June 30, 2009
Variety Article Mad Libs
Variety Article Mad Libs
June 24, 2009

Missed Connection Fan Fiction

Patty is at Motel 6 on Roscoe - w4m - 38 (Valley)
Reply to: pers-bcp5n-1220365113@craigslist.org

I’m leaving tomorrow for Canada. If you have any balls, McGough, you’ll come and say good bye because I don’t know if me and the little ones will ever be back. Grow some freakin’ balls dude. Stop calling the cops like a puss. Be a man. This is your last chance to see me and speak honestly and explain why you lied to the cops. Why you would do something so mean to me. I deserve an explanation. Pronouncing your impotency was mean, but doesn’t equate to trying to have me locked up.

Patty dipped her hand towel into the metal bucket of ice, half water by now but still cold. She wrung it out and brought it to her forehead. When she pulled it away a brown layer of day-old sweat stained the white cloth like a smear of dripped tempera. Patty aired herself out by pacing around the room, feeling too overwrought, and too lazy, to shower.

The room smelled old and dry and faintly of drug store perfume. A pair of windows poked crooked under moth eaten curtains made of pink flowers against a blue sky. Patty could see Donald and little Julie roughhousing out by the pool. Donald had found a plastic squirt gun and was using it to douse his sister with a torrent of chlorine. The girl retaliated by chucking golf ball-sized berries at his head.

Patty lit her second to last Virginia Slim and thumped down on the bed. The comforter was a flipped-around version of the curtains. Blue flowers on pink sky. Patty sighed once, then again, after she decided she deserved it. There was leftover Chinese in the fridge. Patty thought about that for a while. Mulled over the idea of cold broccoli in greasy peanut sauce. She lifted up her shirt and stuck a finger into the corner of her white Maidenform bra. She pulled out a tight, wet wad of crumpled hundred dollar bills.

“Canada,” Patty thought. “They use dollars in Canada?”

There was a knock on the door, quick and bitter. Patty leapt up, shoving the money back down inside her cleavage. She peeked through the curtains. Donald was holding Julie by her feet and dangling the little girl over the pool. Julie shrieked bloody murder while Donald cackled like late night TV.

Patty closed the curtain and forced her plump lips into a smile. She pulled the door all the way open in one decisive jerk.

McGough.

Patty seethed with anger. She slammed the door right in McGough’s swollen pig face and sat back on the bed. She bit down, grinding her molars into a tombstone of all the invisible things she wanted to say. She opened the door.

“McGough.”

McGough grunted. Patty let him into the room and positioned her hands upon her hips in a stance of expectation. They stood that way for a while, whole minutes buzzing between them.

“You want Chinese?” Patty asked finally.

McGough shrugged. Patty got the broccoli and the orange chicken from the fridge, and handed the cartons to McGough along with a pair of wooden chopsticks slipped from their white paper covering.

“The hell I’m supposed to do with these?”

Patty shook her head. She took the chopsticks back from McGough and demonstrated the over, under method for scooping cold protein into grubby mouths.

“You never used chopsticks before?”

McGough shrugged again. He tried to do as Patty showed. A sticky clump of chicken fell from the box and died swiftly on the blue carpet.

Patty laughed despite herself. McGough let out a quick snort, and seconds later they were steamrolling the bed, crunching the blue flowers with their bulk. McGough sucked the sweat off Patty’s neck. Patty reached for McGough’s belt buckle, love-sick fingers a thunderstorm against the mane of a metallic lion. McGough breathed deeply. Swallowed. Patty clawed at his pants.

McGough reared back suddenly. Patty reached for him and he slapped her hand red and stinging.

“Patty. I can’t.”

Patty shook her blushing head and shredded splinters from the chopsticks. McGough looked down at buckle, meeting the bumpy eyes of his little bronze lion.

“I mean… I can’t.”

Patty began to laugh. Slowly at first, then maniacally. Bitterly.

“I swear to fucking god.” McGough grabbed the carton of broccoli and threw in the direction of the west wall, where it landed with a thwack and slid slimy down the cheap paint. He tucked his shirt back into his pants and stomped towards the door.

“You better go get your kids before they drown each other to death. Cops can be here in an instant.”

Patty looked through the window where Donald and Julie were chicken fighting in the water, using sticks to jab each other in the belly. She emptied ice from the metal bucket into her mouth and sucked.

“McGough?”

McGough turned, a detectable quiver beneath his snout.

“They use dollars in Canada?”
June 16, 2009
Carvings in the tree stump next door read “WILLIAM MORRIS + ENDEVA 4EVA.”
Carvings in the tree stump next door read “WILLIAM MORRIS + ENDEVA 4EVA.”
June 9, 2009
“Now bring me the raccoon.”“Um, there’s a lot of stuff here. I’m not sure we have room for the raccoon.”“What do you mean no room for the raccoon? This photograph is about liberation. From the shackles of society! How can you say that without a raccoon?”“Well, you’ve got the chains. And the bracelets and the tie and butterfly and the bed and the belt and the unbuttoned shirt and the… Okay, I’ll get the rac- Ow! He bit me. The little fucker bit me!”“Of course he bit you, Olivier, he’s a liberated raccoon. What else would you expect from a liberated raccoon, a kiss on the ass?”“Um. It’s kind of bleeding. Should I…”“Should you bring me the raccoon? Yes. Bring me the raccoon.”“(Sigh). Where do you want it?”“Pointing to his cock.”
“Now bring me the raccoon.”

“Um, there’s a lot of stuff here. I’m not sure we have room for the raccoon.”

“What do you mean no room for the raccoon? This photograph is about liberation. From the shackles of society! How can you say that without a raccoon?”

“Well, you’ve got the chains. And the bracelets and the tie and butterfly and the bed and the belt and the unbuttoned shirt and the… Okay, I’ll get the rac- Ow! He bit me. The little fucker bit me!”

“Of course he bit you, Olivier, he’s a liberated raccoon. What else would you expect from a liberated raccoon, a kiss on the ass?”

“Um. It’s kind of bleeding. Should I…”

“Should you bring me the raccoon? Yes. Bring me the raccoon.”

“(Sigh). Where do you want it?”

“Pointing to his cock.”

oldjewstellingjokes:

Norman Stiles, “Sperm Bank”

According to his bio, Norman Stiles “graduated from Hunter College in New York City, in 1964 with a BA degree in Zoology and Chemistry, which gave him the basic foundation for a career in comedy and children’s educational television.”

Since then he has over 20 Emmy nominations and 12 awards – so maybe it did?

June 8, 2009
Trailer Recap: Shrink We open on the set of a talk show. A dignified older host with shambles of tobacco teeth introduces our protagonist: Dr. Henry Carter, therapist to the stars. Henry, played with tired eyes by Kevin Spacey, adjusts his glasses like he’s done this a million times and throws the camera a quick smile.Next we’re in Henry’s large, modern office. It’s morning and we see the doctor plod into work wearing week-old scruff and an expensive gray suit. He greets his off-screen secretary, a woman with the charred-tin voice of a decent looking character actress. The secretary, whom I imagine as a dyed blonde size 8, tells Henry his book has broken onto the bestseller list. And, by extension, lets us know that Henry is somewhat of a celebrity himself, thereby a legitimizing him as the leading man in this film about Hollywood.Next we see a montage of Henry’s clients. A troubled starlet, a paranoid executive, a jittery struggling writer with a three-hundred dollar haircut, a beautiful actress and her actor boyfriend who brings beer to his sessions. All of who fling their Hollywood problems at the revered Dr. Carter in quick-cut succession.But the real issue is with Henry, a psychological wreck in his own right. He’s gone down the path of all-night pot benders, the destruction symbol of choice for smart, wealthy movie characters over the age of forty. Henry does a lot of stumbling around and waking up in places other than his bed. Places like the driver’s seat of his BMW and the chair next to his Hollywood Hills backyard pool.  So somebody stages an intervention. Henry claims to have Compassion Fatigue Syndrome.We begin to track with the screwed-up struggling writer who has that expensive hair — a young, good-looking guy who seems to be a bit of a catalyst for Henry’s own recovery. At this point all the characters become interconnected. The writer has encounters with the starlet and the paranoid exec. Twice Henry runs into the beautiful actress whose narcissistic, lager-toting boyfriend she’s kicked to the curb. This woman wants to bang Henry, her therapist, but instead they eat Ben & Jerry’s ice cream on the sidewalk.Three title cards appear. RELATIONSHIPS. ENTANGLEMENTS. COMPLICATIONS. The paranoid exec, previously seen as a cheating-hearted straight guy named Angus on The L Word, paces around Henry’s office like a paranoid person might. He thinks there’s danger everywhere. Then we’re introduced to Henry’s pot dealer, a white kid with Mark David Chapman glasses and the cadence of slow rotisserie used to indicate relative innocence. Henry asks serious questions the kid can’t answer and then goes nuts. He throws papers around, punches someone in the face, and there’s a mysterious shot involving a hill and a shovel. Things speed up. Henry interacts with his clients. His clients interact with one another. Freedom metaphors abound: motorcycle rides, index cards flung into the wind, shouts from high atop a hill that overlooks the city. Followed by a final encounter between Henry and his pot dealer in the kid’s car, a comic moment where we see that Henry has taken to treating his dealer like his very own therapist. Right there in the backseat of a car parked high on a palm tree laden hill overlooking Los Angeles.The shot is beautiful, just like rest of it. Playfully handheld long lenses capture an attractive cast and the sprawling landscapes of a flawed Heaven. Because in Hollywood there’s an Other Hollywood. A place where quaint mental breakdowns are an occupational hazard of being brilliant. Where it’s safe, if not charming to drink in the middle of the afternoon if you’re in a five-hundred dollar flannel shirt and have a handsome face and overflowing talent. A different sort of logic prevails in these kinds of L.A. films, which take the circumstances of Real Hollywood fantasy life: the temptation, the indulgence, the irreverent behavior, and describe them as the tragic flaws of compelling antiheroes. And, detrimentally, as indicators of brilliance. These special creative people just can’t help themselves, but aren’t they more interesting for it? It’s an unattainable reality, where you can have your cake and avoid being judged for it, too. Because in the real world if you’re drinking in public in the middle of the afternoon or going around punching people in the face you’re going to end up on the homepage of a gossip site with a doodled cock coming out of your ear. And you will be mocked by millions for your privileged buffoonery. In this sense gentle Hollywood films fall into the category of ultimate escapism, because they’re made by people who should know better. Written with the desperate desire to break into this world, but also hopeful that the world is something it isn’t. Because, let’s face it, Hollywood is fucking gross almost all of the time.* I’ve seen the jittery creative writer crumble in the face of the big white guy in a suit. I’ve also seen people on drugs who are grappling with newfound success and the implications of their own brilliance, and there is always a substantial amount of whimpering and, like, snot. Captured on camera these scenarios would feel more like episodes of The Apprentice and Intervention, respectively, than Shrink. But I guess if you’re sitting in a coffee shop with a copy of Final Draft it’s nice to imagine that your inner demons are so interesting to other people that they will revere you for your devastatingly poor behavior. And for your three-hundred dollar haircut.*Except for those times you meet someone at maybe a dinner party in a big house who has done a lot of cool things and has great stories and opinions and you end up drinking red wine until the sun comes up, but this usually happens completely by accident and without act breaks. (Left: Thomas Moffett, writer of Shrink, Right: Jeremy, the jittery writer character with the hair)

Trailer Recap: Shrink

We open on the set of a talk show. A dignified older host with shambles of tobacco teeth introduces our protagonist: Dr. Henry Carter, therapist to the stars. Henry, played with tired eyes by Kevin Spacey, adjusts his glasses like he’s done this a million times and throws the camera a quick smile.

Next we’re in Henry’s large, modern office. It’s morning and we see the doctor plod into work wearing week-old scruff and an expensive gray suit. He greets his off-screen secretary, a woman with the charred-tin voice of a decent looking character actress. The secretary, whom I imagine as a dyed blonde size 8, tells Henry his book has broken onto the bestseller list. And, by extension, lets us know that Henry is somewhat of a celebrity himself, thereby a legitimizing him as the leading man in this film about Hollywood.

Next we see a montage of Henry’s clients. A troubled starlet, a paranoid executive, a jittery struggling writer with a three-hundred dollar haircut, a beautiful actress and her actor boyfriend who brings beer to his sessions. All of who fling their Hollywood problems at the revered Dr. Carter in quick-cut succession.

But the real issue is with Henry, a psychological wreck in his own right. He’s gone down the path of all-night pot benders, the destruction symbol of choice for smart, wealthy movie characters over the age of forty. Henry does a lot of stumbling around and waking up in places other than his bed. Places like the driver’s seat of his BMW and the chair next to his Hollywood Hills backyard pool.  So somebody stages an intervention. Henry claims to have Compassion Fatigue Syndrome.

We begin to track with the screwed-up struggling writer who has that expensive hair — a young, good-looking guy who seems to be a bit of a catalyst for Henry’s own recovery. At this point all the characters become interconnected. The writer has encounters with the starlet and the paranoid exec. Twice Henry runs into the beautiful actress whose narcissistic, lager-toting boyfriend she’s kicked to the curb. This woman wants to bang Henry, her therapist, but instead they eat Ben & Jerry’s ice cream on the sidewalk.

Three title cards appear. RELATIONSHIPS. ENTANGLEMENTS. COMPLICATIONS. The paranoid exec, previously seen as a cheating-hearted straight guy named Angus on The L Word, paces around Henry’s office like a paranoid person might. He thinks there’s danger everywhere. Then we’re introduced to Henry’s pot dealer, a white kid with Mark David Chapman glasses and the cadence of slow rotisserie used to indicate relative innocence. Henry asks serious questions the kid can’t answer and then goes nuts. He throws papers around, punches someone in the face, and there’s a mysterious shot involving a hill and a shovel.

Things speed up. Henry interacts with his clients. His clients interact with one another. Freedom metaphors abound: motorcycle rides, index cards flung into the wind, shouts from high atop a hill that overlooks the city. Followed by a final encounter between Henry and his pot dealer in the kid’s car, a comic moment where we see that Henry has taken to treating his dealer like his very own therapist. Right there in the backseat of a car parked high on a palm tree laden hill overlooking Los Angeles.

The shot is beautiful, just like rest of it. Playfully handheld long lenses capture an attractive cast and the sprawling landscapes of a flawed Heaven. Because in Hollywood there’s an Other Hollywood. A place where quaint mental breakdowns are an occupational hazard of being brilliant. Where it’s safe, if not charming to drink in the middle of the afternoon if you’re in a five-hundred dollar flannel shirt and have a handsome face and overflowing talent.

A different sort of logic prevails in these kinds of L.A. films, which take the circumstances of Real Hollywood fantasy life: the temptation, the indulgence, the irreverent behavior, and describe them as the tragic flaws of compelling antiheroes. And, detrimentally, as indicators of brilliance. These special creative people just can’t help themselves, but aren’t they more interesting for it? It’s an unattainable reality, where you can have your cake and avoid being judged for it, too. Because in the real world if you’re drinking in public in the middle of the afternoon or going around punching people in the face you’re going to end up on the homepage of a gossip site with a doodled cock coming out of your ear. And you will be mocked by millions for your privileged buffoonery.

In this sense gentle Hollywood films fall into the category of ultimate escapism, because they’re made by people who should know better. Written with the desperate desire to break into this world, but also hopeful that the world is something it isn’t. Because, let’s face it, Hollywood is fucking gross almost all of the time.* I’ve seen the jittery creative writer crumble in the face of the big white guy in a suit. I’ve also seen people on drugs who are grappling with newfound success and the implications of their own brilliance, and there is always a substantial amount of whimpering and, like, snot. Captured on camera these scenarios would feel more like episodes of The Apprentice and Intervention, respectively, than Shrink.

But I guess if you’re sitting in a coffee shop with a copy of Final Draft it’s nice to imagine that your inner demons are so interesting to other people that they will revere you for your devastatingly poor behavior. And for your three-hundred dollar haircut.

*Except for those times you meet someone at maybe a dinner party in a big house who has done a lot of cool things and has great stories and opinions and you end up drinking red wine until the sun comes up, but this usually happens completely by accident and without act breaks.

(Left: Thomas Moffett, writer of Shrink, Right: Jeremy, the jittery writer character with the hair)

May 29, 2009
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Talk Show Host - Radiohead

Most Radiohead reminds me of Adderall and studying for high school art history tests, or of bad student films. This song reminds of Romeo + Juliet, which it’s in, and of taking long drives in Henry, my ‘91 Corrolla, freshman year of college for no reason other than I didn’t want be at school.

Henry was stolen later that year. He saw some tough guy Eastsiders checking out his spotty coat of paint and his tantalizing plumes of exhaust and was all, “You want me? Well fucking come and find me. I’ll be waiting with a gun and a pack of sandwiches.”

Dummy. It wasn’t too hard to find Henry as he was a loud automobile with a particularly rhythmic clang. So the guys tracked him down and Henry taunted them further, “You want me? Fucking come on and break the door down.”

And the guys were like, well hey now, easy, we don’t need to do all that, And they popped open the front door with Henry’s own antennae, which would have been a grave indignity, but it didn’t work anyway. Henry was found a few weeks later, abandoned after his engine gave out, filled with exercise equipment and empty pizza boxes.

May 27, 2009

Thinking About TV: Mental and Glee

Fox’s new renegade-doctors-saving-crazy-people series Mental premiered last night. The pilot episode opens on the floor of a psychiatric hospital the morning a new chief is scheduled to arrive. A brief set-up establishes that, as in all TV hospitals, there’s a manipulative bad guy with power (black!) who resents our protagonist before he’s even met him, and a couple of young, wide-eyed residents whose jobs hang in the balance for no apparent reason.

Everyone on the floor is buzzing about, have you seen our new head honcho, where is this guy? What kind of a person are we even expecting? And then we see the crazy people. All docile and drooly except for one guy: a dyed-in-the-wool nutso schizophrenic played by Eli, the inbred overall-wearing rapist from season one of 24, whom I once saw standing outside the Coffee Bean in Studio City and ran from in a TV-flashback-induced panic. In Mental his name his Vincent, and his particular schizo thing is that he sees the demons inside of people – their eyes have serpentine pupils and they grow tails. So he’s surrounded by all this monster folk, and he freaks out and takes off his clothes, yelling all kinds of gibberish. The hospital staff tries to restrain him, which only makes him schiz out even more. And then suddenly, a man appears. A very clean looking handsome man with an English accent walks in out of thin air, strips naked and tells Vincent that they’re in this together. Now it’s the two of them against the hospital staff, throwing chairs and stuff, until the English man convinces Vincent to chill out and let himself be restrained. Vincent is taken away and the entire rest of the hospital looks at the English man, like, who is this person?

The guy is, of course, the new chief of psychiatry. It’s abundantly clear to the audience that this is the hospital’s incoming eccentric leader, scheduled to arrive any second now, yet none of the staff seems to have any idea. And the script makes us wait and wait for that reveal, wasting our time building up something we already saw coming. It’s a smug scene, reminiscent of how many countless shows that expect audiences to be inherently pleased that they get to watch this daring protagonist who is so unconventional and “bad” that he is, of course, completely and unwaveringly good.

The rest of the episode plays out pretty much about how you’d imagine it would. Mental is a procedural, a genre never expected to offer the most innovative or cutting edge programming, but at least cops shows can invent enough twists and turns and red herrings to stay ahead of their audience. With Mental, the arc of the pilot is this: a crazy guy used to be an artist but his medication stifled his creativity so he stopped taking it and now he’s freaking out again. The entire mystery of the episode was essentially taken from the Wikipedia entry for schizophrenia.

Last week Fox offered a sneak peak at new series Glee in the hopes of building excitement for its fall premiere. The hour-long show offers a lot: showtunes, glitter, bright colors, an adorable cast, Jane Lynch in a track suit, and enough gay per frame to make Andy Cohen’s fall slate slink away in shame. So pretty much it had makings to be the greatest television show of all time, and then they went and added plot to the damn thing.

Glee’s about a small-town Spanish teacher who’s married to his own high school sweetheart — a nagging bitch who wants him to quit his teaching job and enter the more lucrative field of accounting. This teacher, Will (Matthew Morrison, incidentally the love of my life for like an hour after I saw him play Hairspray’s Link Larkin on Broadway) has aspirations of taking over the neglected glee club and leading it to glory, jazz fists in the air. Which sounds fun and all, except the glee club gets together in the first act and the rest of the hour winds us through half a dozen near-miss moments in which the club’s existence is threatened. Including Will’s wife’s pregnancy and his consequent decision to take that accounting job after all.

Of course, this simply cannot happen for many reasons, not least of which is that the show really wouldn’t have much of a future with Will’s hands pounding a giant calculator instead of a sparkly cummerbund. So the pretty redheaded teacher who has a crush on Will begs him please come look at this one last thing before you decide to quit, and then shows him videotape of when HE HIMSELF was in the school’s glee club so many years back. Will watches the video and realizes, and then says out loud, that being in the glee club was the only time he was every truly happy.

While all this is happening a hunky football player named Finn is going through some stuff of his own. Finn has a great singing voice and was pretty much manipulated by Will into joining the glee club. Which does not go over so well with his football-jerk teammates. So once Will decides to abandon the club for pocket protectors and decimal points, Finn figures it’s time he got out as well, and quits the club for several whole minutes. But then Finn changes his mind, mainly because he loves singing. So Finn and Will have pretty much simultaneous emotional breakthroughs in the final act.

I wish I could remember the exact words they said, because believe me words were said in this subtext-free episode, but the gist of it all is that Will and Finn both realize that life is too short not to do what you love, nagging wives and mean football players be damned. Except it’s a show about a fucking high school glee club, so how could we possibly not glean that sentiment as being the point of the series from the first scene, or from the ads, or even the billboards?

So then, Fox, a bit of a disappointment. Both Glee and Mental take decent enough premises and subject them to the tract house school of TV writing. Which amounts to years and years of television following the same rules of structure, and adhering to the idea that: what we’re writing looks like a TV script, it has the same act breaks and themes and emotional arcs as other shows, so it must work.

Except audiences are smarter than that, right? We’ve seen all those other episodes, we know how they play out, so what’s the point of watching when we can see and feel every moment coming?
May 25, 2009
I’ve been sick for seven days, in an apartment with no cable and a WiFi signal I can only get by holding my computer three feet above the ground in the far corner of the living room. This is what I’ve been doing, mostly. It’s a stupid trick some Dutch guys taught me as the sun was coming up over a tiny hole-in-the-wall in Prague, and I promise it isn’t any more exciting for me than it is for you.
May 21, 2009
This image’s accompanying sound is a long, broken sigh that bounces off the hollow walls and dies inside a carton of stale Pad Thai.
This image’s accompanying sound is a long, broken sigh that bounces off the hollow walls and dies inside a carton of stale Pad Thai.