Girl in a Cage

Me and Homer Down By the Schoolyard

I think it's fair to say that I have a sentimental attachment to The Simpsons that transcends anything I feel about any other show.

At one point in my life, I was forced to read Puritan literature. Avoid this fate if at all possible. The one thing that stuck with me about those nutty humorless dudes was that the Bible just informed every aspect of their lives. For everything that happened, they could find a parallel in scripture.

I'm like that, only with The Simpsons instead of the Bible. Seriously. Nearly everything that happens seems to evoke a Simpsons quote in my mind. (My favorite comes from the one where Bart saves Burns from hypohemia, and the Simpsons get a big stone head as a thank-you gift. Homer: "There is no moral! It's just some stuff that happened!")

I saw my first episode of The Simpsons when I was a senior in college at the apartment of my friends Christine Beasley and Jen Fors. (I include their full names in case they're autogoogling---how y'all doin? send me an email!). I was in the company of my girlfriend Kirsten. Since then, these things (and many more) have happened in my life: Graduated college. Moved to Taiwan for six months. Moved to Boston with my girlfriend Kirsten. Was unemployed. Was employed as piss boy at Thinking Machines Corporation, a now-defunct supercomputer manufacturer. Went to graduate school. Got a teaching job. Got laid off. Got another teaching job. Married Kirsten. Had a daughter, Rowen. Got two more teaching jobs. Kirsten was diagnosed with breast cancer. Wrote and published a book about it. Got to be on the Today show and the Rosie O'Donnell show. (Rosie gave me a Gamecube! Nice!). Quit my job when asked by new, evil incompetent boss to reapply for it. Got another job. Was told by doctor that Kirsten had only weeks to live. Said goodbye to Kirsten forever. Quit teaching. Sold a novel. Grieved and grieved some more. Met Suzanne. Fell in love with Suzanne and her kids. Moved into a new house with Suzanne, Casey, and Kylie. Married Suzanne.

That's only the big stuff. There were a lot of youth soccer games in there too. My point is that nearly everything important in my life has changed at least once since The Simpsons began, and so I derive a certain amount of comfort from their always being there. Sure, they're not as good as they used to be, but who among us is? Yes, they've had bad years, but haven't we all?

These days, I watch not in the hope of a brilliant episode, (Though the 24 episode was brilliant) but more in the hope of brilliant moments. With any other show, I'd say it's time to call it quits, but even in the midst of what I can't help thinking of as the Worst. Season. Ever., I can't quite bear the idea of the Simpsons hanging it up.

Gadget Lust and the Future of Reading

I have a serious case of gadget lust for Amazon's new Kindle e-book reader gizmo. I'm not going to completely do an upaid commercial for Amazon, but it's clear that they're trying to create the ipod for books, and they may have succeeded. (Note to Jeff Bezos--send me a tester! I'll totally blog about it!).

There's a lot that scares me about it--mostly how you have to buy your books through Amazon (but they whiz through the air and into your hands instantly! How cool is that?), and what is that going to mean for good old bookstores? You can't really browse online--I mean, yeah, technically you can, but it sucks compared to actual browsing. The Kindle is cool because if somebody recommends a book to you (Like my novel Dear Catastrophe Waitress, available to download onto your Kindle for $7.99! Have I mentioned it's got hot sex?) you can do the instant gratification thing and download it right away when it's still fresh in your mind, and not have to do the "Uh, I'm looking for this book by this one guy?" thing in the bookstore.

But, on the other hand, if people are buying the books they hear Terry Gross talk about without going to the bookstore, they won't pick up the impulse buys, and they'll probably buy fewer books. It's a problem with any search-driven shopping thing (from the perspective of the seller). How do you get people to buy the thing they didn't know they wanted if they can search and go straight to what they want? I've had quite a few people tell me they first picked up one of my books because they saw it in the bookstore and it had a cool cover. I don't know how you reach those people on a website. And if the bookstores can't bring you in to buy that book you heard about because you've already downloaded it, how are they going to stay in business?

On the other hand, if books can now be associated with a cool gadget, maybe people will read more books.

I don't know if the Kindle will catch on, but something like it will, and it's going to revolutionize bookselling. Scary!

Finally, if you check out the Kindle page on Amazon, you can find videos with well-known authors like Neil Gaiman, Toni Morrisson, and Daniel "Lemony Snicket" Handler talking about how the Kindle is the best thing to happen to books since the printing press, and all I could think while I watched them was ,"Dammit, Jeff! Why not give us obscure authors some video face time! I would have whored myself for you for probably less than half what you're paying those heavy hitters! Cripes!"

A Kiss After Dying

So a literary giant, one of the best American writers of the twentieth century, died last week. So did Norman Mailer, but I'm talking about Ira Levin.

Ira Levin wrote A Kiss Before Dying, which is a top-notch mystery, and The Boys From Brazil, which is a top-notch espionage/science fiction/thriller. Both books are still great reads and still worth picking up. And those are his lesser works. (Well, there are others that are lesser still--Sliver is horrible.) (He also wrote Deathtrap, which I'm not really familiar with except that they made a movie of it and Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve kiss, and everybody was all atwitter about that when it came out.)

His major works--and I'm talking major in terms of quality here, not heft--one of the things I really admire about Ira Levin is that he wrote short, readable novels instead of pretentious doorstops--are The Stepford Wives and Rosemary's Baby. Both are masterpieces of paranoia and suspense, and both are among the sharpest, most powerful feminist novels ever.

I came to Levin's work in college, and let me tell you I was not in the best frame of mind to receive any feminism at that point in my life. I actually had somewhat of a chip on my shoulder about it, having already endured a couple of years of wealthy young women berating my broke, in-debt-up-to-my-eyes ass about how I ran the country and was ruining the world. (As I've mentioned before, the guys who went along with the "men are evil" party line got tons of play, but I was more interested in arguing. Idiot!) And yet both these books provided me with both rip-roaring entertainment and challenging ideas that probably changed the way I thought about the role of women.

The Stepford Wives is the more obvious of the two in its feminist message-- the men in a small Connecticut town are replacing their wives with obedient, homebound, always sexually available robots. This, Levin suggested, is what men really want from their wives--not pains in the ass who are going to think for themselves, but unthinking drones. It's an incredibly damning indictment: the men in this book would rather sleep with machines than deal with the complications of women having their own minds. Ouch. Coming from a woman, this would have pissed me off incredibly. Coming from a man, it made me think.

And then there's the masterpiece, Rosemary's Baby. If you have not already read this, go buy a copy and read it--you can whip through it in a few hours, and you will. It is completely unputdownable. Come back when you're done--I'll still be here!

Okay, did you read it? Good! Kick ass book, huh? I read it in an afternoon when I was supposed to be doing about three other things, but I couldn't bear to leave the book until it was done. So it's got the conspiracy, the paranoia, the almost unbearable suspense, and one of the best endings of any book ever. When Rosemary finally sees the baby, the horrible half-human product of her rape by Satan, she doesn't smother it in its crib--she picks it up and cares for it, though she knows it means the destruction of the world. Why does she do this? Not because she has some overriding maternal instinct for the abomination in the crib, but because it is her only path to power. Throughout the novel she is a pawn in everyone else's game. Her husband trades her womb for a good apartment and a good job, she is raped by Satan and forced to bear the child against her will. She's been nothing but a walking uterus to everyone else in the book, but now, holding the devil child, she becomes the anti-Mary (The Rose-Mary? The red Mary to oppose the old blue and white one?), holding the Anti-Christ, and she is revered by the satanists because of her role as the mother of the un-savior. Finally, finally, after enduring incredible abuse, she's got power and prestige. Why would she give that up just to save the world?

It's an incredibly challenging idea, and the fact that it comes wrapped in a lights-on page-turning thriller just makes it that much more effective.

I haven't seen much in the way of appreciations for Ira Levin since he died, which kind of surprises me. I think the professional feminists should be tripping over themselves praising him, because few minds are ever changed by polemics, but many can be changed by entertainment.

I'm always thrilled if I find a book that is fun to read and a good story and doesn't make me hate myself for enjoying it. (I'm currently reading and enjoying Richard Laymon's The Beast House, and hating myself for it because some elements are almost unbearably cheesy). Ira Levin wrote four fantastic books that are both compelling and smart, and, what's more, he planted a lot of pretty subversive ideas in a lot of brains while he was at it.

He's one of the writers I most admire, and I'm sorry he's dead.

The Old Left Hander, Rounding Third and Heading For Home.

Cincinnati Reds broadcaster Joe Nuxhall died the other day. I had a lot of affection for Joe Nuxhall--I'm pretty sure his picture is in the dictionary next to "Avuncular". He always seemed like your incredibly mellow uncle that you might sit out back and have a beer with while you listened to the game on the radio. Except he was actually on the radio. He was very good at his job, and while you certainly heard murmurings about other Cincinnati baseball celebrities like Pete Rose and Johnny Bench being jerks, you never heard a bad thing about Joe Nuxhall.

But, despite the many hours I spent listening to his voice, I didn't really know Joe Nuxhall, and I think what really makes us sad about the death of a celebrity is not the loss of that person as much as the loss of a link to a time in our lives when that person was important to us.

For me, this was primarily the years 1986-1989, the height of my baseball fandom. I will try to steer clear of maudlin baseball nostalgia here--the simple fact is that my friends and I went to a lot of baseball games and watched or listened to the games we didn't attend because we lived in Cincinnati and there was simply nothing else to do. These were mostly college summers, when I was too young to go to bars and too old to go to high school parties, and it was cheaper to go to a Reds game and sit in the top 6 than it was to go to a movie. (True! $3.50 for the cheap seats! It was a bargain even in 1987!) So I followed the Reds kind of obsessively, and, this being before the internet, when I went back to college in Philadelphia I could sometimes tune in Marty Brenneman and Joe Nuxhall calling that all-important September series where the Giants would put the Reds away for good in my dorm room on WLW all the way from Cincinnati.

It was a weird, awkward time between adolescence and adulthood, and the Reds, brought a lot of enjoyment into those summers. So my thanks to Marty Brennaman, the late Joe Nuxhall, Chris Sabo, Ron "True Creature" Robinson, Barry Larkin, lots of Reds I can't remember (Like Sox Manager Terry Francona!) and whoever did that animation that ran on the Riverfront Stadium scoreboard where the bun-clad sausage slides into second and the ump says, "Yer...a hot dog?" The manager comes running from the dugout, screaming "Yer blind! It's a smoked sausage!" and eventually the runner, actually a Kahn's Big Red Smokie, is declared out, I suppose, by virtue of having been stuffed in the ump's mouth as "Mmmmm!" reverberated around the stadium.

A Night In the Comedy Trenches

Last night I went to my minister's standup comedy debut at a dive bar in Dorchester.

That sentence probably sums up why I am a Unitarian Universalist as well as any I could possibly come up with.

Let me begin by saying that the Reverend Terry Burke put on a very good set--I liked the fact that the jokes came as part of a little narrative, and I liked the fact that a lot of the punch lines were snuck in so dryly that it took the audience a beat or so to catch up. All in all, a fine debut.

Now for the rest of the evening. First of all, to call this place, The Emerald Isle, a dive is really a disservice to many fine dives I've been to in my life. Having been a punk rock fan and a friend of musicians, I have had good times in many dives and found them to be strangely joyful, homey places despite, or possibly because of, their run-down nature.

This place was not like that. It was the single shittiest bar I have ever set foot in in my entire life. Once, in 1989, I went into a pub in Uig, Scotland, a dismal fishing village on the Isle of Skye, with my friends Hugh and Jamie, who now goes by Walker, la-dee-da. The taciturn fisher folk eyed us with hostility as they played pool, clearly trying to decide whether to use their pool cues to finish their game or bash our heads in just to teach us a lesson for being studenty pansies. That was the scariest situation I've ever been in in a bar, but even that place was nicer than the Emerald Isle.

Okay, so drop ceiling, the occasional stool, the worst service I've ever gotten at a bar (and, I mean, I'm male, so I'm used to bad service at bars), and, oh yeah, did I mention they're closing the place down because it doesn't have a sprinkler system? So the night was kind of a wake for this apparently venerable open mike comedy night.

And it was definitely a weird scene--most of the people were regulars, and were comedians, or aspiring comedians. Now, I had the idea from seeing that Jerry Seinfeld movie (no, not Bee Movie, the other one) and various other behind the scenes things that comedians offstage are bitter, grumpy, vaguely scary people. Hanging out with a bunch of them for an hour and a half did absolutely nothing to dispel this impression.

Person after person got up and did 2- to 5- minute sets, and most had at least one funny thing to say. Talk about your tough crowds, though. I got why they all went to this thing. Because it's an incredibly tough comedy training ground--it can't be easy trying to make a room full of comedians laugh. (The alcohol just seemed to bring out extra bitterness and make them less likely to laugh rather than more). It's fiercely competitive, so, as the guy who named his boy Sue observed, you have to get tough or die. So, on the one hand, it's a vicious trial by fire. On the other hand, it's completely low stakes, because you're on a makeshift stage in the shittiest bar on earth, and everyone in the audience is a fellow comic who's never going to pay to see you perform anyway, so it's not like bombing would have any big negative impact on your career.

So, like I say, I got why this was a beloved scene, even though the bar was a hellhole.

It should be said, though, that I didn't share the love, and the weird combination of weepy nostalgia and hate in the room made it uncomfortable.

And then the fat guy got naked. Well, no, he wore a tube sock on his genitals, a la Red Hot Chili Peppers. But it's one thing to see those chiseled funk-punkers dressed only in a cotton codpiece, and quite another to see a morbidly obese comedian similarly attired. My friend Alex didn't actually know about the sock because the belly was obscuring the sock anyway.

I couldn't decide if this was a really brave or really desperate thing to do. On the one hand, it was pretty funny--the guy had this vaguely hostile persona and just kept doing his act without really acknowledging that he was nearly naked, and it is kind of brave for someone with a body like that to get naked in front of a room full of people. On the other hand, it was disturbing and gross and seemed somewhat pathetic. Alex looked at me and said, "I think it's time to leave." I agreed, and we heard one of the other comics saying, "well, that's one way to clear out a room" as we left.

We went next door to the clean, nice yuppie bar with decent beer on tap and a female bartender who gave us good service, thinking she could use her feminine wiles to weasel a good tip out of us. Sucker!

There is Power in a Union

I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that I'm supporting the writers' strike, though I am not a WGA member. (And I should say that I'm supporting the strike only morally. In every other respect, I am doing absolutely nothing). I'm fully in favor of anything that will make writers more money. And really it's only fair that writers and everybody else who worked on the product should be compensated fairly whether it's shown in a theater, on TV, or on your laptop.

One thing that bugs me about the coverage is the idea that because some writers make a ton of money (not me, sadly, but maybe someday), they should basically shut up and be happy with what they have. And, I mean, yeah, people who write for movies and TV are not coal miners or something. But the same thing happens when pro athletes go on strike. Because their working conditions are better than most people's (Well, I don't know about NFL players, though--most of us don't put our bodies on the line in that way in our work.), people act like they should never try to improve their lot.

What's weird about this is that nobody seems to take the producers (or the pro sports owners) to task for making a lot of money from their work. Why is it that so many people resent labor for making money, but don't even question management making money? It just seems like people are brainwashed into thinking that owners and managers making boatloads of money is just the natural order of things, and the people who work for them should be happy with whatever they get, especially if it's a lot. But if you are responsible for the product being valuable, shouldn't you be paid accordingly? Even if your small slice of the pie is big because it's a huge pie, why should somebody else get the whole rest of the pie?

How many shows do you watch because they're produced by somebody you've heard of? You watch for the writing and the acting, and sometimes the directing. (Whenever a movie commercial says, "From the producer of Insert Successful Movie Name Here", it sounds kind of desperate to me, whereas when it says, "From the director of Insert Successful Movie Name Here," I at least give it a second look.)

So, anyway, thanks to my colleagues in the WGA for fighting the power, and if you're jealous of their money and power, don't just complain--unionize!

Stick It

So last night we watched Stick It with the kids. It's a pretty standard story of a bad girl who walks away from gymnastics only to be forced back into it when she crashes her bike through the picture window of a house under construction and she comes before the judge who is Flo from Alice.

Okay, actually this was a sports movie that was completely atypical. For one thing, it didn't suck. For another, it had a completely unpredictable ending. For a third, it managed to both celebrate and criticize the sport it's about, which is a pretty neat trick.

I'm not sure why this movie didn't do better, except maybe that it's not your standard "plucky girl wins the championship" story. Whenever I see a movie like this that could have been a formulaic piece of crap and manages to be a real movie instead, I wonder why more movies don't have this level of ambition. Perhaps because this movie didn't do very well, and most people would rather watch a formulaic piece of crap.

Missy Peregrym from Reaper starred, and her performance in this movie made me realize that she's just criminally underused on that show. She's capable of doing so much more than "Sam, where were you last night?" and the writers oughta let her. As soon as the strike is over.

Uncomfortable, but not Laughing.

So I was a fan of The Sarah Silverman Program last season, but the only one I've caught this season left me cold. This is the blackface episode--Sarah, in an attempt to find out how difficult it is to be black, spends the day in minstrel-show blackface. Now, I was not inherently offended by the idea, but it did make me uncomfortable. Which would be okay if it was also funny. But it seemed that she'd mistaken discomfort for humor. The fact that something makes me uncomfortable does not in and of itself make it funny. It seemed like she was reaching so hard for discomfort (having perhaps figured out that just saying vagina a lot is not much to base a character or show on) that she forgot to be funny about it.

Like the torture trend in horror, the discomfort trend in comedy is something that totally leaves me cold. I finally, at the urging of several of my friends, recorded Borat, and I couldn't really watch it. Well, I did fast forward to the naked wrestling scene, which was every bit as hilarious as I had been told, but overall, it's just not that hilarious to me: look! Suckers will believe I am who I pretend to be! Wow. Funny stuff. It does make me uncomfortable as hell to watch, but I just don't find it all that funny.

I caught a few minutes of Extras, the Ricky Gervais show about a semi-struggling actor. The part where Daniel Radcliffe inadvertently flipped a condom onto Diana Rigg's head was hilarious, but the part where Gervais is complaining about the noises a developmentally delayed kid is making in a restaurant--again, it was horribly uncomfortable, but not funny.

I may be all alone here, since this is clearly in vogue (and all the Daily Show taped interview segments are based on the same thing), but I guess the whole thing strikes me as lazy comedy. I just don't think it takes a whole lot of skill to create discomfort, and I prefer it when performers go the extra mile to actually make something funny.

Literary Throwdown!

So I wrote a fairly negative review of Joshua Henkin's Matrimony in today's L.A. Times. It's only fairly negative because I toned down the negativity in the editing process. You shoulda seen it before!

Of course, I have mixed feelings about writing a bad review of somebody else's work. Is it bad karma? I get stung by bad reviews of my work--how can I inflict that pain on somebody else? Well, it's a good question. Short answer: I'm kind of a dick.

But then I was thinking Henkin and I could start a little literary feud. Regular readers of this blog may recall that I hoped for the same thing when I trashed the steaming pile of excrement known as Frank McCourt's Teacher Man in the Boston Globe. But apparently Frank was too busy dancing a merry jig atop the pot o' gold they gave him for an advance to care about my review.

But Joshua--(Can I call you Josh?) I know you're reading this, because you're a writer, and you therefore autogoogle regularly. Obscure literary novelist vs. obscure popular novelist--this could only help both of us! Here's how I'd go after me: "Halpin, a scribbler of popular fiction that has thus far not proven to be very popular [ouch! That smarts!--ed.], disses both me and Papa Hemingway in one review. Of course suicides are known to become unquiet spirits, so it's my sincere hope that Papa will rise from his grave and crush Halpin like the insignificant little gnat he is." Okay, okay, the whole unquiet dead thing is much more my style than yours, but you get the idea. Hit me with your best shot! Fire Away!