A history of unfortunate coincidences #3

This man's parents met and had unprotected sex at least once.

A picture of the Deluise family, for your enjoyment

A history of unfortunate coincidences #2

Failed singer Mary Desti, the mother of film director Preston Sturges, forced her young son into a bohemian lifestyle he hated, flitting around from country to country and museum to museum on her rich businessmen husbands' dimes. She briefly dated Aleister Crowley, who called the young Sturges a "most god-forsaken lout." Desti also became close friends with the dancer Isadora Duncan. Duncan had a fondness for wearing long scarves. Desti founded a cosmetics company called Maison Desti. The company carried a scarf that Desti thought Duncan would love. She presented it to her as a gift. Duncan wore the extremely long scarf when she hopped into the 1924 Amilcar of an Italian mechanic she planned on sleeping with. Her scarf became tangled around a wheel of the car, choking and yanking her to her demise. Ironically, the car is often erroneously reported to be a Bugatti, perhaps because that brand of automobile was the nickname given to the mechanic by Duncan. Desti, who was there when Duncan got in the Amilcar, told reporters that Duncan's last words were "Goodbye, my friends, I am off to glory." Later, she admitted making this up to protect Duncan's reputation, whose real last words were "I am off to love." Desti's son Preston went on to become one of the greatest writer/directors of comedy in film history. His golden rules for successful comedy:
"A pretty girl is better than a plain one/ A leg is better than an arm/ A bedroom is better than a living room/ An arrival is better than a departure/ A birth is better than a death/ A chase is better than a chat/ A dog is better than a landscape/ A kitten is better than a dog/ A baby is better than a kitten/ A kiss is better than a baby/ A pratfall is better than anything."

Free Giveaway! First come, first served! Free!

Hey dudes and dudettes,
Those crazy limeys from across the pond sent me two of something when I only wanted one of something. If anyone would like an extra copy of this month's Mojo magazine and free CD, please respond first in the comments section for this post. One caveat: You must be in Austin sometime whenever or be in either eastern or western Nebraska during the Christmas holidays. I'm too damn busy to mail anything, so tough luck, chumps. Led Zeppelin is on the cover. Not the golden, glistening rock gods of yore, unfortunately, but the graying graybeards of today. However, these men have aged surprisingly well, with the exception of John Bonham, who did not make the cover. Particularly John Paul Jones. What a magnetically handsome man. A man's man. A suave man. A man who knows how to please, and how to tease. I am lost in his eyes, never to return. Oh John Paul Jones, take me away from all this hustle and bustle (in my hedgerow)! (groans, booing)
The magazine also features, according to the cover (I've been too busy to open the thing and verify whether it's all a pack of lies, containing only 76 glossy pinups of Lance Bass): Elvis Costello, the Pretty Things, AC/DC, Ray Davies, Stevie Wonder, Radiohead, and the Beatles. The CD is a collection of British hard rock from 1968-1973, including The Pretty Things, Terry Reid, Slade, The Move, etc. Also the awesomely named Pete Brown & Piblokto!, and yes the exclamation point is part of the name. I haven't listened to it yet, but their CDs are usually pretty good.

Overheard in American Lit class

"You know how much I love butterflies, right?"

and

"Whoah! Tennessee Williams is a man?"

What's the message?

I left a message for my wife yesterday that read: "Washing my car, back soon."
When I returned, I looked at the note and realized its confusion. It could be read as: "I'm washing my car. I'll be back soon."
Or:
"Washing my car and back soon."
This raises many questions. Would I be washing my back at the same time as I washed my car? Would I just be washing my back, or the rest of my body as well? And how soon? Doesn't the word "soon" look strange if you stare at it too long?

A history of unfortunate coincidences #1

In 1989, when Domino's Pizza's "Avoid the Noid" advertising campaign was at the height of its popularity, a 22-year-old schizophrenic in Georgia named Kenneth Noid believed the commercials directly targeted him. In retaliation, he kidnapped two Domino's employees and held them hostage. He forced them to make him a pizza, then demanded $100,000, a getaway car, and the Robert Anton Wilson novel The Widow's Son. They escaped. He turned himself in to the police.

Words to live by

Life explained, from the W.C. Fields movie Million Dollar Legs:
"Here in Klopstokia, all the women are named Angela, and the men are named George."
"Why?"
"Why not?"

Plugola

A Halloween surprise over at our subsidiary, Decapitated Zombie Vampire Bloodbath.

To make up for my lack of posts, here is a dirty joke

Fred's wife has been feeling strange for weeks, so she goes to the doctor and undergoes a series of tests. A few weeks later, the test results are in, and the doctor calls Fred into his office, alone. "What is it, Doctor?" Fred says. "Is she going to be okay?"
"I'm sorry, Fred," the doctor says. "I wanted to break this to you first. Unfortunately, we've had a chart mix-up with another patient, but the news isn't good either way."
"What's wrong?" Fred asks.
"Well, she either has Alzheimer's or AIDS."
"Oh god, what should I do?" Fred cries.
"Well," the doctor says. "I suggest you drive her three miles out of town and drop her off. If she finds her way back home, don't fuck her."

WTF? LOL! SOENVOENG0OENFVIQDHFQGENQEP

Thurston Moore is opening for Bright Eyes.
That's like having Keith Richards open for Ugly Kid Joe.
What the fuck?

Tortured Louis Black paragraph of the week

I've said all I had to say about why I find Black's columns so revolting, so from now on, I'm going to let the man speak for himself. Here is the tortured Louis Black paragraph of the week, from his latest column, "Cat and Mouse."

"Last night, all through the night, I was so sweetly tormented, thinking about words, possibilities, and emotions, that I slept not at all. Tortured fever-thoughts about this column - not just the one you are now reading but the ongoing, weekly entity - kept me awake. Usually I know what I want to say but frequently don't know if I really want to say it."

Ye gods

This is a companion post to my last one.
I don't think 30 is old, or 37, or 48, or even 59. But my jaw dropped today when one of my psychology professors said, "Most of you were in seventh grade when the September 11th terrorist attacks occurred." I am a young man of 30, but jeez, talk about an alienating statement. I almost felt...what? Shame? Embarrassment? What am I doing here? I've been having recurring nightmares this past month about having to re-do my senior year in high school due to some arcane bureaucratic snafu. But the nightmare is real!

I may be 1,000 years old, relatively speaking, but going to college for the second time has mostly been a good thing. I have my work ethic back, I feel more mentally stable, and the memories of my completely lost last three years are starting to fade. I feel alienated from the other students, but I felt that way when I got my journalism degree. Journalists are arrogant dicks, for the most part. Born not made. Who are these people I'm going to class with? I don't know why two of my classmates spent the entire lecture yesterday talking about "Desperate Housewives," I don't know why the guy on the bus wanted everyone to hear his cell phone conversation when it consisted of monotone variations of "Dude, that's badass," and I don't know why the girl walking in front of me down the street last Friday spent her entire conversation preceding every sentence with a monotone "Oh my god." I don't know why a girl in my psychology class responded to an opinion survey with the words, "I don't understand any of these questions. I don't get it. What are the answers to these questions?" I'm observing a fourth grade class every Monday this semester, and every single kid in that class is interesting. Unfortunately, I know all too well that two-thirds of those kids will change into astonishingly boring human beings. Something happens between grade school and middle school, some invisible hand tries to pound the interesting out of us, and most of us never make it out alive. This post is going in a different direction than I intended, so I'll just stop now before it degenerates into a diatribe about how trendy and lame the popular kids are. Kill everyone twice! Don't trust anyone under 30! Pina coladas for all!

Back to School: Report #2

Not much has changed since my first time in college, but occasionally something happens that makes me feel 1,000 years older than most of the other students (though there is a person or two my age and older in all my classes, excepting the 101s). I don't feel much distance between my decrepit 30-year-old ass and their firm, luscious 20-year-old asses, but for whatever reason, many of these younger students' cultural references either don't extend past 1998 or are chronologically confused.
Example #1: In my post-Harlem Renaissance African-American lit class, I worked on a group project about blues music of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s and its relation to Zora Neale Hurston's prose. During a group meeting, a girl said, "Roberta Flack might be a good example. She was right around this time period, right? Or was she a little later?"
Example #2: In my American Lit class, we watched the first fifteen minutes of Peter Bogdanovich's Daisy Miller after reading the Henry James story. In the film, Daisy's little brother was played by Larry McMurtry's son James, who is currently an Austin singer-songwriter. The professor told us that the young actor grew up to be a musician and asked us if we knew who it was. One of my fellow students said, "Neil Young?" Keep in mind, he'd already told us the year of the movie's release, 1974.
Example #3: In my enormous 500-student psychology class, one of the two professors asked the lecture hall how many of us had seen A Clockwork Orange? Only about 30 people raised their hands.

I don't think it's necessary, or even that important, to have a rough estimate of when Roberta Flack's career began or how old Neil Young was in 1974, or to have seen the Kubrick film (his worst, in my opinion, though very appealing to people in their late teens and early twenties and extremely popular with that age bracket the last time I was in that age bracket, which I didn't think was that long ago but apparently some cultural shift has taken place and maybe these kids are all really into Barry Lyndon). I don't think knowing pop culture details and approximate dates makes anyone smart. I'm just surprised. Middle-aged co-workers at my last job were always saying things to me like, "You're probably too young to have ever heard of Jack Benny/Nina Simone/Paul Simon/Spiro Agnew, etc." and I was always taken aback by that. I always assume people are aware of at least a few things that predated their births. I mean, come on. By their logic, no one alive should have the slightest fucking clue who William Shakespeare or Abraham Lincoln are. Civil War? Never heard of it. Who the fuck are The Beatles? Spare me your arcane minutiae, Pops. This is the nineties. But maybe my middle-aged coworkers were right to assume I'd never heard of anything that predated 1977. Maybe my friends and I are Paleolithic weirdos for being interested in things that happened prior to "Desperate Housewives." But in my culturally deprived small Midwestern hometown in the early 1990s in the adolescent world of immediate-present-only, we watched Cheech and Chong movies, listened to Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, and knew that Roberta Flack was not an early 20th century blues singer. It wasn't all Alice in Chains, Encino Man, Bell Biv Devoe, Lorena Bobbitt jokes, and Clearly Canadian. We didn't live in a total vacuum. Does anyone remember John Tesh? Is there anybody out there who remembers "Manimal"? I have been left behind. Kool and the Gang are contemporaries of Emily Dickinson in the world of today's youth. My beer gut grows larger as my capacity to learn new technologies diminishes. The Grim Reaper takes my hand, and I sing Kajagoogoo's "Too Shy" as I slowly shuffle toward my demise. Remember me as someone who experienced my pop culture firsthand, not through Peter Griffin. Fuck the police. Welcome to the jungle. Do you like pina coladas?

Tortured Louis Black paragraph of the week

Louis Black's column this week, "Knocked Out, Loaded," contained many of his usual flaws: awkward sentence construction; bizarre, paranoid, megalomaniacal attacks on those who dare to criticize the Chronicle; precious stirrings of his oh-so-poetic heart; status quo journalistic cliches presented as deep thought (example: "(Movies directed by actors) don't really work, and when they do, their obsession is clearly about the actorly, not the cinematic," a conventional film-crit opinion I largely disagree with, but I digress); and celeb name-dropping. The latter clearly presses my annoyance button the most. He really stretches himself this time, though, writing about the new Ethan Hawke-directed film, The Hottest State: "In my world, the first 15 minutes were perfect. Not perfect as in a nice job by a friend of a friend (emphasis mine) or a surprising achievement by an actor directing but in the most visceral way: The pleasures of the viewing experience were more sensual and physical than intellectual." What a convoluted and unnecessary way of bragging about being two degrees of separation from Ethan Hawke. What a sad thing for a grown (middle-aged!) man to do. That was merely the appetizer for this week's shameless entree:
"Years ago, my friends Maggie Renzi and John Sayles came to town for a car trip to West Texas. When they arrived, I excitedly exclaimed to John, '... and we can visit my friend Robert Rodriguez's set, where he is shooting his new movie, Desperado, in Acuna, Mexico!'"

Maybe I'm picking on a guy who may be just fine in person? No. I've been the unfortunate victim of three public speeches by Black, and he is his column. Before a screening of Terminal Island, he bloviated for 15 minutes about his friendship with Jonathan Demme, apropos of nothing. Before a Manny Farber art exhibition, he spent 15 minutes rattling on about his friendship with Leonard Maltin (or "Len," as Black called him). At an Austin Film Society event, he dribbled on and on about his friendship with Richard Linklater, which embarrassed me, in part, because Linklater was standing next to him waiting to speak. I was much more interested in what he had to say about AFS, but I had to wait a long, long time to hear it. Black's not the only member of the Chronicle to suck the air out of the room. If you are ever at an event in which Chronicle music critic Raoul Hernandez is about to speak, flee from the room immediately. If fleeing is not an option, find the easiest way to commit suicide. Hernandez gave a 20+ minute speech before a screening of Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait that included a seven-minute vignette about buying the laserdisc of Otto Preminger's Laura. I wanted to tear my eyeballs out and shove them in my ears. Black not only bloviates with the best of them, he hires master bloviators. He has assembled an unholy bloviating army of the damned! Get away! As fast as you can! For the love of God!

Religious Week continues

Born-again and fundamentalist Christians often mention a particular phrase, always worded the same way, that really grates on my nerves: "my personal relationship with Christ." What, are you fucking him?

Religious Week Begins, or Can-Smashing Robot's Holy Days of Obligation

Three people I saw in person who are now dead:

Reggae

Goddamn, if reggae doesn't get a bad rap. When people say they're into reggae, it usually only means that they own Bob Marley's "Legend," a pet iguana and a beer-stained pool table too close to the wall, have a seashell-necklace, a blonde ponytail, and some ditch weed, and are pissed off that the night has turned into a "sausage party." However, much like soul music, every reggae song from the 1960s and 1970s is good.


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