What the hell happened to The Onion?
I moved to Santa Monica six months ago and it just started showing up at my local record store.
First, I notice that it’s been re-designed.
Second, I notice that it’s now unfunny and stupid.
This is the Onion, the august, revered Onion, the paper a grateful nation once turned to each week to make sense of the world?
Let’s look at the front page: “New Oliver Stone 9/11 Film Introduces ‘Single Plane Theory’ — Jesus, an Oliver Stone conspiracy joke? Really? Is that the best they came up with this week?
Below the fold: “Condoleeza Rice Holds Bathtime Talks With Undersea Representatives.” The story goes on, about Rice having talks with the toys in her bathtub. What? Huh? Skewering what burning public issue, exactly?
Other headlines: “Hasbro Concedes World Not Ready for Rubik’s Chicken” — again, huh?
“Millions Of Americans Buying Floyd Landis-Inspired Bracelets” — with a photo of said bracelet, yellow rubber (referring to the Lance Armstrong bracelet), which reads “Cheat to Win.” On the nose, unfunny, landing with a thud.
“Twin Mysteries Of Missing Hamster, Clogged Sink Solved Simultaneously” — honestly, these are the kinds of headlines I would expect from a group of high-school students trying to imitate The Onion.
On Page 4, “Abusive Husband Has Sense of Humor About It” — I’ll admit, the headline got my attention, but the story is almost unbearably unfunny. The “joke,” apparently, is that the abusive man, who is described as breaking his wife’s jaw, beating her with a wrench, giving her a bloody nose, and biting her on the head, is able to laugh about his predicament. There is no attempt to explain why “Abusive Husband” and “Laughing at Life” should go together in humorous juxtaposition, and as the article trudges on, it seems we’re just supposed to laugh at the way the wife is being beaten and humiliated. Indeed, mere inches away is a new feature, “Unsung Heroes,” where a woman named Sheila Kessler is described as having “had her third abortion Wednesday, but didn’t bitch about it so much as she did the past two.” I can’t think of a time of my life when I would have found that funny, but having it next to the piece that supposedly “pokes fun” at the abusive husband, it made my skin crawl.
There are many new comics in the new re-design. They’re all unfunny, and some of them are so unfunny that I can’t tell if they’re supposed to be satires or or not.
Where there used to be the irreplaceable Jackie Harvey, there is now the eminently replaceable Amelie Gillette, who writes a completely straight-faced, ordinary, slightly-bitchy, Entertainment Weekly-style “Hollywood tidbit” column.
The only headline I laughed at was “Road Trip Ruined by Illinois.”
“American Voices” continues to hit the mark, however. The subject is “Universal Health Care for San Fransisco” and Henry Gaven, Historian, opines “First they make a mockery of my bitter, loveless marriage, now they make a mockery of my restrictive, overpriced health care. Is nothing sacred to these monsters?”
Projector bulb update
I could have ordered this projector bulb from a number of places on line, but I thought I’d be a mensch and support a local business. So I called up the home theater specialist on the corner and asked them if they had a bulb in stock.
They did not, but said they could get one for me in a week.
That was eight weeks ago. During that time, I have actually gone to New York and shot a feature film and returned.
Now then. Based on my conversations with the knowledgeable, friendly guy on the other end of the line, I formed a mental picture of him in my head. I imagined him, for some reason, as an aging Venice Beach hippie type, I don’t know why, but I imagined him with long, thin blond hair in a pony tail and a perpetual three-day shadow. I imagined him coming to work in a muscle t with a Hawaiian shirt over it, and wearing yellow-tinted sunglasses indoors, and always chewing on a toothpick, and with a gold stud in one of his ears.
Again, I say, I don’t know why I imagined this, at all the other high-end video stores they have a bunch of smooth, well-groomed, oily young men who have no compunctions about selling you a $200 connection cord. Because this place looks more nuts-and-bolts from the outside, I guess, I imagined it was more like an auto-body shop or something.
Today, I was in the neighborhood so I thought I’d go in and say hi and ask what the hell happened to my projector bulb. The guy in my imagination was, of course, nowhere to be seen. Instead, there was a guy who bore and uncomfortable similarity to Nice Guy Eddie from Reservoir Dogs. The guy was a little chunky and had short, wavy hair and even walked like Nice Guy Eddie. He also did a little huffing thing when he walked. He didn’t seem that out of shape, but the huffing thing struck me as odd.
Anyway, no bulb. Nice Guy Eddie has to order from a head office, and the head office doesn’t return his phone calls, and anyway now he says it “normally” takes six to eight weeks for a part like that.
Normally, at this point I get angry and say something like “Then why did you tell me it was going to take a week?” But for some reason, because the guy looked like Nice Guy Eddie and I am still saddened by the passing of Chris Penn, I decided “Hey, I live in California now, I’m not supposed to get upset about that kind of thing.”
So there’s an ever-growing stack of DVDs on my “DVDs to watch” pile, and my apologies to my dozen or so readers.
In the meantime, I’ve just discovered that I can post drawings from my own collection on this here blog, so I thought I might start doing that. Here’s one now. It’s called “The Two Cinemas”
click for readable view
Two magazines, two covers, one confused reader
Two stories about heavy topics that will blow your mind.
First, the new issue of Rolling Stone. Breaking news! Led Zeppelin was a good band!
I’m trying to imagine this pitch meeting. The great writer Mikal Gilmore bursts into Jan Wenner’s office, his fedora pitched back on his head and a butt dangling from his lower lip. Wenner is talking on the phone, Mikal presses the button to hang it up.
M. Stop the presses, boss! I’ve got a story’s gonna set this town on its ear!
J. This better be good. That was Billy Joel I was talking to.
M. Okay — what’s the biggest story in rock music today?
J. Lance Bass is Gay.
M. Bigger.
J. Jack White has formed a new group.
M. Bigger.
J. Sleater-Kinney has broken up.
M. No! Led Zeppelin was a good band!
J. (coffee sprays from his mouth) But that’s ridiculous! Can you prove it?
M. I got all the goods right here, chief.
(throws down a file folder.)
Testimonials, musical analysis, best of all, sales figures. CDs, DVDs, T-shirts, everything.
J. But this — this is extraordinary. How did you find all this out?
M. I’m a journalist, chief. I hear about a hot story and I chase it down. That’s what I do.
J. (looks through the data) But — if this is true — why, it would shake the industry to its very core. Do we dare print this?
M. Dare?! Is this the same Jan Wenner who got Elton John to say he was a fruit? Is this the same Jan Wenner who dared to suggest that George W. Bush is an incompetent president? Is this the same Jan Wenner who gave five stars to Mick Jagger’s Goddess in the Doorway?
J. You’re right, you’re right — by God, this is just the kind of incendiary, match-lighting story this magazine was built on!
________________________
And then there’s Newsweek. You can’t see the headline very well on their website, but it’s something like “OLIVER STONE’S 9/11: The Controversial Director Chooses Courage over Conspiracy for “World Trade Center”.
Okay. So Oliver Stone is a Controversial Director. True.
Oliver Stone is also a Conspiracy Nut. True, if one has not seen an Oliver Stone film in fifteen years.
Here’s the thing. By choosing this headline for their issue, they didn’t make me think “Good for Oliver! Way to go, choosing Courage over Conspiracy! That’s m’boy!” Instead, I saw the cover and thought “Wait, Newsweek is telling me there was a choice?” That is, Newsweek is saying that there was a conspiracy, and isn’t it nice that Oliver Stone decided not to focus on it?
Back in the day, it was only certain crazy friends of mine who used to talk about the “planned demolition” of the World Trade Center, and how the federal government plotted the whole thing out, using the Al Qaeda people (or someone) as decoys, how they conspired with Al Qaeda to have their guys fly the planes into the towers, after which they would destroy the buildings, and thus begin the process that we’re living through today, ie the institution of our current facist state, permanent control of the government by religious fanatics, etc, etc.
All of which I used to hear and think “Come on, guys, get a grip.” Are you telling me that the same guys who screwed up Afghanistan, screwed up Iraq, screwed up New Orleans, the same guys who haven’t succeeded in doing anything else in six years of unrestricted power (besides stealing two elections), are you telling me that these guys demolished the World Trade Center?
And now, looking at Newsweek, I have to ask: What do they know?
Feeder Birds
One of my least-known side projects is a graphic novel I’ve been steadily working on for about five years now called Feeder Birds.
A while back, I had a house in upstate New York. There was a nice back porch (the “sun room”) where you could sit and read and watch wild animals gambol through the back yard, deer and squirrels and even the occasional bobcat.
We hung up a bird feeder, and over the course of a lazy weekend I would watch the birds at the feeder and draw little sketches of them.
The behavior of these birds shocked me. They weren’t friendly or chipper or pretty. They were mean, vicious, cutthroat bastards clearly descended from the dinosaurs. They fought amongst themselves over primacy of the feeder and brutally devoured everything in sight.
An idea started to slowly seep into my brain to tell a serious, complex gangster saga, but instead of making it about Italian Americans in Little Italy, do it with these birds at the feeder upstate.
And hereis some of our cast.
FROM TOP:
CARDINAL is the leader of the gang. Months back, he freed the feeder from the clutches of the evil Squirrel gang and was unanimously chosen as leader. Since then, he has discovered a way to ferment suet, which creates a substance he calls “Numbskull.” He trades Numbskull to the local sparrows (the sparrows are the “civilians”) in exchange for regular birdseed. The Numbskull trade is so successful that within months Cardinal controls every scrap of birdseed in the neighborhood. The power this affords him is a great pleasure, but it also carries with it much trouble and responsibility, some times too much for a simple bird to bear.
DOVEY is Cardinal’s wife. Dovey used to be married to Woody (a Woodpecker), a straight-arrow bug-eater and all-around nice guy. But Cardinal wanted her, so he took her. He had his two most vicious thugs go to her house, gouge out Woody’s eyes and peck him full of holes. Then he swooped in to “save” her, providing her with food and shelter, and a daily supply of Numbskull to calm her shattered nerves. Now she’s hooked on the stuff and unable to function without it.
FLICKER is Cardinal’s best friend from childhood. Capable of eating both bugs and seed, he’s not really a feeder bird. He doesn’t indulge in the brutal strongarm tactics of Cardinal’s gang, but nor does he turn his back on his friends. His complicated loyalties will eventually get him into deep trouble.
CHICK is Cardinal’s major enforcer. Not the smartest of birds, he has a quick temper and a foul mouth. He explodes at the slightest provocation and will take on a bird of any size.
TUFTY is a mere child. He worships the Feeder Birds for their style, high-living and strength. When he grows up, he wants to be a vicious thug just like them. His looks and ambition make him a valuable asset to the gang. He can get to places that others cannot and his loyalty to Cardinal is boundless.
JUNKO is a lesbian soldier, Chick’s second-in-command. She’s quite a bit smarter than Chick but no less efficient in her duties as an enforcer. Chick has carried a torch for Junko for quite some time, a fact that Junko has heretofore been blissfully unaware of.
COWBIRD is a psychopath. He’s not an enforcer, he’s a maniac. Unable to speak properly due to the seething rage he carries within his heart at all times, he merely waits trembling and twitching for the opportunity to once again unleash his fury upon whatever happens to be in his way at the moment.
STARLING is Cowbird’s minder and the only bird who can understand his twitching, growling murmurs. He is always at Cowbird’s side, ready to back him up in a fight and lend his muscle to the fray.
MR. GROSBEAK is the leader of a rival gang, the Finches, who have always ruled the adjoining neighborhood. Grosbeak does not desire warfare, but if Cardinal expands too far into his territory he will be forced into conflict. He is old, wise and completely amoral. He’s seen a dozen birds like Cardinal come and go and knows every trick in the book.
I’ve been developing these characters and their story off and on for 
r_sikoryak‘s Carousel slide shows. For the next presentation (Chapter 5, Part I — December 7, buy your tickets now!) I am taking the big jump into learning Photoshop. These images were drawn using a Wacom tablet, a device brand-new to me. They have almost none of the depth or nuance of my regual pencil-and-paper drawings, but one must start somewhere.
Fred and Louie live!
For fans of Frank and Louie (the cat pictured a couple of posts back), we now have live video. Go Frank and Louie!
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Spoiler alert.
There is a guy. He has a friend. They both like the same girl.
There is a man who calls himself Dr. Caligari. He has a carnival act, what he calls a “somnambulist.”
Dr. C is mistreated by an impatient clerk.
The clerk is found stabbed to death in his bed. This upsets the citizenry.
The guy and his friend go to the carnival and see Dr. C and his somnambulist, whose name is Cesare.
Cesare, played by Conrad Veidt, has a thin, weird, unsettling, urbaniak-style creepiness about him. He sleeps in a coffin, the “cabinet” of the title. (For unrivalled creepiness, check him out in The Man Who Laughs, where he inspired the Batman folks to create The Joker.)
Dr. C says that Cesare can tell the future. The guy’s friend steps forward and says, with a laugh, “How long will I live?” Cesare stares at him with his Urbaniak glare and says “’til break of day.”
That night, Dr. C sends the sleepwalking Cesare out into the night to murder the guy’s friend in his bed. He does so. This upsets the citizenry.
The guy now has the girl, but she’s upset because the friend has been stabbed to death in his bed. Her father, sensitive to this type of thing, goes to investigate the doctor and his somnambulist. The father goes out to the fairgrounds and finds that a dummy rests in Cesare’s coffin.
Cesare, at that moment, has gone to the girl’s house to kill her. He is startled in his efforts by some local citizenry, who chase him through town (shades of Fritz Lang’s M).*
The guy goes chasing after Dr. C and follows him to an insane asylum. The staff of the asylum grab the guy, who is hysterical. He insists that the man responsible for the death of his friend and the abduction of his fiancee is in their asylum. The orderlies take the guy to the head doctor, who turns out to be — yes, Dr. Caligari.
The guy waits until the doctor is out of his office, then ransacks his files until he finds the proof that he is behind the mysterious murders in town. It seems that this doctor, inspired by an Italian man named Dr. Caligari, decided to perform an experiment on a cataleptic, to see if he could get a sleeping man to do things he would not do when awake. Once he had done so, it appears that the doctor got a little carried away, getting poor Cesare to kill just about anyone who inconvenienced the doctor.
The guy, burning with righteous fury, accuses the doctor, who denies everything until the body of the dead Cesare, who has apparently collapsed in a field outside of town, is brought in. At this point, the doctor also collapses, in grief, and spills the beans about his psychiactric misdeeds. He is bound in a strait-jacket and carted off to one of his own cells.
All well and good. But then, in a Donald Kaufman-esque twist ending, we PULL BACK TO REVEAL that this tale is being told to us by the guy, who, for some reason, STILL LIVES AT THE INSANE ASYLUM. We come to find that his fiancee is there, and Cesare too, and that they’re all quite stark raving mad. So apparently none of this involving tale is true.
In addition to the twist ending (or as M. Night Shamalyan calls them the “paradigm shift”), there’s the matter of the sets.
They are deliberately weird, fake, flat, hand-made, crazy, unsettling and bizarre. Unlike anything that’s been done before or since, I don’t know why. And at first you’re like “What’s with the sets?” But then, when the twist ending comes, you say “Oh, I see, because the narrator is crazy.” Frankly, I don’t know why this experiment has never been repeated. Only recently, with movies like Sin City and A Scanner Darkly has this kind of heavily stylized, deliberate artificiality found its way into a mainstream feature. Correct me if I’m wrong.
And, of course, I’m thinking about a remake.
The thing I like best about the movie, aside from the visionary sets and the ahead-of-its-time narrative, is the film’s ideas about guilt. Dr. C has found a way to commit evil acts with a clean conscience — he’s not the one killing people, Cesare is. Cesare, on the other hand, also feels no guilt because he doesn’t even know that he’s killing anyone. People die, citizenry is hysterical, and no one has to pay a penalty. No one is guilty. No wonder the protagonist has gone insane.
*smarty-pant film students will recall that Lang was first asked to direct Caligari.
Moby-Dick, the movie, sort of
As any sentient English-reading American knows, Moby-Dick is the greatest novel ever written. It begs to be made into a great feature film.
It, so far, has not.
In 1930, they shot a version with John Barrymore where Ahab kills the whale and is happily re-united with his patient, long-suffering wife. In 1956, John Huston shot the most famous version with considerable cinematic flair but with Gregory Peck tragically miscast as Ahab. By 1998, there was a TV-movie version with Patrick Stewart as Ahab, which I have not seen, but which was made for TV.
As I’ve noted before, there’s something about great literature that resists film, no matter how “cinematic” the literature seems to be. The Godfather is a great movie from a pulpy page-turner. So are Jaws and Silence of the Lambs and Gone With the Wind. The Great Gatsy, however, I think is doomed to ever-diminishing returns.
Moby-Dick is doomed, I think, for four reasons.
1. It’s period, which makes it expensive
2. It’s about whaling, and 19th-century whaling at that, which no one cares about
3. It’s based on a work of “famous literature,” which makes people want to go see Pirates of the Carribean 2: Dead Man’s Chest instead
4. It’s called Moby-Dick
Now then. What does make Moby-Dick a great idea for a movie?
1. Deathless, universal themes of leadership, manhood, adventure, madness, obsession
2. A terrific, flawless, inexorable plot
3. Indelible, time-tested characters
So, to make Moby-Dick into a movie, the thought occurs to me, as it does to any screenwriter, “Well, let’s just stick with the stuff that works and throw out the rest.”
That is to say, keep those themes, keep those characters, keep that plot, but throw out the title, the reputation, the period setting, and most important, the whaling.
What is the plot of Moby-Dick? The plot of Moby-Dick is that a crazy, obsessive leader goes “off the res” and gets the men in his care tangled up in a dangerous mission of revenge that can only end in death and ruin.
The first person who springs to mind, of course, is George W. Bush. But no one is going to develop that movie any time soon.
It could be almost anything. It could be thieves, it could be spies, it could be an office, it could be a school, it could be merceneries.
So here’s the question: what is the 21st-century equivalent to 19th-century whaling?
Ahab is a crazy captain, but his employers let him be crazy because he produces results. Christ, isn’t that the protagonist of every police drama made in the past 40 years? And that would make Ishmael the rookie cop who gets drawn into the shady side of undercover work. The cliches write themselves!
But Ahab is not in the employ of the government, he is in the employ of the investors of The Pequod. Part of the drama of Moby-Dick is that Ahab isn’t just fulfilling a personal vendetta, it’s that he’s doing it with someone else’s ship and with men who don’t share his sense of outrage and vengeance. The voyage of the Pequod is a commercial venture. Ahab is not only asking his men to give up their lives, he’s asking them to give up their stake in a lucrative commercial venture.
Whaling, as Melville describes it, is a hugely profitable but also derided profession. Even in 1851, apparently, whaling was seen as a necessary but ugly economic truth. One might use whaling products every day, but one did not wish to hang out with whalers. Whaling was seen as an adventurous, dangerous but low-class thing to do with one’s life.
So who are today’s whalers? Our mercenaries in Iraq seem to be a good point of comparison. But maybe it’s someone in the drilling or mining profession instead. Maybe it’s drug-runners, maybe its firefighters, maybe it’s paramedics, maybe it’s cops after all.
Or maybe it’s a heist movie. If Danny Ocean took Elliott Gould’s money for the casino job and then said to Matt Damon and his crew, “You know, I’ve got a better idea, let’s rob Fort Knox instead,” is that Moby-Dick?
But the gold in Fort Knox is dead. It’s a metal, it’s not alive. Moby-Dick, the great white whale, is alive, natural, unplaceable and unknowable. Ahab is asking his crew to join him in a mission to know the unknowable. And that makes it tricky.
Bentfootes wrap-up
This photo has nothing to do with today’s entry. But it looks cool. It’s a real cat!
I am back in my basement in Santa Monica. My plane barely skittered out of JFK ahead of a bank of thunderstorms. My colleague and co-director Kriota Willberg was not so lucky; she was to have taught a workshop in Toronto this weekend and instead spent $200 going to and from the airport in taxis, only to learn that her flight was cancelled due to the weather conditions.
I fear that this sort of occurrence will become more occurrent as the global-warming thing asserts itself.
In any event, The Bentfootes is in the can. Thursday morning was the last chance we had to work with Mr. Urbaniak, who, in contravention of earlier days, showed up not drunk but hopped up on goofballs. He was so manic and out-of-control that we had to speed up the camera in the hopes of his performance looking “normal” when we slow it down and loop it. We shot six scenes in forty-five minutes, with Mr. U rushing from set to set, not even stopping for lighting or to make sure the other performers were in place.
Gary “gazblow” Schwartz came for his cameo, and since he’s a bigger guy we put Mr. Urbaniak in a corner and had Mr. Schwartz block his way to the door, and thus pinioned Mr. Urbaniak was able to deliver something like a real performance.
Friday, Mr. U was supposed to shoot another day on “Kidnapped” but apparently his William-Burroughs-level of drug consumption got him sent home from that project for the weekend, so we got to shoot a scene where Mr. U has a friendly conversation with some dancers. Because Urbaniak is who he is, the scene developed into a paranoid shouting match.
We tried to get the orange tape-on-a-stick to do the scene instead, but its agent would not return our phone calls.
Obviously, still no projector bulb. But I have Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz playing in my head, if that counts.
Ankle-deep in Bentfoote-land
My apologies to my faithful readers, I have been ensconced in the Jack H. Skirball Theater shooting the dance sequences for The Bentfootes. James Urbaniak has been “unwell” and unable to attend the shoot up ’til now, so we need to shoot around him. In his place, a PA has been holding a stick with a piece of orange day-glo tape at the end. Mr. Urbaniak will be digitally composited in later.
For those interested in the history of this unique and bizarre project, factoids and whatnot may be found here.
Be back soon!