands and bravely facing forward, come to silent terms with the reality of imminent death, that it’s real and inevitable and comes for everyone.

For a movie set in the Land of the Dead, the filmmakers manage to keep the tone light and the skeletons that populate the film friendly and not really scary. But all of that gets set aside for a couple of plot twists that would be, in lesser hands, shocking. And that’s always the upshot with Pixar; somehow, with all that could go wrong, this film somehow has turned out to be a masterpiece.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. II//Spider-Man: Homecoming

This year saw the release of a sequel to a science fiction blockbuster that managed to surpass the first film in scope, plotting, emotional engagement, and the ability of the writer/director to satisfactorily resolve plot points carried over from the first film while not distracting from the main story he’s telling. And that movie was not Star Wars.

Guardians of the Galaxy is about family, and what it means to belong to one, while Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a movie about telling the story of Star Wars. Way back when the first Guardians of the Galaxy was announced, I followed the news with surprise and interest. Partly because that’s a big investment, in a film based on a comic title that doesn’t exactly have the popular cachet of an X-Men or Spiderman.

Also my experience with writer/director James Gunn’s work didn’t exactly scream “light-hearted romp for all ages.” His filmography including the screenplay to the Lemmy Kilmeister/Jane Jensen vehicle Tromeo & Juliet (a movie with its own rewards. In the mid-90s I went through a phase of being a big fan of the music of Jane Jensen. There are very few of us out there and so I have a degree of affection for this movie that may outweigh its charms) as well as the movie Super, a take on the superhero genre that equally made me laugh and bummed me out. I would have expected him to follow a creative path like that of Todd Solondz, turning out quirky, well-received studies of characters on the fringe.

I liked the first Guardians movie okay. But Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. II managed to strike a balance between what’s required of a blockbuster film delivery system like Marvel Studios, and great filmmaking. The movie starts with a battle royale with a space beast from another galaxy, and immediately places it in the background so we can watch a baby tree named Groot happily dance to ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky.”

As a way to reestablish your characters, universe, and overall tone with its audience, it succeeds perfectly, telling you everything you need to know about the movie you’re about to watch in a shade over four minutes. It uses CGI and special effects to create the illusion of a long, unbroken shot that dips in and out of the action, reintroducing us to the main cast one-by-one, while the camera constantly dances with the music. I would even say that this opening titles sequence is better filmmaking than most of the prestige pictures that will win Academy Award™-brand artist validation trophies.

Writer/director Gunn roots his film in something that many of the summer blockbusters I watched this year could not seem to figure out: relatable human stakes. I mean, sure, we can all understand the need to race against time to keep a bad guy from destroying the Universe as we know it. That’s the easy part.

But where Guardians takes a step beyond is to place that, again, in the background to goals we can relate to. Chris Pratt’s Starlord is running from the only father he’s ever known to chase a mythical biological father who never cared about him. Rocket Raccoon is a fellow orphan, a science experiment who has found a real family, and can’t stop himself from pushing them away. Gamora is forced to face the fact that she really owes her sister, who happens to be a notorious super-villain, an apology for the way she participated in her childhood abuse at the hands of their father, Thanos the Dark Lord.

Yes it’s all a bit silly. Superhero movies are by their inherent design. But the film engages us emotionally all the way through, and ends on an earned bittersweet moment that doubles as the greatest advertisement for the sublime Cat Stevens album Tea for the Tillerman.

At its heart, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.II is a simple redemption story staked into the ground of a blockbuster franchise tentpole. And while Spider-Man: Homecoming isn’t necessarily as well-realized, it features an appealing pair of lead performances.

Make no mistake; Sam Raimi’s first two Spider Man movies remain the definitive Spider Man movie-going experiences, and Tobey Maguire is great in it. But there’s something much younger, much more vulnerable, about Tom Holland’s performance as Peter Parker, who is much more believable as the outcast high school genius who is burdened with powers he never wanted. And the great Michael Keaton as his nemesis, the Vulture.

Unfortunately, Spider-Man suffers from the same problem a lot of even the best comic book movies (including Michael Keaton’s own Batman), which is that once you get past the fun of establishing the characters, their relationships, their various crises, and the early-going light heroics, there’s still the required Gigantic Crisis That Must Be Averted To Save The Day that takes up the last third of the film, and that brings the actual forward momentum of the story to a halt. But with Holland and Keaton, there’s enough charm and chemistry to make it easy going.

The Fate of the Furious

This might be the best bad movie I’ve enjoyed in a long, long time. If Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. II digs deep into character and situation, Fate of the Furious, the eighth entry in the Fast and Furious car chase franchise, practically opens with Vin Diesel looking at the camera and saying, “This is a dumb movie. In fact, this isn’t even a movie. It’s an exploding car delivery system. Sit back, turn your brain to ‘silent,’ and just take this in.”

Not only is this not a movie, it’s actually two movies starring two huge action stars who not only clearly do not like each other, but in the seven minutes of time that The Rock and Vin Diesel actually spend in frame together, they literally can’t make eye contact with each other. These are two movies that have been edited together and whose stories dovetail at the very end. One is about Cool Car Driving Guy Vin Diesel who has a Cool Car Driving Chick and a Cool Car Driving Baby who is kidnapped by a Bad No Good Lady.

The other stars Jason Statham and The Rock, the two most charismatic action stars working today. Jason Statham and The Rock are in prison for some reason, and they are broken out despite the fact that THE ROCK DOES NOT BELIEVE IT’S RIGHT TO BE BROKEN OUT OF PRISON SO HE IS ALMOST LITERALLY DRAGGED OUT AGAINST HIS WILL.

The movie ends with cars being chased over an arctic tundra by a radio controlled nuclear submarine that fires a torpedo at them AND THE ROCK PHYSICALLY PUSHES IT AWAY WITH HIS BARE HAND WHILE DRIVING A JEEP. Jason Statham engages in a gunfight ON A FUCKING AIRPLANE THAT I THINK NOBODY IS ACTUALLY FLYING while using A BABY IN A BULLETPROOF CARRIER AS A FUCKING SHIELD.

No other action movie I’ve been to this year had the audience cheering as much as we did when Vin Diesel made his hero’s entrance at the end to save the day. Not Star Wars, not Thor: Ragnarok, not even my beloved Guardians of the Galaxy. Is this a great movie? No. Is it even, technically, classifiable as a motion picture? Quite possibly not. Is it completely kickass and the most fun watch of the year? You bet your sweet ass.

Kong: Skull Island

Look. If I say, “King Kong, but he was the star of Apocalypse Now,” and your reaction is anything other than, “Holy shit, I have to see this movie RIGHT NOW,” I get it. You can skip the rest of this entry, because I’m going to keep this quick. I know that I’m not going to make any converts, because anyone who was excited by that premise saw it in the theatre same as me.

Other King Kong movies have focused on removing the monster from his natural habitat into the wicked world of science and man, and how this destroys him. Kong: Skull Island prefers to take the traditional first third of the King Kong story—scientists and businessmen invade Skull Island and, unheeding to the warnings of natives, find and subjugate Kong—and blows it out into a two-and-a-half hour Vietnam-era war film.

As an allegory of man’s destruction of the Earth’s natural environment, Kong is heavy-handed but doesn’t beat us over the head too badly with its point. An ensemble cast of great modern heavyweight character actors, including Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, and Tom Hiddleston, anchor a film that, in the hands of lesser thespic talents, could come off as a bit silly. But the cast delivers the goods, especially Jackson who provides a surprising amount of shading to a character that seems to be written as a cardboard Vietnam Vet Gone Rogue accidental villain in search of last-minute redemption.

As with the best of the Kong movies, the monkey remains the most sympathetic character, a pure and innocent creature who only turned into a killer when confronted with man. If Kong’s love story with Brie Larson seems a bit more contrived than his lust for Fay Wray, our King Giant Murder Monkey is still enough of a tragic hero that we want to watch him anchor a Giant Monster “shared cinematic universe” (a phrase that should strike a note of concern for anyone who, as I did, sat through The Mummy this year).

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

I think this movie could have been called “Frances McDormand’s Next Oscar®-brand Award Show Reward” and called it a day. About a woman who rents the titular billboards outside her town to chastise her local police force for failing to solve her teenage daughter’s rape/murder, this is a film that’s unafraid to constantly shift the emotional weight under your feet.

McDormand’s character is in a sympathetic position, but is an unsympathetic personality. Woody Harrelson’s backwater police chief is in an impossible position, and he finds ways to win that hurt everyone whose life he’s touched. Even as we pull back to get a better look at the full tapestry of life in this town, pulling each character’s thread causes their lives to unravel.

But while it continues to find new ways to confound our expectations for where the story will go next, the film itself seems uncertain of its own tone. Is it a slice of life character piece? Is the film’s point of view that life is messy, without resolution or pat endings? That there’s ultimately no justice, at least not in the sense that we like to think of justice, with guilty parties getting punished? Perhaps, and it’s a powerful and daring trick to pull in a wide release film with major stars. And yet the director, as if not quite trusting himself, reverses himself in the film’s final 15 minutes, promising resolution and justice and redemption.

It’s a messy movie, and by no means a perfect one. Three Billboards tries to walk a tightrope, balancing dark humor and drama, but it stumbles and falls a few times. And like a great many movies being made, it feels about twenty minutes too long, with a couple of subplots being given particular attention with no real attempt to, if not resolve them, then at least fold them into the overarching theme of the film.

Sam Rockwell’s character, in particular, is made irredeemable; he is guilty of terrible acts for which he receives no punishment. Late in the film, he’s destroyed professionally, physically, and personally, and after we learn that there’s one thing he’s not guilty of, we’re asked to reconsider some of what we think we know about him. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t feel like a strong enough shift be asked to change how we feel about a character after having seen the things we’ve seen him do.

But just because this movie isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile. You will see it nominated for, and probably win, a whole bunch of awards of the next few months. And deservedly so. Sam Rockwell does the near-impossible: create a character so fully-rounded and three-dimensional, you will forget he is a racist Southern officer named “Jason Dixon.” A name so on-the-nose it might as well “Colonel Foghorn Sanders.”

Get Out//It

I think it’s an indicator of how far the American horror film has fallen, that people got excited that Jordan Peele’s Get Out is actually about something relevant. Horror as a genre is always supposed to be about something. Halloween isn’t just a movie about a dude who stabs people in the woods. It’s about free-floating anxiety and the sense that no matter how orderly our lives may feel, there’s always the sense that there’s something just out of sight waiting for us. Made in 1978, it’s about post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America, and the country’s collective realization that everything we had learned was a lie.

The Shining is less about a man trapped in a haunted hotel, and more about what it means to be a family trapped in an unpredictably violent relationship with an alcoholic. Psycho is a movie about the dysfunction lurking under the sense of self during the boomtime economic recovery that America experienced after World War II. Whether these were intentional choices by the filmmakers or not, they capitalized on a collective sense of unease that we as a society feel, even if we can’t articulate what it is or why.

Get Out audaciously makes the subtext plain on the page, so that the viewer has no chance to escape the message amid the tension and suspense: In post-Obama America, Peele tells us, even “tolerant” white Americans who would consider themselves progressive because they like rap music and black culture, are, in their own way, blind to their own racism and their destruction of black culture even as they consume it.

Which is ironic, given that Jordan Peele’s previous project was the great, and greatly successful, Key and Peele sketch show on Comedy Central. A tremendous accomplishment, Peele and his sketch partner, Keegan Michael-Key (maybe the greatest comedy actor of his generation) brought an African American sensibility into the living rooms, iPads, and iTunes movie player windows of young white Americans across the country. As Dave Chappelle discovered in his own massively-popular Comedy Central sketch comedy show, you can have 100% control over the product, and you still can’t control how it will be consumed, enjoyed, or interpreted.

I may be putting words into Peele’s mouth here, but a movie like Get Out seems to be a reaction to that. Asking the question, “Who am I speaking for if not myself? Who, in this country will protect us not just from the cartoonishly evil people we already know to look out for, but those who come as friends, as fans, as family?”

And this strikes a chord in this country, which feels more polarized than ever. Where news of black men being gunned down by police have dominated the news, and in response it feels like the entire system has turned a blind eye to systemic racial murder. Because when it comes to creating popular culture, the personal is always political. And nobody knows this better than Stephen King, who has created some of the seminal works of late-20^th Century horror fiction. His book, It, is a classic look at what it means to be an American child, interpreting a world full of very human horrors through the lens of willful naivete and fairy tale.

There’s a point, as you pass through the beginnings of adolescence, when you begin to see things as they truly are. That the adults you had assumed are monolithically strong and smart and good are actually just human beings, sometimes too bent to do the right things, sometimes too scared. It’s on this point that the world that Stephen King creates teeters, as the kids find the sum of their childhood fears and real world abuses embodied in one evil clown that lives in the sewers beneath. The second half of the book is actually a very smart look at Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder, and how we deal as adults with the fallout of a childhood full of things we can’t remember, or don’t care to.

Stephen King’s It, the film, focuses on the first half of this story. In deference to not releasing an unwatchable seven hour movie, a lot of the fat in the plot is trimmed away. And if the fat is where the flavor is, then so be it. Because Andy Muschietti, like Jordan Peele did with Get Out, creates a horror film that delivers the scares while remembering that it’s also supposed to be about something. If It owes as much to Steven Spielberg as it does to Stephen King, that’s no great sin. In an age of indie films that paint from a palette of handheld yellows and browns, it’s nice to see a brightly-lit film that embraces the Steadicam greens and blues.

The Ballad of Lefty Brown

This is an American Western, filmed on actual Kodak film with the sweepingly beautiful backdrop of Montana scrubland as its setting. It pulls off a narrative move in the first ten minutes so ballsy I wouldn’t dare to spoil it here. And you won’t enjoy it, because you’re going to watch it on Netflix on your TV in bed while scrolling Facebook and answering texts.

Which is fine. But if you get the chance to watch this in a dark theatre, I strongly recommend you go, as it rewards the effort it takes to allow yourself to submerge yourself into its world.

Taking its cue from the great oaters of the 1950s, the John Ford and John Wayne films, with their sense of what is right and what is just, Ballad reaches an ending that feels a bit pat and forced. Is it bad that I can no longer feel good about a happy ending anymore unless it unfolds organically? Perhaps, and I suspect I may be in the minority in that view. Bill Pullman is an American treasure of the cinema, who pulls off the common actor’s trick of being both underrated and consistently working. Also a special mention here to Kathy Baker, who takes what could have been a thankless role and dominates every scene she’s in. When you’re in scenes with actors like Pullman and Peter Fonda, that’s no easy trick to pull off.

The Shape of Water

Man, I liked this movie an awful lot. It starts as the kind of film that usually gets under my skin; highly stylized, with purposefully whimsical elements that are beautiful and as airless as a Faberge egg. As we stay wit hthe story, it becomes apparent that this is a deliberate choice.

Sally Hawkins is a mute cleaning girl at a government lab whose purpose and provenance are kept deliberately vague. She lives in an artist’s garret above a second-run movie theatre, and her closest neighbor and friend is a gay commercial artist who is obsessed with old films, and has recently aged out of a career in advertising, an industry that’s always looking forward.

Color is an important part of Del Toro’s storytelling Shape of Water, and the pallet he works with is almost another main character. The first two-thirds of the film are greens and blues, and we see that this is because the people in his world are underwater in their\ own lives, unable to communicate, barely able to communicate because they’re drowning in their own loneliness.

A swamp creature from South America is dragged in chains to the lab, and Sally Hawkins’ working girl very quickly senses a kindred spirit lurking in the muddy depths of his tank. As she falls in love, as the outside world tries to contain the creature, slowly the clockwork design that dominates the first half of the film falls apart. In fact, every time a character is about to be upended, another splash of red is added to the canvas.

And all through the film, intimacy and communication are the agents of chaos that takes this world apart piece by piece. Whether it’s Michael Shannon’s wound-up government agent putting his hand over his wife’s mouth during an act of love-making, because he “can’t” when she’s talking, or Richard Jenkins’ artist bravely making a move on a counter boy he’s been afraid to open himself up to, it’s communication that makes the colors run in this meticulously-painted masterpiece. It’s a neat trick when a filmmaker creates a fully-realized world that you never want to leave, and yet still has you fully rooting for its destruction when it happens.

Bright

I enjoyed the shit out of Bright. It is not a good movie. It’s a lot of banter and explosions and ridiculously wasted special effects.

The first thing you need to know is that I am a David Ayer fan. In 2001, two screenplays he wrote, Training Day and The Fast and The Furious, premiered becoming massive, genre-defining successes. End of Watch, a movie he wrote and directed, a minor classic. Even if he had never directed a movie before Bright, there is a lot of evidence out there that he knows a thing or two about crafting story. And believe me, there’s very little in Bright.

The second thing you need to know is that I am HUGE fan of the buddy cop action/comedy genre. I love the best of it: Lethal Weapon, 48 Hours, Beverly Hills Cop. I love the worst of it: Beverly Hills Cop III, Running Scared (where tiny middle-aged Long Islander Billy Crystal plays a tough-as-nails Chicago cop who can dunk on a bunch of teenagers in a game of street ball), Red Heat, and Dead Heat, a movie that pairs Joe Piscopo with Treat Williams as a zombie cop named Roger Mortis. I love these movies, and in a perfect world, Shane Black would have as many Oscar® brand entertainment industry-strength suppositories as the great William Goldman.

And it’s not as if Bright doesn’t have a killer hook; transposing a fairy tale world onto a modern-day noir is about has hooky as a premise gets. However, in Bright, we’re given stakes that are way too big to be relatable. As I said in the entry for Guardians of the Galaxy above, if your movie can’t find a way to get big while also being small and relatable, it doesn’t matter that you have human charm machine Will Smith in the lead role, your viewer just is not going to give a shit by the end.

Will Smith, by the way, deserves an MVP award from Hollywood for carrying this movie, as well as Ayer’s previous, Suicide Squad, like a champ. For the record, Suicide Squad was another movie that I enjoyed unironicallyas a pure moviegoing experience. If you’re going to make a bad comic book movie, don’t make it so boring that people mistake your film for art (Logan, which is basically The Piano with mutants). And for god’s sakes, don’t let your actors in on the fact that you’re making garbage. By the time they got around to filming Justice League, the stars had been so lambasted for Batman v. Superman, they walked through Justice League depressed. Like they know they’re going to get beaten up for appearing in this movie, no matter how it turns out. Like the group of cool kids who go to their high school reunion and realize that middle age has transformed them into losers somehow.

Suicide Squad was all forward motion and optimism, and Margot Robbie is a standout because it feels like she’s decided that she’s in her own amazing action movie where she’s the protagonist. It looks great, and moves at fast clip for a movie that’s easily an hour too long, and everybody, from Ayer to the actors to the set designers to makeup to costumes, all conspire to help the audience forget that what they’re watching makes no goddamn sense.

Justice League is the aftermath of a trainwreck, a public hearing with Amtrak officials to determine what went wrong. Suicide Squad is a neon spaceship with its controls set to find the heart of the sun.

By contrast, Bright is an Edsel with four screaming passengers that’s been pushed off a cliff. At times you can convince yourself you’re flying along, but when the ride ends it ain’t going to end pretty. Will Smith is great as always, but for the first time he seems genuinely tired. Like he’s he made a wish with an evil genie and got stuck in the cycle of starring in big budget action movies and promoting big budget action movies, and hasn’t had a good night’s sleep since Bad Boys II (a GREAT movie, by the way).

There’s a great many things wrong with this movie that wants to be a parable about racism, but unlike Get Out, was written and directed by two men who never experienced it first-hand. See, it’s set in a world where, essentially, Lord of the Rings is actual history, and Will Smith’s partner is an Orc. Orcs have been discriminated against for 2,000 years after siding with The Dark One in a massive battle. The problem is the film also seems to embrace shades of actual racism (Latino gangbangers straight out of a 1990s LAPD recruitment film) and anti-Semitism (elves are all rich, and live in their own separate section of Beverly Hills, and not-so-secretly control the government).

But the biggest problem is the lack of give-a-shit stakes. See, the most powerful weapons in this film are magic wands, which can only be handled by supernatural beings called Brights. It’s supposed to be a major plot twist that Will Smith, an ordinary street cop and regular human being, is a “Bright.” But we know this already for two reasons:

First, a street prophet tells us so, communicating this fact to his Orcish partner, in subtitled orcish, so we know even if Will Smith doesn’t.
Secondly, it’s a movie called Bright, starring Will Smith. All of the poster art for the film say “BRIGHT” in big letters over a picture of Will Smith’s face. Sure, it’s an ancillary aspect of filmmaking, but in this case it’s very important in what the movie communicates to the audience.In the movie The 40 Year-Old Virgin starring Steve Carrell, with posters of Carrell’s face over the title, you are left with no mystery walking in about which character in the movie is a virgin, or how old he is. In the Jim Carrey movie Liar Liar (a better movie than it’s given credit for), there’s no third act twist where it turns out that Jim Carrey’s son is the Liar.It’s as if The Usual Suspects was called Who Is Keyser Soze? and was advertised with Kevin Spacey standing alone on the poster for the film.

So the movie tries to throw us a curve ball by withholding fifty percent of the information we would need to enjoy the story until the very end. See, there’s an Orcish prophecy about the end of the world, and the twist is that Will Smith is a central figure in their doomsday fable. But we don’t learn there’s even a prophecy until the final half hour. And in the end, Will Smith learns he’s a Bright by grabbing the magic wand.

Now, this could have been a movie about Will Smith knowing he’s got special powers but not wanting to acknowledge or use them for reasons. Or it could have been a movie where Will Smith slowly learns he has powers and in the final scene he decides to risk trusting his gut that he’s a “Bright” by grabbing the wand in what would otherwise be a scene of tremendous self-sacrifice.

But instead he just blindly grabs the wand and trusts that he’s awesome enough to survive. It’s as if Star Wars decided not to tell us anything about the Force and Luke Skywalker’s connection to it until the very end of the final trench run sequence.

I hold none of this against the movie. This is a list of films I enjoyed this year, and Bright closes it out with no sense of irony or sarcasm. Because in this movie, you get to root against everybody. Everybody, every character, turns out to be a dick to one degree or another. If it seems one guy is unjustly accused of something, you find out that no, he really did the wrong thing and got lucky it worked out. And so you really just get to dig in and enjoy two solid hours of CGI-enhanced mayhem. And in this case, it failed in a way I find more interesting than many of the “good” movies of 2017 succeeded.

0 THE TEN BEST BOOKS I READ IN 2017

From David Letterman to Rolling Stone magazine, and forgotten giants of the entertainment business, Liam reviews the ten books he HIGHLY recommends.

December 18, 2017
by Liam
· Blog · Liam Nerds Out · Uncategorized

NOTE: I understand that it’s tough to read these essays in my website’s blog format. I wish I could change the white on black writing for blog pages and leave the rest of this website alone, but it’s just not possible with my WordPress template, so I’ve made this available as a PDF file as well.

Before moving to Los Angeles, I had assumed that, upon landing safely here, my reading habit would be curtailed, if not cut off entirely. This was partly because of the culture—TV and movies really do rule the landscape—and partly because

I wouldn’t be commuting via public transit as often. As a native New Yorker, most of my reading was done on trains and buses.

Happily, instead I’ve found that I’ve been consuming books at my usual voracious rate. Mostly because reading is such a phenomenally enriching way of procrastinating on the writing I have to do. In fact, I would estimate that I’ve probably read a book and a half a week, on average.

(Unfortunately, I just started The Great Escape, Paul Brickhill’s eyewitness account of the massive WWII POW camp escape that formed the basis of the movie of the same name. I can already tell that I will have it finished well before the New Year but too late to make this list, and so I will just give it a plug here.)

The following list does not entirely consist of books published in the past year. In fact, the first book on this list was first published in 1928, and remains long out of print. Also, I could have filled this list with books written by comedians and cartoonists whom I consider friends, but I decided as a whole to leave those alone. I just don’t have time to deal with anyone’s resentments because one friend wants to know why I left them out and picked another person we know instead.

That being said, I will acknowledge my personal relationship with the author of each book as necessary when it comes up. And without further ado, and in no particular order:

CLOWNING THROUGH LIFE – Eddie Foy & Alvin F. Harlow – BUY IT HERE

This is a year that saw me rediscovering the roots of comedy in America, reading, watching video of, and listening to audio of America’s oldest and most forgotten stars. It’s a healthy thing to do, if you care at all about your craft, to show an interest in where you come from and who your pioneers are. Maybe it’s because you can steal wholesale from them, and I’ll talk about that a little more in the entry on Introducing Bert Williams below. Or it’s just as a healthy reminder that as important as you may be, or wish you were currently, you’re nothing more than another name in a continuum of comedy writers and performers, and that as many as came and went before you, there will be as many to come after you as well. Or maybe you just need a reminder that the business is the business, and there’s nothing you’re dealing with that people didn’t have to deal with before.

Most people now remember Eddie Foy as the subject of the Bob Hope film The Seven Little Foys, which, when I was younger, seemed to be on TV one out of every six Sunday afternoons. But there was a time when Eddie Foy was one of America’s pre-eminent comic actors, working his way up from tiny touring companies of long-forgotten plays to one of the biggest stars on Broadway.

Eddie Foy’s book is, like many actors’ autobiographies, filled with exaggerations and tall tales. And yet, he really was there for some of the most formative and interesting episodes of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth (published in 1928, this book was written during the height of the Gilded Age that preceded The Great Depression, and it takes a minute to remember that when he talks about the Great War that young people were sent to fight, he means World War I, which wasn’t even called that back then because World War II hadn’t happened yet.)

Eddie Foy was a young boy when he was caught up in The Great Chicago Fire, and had to carry his baby brother to safety. He was there, onstage on December 1903, for the Iroquois Theatre Fire, which still stands as the deadliest single-building fire in United States history, and whose aftermath ushered in the fire safety codes that we still live by today. He stood onstage and sang to the stampeding audience as the building burned around him, not knowing if his wife and child had made it to safety, in the hopes of calming the maddened crowd.

On occasion, he reaches a thoroughly unbelievable chapter in his life, for instance the two summers he spent as the theatrical toast of Dodge City, befriending Western legends like Doc Holliday and Wild Bill Hickok. When he does, he provides the reader with either proof or, in the case of the aforementioned chapter, a testimonial from a doctor of national renown.

If I have any fault with this book, which is a fantastic read and invaluable window into a world long past, it’s that Eddie Foy is too much a creature of the theater, and perhaps not the best arbiter of what’s interesting and what isn’t. For instance, he gives the reader excruciating detail about his first acting job as a literal spear carrier, while the fact that his mother was Mary Todd Lincoln’s caretaker after the President’s death takes up half of a page.

LETTERMAN: THE LAST GIANT OF LATE NIGHT – Jason Zinoman – BUY IT HERE

I should start this review by acknowledging that, as the official comedy critic of The Failing New York Times, Jason Zinoman occupies a rarified position of power in my little corner of my little world. And I suppose it’s politic to praise his book, but as people who know me best will acknowledge, I’m not a tremendously politic person. The truth is, I’ve stopped being afraid of journalists and the power they wield around the time ten years ago when all the major NYC dailies did their once-a-decade writeup of this crazy “alternative comedy” scene that the kids are into, and all used me as a resource and then cut me out of their coverage, the Times being the most egregious offender. And happily, I no longer carry a resentment over that particular lack of quid pro quo, because I made a decision that I would rather be happy than right. But the truth is that it gave me a broader perspective on what the relationship of an artist and the media should be.

All that being said, Zinoman has written a corker. As a journalist, Jason has the right instincts for researching and telling a story, and as a journalist for the Failing New York Times, he has a degree of access that other would-be Boswells don’t. Thus, he manages to grab a rare sit-down interview with the legendary Dave himself, as well as many many people in his world who normally don’t speak on the record.

I’ve been a fan of David Letterman and his late night talk shows since I was a teen. Since A&E ran daily reruns of Late Night with David Letterman in the afternoon and I was able to pick up on the show from episode one. When you’re young, and you’re angry, and you’re skeptical of the powers-that-be, there is no greater friend than the ornery, ironically detached and scathing Young David Letterman. Refusing to take anything, even his own show, seriously (or at least publicly, as he was famously a perfectionist behind the scenes), he tore down and turned inside out the fabric of show business, and then wore it as a bathrobe.

As he matured, as he grew more successful, his show matured and started attracting the sort of big names that talk shows need, and who need “cool cred” that a talk show like Letterman’s Late Night could afford, and then it changed again when he went to CBS and found himself suddenly one of the Great Old Men of the medium. Towards the end of his run on The Late Show, my favorite segments were when Dave would just speak extemporaneously to the public, talking about something as serious as a blackmail attempt, or as seemingly banal as a day he spent with his son.

So with two books on “The Late Night Wars” and millions of column inches filled about the hosts of late night TV, why is this book necessary? Because J-Zin did the research, and he did talk to as many people as possible, there’s actually much to learn about the reclusive star who shared so much on TV and revealed so little of himself. His early college radio career, the boozy and hilarious first marriage ceremony, the earliest days as a struggling Los Angeles comedian. Zinomensch fills in the areas between public and private person and manages to tell a far more complete story than what we already knew.

STICKY FINGERS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JANN WENNER AND ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE – Joe Hagan – BUY IT HERE

If David Letterman was a larger-than-life media personality who desperately guarded his privacy, Rolling Stone’s founding editor Jann Wenner was a behind-the-scenes power broker who sacrificed everything to be a larger-than-life media personality. I knew that I was going to buy this book the first time I read an article about it, in which the author, Joe Hagan, explained that Jann had hired him to slap together a hagiography, and gave him hundreds of hours’ worth of interviews and unrestricted access to his archives. And then Hagan decided that the only ethical way to tell this story would be a warts-and-all biography, stabbing old Jann right in the back. Which is a story that a lot of Rolling Stone subjects can tell, and in this book they certainly get a chance to.

I have nothing against Jann Wenner, personally. As you read in the book, he took every risk and chased every lead to bring his vision of a publication that reflected his generation’s sensibility to life, and to keep it running. As obvious as that concept seems now, back in the 1960s it seemed unthinkable that the world-at-large could support a mainstream newspaper that did in-depth reporting on rock and youth culture, in which that generation’s twin obsessions with copious drug use and loud guitar music were covered with the gravity of Watergate or the Moon landing.

And despite his reputation as a gadfly, he did take this mission seriously. When his former business partner Mick jagger put together a boondoggle of a festival at the Altamont race track, in which the Rolling Stones’ headlining set was punctuated by a riot in which the Hells Angels’ Motorcycle Club beat and murdered their fans, Rolling Stone was merciless and thorough in its coverage of the event, and wasted no time in pinning the blame on Mick personally. And when Hunter S. Thompson filed his landmark gonzo Fear and Loathing political coverage, Wenner gave him a long leash and physically cut and pasted his speed-addled writings into a coherent narrative.

And while the book leaves no doubt that he achieved his goal of being a Very Important Person, it’s similarly unflinching in its look as a man so driven to power that he’s willing to discard friends and lovers and John Lennon. As the Baby Boomers, a generation of self-described idealists, burn out on leftist politics and start craving success and the comfort of material goods (as well as the rush of cocaine), so did Wenner, and so did Rolling Stone.

Joe Hagan is another journalist who knows a thing or two about storytelling, and it shows in his ability to craft a page-turner of a story about, what is in the end, another story of how an old media giant came together and survived bankruptcy both financial and creative.

IN SUNLIGHT OR IN SHADOW: STORES INSPIRED BY THE PAINTINGS OF EDWARD HOPPER – edited by Lawrence Block – BUY IT HERE

Full disclosure: Not only do I consider Larry a great social media friend, but I’ve talked to him in person and interviewed him on a podcast, and I like him a lot as a real decent dude. He’s also an Edgar Award-winning Grand Master of mystery fiction, and his worst books are still crackerjack fiction that stand with the best of modern detective fiction.

I could recommend a half-dozen of his novels in this space, but instead I’m going to recommend this collection of shorts stories curated from a variety of the greatest American genre fiction writers, inspired by that greatest American painter of narrative fiction Edward Hopper. Who better to serve as a jumping-off point for noir writing than the painter of the ultimate work of noir visual art, the 1942 painting Nighthawks?

And for the effort, Block has assembled a veritable Dirty Dozen of Big Bestselling Names – Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Child, Jeffrey Deaver. And while, as in many themed anthologies of short fiction, the quality varies from piece to piece, there’s enough gold between the covers to make the book more than worthwhile.

Jesus Christ, that last sentence sounds like something from the desk of a publishing company’s PR department, doesn’t it? It’s true, though.

INTRODUCING BERT WILLIAMS: BURNT CORK, BROADWAY, AND THE STORY OF AMERICA’S FIRST BLACK STAR – Camille F. Forbes – BUY IT HERE

Entering that continuum of performers who were once the brightest-shining stars in the world, and are now mostly forgotten, I had known Bert Williams for many years as a name, a vague reference, more than anything else. The first black comedy superstar in the United States, arguably the first black celebrity, and a headliner in vaudeville back when that meant everything. And as usual with things that you “know” from having absorbed them second-hand, that was only scratching the surface.

In Camille F. Forbes’ fantastic biography, we begin at the earliest medicine shows, where a young light-skinned boy Bert Williams got his start, barking customers in. (Medicine shows were traveling revues, a proto-vaudeville circuit, where admission was free, and pitchmen would sell their dubious medicines between acts.) From there, the shy Williams graduated to minstrel shows, where he learned to conquer stage fright by donning blackface.

A lot of comedians will that the only way to get comfortable onstage is to wear a mask of one kind or another. If you’re up there speaking honestly about your fears, your neuroses, your hangups, there’s a better-than-average likelihood that people in the audience will judge you, even hate you. So, as I say, many comedians put on a mask of sorts; an attitude, or a character who says the things you secretly think but never expected to hear spoken aloud in polite society, a costume or a style. Anything that creates a protective barrier between the fragile performer’s ego and the barbarian horde of strangers in the audience.

Blackface went out of fashion relatively quickly among most audiences and performers of all races as an embarrassing relic of a better-forgotten recent past, but Bert Williams wore it all the way to the end of his career, by which time he was a star of enough magnitude that there was no succumbing to the pressure among his peers to change.

Young Bert wound up partnering up with the crusading, pioneering African-American performer/producer George Walker, who pushed the duo’s business prospects from touring headliners to the first stars of the first all-black production on Broadway. Success followed success for the duo, and when Walker succumbed to a stroke at a young age, Williams found new stardom as a solo, eventually headlining the immortal Ziegfield Follies.

These are the bare bones of the story, and a fine enough read on their own. What Forbes does is paint a broader picture of the world of pre-war, pre-Depression Broadway and show business, and provide a look at not only Williams’ successes, but the petty, daily indignities he suffered as a result of those successes. The hotels where, if he was allowed to enter at all, it was only through the maintenance elevators. The loneliness of being a major African-American in the mostly-white business of vaudeville. The constant humiliating treatment by performers of lesser talent and stature. The notorious White Rats vaudeville union.

Add into this an in-depth look at Williams and Walker’s musical comedies, the founding of the African American Frogs club as an alternative to the all-white theatrical clubs and associations from which this newly-rising affluent class of artists were being excluded. Their wealthiest members relegated to the balconies to watch the latest Williams and Walker play.

The work of Williams and Walker was all new to me, and Forbes is to be commended for – well, not quite re-discovering these works, because they had never been lost. It’s just that they had never been filmed for posterity, the technology obviously not existing to do so. But it’s tough to breathe new life into the musty old works of the Golden Age of Broadway, mostly because there’s so much context to be created for appreciating them. This Forbes has done wonderfully.

If I had one complaint, it’s that Ms. Forbes appreciates that the fact that Williams and Walker were, by being successful and famous actors and businessmen in a time when Jim Crow was not only the law of the land but also a hugely popular style of songwriting, in themselves a political and social statement. But she has in this book devoted pages to explaining plainly and repetitively the importance and impact of who these men were, to the point where I stopped reading and said to myself, “She must be an academic.” Sure enough, flipping to her bio on the back flap she is a professor at a university in San Diego. This is just a personal pet peeve, as someone who feels that it’s too easy to analyze and pick apart the alleged political implications of standup comedy.

But that’s a minor quibble for such a thoroughly engaging and well-written biography of a man who is considered by many today to be a footnote, when he’s considered at all. Although i was delighted to learn, through reading transcripts of Williams’ solo monologues, that Richard Pryor had lifted huge chunks of the Bert Williams monologues wholesale for his classic album …Is It Something I Said?, particularly the Mudbone monologue interlude. As I say, we in the business of comedy stand on the shoulders of giants who stand on the ruins of statues of giants.

Of all the books I read this year, this is the one that I find myself thinking about again and again.

HARPO SPEAKS – Harpo Marx and Rowland Barber – BUY IT HERE

If you had a chance to read this when you were young, as many of my friends did, then just know that I envy you. Halfway through reading this autobiography of the “dumb” Marx Brother, I realized that I was breathlessly falling in love with a book about a man who had been dead long before I was born.

I’ve been a fan of the Marx Brothers since I was a wee lad, watching their movies with my grandfather a huge fan and, like the brothers, a Jewish native New Yorker (although of course about forty years younger). For a while when I was young, their movies came on PBS late at night, and the tapes I made on our huge, $400 state-of-the-art VCR, were treasured by me until I finally, reluctantly, had to throw them out last year.

And while I knew a lot about the Marx Brothers and their career, and I knew some about Harpo having read about him through essays and reminiscences of his friends in the Algonquin Round Table, and his brother Groucho’s biographies and autobiographical writings, I was embarrassed to learn that still I knew maybe a quarter of the story.

The book begins with Harpo’s hardscrabble beginnings at the end of the 1800s, when New York City was all unpaved roads and cobblestone, and the Upper East Side was still a shtetl. His mother, the great Minnie Marx, is portrayed as an evangelical preacher sort of character, someone who one would believe almost literally heard the voice of God tell her that her children belonged in show business.

The book takes us into the lowest depths of professional touring vaudeville (and those were some deep troughs, that forged a performer’s desire to commit to a life of show business or quit and lead a life of guaranteed meals and income), to the brothers’ natural evolution from a singing child act who channeled their untameable creative energy as adolescent cutups into a professionally unprofessional comedy act.

Harpo’s stage character was that of a childlike naïf with no voice who sometimes does the wrong thing, but only because he really didn’t know any better. And the real-life Harpo portrays himself as a similar character in this book, floating from stage success to friendship with the most powerful newspaper critic in New York City, the mercurial and fascinating Alexander Woolcott. From there he seems to drift into a friendship with the era’s greatest playwrights and authors, and through all sorts of adventures, including a successful run in the newly-formed Soviet Union.

if the character seems a bit unbelievably Chauncey Gardiner-esque, and if some of the anecdotes seem a bit too on-the-nose for how they wrap up neatly in a punchline-driven bow, you are able to forgive Harpo, being not only such warm and wonderful company as a storyteller, but also for being a genuine national treasure and part of one of the greatest comedy teams that ever escaped vaudeville and early Broadway and into immortality.

NO MUD NO LOTUS: THE ART OF TRANSFORMING SUFFERING – Thich Nhat Hanh – BUY IT HERE

I think it’s inevitable that, when you move to Southern California, especially into Los Angeles, you begin to embrace philosophy, and meditation, and looking within. Perhaps it’s because you’ve reached the end of the classic journey of American expansion, and you’ve moved westward and westward until the only options are to either push west and drown in the Pacific Ocean, or to push further within.

Or perhaps it’s the first time you sit on a beach and watch the beauty that is the sun setting over that Pacific Ocean, and you suspect that there’s more to this world than you believed possible. Or maybe it’s because LA makes it easy to make a lifestyle out of sitting alone in your apartment smoking weed and thinking about yourself a lot.

In any case, in the city that spawned a thousand cults, I sat and on the suggestion of friends, read a few books on Eastern philosophy. And through that reading I stumbled on this work by Thich Nhat Hanh, a 91 year-old Buddhist monk, author, and activist.

Through a combination of breathing exercises, meditations, and a little bit of self-help wisdom, Nanh espouses a simple but enticing philosophy: that in order to transcend suffering into happiness, we can’t shy away from this suffering but rather embrace it, recognize what lies at its roots, and learn to live within it. After all, just as there would be no beautiful lotus flower if there was no mud in which it could blossom, so your life would have no true joy if it had no sorrow with which to compare it. Or as Butthead (of Beavis and Butthead) puts it, “You’ve got to have stuff that sucks in order to have stuff that’s cool.”

It’s an appealingly simple and easy-to-grasp philosophy, and if seems one of those “Well of course, it’s obvious when you put it that way” ideas, well, guess what? If you had put it that way, I’d be writing about your book on the Zen way of deconstructing the pain and trauma that comes with being alive in this wicked world of sin and suffering.

I’m not necessarily saying it provides enough meat on its own to make an intellectual banquet, but few books on philosophy and self-help do. But there’s enough here to make a fine stew, and that’s better than most.

IN GOD WE TRUST… ALL OTHERS PAY CASH – Jean Shepherd – BUY IT HERE

When I was a kid, I had two major exposures to Jean Shepherd:

For some reason, maybe they owned a copy of the print, maybe the studio paid them to do this, but for at least a couple of years, the Loews Elmwood theatre in my neighborhood would have a free Christmas Day screening of Jean Shepherd’s now-classic film A Christmas Story. This was back when VHS copies of tapes were relatively expensive, and way back in the dark ages before the thousands of cable channels and dozens of movie screening sites made watching whatever you want whenever you want a lifestyle.

Cable TV gets all the credit for cementing the film’s status as a classic, but long before TBS went national, my best friend James and I knew all the dialogue by heart and would shout it back and forth to each other through the slicing winds of the cold grey Queens winters. Of course, this movie was loosely based on Shepherd’s autobiographical writings of his childhood in Depression-era Indiana, a time and a place that was as exotic to little me as Edwardian England, or Medieval Japan.

My second exposure: When my parents told me who Jean Shepherd was, and that this movie that I loved so much was actually based on one of his books, I was mad to read his work. (Incidentally, this is how I came to Sherlock Holmes, after I went with my sister to see Young Sherlock Holmes for her birthday.) The only Shepherd book my parents had at the time was a much-loved copy of Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters.

I loved Wanda Hickey and read it front-to-cover. But something in me as a young child understood that as funny as it was—and it still stands as one of the funniest books I’ve read—and that might be a fun list to tackle some day—it also had a much heavier, much less whimsical tone than A Christmas Story, and so I left this book alone, so as not to ruin the thing I loved.

As an adult tackling In God We Trust…, I recognize how right on my instincts were. Jean Shepherd was a crotchety old grouch, which is one of the reasons his stories are so great. It’s not so much that he sees clearly enough that it cuts through the mists of childhood nostalgia so much as he’s enough of a cynic to recognize the cheap magic trick those memories can be. Hence his descriptions of an event as wondrous in childhood memory as his father saving up his salary to take the kids to the annual county fair are grandiose and wide-eyed as only a child could see them, while also being as world-weary and cynical as only someone who had been disappointed time and again by the world as an adult can be.

And yet, as cutting as he was, there was an affection to it all. When he looks back at himself as a “dumb little kid,” it’s with a rueful half-smile.

His whimsy is both sincerely-lived and hollowly-mocking, and while, as I can appreciate the mordant humor, a part of me will always appreciate the job that Bob Clark (the director of the film) did in dulling the razors and allowing a little more light and joy into the story.

KILL THE GRINGO: THE LIFE OF JACK VAUGHN, AMERICAN DIPLOMAT, DIRECTOR OF THE PEACE CORPS, US AMBASSADOR TO COLOMBIA, AND CONSERVATIONIST – Jack Hood Vaughn – BUY IT HERE

Again, I have to be honest here. I would probably not have picked up this book if Vaughn wasn’t the father of a friend. Local libraries are filled with the autobiographies of career army officers and local elected officials and you always think you’re going to find a rare gem in these books and you never do. But if that’s a rule, then Kill the Gringo is that rare exception; a book by a relatively-unknown figure that is in turns exciting and insightful.

And Vaughn can be said to have led an interesting life, to say the least. As the man who took Sargent Shriver’s place as the head of the Peace Corps (and before he ever made Lieutenant AH HA HA HA HA excuse me while I put that gem into my Smothers Brothers submission packet), and then the ambassador to Panama and Colombia, Vaughn can certainly be said to have lived every second of his life.

These kinds of memoirs tend to make me feel bad about the relatively little I’ve done, until I remember that they never include long stretches of, say, unemployment when the author decided to just take a couple weeks to himself and watch The Price Is Right while he gets his head together. But the story of his Peace Corps years are an extraordinary read (I still suspect the CIA was involved with the Peace Corps, but the former head definitively states that’s wrong, so who am I to deny it?), and an actually interesting and new look at an era that can sometimes feel as if it’s been written about to death in journalism, literature, film, and song.

And before 2017 and Twitter, how many people could tell you a story about getting yelled at by a sitting President?

DOWN AND DIRTY PICTURES: MIRAMAX, SUNDANCE, AND THE RISE OF INDEPENDENT FILM – Peter Biskind – BUY IT HERE

Peter Biskind is an extraordinary and tireless chronicler of the Greats of Hollywood, from his seminal look at American New Wave cinema of the ’70s Easy Riders and Raging Bulls to a book he edited, My Lunches With Orson, a series of rambling conversations between Orson Welles and Henry Jaglom.

As more and more news of Weinstein’s alleged monstrousness has come out, harassing, assaulting, raping, coercing, and silencing some of the most famous women in Hollywood, this book, which I read back in January, keeps coming to mind. In it we learn about indie cinema and its two fathers – the (as portrayed in this book) dithering cipher Robert Redford, whose Sundance Institute initially champions deliberately uncommercial works by outsider auteurs, and whose film festival becomes, almost against every instinct of the people who run it, a marketplace for the newest and most interesting voices in American cinema of the ‘90s.

And on the other hand you have the Weinstein Brothers from Queens. And why do all the monsters of 2017 have to be from Queens, my own homeland? Crass, rude, and lacking formal film education, the Weinsteins have PT Barnum’s instinct for showmanship and Sam Goldwyn’s brutal appreciation for the bottom line over all.

The world has become acquainted with Harvey Weinstein, Sexual Predator, but readers of this book, and really anyone who was in the film business starting in the early-to-mid ‘90s, got to know Harvey Weinstein, The Large Predatory Animal. This book portrays Miramax as a shop where the best and brightest young stars of the cinema went to learn their trade, to make the kinds of films they’d always dreamt of making, and to watch that film get taken from them and cut and cut until it fit the vision that Weinsten, an aspiring filmmaker himself, had in his head.

And this book is full of stories of violence, of fistfights, of going to war in every sense and in every avenue, and of having the results—Oscar after Oscar—to make his methods, if not palatable, at least something that the rest of the film business could turn their heads from. The Weinsteins who not only gave the world Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith, but also the modern concept of the the Oscar marketing Campaign, placing ads and sending freebies to academy members. The Weinsteins, who discovered and championed some of the greats of the late 20^th Century, and bullied and abused them at every turn.

While the Sundance stuff is interesting, and Biskind takes us down some avenues and reminders of where the ‘90s Indie Cinema movement succeeded and also how it failed, it was, even before the #metoo movement took steam, Harvey Weinstein that dominated this narrative for better and for worse. In fact, the book begins with an autobiographical interlude, in which Biskind is summoned to the Miramax office and run through the Weinstein Brother Wringer: First he’s threatened, then he’s flattered, then he’s bribed with a too-good-to-be-true publishing deal with Miramar Books.

All in all, it’s a fascinating look at a period of American cinema, as told by the winners and, even more entertainingly, by the losers. A period whose story is still recent enough that very few critics are taking the kind of perspective on it to give it an overview that Biskind does. Still and all, with all that we’ve learned about the players in this book this year, I’d love to get an updated edition with all the stuff Biskind couldn’t or wouldn’t print before.

2 Giving Quentin Tarantino the Reins to Star Trek May Not Seem the Logical Thing… But It Is The Human Thing To Do

December 8, 2017
by Liam
· Blog · Liam Nerds Out · Liam's Notebook · Uncategorized

It seems odd that I have lived long enough that a sentence like, “The Star Trek nerds of the Internet are become outraged,” should seem like news. Because I remember a time, back in the long ago, in the before times, when the Internet was much smaller, and it seemed that fifty percent of the bandwidth used on the Internet Super Highway was engaged in an endless war of Picard v. Kirk.

But we do, we live in a world where your most elderly relatives can, with a click of a mouse, keep tabs on your entire life through Facebook. And as the popular culture spreads through the Internet, just like a deadly virus spreads through a bad B-thriller about the Congo or something, and as Internet nerd culture has engulfed the mainstream, a sentence like this becomes a novelty.

And, so: The Star Trek nerds of the Internet are become outraged. A story broke that, in addition to the upcoming film that he’s announced about the Manson Family murders, Quentin Tarantino has come up with an idea he likes for a next Star Trek movie, and will, in all likelihood, move on to supervise the writing of it, and direct it as well.

Let’s forget for the moment that Quentin Tarantino is notorious for conceiving, enthusiastically announcing, and discarding movies (the joint Reservoir Dogs/Pulp Fiction sequel about the Vega brothers, or the real-time 15-years-later follow up to Kill Bill being the first two that spring immediately to mind).

And let’s forget for a moment that Tarantino seems to be hip-deep in production of this Manson film, which should probably take the focus of his energies for at least the next year. And there’s no knowing what Tarantino, of the famously fleeting attention span, will feel about his Star Trek movie when he actually gets the time to sit down and make it a reality. Or not.

But that’s no fun. So let’s talk about what has this fandom up in arms, which is Quentin Tarantino and Star Trek.

As an aside: The Manson movie is a no-brainer. And not just in the broad, general sense that Tarantino is the ultra-violence and pitch-black humor, Larry Cohen-as-artiste, Grindhouse-on-the-Riviera guy. But because his trademark is switching from moments of dark comedy to acts of brutal violence, often on the whisper-blink of a dropped dime.

Who else could do justice to the story of a failed singer/songwriter, of a burnout who swung into Dennis Wilson’s orbit long enough to have the Beach Boy steal the tune from one of his songs. The tragicomic American success story who finds family, love, and fame as a hippie philosopher king as the head of a sex and murder cult, who found his celebrity as a murderer/criminal in the murder of the wife of a celebrity director (and soon-to-be criminal himself?).

If Oliver Stone’s final draft of Natural Born Killers turns a story of a cross-country thrill-kill spree into a heavy-handed satire of the media’s tendency to make heroes of outlaws, then Charles Manson was Tarantino’s proto-draft, making the same point but in real life. It would make sense that eventually he would circle all the way back in his career.

And so. Tarantino’s characters scurry and scutter like cockroaches in the shadow that pools like blood beneath the green trees and white picket fences world of that dream. In the projectionist/revolutionary-cum-revenge killer of Inglorious Basterds, in the unseen and shadowy mastermind Bill of Kill Bill, in the seedy drifters and petty criminals of Jackie Brown, the late Charlie Manson would have found plenty of happy company in Tarantino’s movies.

All of which makes Tarantino The Auteur of the Bottom of the Double Feature a hell of an odd fit for Star Trek, the JFK Era’s “In ten years’ time we will land a man on the moon” credo made flesh. A director, whose gritty bottom-dwelling characters live in a world governed by the Bob Dylan lyric, “To live outside the law you must be honest,” tackling a TV series star-bound ideals of the Mid-Century Man , whose moral code lies in the refrain repeated throughout its films: “The good of the many outweighs the good of the one.”

Tarantino the filmmaker about compulsion and expulsion, about blood and lust, often spontaneously so. Taking the reins of Star Trek, a series whose hallmark is restraint and, most importantly, the enforcement of the codified rule of laws, both of man and of nature.

Star Trek’s characters may be men and women of action—or in the case of The Next Generation, men and women prone to endlessly debating and discussing, like a Jewish family at the Olive Garden for the first time, examining the menu—but their actions are grounded in sharply-drawn laws, directives, and codes of conduct. By the laws of the Federation of Planets, the directives of Starfleet that govern everything from dress code to protocol on encountering new species and traveling through time. Some of Captain James Kirk’s biggest struggles are the moral ones between what’s “right” for the crew that his captaincy makes him responsible for, and what’s “right” for the beings he encounters, and what’s “right” as defined by the iron-clad laws of the world in which he lives.

Which isn’t to say that Tarantino’s characters are lawless. They live by the outlaw’s code, and it’s only when they step outside that code, when they go back on their word or sin against their fellow bottom-dwellers, for lust or money, that they meet their fate. In Pulp Fiction, Ving Rhames’ mob boss Marcellus Wallace e xplains at great length the moral and philosophical underpinnings of why Bruce Willis’ boxer Butch must throw his fight. Instead, Butch wins his fight, killing the other boxer in the process, and finds himself facing death and sexual assault in the basement of a redneck pawn shop.

In fact, it’s only after his decision to stop, when he’s on the verge of freedom, to go back and save the mob boss who has marked him for immediate murder because it is the right thing to do by the lights of the world he lives in, that he finally gains everything he lost by going back on his word; freedom to travel, freedom to collect the money he won betting on himself, freedom to be with the woman he loves (and he gets to trade in his crappy old car on rapist Zed’s dope chopper in the bargain).

And yet, at the end of the day, is Captain Kirk and crew so different? Look at Star Trek III: The Search for Spock where Kirk and crew risk everything to save their friend Spock, whose dying body was separated from his mind saving his friends in the previous Star Trek film. They steal a starship, they turn outlaw, they land on the Genesis planet – a place of Godlike power to create life that has been forbidden to man, they destroy a Klingon warship in an act of war that is contrary to every law of Starfleet, all to save their friend who had just recently saved their lives. And then in the subsequent film, they find redemption and restoration to their status quo only after saving the planet Earth from a shadowy alien threat.

In Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino breaks every narrative rule concerning depicting historical events, destroying the entire Nazi High Command in one act of bloody, explosive revenge, ending World War II years early. Cristoph Waltz’s SS colonel Hans Landa could have saved the lives of his superiors, but instead chose to use his knowledge of the forthcoming event to strike his own deal with the United States high command to flee the soon-to-topple Fatherland and land in comfort. Of course, this being a Tarantino movie, and Landa having broken the outlaw’s code, a bloody and permanent punishment is practiced on him in the woods before he can escape.

Whereas, in the classic Trek episode, City on the Edge of Forever, Kirk and Spock end up back in the New York City of the Great Depression, having made a leap of faith through alien time travel technology to rescue his friend Dr. McCoy. Back in the past, he meets, and falls in love with, a woman, Edith Keeler, whom Spock discovers in her alternate timeline founds a pacifist movement that ends up delaying the United States’ entry into WWII, thus allowing the Nazi government to triumph. Deciding that the good of the many outweighs the good of the one, and realizing that he can’t allow his love for this woman to destroy history as we know it, Kirk must stop himself from allowing Dr. McCoy to save Keeler from being killed by a truck.

Breaking this moral code is depicted as an almost impossible choice in the Star Trek universe. In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the crew is back in 1986 San Francisco. They have rescued the whales that will talk down the alien satellite that is destroying the Earth. They have their stolen Klingon Bird of Prey ship powered up. And they have a crewman, and friend, being held prisoner by the 20^th century military. Mr. Spock, the reliable logical moral arbiter, says that they must go back and rescue him, at the risk of their own mission. Kirk asks if it’s the logical thing to do. Spock says, “It’s the human thing to do.” And the theater I watched this movie in erupted in applause, because goddamn it, he’s right.

In Inglourious Basterds, we have Melanie Laurent’s Jewish projectionist who has seen her family destroyed in the Holocaust, and in City on the Edge of Forever, we have William Shatner’s Captain Kirk who must let his girlfriend die, and they are both given a chance to personal satisfaction at the expense of history’s delicate tapestry. Tarantino is willing to destroy history as a way of creating a helluva twist, while the Star Trek universe is about maintaining the status quo. About personal sacrifice in the service of the common good.

For all of Kirk’s reputation as an intergalactic ladies’ man, his swinging is mostly confined to the bloodless clinch and kiss. Whereas Tarantino is about the twin flames of murder and desire. And yet, for the surface differences, this is where the two come together.

Another classic Star Trek episode: Theodore Sturgeon’s Amok Time. In the Trek universe, First officer Mr. Spock comes from an alien race, the Vulcans, whose entire civilization is built on the suppression of emotion in favor of cold, logical behavior. But once every seven years, they undergo pon farr, a savage blood lust and inevitable death, and once every seven years, unless they are able to mate (been there!) with someone with whom they are in a relationship, they will die.

And here, we find a Tarantino-esque moral dilemma. Spock, who faces an arranged marriage that has been set by his parents since birth, arrives at the planet Vulcan to find that his promised, T’Pau, is in love with another. And if a Vulcan woman does not wish to wed, she may demand a kal-if-fee, a duel between her two loves, to the death. In order to protect the man she truly loves, she demands Spock fight his best friend Kirk in the kal-if-fee. This story is the bloody stuff of the best western murder ballads, and certainly a plotline that could fight into a Tarantino-esque film. And Spock does it. He murders Kirk in the heat of pon farr. Only to find later that Kirk was only heavily-sedated, because nobody was that committed to serial storytelling in the 1960s.

After all, in Pulp Fiction, it’s only after John Travolta’s hitman clearly decides that he is going to sleep with his boss, Marcellus Wallace’s wife, and after she decides to sleep with him, that she accidentally overdoses on heroin and Travolta’s Vincent Vega must save her life or surely be murdered by Wallace in return.

It’s this horror of upending the status quo of the world that the characters live in that many of Tarantino’s films share with the best of Star Trek.

In fact, the famous “Spock with a goatee” evil alternate universe is one that the director would find himself quite at home in. A world where murder is dispensed liberally (if, again, bloodlessly, through the use of a machine) as a means of gaining and keeping command. Where Kirk gives in fully to his animal, sexual passions, keeping mistresses among his crew. It’s telling that the closest this universe has to a “good guy” is dependable Spock-in-a-goatee, who remains logical and intelligent, displaying restraint and a relative respect for the chain of command. In a world where Starfleet acts less as an exploratory and military force and more as a loose-knit aggregation of pirate ships, Spock stands against the horrors of lack of respect for the rule of law.

In other words, it’s a cautionary tale about what happens if society in that universe behaved in the way it does in Quentin Tarantino movies. And if he wanted to set his Star Trek movie in that evil mirror universe, I would be the first in line to buy a ticket.

But as I said, nerds on the Internet are furious about this. And I say, if the Trekkies are going to freak out, then by all means, let them freak out. This is the nature of the passionate fan. Because Star Trek has been around for a long time, because it’s never been a blockbuster in the nature of the Star Wars phenomenon. Not only has that never been Trek’s strength, when Roddenberry and Paramount tried to fit Star Trek into that mold with The Motion(less) Picture, it failed miserably.

Star Wars is a film series that values spectacle over all, with much less concern for interpersonal relationships except in the grandest terms; it’s a world of gigantic oedipal stories told with gigantic mythic archetypes. It’s telling that of all the characters, the most consistently relatable is Han Solo, the cocky pilot who gets in over his head constantly, who fails consistently, and whose heroism lies in overcoming his own limitations.

And the first three movies were set in worlds painted with such broad brushstrokes, that much of the detail and shading happened offscreen. As a young child, how did I know that the lead Ewok’s name was Wikket? It’s never mentioned in The Return of the Jedi, and I certainly was not sitting still studying the closing credits. No, it’s through the tie-in books and toys and spin-off specials and Burger King giveaways that you learn more about this world, names of species and back stories and characters who popped up in the background. If you are of a certain age, and I say the word “Lobot,” you know exactly who I am talking about, even though he spends almost no time on-screen and has no lines.

But Star Trek is all shading and detail, all about character development and relationships. Even the starship Enterprise becomes a leading character, and her heroic death and self-sacrifice in The Search for Spock is shocking and tragic. Kirk and Spock and McCoy are three mid-century manly men in the John Ford western mold. All surface bravado and machismo, under whose cover strong emotions simmer. There’s a bond of brotherly love that dares never show itself except in times of extreme distress and danger, or in the afterglow of a near-death experience, when they can relax and let their guards down. No wonder so much fan-fiction surrounds a hypothetical romantic and sexual relationship between the three, when there is a love that clearly does not speak its name. Even if that love is nothing more risqué than the fraternal bond between the members of a college football team.

The strength of Star Trek lies in its relationships, and not just between the characters, but even more importantly, between the show itself and the fans. Before the Internet broke down the walls between popular and outsider art, there were many examples of music, TV, movies, that were initially designed for mass-market consumption, but was such a product of personal vision that it found itself the object of a niche, or “cult,” audience. A group of fans for whom part of the joy of watching a show, or reading a book, or following a band that wasn’t constantly on the Billboard charts and in rotation on MTV, lay in knowing that it wasn’t popular.

I used to have a joke that the Internet made moot, about how nerds who are nerdy for a thing, enjoy maintaining the status of a “true fan.” That I’d found not only a Star Trek slash fic (gay-themed fan-fiction) site, but one that was written entirely in Klingon, with the only English being, “I do not provide translations. If you cannot read Klingon, you are at the wrong site.” That this kind of nerd was nerdy about the thing that they loved that it turned them into snobs.

Because before the Comic-Cons became so huge that they were an important part of launching film franchises, before “geek culture” and “popular culture” became entwined, the official mass-media popular posture on shows, especially science fiction shows like Star Trek or Doctor Who, would be that this was fringe-dwelling weirdo stuff appreciated only by foul-smelling losers who live in their parents’ basements.

Not like “real” entertainment, TV shows like Miami Vice or The Dukes of Hazzard which ran for years on major networks in prime-time slots, and weren’t cast off onto fuzzy UHF stations from far-flung states in late-night syndication, or even more suspect to population at large, on PBS.

And so you would have to hunt for the shows you liked, which, even if they did play in first-run prime-time, often jumped around the schedule sometimes with no notice. And you would seek out books, and fan clubs, and little fan conventions in run-down hotels. And you would build a community.

When I was a lad of twelve, my dad taped a marathon showing of the British pre-apocalyptic show The Prisoner. I watched the whole thing, enthralled with its clever plotting, smart scripts, and groovy English Mod style. One day at Barnes & Noble bookstore, and it’s funny to think that Barnes & Noble, which was once considered poison for mom and pop bookstores, was choked out of business by Amazon. But one day, I found and paid my own birthday money for a guide book to The Prisoner, entitled The Prisoner Official Companion. It was there that I learned about entire alternate versions of episodes that were shot and never aired, and I learned why there were weird fantasy episodes that were completely out of tune with the rest of the series (long story short: ITV contract with more episodes than series creator/star Patrick McGoohan had good ideas for).

I carried The Official Prisoner Companion around my junior high school for three months, hoping a cute girl would notice and tell me that she thought I was super cool. Shocking twist ending: Never happened. But in the back was a guide to all of the various Prisoner fan groups you could belong to, and so as a 12^th birthday present, my parents subscribed me to the cheapest one (six bucks for six months, I think). Every month or so I would receive a hand-Xeroxed, hand-stapled fanzine, with stories and baffling comics written by fellow fans. It was a thrilling peek into a world where people obsessed over all the same things I did.

I owned The Doctor Who Programme Guide, a listing of all of the episodes of the first 20-something years that was already five years out of date by the time I picked it up. And I read it cover to cover many times. I was a lonely kid, yes, but I also got a huge kick out of the paragraph-length breakdowns of the show’s episodes. I would read them over and over, noting which episodes I hadn’t seen, wondering about the episodes that hadn’t been produced, and trying to imagine the episodes that had been lost forever.

And so, when you feel as if you are alone in the dark, loving something as your own, wondering who else could even be paying attention, feeling isolated, it’s as if the show has been made for you personally. And you develop a specific personal emotional attachment to it. You love it, yes, and you also feel an ownership over it.

And then came the Internet.

I’m a native New Yorker. If you’re ever in New York City and you want to find out who grew up there, just talk to them for more than thirty seconds, and they will tell you. I am that guy, and frankly, I make no apologies. And so here’s a story, called Once Upon A Time, Here’s The Way It Would Go:

A little place would open up in your neighborhood. A café, say, or a restaurant. And maybe a local paper would give you a little blurb about what was opening there, and you would decide to give it a chance. And if it was good, the décor charming, the food tasty, the price reasonable, you would spread the word. And maybe it would get to the point where you would have to wait ten, fifteen minutes for a table on the weekend, which is only fair because you like to see a local business that you like stay open.

Then word of mouth would spread to a writer for a travel guide, Fodor’s Guide to New York, or maybe Zagat’s would catch wind and drop in on a good night. Or a friend knows a guy at the New York Times and their reviewer comes by. And there would be a major write up, and then the place would be mobbed and the owners would maybe expand into the next three storefronts to handle the overflow business, and then open a second location in midtown.

And this process would take years, and even though you had lost a neighborhood spot, you had gained the ability to tell everyone you know, “Oh yeah, that place? I used to go there, before it became a tourist trap.” And while it was always sad to let go, it’s the natural cycle with everything that’s beloved, whether it be a bar, or a restaurant, or an entire neighborhood. And so it goes with popular culture.

Only the Internet accelerated this to a destructive pace. Suddenly there were a million New York blogs, and suddenly there were a million local experts touting any and every new thing under the sun. And there came the scenesters, like locusts they came. From all across the country, from all around the world. Young people, the offspring of an affluent generation who told their children that they could be anything they wanted to be, without adding the important addendum, unless you don’t have a natural talent for it, in which case it’s okay to stay closer to home and live an ordinary life. And being a generation that only dared to move to NYC after a decade of sitcoms promising it was tame and bland enough for safe living, and fearful of anything that didn’t come pre-approved, they built their Gaps and their Starbuckses and they swarmed over any and everything that these blogs promised were cool. Venues and bands and entire neighborhoods they consumed.

And look, this isn’t to say that I don’t want the things I love to be appreciated by a wider audience. Because Paramount believed there was a wider audience for Star Trek than NBC was giving it credit for, we have all the movies, and novels, and comic books, and other ancillary media I consumed as a child.

As I said, when I was young I would go to science fiction conventions. At their best, these would be a floor of conference rooms in a somewhat disreputable hotel. The actors would come to speak, to meet their fans, the authors would come to drink and mingle, the vendors would sell their merchandise. For twenty dollars, I got my hot pudgy hands on a second-generation bootleg dub of Heavy Metal, which was at the time unavailable on home video due to music rights. Grainy Star Trek blooper reels would be played. I once met, and shook the hand of Isaac Asimov, who was the keynote speaker at one of the bigger cons.

I’ve stopped going to conventions. They give me panic attacks. The convention floors is packed with packed with young people in costume, having found a way to keep the Halloween party going beyond the full week out of the year it’s allotted in most cities now. The sounds and the music and the lights and the overwhelming melancholy I feel knowing that the world I once knew is gone.

And so, of course, as a Star Trek nerd, I’m going to have mixed feelings about Tarantino taking the reins on the franchise. But he could be good for Trek. He understands, in a way that the best producers and directors of the original franchise films did, the need for action to propel story, for humor to leaven the operatically-tragic moments of tragedy.

And yes, Tarantino is a grindhouse director, but he’s also shown himself to be the master of what Star Trek is at its absolute best – the granite and stone elements of B-movie garbage, chipped and chiseled and shaped into a work of art. Popular, yes, and in its own ways trashy, but still art. Of all the living Great American Directors, he’s the one I would most trust to take something as basic as a show pitched as “Wagon Train to the Stars,” and turn it into something great. Roddenberry did it almost by accident. Maybe Tarantino could do it on purpose.

But that leaves the real question: Why? Why do we keep bringing Star Trek back? Why do we keep making every Star Wars movie a record-breaking blockbuster? Why are the biggest money-making films based on comic books like The Avengers? Not to say that these aren’t great franchises that don’t speak to every new generation.

It’s just that the first Star Wars movie came out forty years ago. The first Avengers comic came out fifty-four years ago. The original TV series that Star Trek is based on went off the air almost fifty years ago now. Doctor Who still follows almost exactly a template that was established almost fifty-five years ago.

So why do we keep circling around these things over and over? Why is our culture incapable of creating new beloved myths? Is it because they still speak to us, or is it because they made us a feel a certain way once upon a time, and we as a people are trying to recapture the magic of that first fandom? When I watch, when I support, these things, am I holding on to something I love, or am I having trouble letting go of who I once was?

Western civilization, as defined by American-style democratic institutions both political and cultural, is facing a crisis point. A significant chunk of the population, scared by a chaotic-seeming present, cling to a certain cultural recidivism. Won’t let go of a mythical past where everything was better, and so a President was elected on the slogan “Make America Great Again.” The idea was to bring back, not so much a better time, but the feeling that believing that such a time had existed gives you.

And while I am certainly not going to sit here and compare Quentin Tarantino to Donald Trump, the question becomes: In order to move forward in our culture, is it necessary to bring everything with us? Luggage filled with nuggets of gold mixed in with blocks of lead? These things are the movies and television and boks I have loved, but sometimes it is time to let the dead bury their own dead, in the words of the prophet, and remember that part of the thrill of popular culture was the thrill of discovering something new. Nurturing it, following it, loving it, and letting it speak to you in the aloneness of the dark.

A fear of the new, of the unknown, of change and trying something new, will eventually lead to a culture like all the formerly hip neighborhoods of New York City, nothing but chain stores and culture that is neither surprising nor scary.

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0 LIFE IN THESE UNITED STATES

0 ODE de TOILET: Being A Study of The Life and Works of Edgar Allen Adgar-Allan, “America’s Dirtbag Laureate”

0 TRUMP AS THE MAYOR FROM JAWS

0 2019 – The Tell Your Friends! podcast returns!

0 LA STORIES

0 It Makes Me Really Uncomfortable When People Write Nice Things About Me (BUT DON’T STOP)

0 From the archives: COUNT DRINKULA

0 Twelve Movies I Enjoyed In 2017

Colossal

Birdboy: The Forgotten Children//Coco

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. II//Spider-Man: Homecoming

The Fate of the Furious

Kong: Skull Island

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Get Out//It

The Ballad of Lefty Brown

The Shape of Water

Bright

0 THE TEN BEST BOOKS I READ IN 2017

CLOWNING THROUGH LIFE – Eddie Foy & Alvin F. Harlow – BUY IT HERE

LETTERMAN: THE LAST GIANT OF LATE NIGHT – Jason Zinoman – BUY IT HERE

STICKY FINGERS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JANN WENNER AND ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE – Joe Hagan – BUY IT HERE

IN SUNLIGHT OR IN SHADOW: STORES INSPIRED BY THE PAINTINGS OF EDWARD HOPPER – edited by Lawrence Block – BUY IT HERE

INTRODUCING BERT WILLIAMS: BURNT CORK, BROADWAY, AND THE STORY OF AMERICA’S FIRST BLACK STAR – Camille F. Forbes – BUY IT HERE

HARPO SPEAKS – Harpo Marx and Rowland Barber – BUY IT HERE

NO MUD NO LOTUS: THE ART OF TRANSFORMING SUFFERING – Thich Nhat Hanh – BUY IT HERE

IN GOD WE TRUST… ALL OTHERS PAY CASH – Jean Shepherd – BUY IT HERE

KILL THE GRINGO: THE LIFE OF JACK VAUGHN, AMERICAN DIPLOMAT, DIRECTOR OF THE PEACE CORPS, US AMBASSADOR TO COLOMBIA, AND CONSERVATIONIST – Jack Hood Vaughn – BUY IT HERE

DOWN AND DIRTY PICTURES: MIRAMAX, SUNDANCE, AND THE RISE OF INDEPENDENT FILM – Peter Biskind – BUY IT HERE

2 Giving Quentin Tarantino the Reins to Star Trek May Not Seem the Logical Thing… But It Is The Human Thing To Do