Thumper’s mama would be pissed at me.

She always said, “If you cain’t say sumthin’ nice, don’t say nuthin’ at all.”

Since posting my gripe list about Superman Returns I see that I’m not the only one who was severely troubled by the movie; severely enough to post their dismay and heap on the nitpicking.

There were a lot of things I liked about Superman Returns.

--I liked Superman’s boots. I liked them a lot. They look like Frank Miller designed them.

--I was transfixed on Supe’s cape—his whole costume in fact. It was dark and looked like it was made from a material not found on this planet.

--I liked that Superman’s power level fluctuated with the amount of solar radiation he had stored up. One minute he’s having trouble stopping a commercial airliner from crashing, and the next he’s lifting an entire continent and chucking it into space.

--The design of the movie was pretty much gorgeous from start to go. The Daily Planet was an art deco orgasm, and Luthor’s yacht is to die for.

--I like that Perry White’s nephew is wealthy enough to live on the seashore and have an airplane in his backyard.

--I like that Lois smokes Brand M cigarettes.

--And I like that it’s a dog eat dog world even in Metropolis.

Got frustration? Me too!

Did you ever begin to ask a question and by the time you were finished you had already figured out the answer? I’m hoping that this will be the case here.

Last night Valarie, my cracked ribs and myself went to see Superman Returns. I had to get jacked up on painkillers in order to climb in and out of the car and sit in a movie theater seat for two and a half hours, so there’s a good chance that I missed some things because of the Percocet.

SPOILER ALERT ***If you haven’t seen Superman Returns yet, please don’t read my questions. Perhaps you could read a good book, or something. I’ve only recently discovered the author Harlan Coben. You could hit the used paperback store and give him a try***SPOILER ALERT

Okay, for starters, I’ve seen cast members from the movie making the talk show rounds, and what they’re saying is that this movie takes place after Superman II from the 70s. So that means that we’re working under the pretense that:

--Lex Luthor knows that Superman is allergic to Krytonite and that a red sun will take his powers away. He also knows that Supes has a crystal hideout and where it’s located.

--Superman revealed his Clark Kent identity to Lois, brought her to the Fortress, stripped himself of his powers, and boinked her like a rabbit. After he gets his powers back Supes (as Clark) kisses Lois and cleverly sucks the oxygen from the part of her brain that stores short-term memory.

--Superman sees that at least three other residents of Krypton (hey, that’s a cool name for a band. Residents of Krypton) survived whatever it was that made the planet explode, when he meets General Zod and his crew. Superman must know about the Phantom Zone from the teachings of his father, and perhaps he even knows that Zod and the Z-Crew were banished there for whatever unspeakable acts they committed on Krypton. (The arrival of Zod and the Z-Crew on earth gives Superman all the motivation he needs to go away for five years to hunt for others. Maybe Supes thinks that the window to the Phantom Zone has somehow broken open—not realizing that he was the one who did it with the Eiffel Tower terrorist nuke—and he feels compelled to go round up all the bad guys who have been banished there over the years.)

So, that said, here are some points that I’m not clear on:

--I guess we’re supposed to figure out that Superman is unable to fly to the spot where Krypton used to be under his own powers because he crashes back on the farm in a ship, so he either built it himself or had the control panel in his Fortress cook one up for him. That said, why the crash landing? Was there some sort of malfunction or something? Wouldn’t NORAD/Homeland Security/NASA have noticed the arrival of the ship with an impact of that magnitude? Plus, how the hell did Ma Kent hoist her 225 pound adopted son into the house and then change him into his jammies?

--Once upon a time Lex Luthor was the greatest criminal mind on the planet, but now he’s been reduced to swindling little old ladies out of their fortunes? WTF? Are we supposed to believe that there was no fiendishly clever way for Lex to get the job done? In the time and effort he wasted wooing the old bird, he could have robbed a dozen banks and stolen a fleet of luxury yachts.

--Are there really no more competent henchmen and molls left in the world? Lex’s crime crew was downright pathetic. And since when does anyone, especially the irritating Parker Posey, get away with slapping Lex Luthor? The Lex I know would grind her up and feed her to the dog.

--I like the notion that Kryptonian technology is based on crystals. I don’t have a problem with that. I mistakenly assumed from the first two movies that the crystals in the control panel were some sort of storage medium that contained the combined knowledge of Krypton, along with an interactive teaching program. I’m more than a little concerned that Superman came to earth with the tools to completely reshape the planet to resemble Krypton.

--And while we’re on the subject of the crystals, as I understood it, it was Lex’s plan to use one of the crystals to build his own continent. I read this as a throwback/tip of the hat/homage to the first Superman movie. The thing of it is, Lex’s plan in the first movie was dumb (dump most of the west coast into the Pacific ocean so all the desert property he’d been buying up on the east coast of the San Andres fault line would be super valuable) but it was thirty-seven times better than his plan in Superman Returns.

For starters, mankind only inhabits a tiny fraction of the inhabitable land on the planet. There are hundreds of thousands of acres available for the taking if you’re a criminal mastermind. Next up, Lex’s plan involves the obliteration of the United States, one of the wealthiest nations there is. If he was so hell bent on building his own nation from scratch, why not go out to the middle of the ocean where you can build away without destroying your potential clientele in the process? (The only part of Lex’s plan that I liked was his incorporating Kryptonite in the process so Superman would be reluctant to visit)

Also, was only one of the crystals useful for building? I ask because when Lex and his girlfriend are escaping by helicopter at the end, she dunks the remaining crystals into the ocean. Wasn’t she afraid that doing so would be five or six (however many crystals were left) times more explosive than the one that Lex shot out of his cannon?

--Was I the only one confused by Lois Lane’s Pulitzer Prize winning story on why the world doesn’t need Superman? Did she write it as soon as the world figured out that Superman was missing—or did she write it just a couple of weeks ago. What was the point of the story? Was it all a bunch of sour grapes? Was it an attack based on him leaving after the world had grown so dependant on him? I’m pretty sure that they don’t give out Pulitzer Prizes five years after the fact, so I’m going to assume that she wrote it recently. Metropolis, as well as the rest of the world has finally come to grips with the idea that Superman is gone and isn’t coming back. Lois writes that the world got along just fine without him for millions of years, and they’ll survive now.

And yet I kept getting the impression that one of the factors that fueled Superman’s five-year journey home was that he was overwhelmed by the burden of protecting the planet. While you and I hear nothing, he hears metal fatiguing on a roller coaster in Rhode Island, and a toddler clicking off the safety on the pistol he just found in his father’s desk drawer, and the Tony Two-Ton gang robbing a bank in Austin, oh, and death rattle of the thousands of children who die of starvation each and every day.

How in the world could Superman justify leaving us for so long? How many lives could he have saved if he stayed? How many kittens could he have rescued from treetops? The very least he could have done was to build an army of Superman robots to protect us while he was gone.

--I think it was really swell of Perry White to give Clark Kent his old job back after his five year sabbatical, but wasn’t there a single person at the Daily Planet who thought it was suspicious that Superman reappears on the same exact day that Clark Kent does? It seems especially silly for Superman to waste his time pretending to be a newspaper reporter today? He has to be doing it in an effort to get back into Lois Lane’s panties again. While he was looking cute eating a burrito, he could have been saving a small village from being swept away in a mudslide. Superman sees all and hears all, so why’s he wasting time playing human?

--Giving Lois a son who is four years and three months old was just freakishly insulting. The very second that Superman (as Clark) learns that Lois has a son he would have read the kid’s DNA and known immediately that it was his kid. That said, to only have the kid’s power surface once, when his mommy was in danger, was so frustrating that it turned into a major distraction. There were three or four times that she was in an equal amount of danger and the kid does bupkus. If you’re going to put something like a Super-Four-Year-Old out there, you really have to commit to it in order for us to buy into it.

--During the last twenty minutes of the movie it almost seemed like individual scenes were fighting it out to see which could be more ridiculous.

Superman hoists a big chunk of crystal into orbit (at least twenty thousand miles up) and then he passes out, yet he somehow manages to land in Metropolis. Did the planet stop spinning while he was up there?

Superman gets taken to a hospital and they peel his suit off him? WTF? And then they leave it casually sitting on a chair in the corner of his room? OMG! And then earth doctors somehow make sense of his alien anatomy to the point where they can monitor his life signs?

The movie ends with Superman sneaking into Lois Lane’s house where he hovers over his sleeping son in his bedroom. Apparently at some point when he was off camera he figured out the truth. Superman decides to leave at the precise moment that Lois has stepped outside for a breath of fresh air. Does she scream in shock and horror? Nope. Does this mean that she knows that Supes is the father? Was the tossing of the piano the first time her son had demonstrated his powers? Did Lois think her son was immaculately conceived or was she sleeping around a lot four years and three months ago?

It’s so frustrating. Singer had the time and the budget to do it right. The effects were very nice. I was happy enough with the casting. But it simply had no heart. The characters lacked dimension and about halfway through I simply stopped caring.

A lot of people seem very pleased by the movie and I’m glad for that. Maybe I’ll enjoy it more by the time it makes it to DVD. I’ll bet there will be a few deleted scenes that if they were in the movie things would have made more sense. Maybe.

Of course, who am I to complain about superhero movies. I liked Ang Lee’s Hulk.

Have a safe 4th of July

Order 'Rockets Gone Wild' today!

What do Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman have in common?

That’s easy. Cast either Hackman or Freeman in a movie and you automatically make it lots better.

Last night I got caught up in the 1969 space drama Marooned. It’s not necessarily a horrible film, but it hasn’t aged well and it plods along at a groggy snail’s pace. Things do perk up however, when Hackman’s character, the slightly unhinged astronaut Buzz Lloyd is on screen.


And this morning I spent a few more minutes than I really should have watching Morgan Freeman valiantly attempting to save Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.


I’m very fond of Hackman and Freeman and would probably watch a movie of the two men trapped in an elevator and simply talking for two hours.

My brain is a bit dusty this morning, but some of the other movies that I can think of Freeman and Hackman made a little more tolerable with their presence include, for Hackman; Heist (2001), Enemy of the State (1999), Absolute Power (1997), The Quick and the Dead (1995), No Way Out (1987) –which was a pale remake of Ray Milland’s The Big Clock (1948) and Night Moves (1975)

Some of the films that Morgan Freeman’s presence helped boost up a notch or two include Dreamcatcher (2003), Deep Impact (1998), Chain Reaction (1996), Outbreak (1995) and Brubaker (1980).

And then of course there’s a long list of great movies that these two gents made only greater, but that’s a topic for another day.

Shoot! Now I really want to watch The Big Clock. Maybe I’ll write tot he folks at TCM and see if it’s in their vaults. I’ve never seen it available on home video

Father's Day Loot!

This year my wife and daughter knocked it out of the park with regards to Father’s Day. In addition to a couple of fun cards, I got three zingy presents.

First up was Paul Simon’s new album, Surprise. I’ve listened to it a few times and think it’s cool as can be. Simon can still turn a phrase and paint a visual picture after all these years, and the addition of Brian Eno to the album is certainly sauce for the goose.

Next was a World Poker Tour game for the PS2. We only live twenty minutes from an Indian Casino, but poker is a lot more relaxing when you’re not gambling with next month’s rent money.


And lastly, but certainly not leastly, is Bad Twin, a swell tie-in to the Lost television series. Besides watching soggy reruns or renting the DVDs from the video store, it’s something to hold die-hard fans over until we get some new episodes. I’m only a few chapters in and so far so good. It’s starting out as a pretty snappy detective yarn. I have no idea where it’s headed, but there have already been a handful of references to the series.

Signs are everywhere...

How much do I enjoy watching M. Night Shyamalan’s 2002 movie Signs? That’s easy—even though I’ve seen it four or five times, I’m watching again. It looks great letterboxed on DVD on my massive big-screen television in the living room. But I’m not down there. I’m upstairs watching it on TNT on our little ten-inch portable television.

To ease the pain in my cracked ribs, my doctor did a procedure on me yesterday at the surgery center, wherein he injected some medication into the nerves that run the length of the damaged ribs. He opted to do in the surgery center rather than in his office, because, to quote him directly, “I don’t want to accidentally poke a hole in your lung, Fred.” I agreed that was something that I didn’t want to have happen. The procedure hurt like hell and my side does feel a little better, but I still don’t know if it was worth the effort. He told me that I’d be in pain for three or four more weeks, and the best thing I could do, besides popping the bottle of pills he gave me, was to stay immobilized.

If I wiggle and squiggle enough I can find a position on my bed where the pain drops down to a manageable level. I can sit on the couch downstairs for limited periods of time, but for the most part I sprawl like a beached whale, immobilized, on the bed. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and watching basic cable (the upstairs television is so tiny and we use it so infrequently that getting a cable box for it would be a waste).

I’m home alone this weekend, which is just a well. Valarie and Dakota took a drive up to San Francisco to visit with Val’s friend Michelle. I haven’t been a happy person to be around, since I took my tumble. It’s tough not to get discouraged. This problem with my ribs came right on the tail end of my kidney stone problem, and it’s tough not to get the blues when you’re on the disabled list for so long.

Watching Signs is cheering me up. Before I started pecking on the laptop during commercials, I had been switching over to old episodes of Spike’s Amazing Videos and COPS.

I like M. Night’s movies a lot. The only one that I haven’t watched repeated times is The Village. I enjoyed it a great deal in the theater when it first came out, but it is sort of a one trick pony. The other day Val was headed over to the video store and I asked her to rent Unbreakable, which for some reason we don’t own. She tried to rent it but it turned out to be broken, or gummed up, or damaged in some manner that prevented the clerk from renting it to her. I’ll have to look for a cheap copy on eBay.

I know a lot of people were so bothered by the flaws and clichés in Signs, and I agree that there are plenty, but that doesn’t bother me from enjoying it all the same. The only thing that consistently bugs me about M. Night’s movies is his casting himself in them. He is very recognizable and seeing him always disrupts my viewing enjoyment.

What are you going to do? You take the good, you take the bad…

The Young and the Hopeless...

I love people but I guess I’ve always been a bit of a loner.

Three of my childhood aspirations included living in a lighthouse, working at a polar weather station, and serving a life sentence in prison.

No fooling.

The prison thing came mostly from my love affair with the movie The Birdman of Alcatraz (Burt Lancaster has always been one of my all time favorite movie stars) and my misguided notion that all prisoners are allowed their own private cells, wherein they can write, read, and draw all day long, and still have plenty of time to pursue hobbies like avian medicine without the fear of anal rape. Sure, the guards would be tough and rough around the edges for the first week or so, but pretty soon they’d see that I was an okay guy and they would bring me old National Geographic magazines from home, and would always look away when I had to use the toilet. I also somehow got it in my head that when you were in prison they gave you all the cigarettes you wanted for free. I didn’t smoke, but the idea of getting all the smokes you wanted by simply asking was darn appealing. I saw other movies set in prisons where the inmates had to work making license plates, breaking rocks, and doing the laundry, and they lived with sometimes four people in a single cell. I figured you could request the type of prison you were interested in at the time of sentencing. As it turned out I somehow avoided a life of crime and never spent any time behind bars, but I’m still pretty young, so you never know. Plus, reading Stephen King’s Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption put some ideas in my head, so if I absolutely have to work some sort of job behind bars, I’ll sign to work in the library or write a column for the prison newspaper.

I’ve never spent any significant time at an arctic weather station, so living and working at one was probably greatly romanticized by the movies. Two films that spring to mind are The Thing and Ice Station Zebra. Of course you had to dress warmly and you probably needed to drink plenty of hot coffee, but life didn’t seem too awful. Once every hour or so you probably needed to check the outside temperature and wind speed, and make sure there was enough gasoline in the electric generator, but other than that you were on your own to read, draw, or write a couple of novels a week, if you wanted to. There would probably be a few other people working at the station with you, but they would more than likely keep to themselves. Plus, if everyone was feeling a little social there was always a recreation area that had a jukebox and a pool table. Because it was a government job there would probably be free cigarettes and all the soda you could drink.

I never saw any movies set in a lighthouse or read any significant books, but they always looked so damned cool that I wanted to live in one. I’m sure that at some point during their crime-fighting career, the Hardy Boys squared off against some criminal types in a lighthouse, so maybe that’s what put it in my mind. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I especially wanted to live inside the lighthouse. I could be quite happy in a small cottage directly adjacent to it. So after a long day I could climb the spiral stairs up to the top and smoke a cigar and drink a Dad’s root beer while watching the sunset.

In the schools today they have therapists available for the kids to talk to. I think this is a great idea and I’m glad my tax dollars are going toward something so worthwhile. I wonder if I’d had someone to talk to when I was young, if I would have told them about my dreams of being left alone, and if they would have taken any action. I clearly had some issues back then that have followed me into adulthood. If some of these issues had been addressed back then and maybe nipped in the bud, who knows how different my life would be today.

Perhaps I could have been saved from my dysfunctional childhood. Or perhaps I should quit lamenting about what coulda/shoulda/woulda and make some changes starting today.

Perhaps.

That's just super...

While I’ve been waiting for my cracked ribs to heal I’ve been watching television off and on and have caught big chunks of the Ken Burns documentary “Look, Up in the Sky: The Amazing Story of Superman” playing on A&E. It’s really quite good. I guess there’s a longer DVD version available for sale that has a bunch of extras (and if there’s one thing we likes is our extras).

The documentary is narrated by Kevin Spacey and touches on the up coming movie every once in a while, but it’s not a crass commercial. There are plenty of good interviews and info that I was not aware of concerning the many incarnations of Supes in print and on film.

If you get a chance, check it out.

Graduating levels of excitement...

After my family moved from the south side of Chicago out to the suburbs, I had to change grade schools. I had been attending Edgar Allen Poe grade school, and my new school was called Sunnybrook. This troubled me because for as long as I could remember we had a copy of the book Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm in the living room bookcase. It was an oversized book and the cover always annoyed me. It was a painting of an eleven or twelve-year-old girl, dressed in a blue gingham dress and bonnet, perched on the seat of a horse-drawn surrey, complete with a fringed canopy.

I’m assuming that the painting was of Rebecca, and that she was on her way, like a smug little Miss Smartypants, to Sunnybrook Farm. I’d read just about everything on that bookshelf a couple of times over, but I never opened Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. The cover just bugged me too much. All of this made going to Sunnybrook grade school that much more annoying. I was hoping that there was no connection between the book and the school. (I never found out for sure, but all these years later I assume the school got its name because of the brook that twisted around the back of the school, on the far side of the baseball/football/field hockey field.)

I graduated from Sunnybrook in 1973. The ceremony was held in the auditorium of the high school I would be attending after that summer. The graduation was the first ‘formal’ affair I’d attended since a big family wedding I attended when I was five or six, so I didn’t have any appropriate attire. My mom took me to Gatley’s Peoples Store on Michigan Avenue and bought me my first necktie and sport jacket. I was warned not to get either of them dirty because both were going straight back to the store the following day. I guess it made sense. We seldom dressed for dinner in our household.

The sport jacket was nondescript. The coolest thing about it was that it had inside chest pockets—the perfect spot to holster my pistol, if I’d had one. The tie intrigued me because it was Navy blue with an alternating pattern of the ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ symbols I’d seen during the opening credits of one of my favorite old television shows, Ben Casey. (The opening featured a series of five symbols being drawn on a blackboard. Man, Woman, Birth, Death + Infinity. A narrator identified the symbols) Long before I wore a necktie featuring them, I’d been interested in these symbols. Were they a part of some language of hieroglyphics that I would be required to learn to communicate with one day? I having a hard enough time with English and now they’re going to be tossing something new at me? I had been seeing a lot of the ‘Woman’ symbol on the news and such, because this was a point when there was a lot of women’s rights speeches being spoken and bra burning going on. As often as I saw the ‘Woman’ sign, I still tended to get it mixed up with the symbol for ‘Man.’ They were both basically circles with extra parts added on. I finally figured out the way to remember them based on the added on parts. The ‘Woman’ symbol had a plus sign attached to the bottom of it because women wanted to be added to stuff (?) and the ‘Man’ symbol had an arrow sticking out of the upper right side of it that sort of looked like a stubby penis at half-salute.

I was stylin’ at my graduation, with my bad self dressed in my sport coat and tie that had these semi-racy symbols on them. I had a full head of hair back then and during the fuss of getting ready for the occasion my dad had forgotten to take me to the barber to get a trim. My mom compensated by styling my hair with a variety of brushes, combs and garden rakes, and then sealing the deal with a half can of her Hair-Net hair spray. I accepted my eighth grade diploma looking fairly dashing. I recall a number of girls who I’d schlumped past in the halls each day for years doing a double take at the sight of me. The coolest thing about the helmet of hair that my mother had fashioned for me was that it was just that, a helmet. It was an inert mass. I could hold it with both hands and it felt rock solid. Not a single strand was going anywhere. As the evening wore on, I believe we went out to dinner afterwards, I continued to fidget with it, producing oddly satisfying crunchy sounds when enough force was exerted on it.

Fun times indeed. And now, some thirty-three years later my daughter Dakota is graduating from grade school. For a variety of reasons, some of them undoubtedly very good, her school is not having a graduation ceremony. Instead, they held a dance and are treating the students to a variety of fun events during the last week of school.

She looked astonishing beautiful in her dress for the dance. She got the royal treatment to help her get ready, including manicure, pedicure, spray-on-tan (yes, we do still live in sunny California, but who has time to go to the beach and do it the natural way?) and hair styling.

Here are some pre-dance photos of my stunning daughter with Lucky (the guard dog sheep), her best friend Selena, and her fadda.

Long time no post...

I've been under the weather lately (I should probably go inside, right? To get out from under the weather?) and trying to get some work done, so I haven't done my usual post a day. I need to catch up.
Emily Post, natch.

The Saturday Evening Post, artist unknown to my uneducated brain.

The Ohafia Post

And of course the Post-It Pet

There. Now I'm all caught up.

Concealed weapons of destruction…

It’s little wonder that America is one of the most gun-lovin’ nations on the planet. When you walk around feeling powerless and impotent, the notion of holding a device in the palm of your hand that's capable of blowing a hole in a wall or snuffing out a human life with just a gentle tug on a trigger is intoxicating.

More bullets are fired during your average Hollywood blockbuster than over the course of a small war. There must be someone on the movie set whose only job is to sweep up the brass shell casings after a scene.

Guns were a big part of my entertainment diet as a child, only it seemed like fewer bullets were fired. Perhaps people used to be better shots.

On television shows like Mission: IMPOSSIBLE, Mannix, The Wild Wild West, Secret Agent Man, and Cannon, both the good guys and the bad carried small caliber handguns, and fired one or two shots at most. And this was back before the days of jamming a pistol in your belt, which I think Mel Gibson made really popular in his Lethal Weapon movies. Back in the day (the 1960s and 70s) real men carried their guns in shoulder holsters.

Toy manufactures back then really missed the boat. Western six-gun holsters were a dime a dozen in the toy store but I never saw secret agent-themed toy gun shoulder holsters. I SO would have gotten one (and this has nothing to do with the fact that most of the toy six-gun belts out there wouldn’t buckle around my tubby ten-year-old belly).

My mother never did a lot of really cool things for me, but one of them that she did do involved my desire for a shoulder holster to hold my arsenal toy guns.

I grew up in Chicago where during the winter months the term ‘wind chill factor’ was used regularly in talking about the temperature. Because it was so damn cold during the winters and the furnace could only do so much, it was common to wear a robe and slippers whilst in your ‘jammies. (One year my daughter, who has spent most of her thirteen years here in sunny California, received a fuzzy warm robe as a Christmas present from a friend of the family. She didn’t understand the purpose of the garment.) I had a favorite blue robe that I wore until it was a frayed rag, but when it was still in pretty good shape I somehow convinced my mother to sew a pocket inside the right chest area. It was important that it was on the right side, because I’m left handed. When she was done I could secretly stash my pistol of choice in it, and draw it at a moment’s notice.

I was a happy little boy. That gun holster saw a lot of action during covert missions that I’m not at liberty to discuss because of national security. When I wasn’t packing heat the hidden pocket was a great place to stash candy bars from the prying eyes of my older sisters.

If I was a kid today I’d probably be bugging my mom to sew me a back sling for a rocket launcher or my BFG.

Today's joke...

A mushroom walks into a bar. The bartender looks at him and says, "Hey buddy, we don't serve your kind here, get out."

Mushroom looks at the bartender and say, "Why not? I'm a fungi"

LOST rocks my world...

The ending bit of the finale almost looked like a commercial. I wonder if anyone tuned out? If they did they missed a couple of French/Russian/Whatever scientists on one of the poles. Here's a shot of one of the scientists. Bad Twin indeed. What a great show.

Name the movie...

I don't really like this film all that much, but I've always been a fan of this little nugget of dialogue from it. Can you name the movie?

“They have a wide selection.”
“I can’t eat fish.”
“You can eat anything you want, Duane. You can eat meat and potatoes.”
“I couldn’t go anywhere I was expected to eat fish.”
“They got beans.”
“I can’t eat beans. I’d come out in a rash if I eat beans.”
“Look, Duane, they have a wide selection.”
“I think I’ll try the fish.”

Tiger's big secret...

One of our oldest cats, Tiger is his name, always seems to be unusually concerned with the exhaust fan in our upstairs bathroom.

From all appearances it’s identical to the one in the downstairs bathroom and the one in the laundry room, which also doubles as the cat’s bathroom.

The two downstairs fans don’t seem to bother him a whit, but whenever he’s in the upstairs bathroom and I turn on the fan, he turns his attention to it with unusual intensity.

(The reason I have occasion to see him in both bathrooms on a semi-regular basis is because Tiger is a bit fickle when it comes to his drinking water. Unlike our mentally deficient Dusty, who is happy to slurp out of the toilet or from pans and bowls soaking in the kitchen sink, or the rest of the gang who are content to drink from the bowl of fresh water we keep near their food bowls, Tiger will only drink from a coffee cup of water left on either of the bathroom counters. He’ll lap it up until the level gets too low for his head to fit in, then he’ll dip his paw in and lick the water off of it. I’m sure he’s aware of the big bowl of fresh water next to his food, but he’s simply not interested.)

So I’m a little concerned over Tiger’s concern over the upstairs bathroom exhaust fan. Do his extra sensitive cat ears detect something that my potato filled human ears is missing? Is there an electrical defect and he’s hearing the sputtering of a sparking short circuit that will result in a fire that will consume me and everyone I love?

He’s not talking, and unless Matt Murdock drops by for a wine tasting party in the near future, I guess I’ll have to haul the step stool upstairs and investigate. I’ll keep you posted, because everyone loves to be posted, right?

First time for everything...

This is the first Frank Frazetta piece of artwork that I fell in love with. Er. It's the first one that I became very much fond of. When I was first collecting comics in the early 70s I seem to recall some comic shop or distributor using this piece of art for an ad. That's when I first saw it. I didn't know who this guy was as the time but I knew he could draw. I came across it in a folder of artwork on my computer and got a little tingle of what I felt when I first saw it.

Just thought I'd share.

More cheese please…

The Encore channel is currently showing one of my weird guilty pleasure movies. It’s a film that I hate but that I always stop to watch, when it’s on.

Released in 1980, Xanadu was a critical and commercial flop that has survived over the years in a semi-cult status. Part of this is due to the soundtrack, which was a big hit then and still sells today.

Olivia Newton-John (my secret girlfriend) stars as a muse to a troubled painter. Gene Kelly stars as a rich old musician that wants to open a disco. The movie is set in a part of southern California where everyone wears colorful suspenders and gets around by roller-skating. The storyline is so full of cheese it’s tough not to gag while you watch it.

Half the soundtrack is provided by Olivia Newton-John, and the other is by Jeff Lynne and ELO.

The movie is a horribly flawed hunk of trash but it’s also a brilliant slice of the late 1970s.

It’s really horrible but I love it.

Losing my religion…

Earlier this morning I was a temporary prisoner in my own house.

I was eating some waffles and watching Live with Regis and Kelly (Regis has been slowly slipping into dementia over the past year and it’s sort of interesting to watch the progression) when there was a rap on the door. We live in sort of a quiet neighborhood where everyone mostly keeps to themselves, so if someone is at the door it’s either UPS or FedEx dropping off or a religious zealot of some type.

I snuck a look through the peephole and saw a couple of gentlemen standing on the stoop. They were senior citizens and their finery included ties and blazers last seen in the 1976 Montgomery Ward catalog. I pegged them as either Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormans.

I didn’t bother answering the door because I didn’t want to make the effort to shoo them away in a polite fashion. Doing what they do I figure these people must get a lot of doors slammed in their faces. I could never do that. I’m pretty good at shutting them down before they get too far into their spiel, but wordlessly slamming the door is just too rude for me. So instead, I went back to the couch and silently waited for them to leave. They knew I was in there. The windows behind the couch were open and anyone walking up the path to our door can clearly hear if the television is on, but after knocking a second time they gave up and went next door.

What sort of possible success rate can people who go door-to-door spreading the good news about their religion have? It was 9:30 on a weekday morning, so for the most part the only people they’re going to find at home are housewives, waffle-eating freelance writers, and retirees.

Let’s say they visit a hundred homes. And out of that number, let’s say that ten percent have people actually at home. Then, figure that only five percent have people home who will actually answer the door. So, out of knocking on a hundred doors, they only see five people. I’d be willing to bet that at least two of them slam or quickly shut the door as soon as they recognize the nature of the caller. Perhaps another two listen to their introductory spiel and tell them thanks-but-no- thanks, and take a copy of Awake magazine in case they want to learn more. That leaves one person who may invite them in and listen to what they have to say. That one soul, who is either genuinely interested in what the door-to-door zealots have to say, or lack the intestinal fortitude to either slam the door in their faces or tell them thanks-but-no-thanks.

Underneath their plaid blazers, the two fellows that knocked on my door this morning must have a pretty thick skin to survive that kind of rejection rate. Or maybe they just don’t care about the slammed doors and they do it for the exercise. Or maybe they’re in it for the chicks. The Jehovah’ Witnesses is a pretty massive organization and they might have some swinging singles nights. (I remember reading once that their monthly Awake magazine has a print run in the millions.) So who knows? Maybe walking door-to-door spreading the good news genuinely makes these people happy. I don’t know.

I’m a fallen Catholic and don’t have much interest in any organized religions—some seem relatively benign and harmless while others promote ugliness and bitter hatred toward non-believers—but whatever gets you through the night, I guess.

Rental Report

This past Sunday, after going out and seeing Poseidon, Dakota and I wanted to visit GameCrazy to swap out some video games. While we were scouring the shelves Val went next door into Hollywood Video and rented some DVDs.

I didn’t see what she had rented until we were in the car. Her choices were diverse, to say the least. She had picked out:

A History of Violence—I loved it in the theater and it’s going to be fun to watch again knowing what to look for that I might have missed the first time.

Munich—I really don’t know what to expect, but Spielberg has made a good movie or two in his time, and I like Eric Bana a lot.

The New World—Again, I don’t know what to expect. A lot of critics loved it. Colin Farrell is always fun, as is Christian Bale.

Match Point—Woody Allen’s best film since a long time. I dunno. I haven’t really liked anything he’s done since What’s Up Tiger Lily.

Hoodwinked—WTF?!?! My first thought was that they put it in her bag by mistake. Valarie loves a good animated movie as much as I do, but this one was in and out of the theaters in a couple of weeks and the way they sold it I was pretty sure it was a stinker. I’d never heard of the writer director team (Cory and Todd Edwards) and I wasn’t even sure what studio had produced it.

Last night Valarie suggested we give it a try. Why not? The voice cast had some fun members, including the always-endearing Patrick Warburton.

It turned out to be a bucket of fun. It was clever, chock full of funny stuff, and there was nary a dead spot. The design of the animal characters was great, but unfortunately the human characters were nauseating to look at. I wanted to scream every time there was a close up of Red (voiced with a lot of charm by Anne Hathaway).

I hope Hoodwinked gains an audience once it starts playing on the movie channels. I think it deserves a second chance. Once the kids start watching it the parents might start paying attention.

As Seen On TV...

Those of you who know me are well aware that I’m a man who is riddled with weaknesses and guilty pleasures.

Most of these are somewhat socially acceptable and legal in states with open-minded legislature. For starters, I love me my robots. I don’t care if they’re made out of machined metal and state-of-the art electronics, or uncooked macaroni glued onto toilet paper tubes. If I see it I need to buy it. If I can’t buy it I need to covet it.

I also have a big weakness for science fiction movies and books, coincidentally, many of which contain robots. Quality is not a hugely mitigating factor. Old and clunky can be as equally enjoyable as sleek and modern.

The list of my other guilty pleasures isn’t especially long or twisted, but one of them in particular that I wanted to talk about today is my love affair with reality television.

The term ‘reality television’ is a bit of a misnomer in this particular case, because while my family and I do enjoy ‘reality’ shows like Survivor, Amazing Race, Miami Ink, American Chopper and Deal or no Deal, the specific aspect of reality broadcasting that I’m talking about falls into the category of ‘Caught on Tape’.

My love affair with this type of show began in the 1980s and was fostered by television shows like Dick Clark’s Bloopers, Blunders & Practical Jokes and America’s Funniest Home Videos. Video footage of local newscasters doing puff pieces at a local animal shelter and then getting attacked by the cats or dogs up for adoption ticked my funny bone. Home video of a toddler experiencing his first snowfall and then accidentally falling head first into a six-foot snowdrift would leave me chuckling for days.

The video footage for these types of shows became more readily available with the development of cheaper, higher quality camcorders. Now when we see some mook lighting a single sparkler that accidentally ignites his entire crate of 4th of July fireworks, the images we see are more detailed and respondent.

Another boon to the area of ‘caught on tape’ video programming arrived when local and state police departments began installing forward looking video cameras in their police cruisers and wiring the police for sound. What great fun this footage was. I think the advent of this development lead to the creation of the delightful television show COPS.

COPS is one of those shows that I never seek out, but always tends to be there when I’m in the mood. When I’m home alone and in a vegetative state in front of the television, it’s an old friend to hang out with for a while. I don’t think I’ve ever made a point of hunting it down and trying to find new episodes. Watching an episode of COPS always leaves you, even if it’s on a subconscious level, feeling pretty good about yourself. We all have our share of problems, but at least we’re not as bad off as those poor slobs. You know, “There but for the grace of (insert your deity of choice) goes me.”

I just finished watching an episode of TLC’s Sports Disasters. It featured speedboat racers skipping a little too high off waves, catching some air and then fragmenting into thousands of pieces. Bullfighters getting caught on the horns of a dilemma and being bashed around the arena. Daredevils racing stock cars, snowmobiles, motorcycles, and whatever else they could put a motor into and subsequently bashing into each other until flames erupted and fire licked at the wreckage.

Most of the segments they show leave me wincing and wondering how much pain they were in the next day, but some of the segments scare the beejeebez out of me. These always tend to involve major sporting events in places like Bolivia or Madrid or Ireland, and the featured sport is more often than not soccer.

I haven’t figured out if South American soccer fans are really that dedicated to the sport and would do anything to have their team win, or if they crazy bastards are simply looking for a fight.

If a referee makes a questionable call he is a walking target and it’s only a matter of time before someone caves in his skull with a soda bottle, a brick, or anything else that can be thrown. Either referees earn a ton of money or they’re gluttons for punishment. Either way, they always seem to get the crap kicked out of them.

As bad as referee bashing can get, it’s nothing compared to a player from one team fouling a player on another team (either innocently or intentionally—it doesn’t seem to matter). The first thing that happens is the players throw down and tear into each other, and then the stands empty out and the rabid fans start stomping on team members and each other.

As the fans get whipped up into a frenzy they start ripping the stadium seating and fence posts out of the concrete to be used as weapons. If the riot police, who seem to always be in attendance at these events, manage to separate the teams from the crowd and empty the arena, they then have to deal with the angry mob that flares up outside the stadium. Cars get overturned, businesses burned, and people punching and stomping each other to pulp. The cops who work these events must have to buy their teargas in massive quantities.

The whole idea of crowd mentality has always scared me. I was working down in LA when there was a quasi riot outside the Staples Center. I was watching it live on television, miles away, from the safety of my hotel room, but what if I just happened to be walking past the stadium that night and suddenly found myself getting stomped for no other crime than being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or what if I owned one of the businesses that got literally torn to shreds?

I think my biggest fear is that I will one day find myself caught up in a crowd that gets out of control for some reason. There’s unbelievable strength in numbers and inhibitions seem to fly out the window when you’re a part of a mob.

If my worst fears ever do come true, someone will most likely have a camcorder rolling and I’ll probably wind up on the news. Keep your eyes out for me.

It ended with a fizzle rather than a bang…

The battle of the kidney stone was an epic event that took place on a miniature scale. The important thing is that it's over.

Much to the dismay of my physician I have no trophy to show for my efforts. During the course of the battle to force the stone out (think Cecil B. DeMille meets Michael Bay), my manly urethra crushed it into submission, and into a pile of grit.

What a stupid waste of two weeks of my life. I don’t know which was worse, the pain or the painkillers. Both turned me into an unbearable ass and a miserable grouch.

Now that the veil has been lifted I have to stumble back into my life.

Things have changed since I was last here.

Your Dork for the day...

If you enjoy reading or writing Young Adult novels or know someone who does, I've got a good one for you. It's also a good read for anyone who likes/hates/or feels indifferent about the classic teenage angst fest, Catcher in the Rye.

The book is called King Dork and it's the first effort by a Bay Area musician (the Mr. T Experience) named Frank Portman.

It's a great read but not perfect. The last few chapters get a bit soggy and the main characters are high school freshmen who are a bit too wise for fourteen--especially when it comes to knowledge of 70s punk rock--but I still enjoyed the heck out of it (so there is no more heck remaining).

Waiter, my reality check, please!

I must type this with frenzied fingers, so please pardon my typos and grammar blunders.

As some of you may know, I’ve spent the past two weeks drugged up and waiting for a kidney stone the size of a manhole cover to drop out of my bladder. This amount of free time, coupled with the steady influx of narcotics into my system, has allowed me to get a glimpse (albeit a fleeting glimpse) of the big picture. The really, really big picture that people are always talking about.

The truth of the matter, (and I’m talking about the really big truth here—so very big that you might want to sit down on a carpeted floor and perhaps call your priest, pastor or other spiritual advisor and put them on hold) is that the world as we know it (or the momentary plane of reality that we currently occupy) is centered in the mind of my next door neighbor’s dog.

This theory first came to me four or five days ago and since then I’ve filled nearly a dozen spiral-bound notebooks with observations. My findings are rock solid.

Everyone knows that the universe is a multi-layered, multi-dimensional smorgasbord of alternate realities. There are trillions of billions of existences out there, and most theoretical physicists towed the company line that each of us created our own worlds based solely on our own select observations.

But that’s wrong. For some unconceivable reason our reality is hinged on the perceptions of Trixie, my neighbor’s German Shepard mix.

The reason I have to write this so quickly is because she’s sleeping and things tend to stay put while she naps. But once she wakes, anything goes.

Because of the steady influx of drugs into my system, coupled with altered sleep patterns, it seems that I’m able to tune into the changes that the world undergoes in the blink of her eye. Things as we know them are torn down and rebuilt so fast we never know the difference. This includes massive false memories, which is part of the reason we never suspect the changes. Earlier this morning I was a sous-chef in a small bistro in Spokane, and before that I was a dust mote in the library in Alexandria. I’m pretty certain that I started the day as a question mark in a joke on the Humor in Uniform page of the September 1974 issue of Reader’s Digest.

And now I find that I’m a fat, bald, occasionally employed writer with a delightful wife and daughter, living on California’s Central Coast. With the exception of the kidney stone (which can only be compared to having a length of rusty barbed wire yanked down through your urinary tract). this is pretty nice and I could get used to it, but I’m sure that as soon as Trixie wakes reality will fluctuate and in a flash I’ll be a rusted 9 volt battery in the Staten Island landfill, and then a strip of Velcro on a sexy maid Halloween costume, and then a secretly gay gardener on an agricultural space ship orbiting Neptune, and so on and so on.

I like the way things are right now and I think I know a way to keep them the way they are. It’s risky but I’m going to give it a go.

I think the only way to keep things status quo is to go outside, sneak up on Trixie, and hit her on the head with a hammer. I figure that way we’ll stay locked into this steam of reality.

If the next time we meet it’s the 13th century and we’re a couple of plankton stuck in the back of the throat of a Bowhead Whale, I guess it would be safe to say I failed.

Wish me luck!

It's impossible not to enjoy this mission...

Valarie, my kidney stone and I saw Mission: IMPOSSIBLE 3 this weekend. I enjoyed the heck out of it. I was jacked up on Percocet, but I think I would have enjoyed it without the drugs. I would say that it's the better of the three Mission: IMPOSSIBLE movies, but the first two are so lacking in what I enjoy in a movie that they don't really exist to me. J.J. Abrams shows his television roots every now and then, but they guy knows what to do with a big budget. I hope the rumors are true and that he's doing a new Star Trek movie set prior to the original series.

Tom Cruise may be a stooge, but he helps deliver an enjoyable movie.

Hey! Keep the racket down!

So I go to my doctor today to talk about the red-hot fireplace poker that's been jammed into my side for the past two weeks (also known as my kidney stone) and not only do I not get cured, but I walk out of there with a bonus malady. They must have been having a special today and I didn't see the sign.

It turns out that I have tennis elbow. I thought you had to play in order to come down with said disease, but that's not the case. It's caused by a tendon that's tearing away from the bone a little bit, and it gets tender and inflamed and hurts. I'm a lefty but it's on my right arm. Go figure. Too much typing, the doctor tells me, or playing with my joystick (video gamers are prone to it). Whatever. In for a penny, blah, blah, blah.

Iron Man is money, baby!

According to the Hollywood trade papers, Jon Favreau has been signed to direct a live action Iron Man movie

I don't have a problem with this. I liked the first 83% of Elf and everything but the robots in Zathura. If Favreau gets his hands on a solid script I think he could go far with Iron Man.

I only have two big items on my wish list. First, I hope they don't waste the time, energy and screen time by telling an origin story. Second, at some point in the story Tony Stark/Iron Man needs to visit Nick Fury aboard a S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier.

Pa, the Beast has done caught the mange. You'd best take him out back and put him down 'fore Timmy gets home...

I intend to give the upcoming X-Men 3 movie a fair shake when it comes out, but earlier today I saw a still photo of the Beast with is shirt off and I thought for a moment that I was looking at someone's Halloween costume. His fur looks awful, like he's got a case of mange or some disease. It looks like he's got two types of fur. One type that's close to his skin and provides basic cover, and then there is a longer fringe that hangs down two or three inches longer than the first. Both levels look just plain wrong.

I made the Halloween costume connection because the fur looks like it's been spray painted with that temporary hair coloring you see for sale with the wigs and make-up. I kind of like what they did with his face and the hair on his head, but his body fur looks like it belongs in a high school play.

They should have called Peter Jackson and borrowed some leftover King Kong fur. That was some good looking fur.

I know the studio is in a rush to get this movie out before Superman, but it looks like maybe too many corners are being cut. Of course all will be forgiven if they sneak a Sentinel in it. All I ask is for Colossus and Wolverine to take down a sentinel with a fast-ball special, and they could do the rest of the film with sock puppets.

The Quartermass Xperiment a.k.a. The Creeping Unknown a.k.a. Some Scary Shit!

The kidney stone watch continues. As I wait for its passing I'm watching The Quartermass Xperiment (also sometimes known as The Creeping Unknown) on TCM.

I wasn't around back then, but I'm betting this British import had to be hands down the most frightning movie of 1955. It was filmed in black and white and there's such a feeling of ultra realisim that after a while you want to peel your own skin off and feed it to the dog.

I'm a big fan of all the Quatermass films (my favorite remains Quartermass and the Pit (a.k.a. for its US release as Five Million Years to Earth) but this one schare the beejeebes out of me the most.

I guess it's a good thing I don't have a dog.

I’ve felt better,,,

I’ve had a couple of kidney stones over the years but this is the first one that has come along with an infection. My doctor sez that kidney infections are sort of common with a stone. I was not aware of this fact.

The problem that I happen to have with infections that require medication to treat is that often the cure is sometimes worse than the ailment. I feel like I’ve had the flu for three or four months, followed by being run over by at least a dozen monster trucks. It’s frustrating because I don’t know if I’m feeling so bad because of the infection or the antibiotic.

Here are the possible side effects from the antibiotic: WARNINGS: All quinolones cause erosion of cartilage in weight-bearing joints. They may cause convulsions, increases intracranial pressure, toxic psychosis, CNS stimulation (i.e.nervousness, lightheadedness, confusion, hallucinations).Should not be used in anyone with seizure disorders, or cerebral arteriosclerosis. There have been deaths due to anaphylactic shock, and cardiovascular collapse. Also occurring are tingling, itching, facial swelling, and difficult breathing.

Then, added to the mix, I get periodic jabs in the side with a red-hot fireplace poker, which serves to remind me that I still have the original problem of the kidney stone.

All this has served to make me one grumpy individual. I wouldn’t want to be around me if I didn’t have to.

The doctor gave me a bottle of painkillers, but there’s a point where I know that I’ve overmedicated, but I’m still in pain. I guess the Percocet can only do so much. If I take more than I’m supposed to I get a killer headache and feel the urge to vomit.

Oh, and the icing on the cake is that this morning a couple of the cats were fighting like animals. Tiger, one of our oldest boys has been feeling a little under the weather. His nose has been wet to the point of dribbling drops of moisture and he’s been very distracted and unable to sit in one spot for too long. I think that the other cats have picked up on this and are pushing him around a little bit. This morning Dusty and Jack had him back up behind the television and there were a lot of ugly noises being made. No real attacking or blood or eyes ripped out and hanging by strands of muscle and nerve. Whenever the cats fight behind the television they somehow always manage to yank the power cord out from the wall. After shooing all the cats to their individual corners and cooling Jack and Dusty down I squeezed my thick arm between the DVD case and the television to put the plug back in place. I somehow didn’t notice that Tiger was still back there and he was still semi-agitated. He mistook my arm for a furless attacker and he reached out and clamped his teeth down on my hand and bit. He bit so hard that he couldn’t let go. This only made him angrier. I got his attention by bopping him on the head with a fat green Christmas candle that was behind the DVD case. He finally let go and I spent twenty minutes bleeding.

These past few days have not been my best.

I have a stone in my kidney a.k.a. a kidney stone...

The doctor tells me that it's just a little bit larger than a grain of rice. This photo demonstrates the size it feels like from my point of view.

Curse you, IMDB! Curse you to hell!

It happened again and you all know how much I hate when it happens!

I love watching movies on TMC. They’re uncut, no commercials, and letterboxed when at all possible. Plus, they play a lot of old timey classic movies from before I was born.

A film had just started playing and it’s a movie that I knew nothing about. It’s called Between Two Worlds and features an interesting cast that includes John Garfield (the Robert Blake of his time—or the other way around, I guess), Sydney Greenstreet, and Edmund Gwenn. The dialogue is snappy and it’s set on a boat. Count me in!

Temporary amnesia fogs my brain, because I really should know better by now, as I grab my trusty iBook and go to imdb.com to get the plot of the movie and try and figure out what I missed. The first thing I read, with no sign of a spoiler alert anywhere in sight, is the major plot twist to the movie. The big reveal.

Well, fuck-you-very-much, as we used to say in Wednesday afternoon catechism class.

I have no interest in watching the movie now. Perhaps another day, when the phenylalanine in my Diet Squirt has boiled the events of today from my mind.

Writing Comics = ?

I guess I’ve written four or five dozen comic books during my stay in comics. Not that many, compared to some writers. Some of the books were kind of crappy but a few of them were pretty damn good.

But it seems like the one comic that people always seem to connect me with is the Amazing Spider-Man Annual #20. People seem to really remember that issue and they have nothing but good to say about it. So it really kind of sucks that working on that book was one of the most horrific experiences of my life.

In the early 1980s I decided I wanted to write comic books. I had never written anything more ambitious than a grocery list, but Jim Shooter had announced in the back pages of Marvel Fanfare that Marvel Comics was looking for new talent. He said Marvel needed people to write, pencil and ink comic books. I knew that I couldn’t pencil or ink, but when Shooter reprinted a portion of a ‘Marvel style’ plot I had a funny kind of feeling that I could do something like that. How hard could it be?

I borrowed my friend Dale’s typewriter and pecked out three stories.

The first one featured Spider-Man fighting Electro in Chicago. It was an ambitious story that was packed with all sorts of action and it culminated with Electro being drawn into the power source of the television antennas atop the Sears tower in Chicago. In a flash Electro’s ‘essence’ is broadcast to every television in the Chicago land area. So whenever you turned your television to channel thirteen you’d see Electro. He’d be kind of like Max Headroom and he would swear at you, demand that you release him, and curse Spider-Man.

The second story featured Marvel’s CB-slingin’ mother-truckin’ superstar US1. If memory serves me, the character had a metal plate in his skull that enabled him to receive and broadcast CB radio transmissions. My story had something to do with US1 pulling his big rig into a small town where nothing is what it seems. Most of the houses and storefronts were props. It wasn’t a real town at all. I think I had some villain/villains taking advantage of lost travelers who happened to pull into the phony town. I have no idea if the bad guys ate the tourists or sold them into slavery. Whatever the deal way, US1 busted up the racket and used his CB skull radio to alert the authorities.

The third story I wrote puzzles me even to this day. It was crystal clear that Jim Shooter wanted to see stories featuring Marvel characters, but for some reason I wrote a story that featured Harry Harrison’s sci-fi hero, the Stainless Steel Rat. The story took place in the spaceport of some distant planet and there was lots of action in the exhaust tubes from a nearby launch pad. It was a pretty good story. I don’t know what possessed me to write it and send it to Marvel. But I did.

I sent the bundle of goodness off with a zingy cover letter and tried my best to forget about it. I was working at the time as a graphic artist. During the day I did paste-up and darkroom duties at a print shop, and at night I did package design for Sears—mostly kitchen and bathroom goods.

Four or five weeks later my SASE arrived back from New York. Jim Shooter (or some editor posing as him) wrote a bunch of encouraging notes on my Spider-Man and US1 stories. The only note written on the Stainless Steel Rat adaptation was GOOD—BUT WHY DID YOU WRITE THIS?

The encouraging notes on my other two stories from Shooter, or whatever editor or intern wrote them (when I worked at Stan Lee Media I wrote enough notes and letters in Stan’s “voice” to know that what you see is seldom what you get) piqued my interest enough to sit down and write a few more stories. More encouraging notes came back.

Somehow during all this I decided that I really wanted to be a comic book writer and it had to be at Marvel. Subconsciously I had created a reasonably unrealistic goal for myself. I had decided deep down that WRITING FOR MARVEL = SUCCESS + HAPPINESS. Nothing less would do.

By this time a local comic book shop owner had introduced me to Tom Morgan, a talented penciller and inker who was also trying to break into Marvel from the friendly confines of the Midwest.

###################################

Flash cut to a couple of years later and Tom and I have moved to the east coast. We’re living in Bridgeport, Connecticut. New York City and Marvel are only a quick train ride away.

We’ve done our share of networking and have befriended a handful of comic professionals. We get out first break doing comics for a new company called Spectrum Comics. We become so involved with Spectrum that we move to the town where they are located. An investor in the company has just bought a big house in Bristol, which is roughly in the center of Connecticut, and we are lured there by the prospect of free housing. New York and Marvel are still reachable; it’s just a longer train ride.

Tom Morgan finally gets a toehold into Marvel. Mike Carlin hires him to do draw a Dazzler inventory story. I accompany Tom when he goes to Marvel, just in case an editor screams out that he needs a writer.

Mike Carlin and his assistant Mike Higgins are saints. They know we are scrambling to get anything that we can. I pitch some Dazzler stories to Carlin, which are atrocious. He compliments me on how neat my typing and pages are.

Things were starting to get ugly where Tom and I were living. Spectrum was suffering a meltdown and it was getting uncomfortable living in the basement of one of the investors. But we were broke and pretty much out of options.

Good fortune came to the rescue. A few years earlier, when I was still living in the Midwest, I was in a pinball arcade with a friend of mine, Rob Dahlberg. The place was dark, lit only by the pinball machines and video games. I tripped over a power cord that was snaked out where it shouldn’t have been. I fall face first into pinball game, I think it was 8-Ball Deluxe, and wound up on the floor not able to feel my hands or feet. Cool, eh?

After the whiplash wears off everything is back to normal. My doctor, who was trying to soak the insurance company for every penny he could, kept me in the hospital for a week. I was sharing the room with a guy who got totally wrecked in a motorcycle accident. He was on a morphine drip and we spent our days watching soap operas. I read a lot of Phillip K. Dick.

So after I get out of the hospital I go to the arcade owner and ask him to pay for my hospital bill and pony up for my lost wages. I didn’t go after any pain or suffering because my insurance had already paid the hospital, so if I could soak him for that I’d call it even. But for reasons I don’t understand, the guy turns into a complete dick. He says he’s not giving me penny one. I’m flabbergasted for the first time in my life. He tells me that if I want anything from him I’m going to have to take him and his insurance company to court. Can you believe that?

I lawyered up with a local firm who sent me to a bigger outfit in Chicago. Lots of paperwork and several months later I get called into give my deposition. I’m living on the east coast at the time but the deposition date coincides with a wedding I have to attend, so I make the train ride back. My friend Rob and I show up at a really fancy lawyer’s office to give our story. My lawyer coaches me and I tell it like it happened. The other guy’s lawyer asks some questions and I can tell by the look on his face that he thinks I’m some sort of scam artist. I finish up and then it’s my friend Rob’s turn. He has to give his statement because he was present when it happened. The other guy’s lawyer is snotty with Rob as well. Rob tells them the same story I just told. For the record they get Rob’s name and address and occupation. That’s when the other shoe drops. Rob informs them that he is an Illinois State Police Trooper. The snotty lawyer visibly pales. He may have even blanched. Everyone in the room that is with the opposing lawyer quickly closes up things. That’s all for now, boys.

Outside on the street my lawyer hoots with delight. And why wouldn’t he? A cop as my witness? He tells me that we’ll certainly win in court, but that the insurance company for the arcade with offer cash settlement a day or two before the actual court date. Good for me, I think, until I learn that the courts are so clogged up that my case is scheduled for eleven or twelve months from then.

I return to the east coast as poor as when I left, and more or less forget about the matter. There are comic stories to write and landlords to dodge and such.

So there Tom and I are living in this fellow’s basement. We don’t want to be there and we’re getting the distinct impression that he doesn’t want us there either.

Then I hear from my lawyer. The case is scheduled or on the docket or some such thing and the insurance company wants to settle. The problem is that I am suffering no ill effects from the incident. I’m not paralyzed or stuck in a wheelchair. What I suffered is known as a soft tissue injury. No broken bones. No apparent damage. They want to settle for eight or nine thousand dollars. The lawyer tells me that if I limp into the courtroom and tell tales of suffering that I might get more from the judge, but the lawyer says he doesn’t think it’s worth the effort. Besides, I’m currently a thousand miles away without a dime to spare for transportation to Chicago. I take the settlement and after the lawyer takes his chunk and assorted bills and liens are taken out, and I share a little with my family, I wind up with a couple thousand bucks, which is exactly the amount of money Tom and I need to get out of uncomfortable guy’s basement.

I don’t know the reasoning for us staying in Bristol. We really should have returned to Bridgeport or closer to New York, but we didn’t. We stayed in Bristol. Tom and I found a woman who owned an apartment building and we charmed her into letting us live there. Neither of us had any sort of steady income. I think we wound up cinching the deal by paying a couple of months rent in advance.

Through all this mess Tom continued to hone his skills and he was starting to get some real notice. I couldn’t get arrested, but I really wasn’t doing my best work at the time.

Then Mike Carlin came through again. He let me know that Jim Owsley had taken over the Spider-Man books and was looking for some new talent.

I pestered Owsley politely but persistently. I went up to Marvel to meet with him for what I guess turned out to be pitch meetings. Other writers would be in his office and the stories they were pitching were insanely horrible. Owsley liked some of my ideas and I would go back to Bristol to flesh them out. He said my stories had good nuts and bolts and that I should really work for DC.

Around this time Tom Morgan hit gold. John Romita senior offered him a staff job in the art department doing corrections and such. Tom and I both knew that it would be insane for him to turn down the job because he lived almost three hours away. He found someone in New York who needed a roommate so we parted ways. I missed him but I was very happy for him. So there I was alone in this massive two-bedroom apartment, two months late with the rent.

I hit on an idea that Owsley really liked. It involved Spider-man battling a mega-terrorist who builds a mega bomb that is capable of leveling Manhattan. The terrorist triggers the bomb with his retina pattern and in twelve hours New York will be no more. Spider-man does something stupid and accidentally kills the guy and burns his face off. Now there’s no way to deactivate the bomb. Spidey does his research and learns that the reclusive terrorist was last seen in public when he was just a boy. Spidey convinces Ben Grimm to let him use Dr. Doom’s time machine so he can go back in time and grab the infant terrorist-to-be long enough to scan his retina pattern so he can come back to the future to deactivate the bomb.

There was more, but that was the gist of it.

Owsley suggested that we could really soup up the story by incorporating the character of Iron Man 2020. Owsley had been Larry Hama’s assistant editor when they produced the Machine Man series that introduced Iron Man 2020. Owsley figured that since we were playing with traveling around in time, we could incorporate the character of Arno Stark, the man inside the armor. Maybe figure out what turned him into the extreme badass he was in the Machine Man series. Anybody who knows me knows I love Iron Man, so I jumped at the chance. The only problem was that I was running out of time. And money. And to make matters worse, Owsley was having troubles of his own, so he’d tell me to come in for a meeting, which was an all day affair for me and twenty or thirty bucks that I didn’t have for a train trip, and I’d get there and he would tell me that he was too busy to meet with me, that I should come back tomorrow. Most of the time I could count on Mike Carlin or Higgins to come out and escort me into the bullpen. I would hang out in their office until Owsley’s door would open and then I’d try to talk to him.

Another problem was that the telephone company finally got wise that I wasn’t going to be paying my bill anytime soon, so they saw fit to shut off my service. This meant that I had to go to the Bristol library and call Owsley from the pay phone. He would want to give me extensive notes on my story and I would be popping in quarters until I’d run out. Then I’d have to ask him to call me back. Of course there was nowhere to sit or nothing to set my notebook on. It was not an optimal situation.

Near the end Owsley said that enough was enough and we needed to put this story to bed. Finish it up and get it drawn. I was all for that. We set up a meeting. I was poorer than poor at this time. The only thing I owned that was worth anything was an old Honda 350 motorcycle I had bought at a yard sale for fifty bucks. I used it to scoot around and run errands. It leaked gasoline but the guy I bought it from told me where to buy the gasket set to fix it. I bought the gasket but I never had the tools to do the task and I wound up returning the gasket set to get the cash in order to buy Tom Morgan a birthday cake. Pathetic, right? The cake had green frosting on it and I had them write HULKY BIRTHDAY on it. I left it in the car when I was running an errand and some bastard actually stole it right off the front seat. Can you believe that? Sure, I left the car unlocked, but still, who steals a birthday cake? Honestly!

So anyway, all I had that was worth anything was the motorcycle. I still had Tom’s car, which he couldn’t use in New York, but he would have been sore it I’d sold it. So I go to the local motorcycle shop in town and they laugh at me when I ask if anyone wants to buy my ride. Finally I convince a mechanic to buy it. He says his grandmother wants to learn to ride. I get forty bucks out of him and a ride home. I have just enough to get into Manhattan. I show up and Owsley says he’s too busy to see me.

I’m almost in tears. I think one of the Mikes happened to walk by and they let me into the bullpen. Inside his office Mike Carlin is furious. He is such a nice guy he refuses to see me treated this way. He goes over to Owsley’s office and tears into him.

Things get blurry from her on. Owsley is having some serious problems and realizes that I’m getting screwed and says he’ll find the time for me. I recall spending a night or two at Tom Morgan’s apartment. His roommate is a royal prick. I think I spent a few nights there, typing away revisions on the roommate’s typewriter. What I’m writing is crap. The story has been so twisted around that nothing makes sense. I meet with Owsley and he plays with a Transformer toy that turns into a gun. He keeps pointing it at me. I don’t know if he’s doing this consciously. He’s put red film over the overhead lights so the office takes on the appearance of some sort of fiery den. I meet and talk with him but he’s not focused on the story. I’m so broke and busted that I’m far from focused myself.

I return home to Bristol, Connecticut a wreck. The mailbox is full of notes from the landlord. I sit in the living room silently as she comes by each day and knocks on the door. She wiggles the doorknob. Somehow she doesn’t have a key to the apartment; otherwise she would have barged in by now. I can’t sleep and I suddenly get it in my head that perhaps a former tenant had been one of those skinflint packrats who doesn’t trust banks. I open the light switch and electrical power outlet covers, looking for wads of hidden cash. Thinking perhaps there might be something hidden away in the ceiling tiles I pile furniture up to precariously check for loose tiles. It dawns on me if I fall it might snap my neck and this would be a ridiculous way to die. I spend a few more hours searching nooks and crannies in closets and the bathroom and come up dry.

I go to the grocery store down the block and use the pay phone to call home. I talk to my sister Marcia and she hears the defeat in my voice. She suggests that I come back home. I tell her that I probably would, but I’d have to hitchhike. It turns out that I don’t have to. Back when that lawsuit with the arcade was settled I gave my dad and my sister a chunk of money. Marcia still had hers and she sent it to me via Western Union.

I packed my clothes, brought all my books to the library to donate them, and left everything else I had for the landlord (who would later track me down in Chicago and try to sue me for lost rent. She would have won but she never showed up in court. The judge told me that there was a good chance that she was never intending to show up—that the very threat of a lawsuit would have convinced me to pay her out of court) and hitched a ride into Manhattan with my friend Bob Lewis, a friend from my Spectrum days. I spent a night or two sleeping on the floor in Karl Kesel’s apartment before I hopped a train to Chicago. Bob was a friend of Karl’s and I think they were inking some project together,

I left without saying goodbye to Tom Morgan. Which I regret doing. I think a part of me was mad at him for getting all successful and leaving me behind. Who knows? But it still bugs me that I left without getting together for him. By this time Tom was a full-fledged Romita Raider and he was picking up all sorts of odd jobs from editors, which lead to him having a fantastic career at Marvel.

Back home it took me a while to sit back down at a typewriter, but I did and not too much after that my friend Paul Mounts yanked me into the world of Now Comics.

A couple of months after I was home something weird showed up in the mail. It was an envelope from Marvel Comics. A No Prize, perhaps? No, it was a check for like three or four hundred dollars. Owsley and Marvel had paid me for the story I had written. I have no idea how they got my home address. Maybe from Tom Morgan. I don’t know. I cashed the check and bought a really good pair of boots.

Four or five months later Tom Morgan calls me and tells me that my story is going to actually see print. It was going to be featured in the Amazing Spider-Man Annual #20. All these years later my jaw is still sore from it hitting the floor.

Not long after that I picked up a copy of said comic in my local shop. The cover was astonishing. I believe it was drawn and inked by Bob Wiacek. I paged through it and it looked stunning. It was reworked, but I could recognize entire chunks of my original story. After five or six pages I didn’t see any credits. I felt a little heartbroken. Finally I got to the last page and the typeset credits were there, looking almost like an afterthought. The penciller was Mark Beachum and the inker was Bob Wiacek. There’s a writing credit for Ken McDonald, but from what I’ve heard the book was scripted by Owsley and Jim Shooter. Finally there’s me: Original Story by Fred Schiller.

I made it. I had the comic in my hands and the boots on my feet. I’d made it at Marvel, which had been my dream and aspiration. So why wasn’t I happy? I had done what I set out to do—in sort of a backhanded way.

Years later it happened again. This time there was nothing backhanded about it. I was hired to launch a new X-Men comic. I was the writer of Professor Xavier and the X-Men, part of Marvel’s ninety-nine cent comic line. I should have been as happy as a clam---a really happy clam. WRITING FOR MARVEL = SUCCESS + HAPPINESS, right?

Nope.

I’m not certain what does equal success and happiness, but it sure isn’t writing for Marvel. What an ass I was.

I’m lots smarter now, though.

P.S. Toward the end of my employment at DC Comics, Jim Owsley came on board as an editor. We talked about the whole train wreck that was my story and he apologized. It seems he was getting grief from every possible direction once he took over the Spider-Man books. He acknowledged that he probably passed along some of that grief to others. It was nice to have that closure. After Owsley left DC he changed his name to Christopher Priest and has been writing some fantastic comics. I wish him continued success.

Tom Morgan is no longer drawing pictures of the Hulk slugging Thor, although he may do that in his free time. Tom has made the transition from drawing comics to working in animation. That makes sense. He’s a pretty animated guy.

This girl needs either a long nap or a sammich...or maybe both...

Am I the only one that's slightly creeped out by the Cingular Wireless girl?

Sometimes life is funny all by itself...

The Weirdness is back!

If anyone is interested, there is a batch of new O’Grady episodes slowly creeping onto The N (which is what they call Noggin at night, apparently).

I enjoy watching O’Grady, even though the episodes can be hugely hit or miss. I’ve tried turning a lot of people on to the show and found that either people love it from the start or they think it stinks on ice. There seems to be no middle ground.

O’Grady is produced by the same braintrust that gave us the far more entertaining series, Home Movies. One day if my lotto numbers ever come in, or an old lady runs over my foot in the parking lot of Wal-Mart and I get me some insurance money, I intend to buy the series on DVD. Rumor has it that one of the boxed sets comes complete with a commemorative Coach McGuirk whistle.


Speaking of boxed sets, my amazing wife bought me the first two seasons of Titus. We greatly enjoyed that series when it was briefly on Fox.

So much to watch, so little time. What’s a body to do?

Jack Bauer is safe for another 72 Hours

Watching television was a lot more fun back before I could tell time and I understood the concept of what a reoccurring character was.

Back when I was a kid (after I’d come in from playing with my dog Rags out in the alfalfa fields) there was a time when I faithfully and effortlessly slipped into the reality of television. There was no second-guessing what was happening—it was all about being in moment, baby—and it was great!

I would be squatting on the floor, enthralled in an episode of the Wild Wild West and shout out, “Jeepers, Rags! There’s no way Jim West and Artemus Gordon are going to be able to defeat Miguelito Loveless’ mechanical shark! They’re goners for sure!” I would sit there shocked and dismayed by the inevitable fate of Jim and Artie, but then after the commercial break I’d see my heroes miraculously escape (with the help of a miniature gramophone Jim had in a hollow boot heel and a diamond-tipped nose picker Artie had up his sleeve).

I’m pretty certain that by the end of the first season of the show I’d figured out that Jim and Artie were always going to somehow escape. If James T. West died, they would have to change the name of the show and everything. So from that point on if I watched an episode of Mannix, or any show that was named after the lead character, there was a reasonably good chance that they were going to survive whatever threat they faced. The same held true for shows like Lost in Space or Land of the Giants. If a character had been on the show for the past eight or nine episodes, it was more than likely they were going to survive the current episode.

Another nail in the coffin of my television watching innocence was learning to tell time, and utilizing this new skill while watching a show. This was a horrible thing. Say for example I was watching an episode of Mission: IMPOSSIBLE. I watch as the team is in motion and the mission that had been thoughtfully planned out is nearly complete. That’s cool. But then I look at the clock and see there’s still twenty minutes until the show is over. Well, now I know that something is going to go wrong and the mission is going to start to fall apart. The team will have to think fast and pull together to stop the evil monarch from plundering the hidden treasure buried under the church tower. The episode is still enjoyable, but imagine how much better it would have been if I didn’t see the bump in the road coming along. There I am saying, “They’ve done it again, Rags. Another successful mission under their belts for the gang…hey, wait! That wasn’t supposed to happen! What’s going on, Rags? I never saw that twist coming, did you boy?”

We’re big fans of the television series 24 in this household. Early on, during the first or second season, there was talk that Kiefer Sutherland thought doing the show and actually having a career was too demanding, so he was only going to do a certain number of seasons. Ever since then there’s always been industry chatter that the producers might end the show by actually killing Jack Bauer off. He dies saving the world. Something big like that. It would be a ballsy way to end things and there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the house.

But now the official word is that Kiefer has agreed to be on the show for three more seasons. Seventy-two hours of action for a cool forty million bucks, plus a production deal. Good for him, of course. Nice work if you can get it, and all that, but at the same it means we know for a fact that Jack will survive any and all situations he gets himself into for the next three years.

I complain, yet I’ll be there every Monday night. I have to be. Chloe is tracking my movements on satellite. She’d downloading my coordinates to your Palm Pilot even as you read this.

E for Entertainment

Valarie and I finally got around to seeing V for Vendetta this weekend and we were both alarmed by how much we enjoyed it. We were both half-expecting it to suck like a Dyson.

In the ten years or so since I last read it, I somehow managed to forget huge portions of the comic story (Years of diet soda have left my brain is stewing in cocktail of Saccharien and Aspertine). This didn’t prove to be detrimental to my enjoying the movie.

I guess if you’re a diehard fan of the Alan Moore/David Lloyd comic and can’t stand to see it defaced in any way, you should keep as far from it away as you can, but if you’re looking for a stylized movie with a point of view it’s a fun way to waste two and a half hours.

Just like the filmed version of the Constantine comic, I enjoyed V for Vendetta for what it was and the story it told. I don’t feel compelled to hold the movies up to the original source material for comparison. One doesn’t impact the other, in my mind. I still enjoy reading Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing comics, and I saw BOTH of the movies.

(And please, someone remind me of how open-minded I am when the Iron Man movie finally makes it onto the big screen, because-as-God-as-my-witness if they don’t develop the live action/animation technology needed to bring the Gene Colon comics to life, or if the helmet comes off and Tom Cruise’s head is inside it, there will be all kinds of hell to pay!)

It takes a Thief...

I just finished watching the first two episodes of the new FX series Thief. I will watch them again with my wife and I think I will enjoy them again, as much if not more than the first time.

Someone slipped something good into the water up at the FX Channel. Shield, Rescue Me, and now Thief. These shows make what the major networks are doing look silly.

Do yourself a major favor and get on the bandwagon. FX is generous with their repeats, so it won’t take you long to catch up. It will be more than worth the effort. New episodes air on Tuesday nights.