Shut up, already.

"I want to see you get better," [Judge] McDermott told Frasure.

"You want to arm wrestle?" was Frasure's reply before being led from the courtroom by bailiffs.

Read the whole story here.

Wow.

I stumbled across myself on the Internet Movie Database tonight (they actually list only about two-thirds of my credits, but I'm too lazy to figure out how to add info), and was fairly stunned to find this post.

Kinda chokes me up.

Sense O' Wonder

Zowie! Check out these images from the Hubble! (Click to enlarge.)

Two mighty spacefleets clashing? No, it's the Ant Nebula.


The Sombrero Galaxy:


The Cat's Eye Nebula:


The Glowing Eyes. (I'm convinced this is where Cthulhu comes from.)


And of course, the Eye of Sauron, unblinking, eternally evil...

For my sister Juliet...

...probably the only person reading this blog who -- well, probably the only person reading this blog, but even more probably the only person reading this blog who will get the following. It's a Tweet I somehow ran across this morning (dear God don't ask me how) by Curt Smith, who is half of the band Tears for Fears.



Here's the link, if you must.

Bloody nicked you are, young Padawan.

Eight Scottish cops have claimed Jedi as their religion.

Oh, Canada

There was a time, between 1981 and 1984, when 11:30 on a Friday evening meant just one thing for me and thousands of other obsessed fanatics: SCTV was on the air! This most brilliant of all sketch comedy shows was made with no budget, no frills, just awesome talents of a group of performers and writers -- among them John Candy, Rick Moranis, Harold Ramis, Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Joe Flaherty and Martin Short. Working with nothing more than a tiny studio and some threadbare locations in the Canadian town of Edmonton, where they lived virtually cut off from the rest of the world, they deployed an arsenal of character-driven humor and technical innovation to make fun of television itself. Each episode centered around the broadcast day at a tiny local TV station in Melonville, and used parodies of commercials, TV shows, movies, bumpers and interstitials to tell actual stories. Classics include the Emmy-winning "Moral Majority" episode, where the station must radically alter its content under pressure from conservative activists; "CCCP-1," where the station's satellite feed is jammed by programs from the Soviet Union, resulting in an escalation that leads to nuclear armageddon; and the awesome "Godfather" parody, which turns the rivalry between the major networks into a gang war ("Sonny hit PBS!"). Only Ernie Kovacs had used the medium so creatively -- and he didn't have Johnny LaRue or Bobby Bittman.

So return with us now to a time when giants strode the earth, and a little town in Alberta called Edmonton was the center of the universe.

Best Line from This Week's "30 Rock"

Liz: "Don't worry. I have some Trix up my sleeve."

Twenty-one Fairly Obscure Desert Island Discs

So like any good music freak, I keep a perpetually evolving list of Desert Island Discs in my head. I've been meaning to write it up for years, but when I finally sat down to do it for this blog, a little voice in my head -- correction, a big voice -- kept interrupting me. "There you go, with all the same predictable choices as a People Magazine Top 25 list. And you call yourself a music geek! But what if you couldn't pick the obvious choices? What if you were denied all the albums that made the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest of All Time list? No Sgt. Pepper's, no Blonde on Blonde, no Let It Bleed, no London Calling, no Goodbye Yellow Brick Road! Only the unexpected albums! Now that would be a list! Oh, and no albums from your Top 10 Live Albums of All Time [forthcoming]. And no jazz, classical, or pre-rock singers such as Nat King Cole or Bing Crosby because, let's face it, we don't have all day." (Yes, the voices in my head are extremely long-winded.)

So without further adieu, here are my Top 21 Relatively Obscure Desert Island Discs (in no particular order, with some commentary):

1. The Youngbloods, Elephant Mountain (1969) A classic gem with unbelievable range, from the searing terror of the opener "Darkness, Darkness" to the soaring grace of the closer, "Ride the Wind." Does not include the Youngbloods' most famous song, the 60's anthem "Get Together," nor does it need it.






2. Grateful Dead, Anthem of the Sun (1968) The most psychedelic of all the Dead's albums, combining multiple live songs with trippy studio soundscaping. And you can dance to it!







3. Harry Nilsson: Nilsson Schmillson (1972) One great song after another, with killer production and an amazing lineup of musicians: "Without You," "Coconut," "Jump Into the Fire" -- and not a drop of filler.






4. Bonzo Dog Band: The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse (1970) The Bonzos were quite literally the missing link between the Beatles and Monty Python: They worked with several Beatles and appeared in the "Magical Mystery Tour" film, then later appeared on the British show "Do Not Adjust Your Set" with Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam just a few months before they formed Python. And head Bonzo Neil Innes appeared in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (as Sir Robin's minstrel); he also wrote and performed the songs for Eric Idle's Beatles parody "All You Need is Cash," the soundtrack to which is the greatest album the Beatles never made. (And which, frankly, I should have put on this list.) This album is their masterpiece. If Tristan Tzara were a rock band, this is what he'd sound like. UPDATE: Holy schnickey! Tristan Tzara IS a rock band! (The Bonzos will forever kick their ass, however.)

5. Bob Dylan/The Band, The Basement Tapes (1975) Weird, moody, elegiac -- and hilarious. No, really. This album cracks me up every time.

6. Brian Eno, Another Green World (1975) Arguably Eno's best album, combining great art-rock songs with short proto-ambient experiments.









7. New Order, Low Life (1985) Eighties dance music as art; one of the greatest albums of all time. Its one failing is that it doesn't contain "Blue Monday," the greatest dance single of all time.









8. Malcolm McClaren, Duck Rock (1983) After inventing punk rock and Adam and the Ants, Malcolm McClaren created this aural trip around the world, combining hip-hop, African and Cuban rhythms -- oh, and square dancing. The "Sgt. Peppers" of the 80's.








9. XTC, English Settlement (1982) That rarest of rarities, a double album with no filler. Every song could be a hit single.










10. Fatboy Slim, On the Floor at the Boutique (1998) 50 nonstop minutes of massive beats and crazy cuts; not for the faint of heart.










11. Air, Moon Safari (1998) If I were to tell you that one of the most gorgeous albums of all time was a French band's modern-day take on 60's soft-rock bubblegum psychedelia, you'd probably think I was nuts. You'd be right, of course, but so would I.



12. Boredoms, Vision Creation Newsun (1999) Hoo boy, where do I begin with this one? The Boredoms are a Japanese noise band, but with this 1995 album they started experimenting with ways to make noise...well, beautiful. And that's this album: noisy but beautiful.




13. Alexander Spence, Oar (1968) The most legendary obscure album of all time. "Skip" Spence, of Moby Grape, suffered an nervous breakdown (he was developing paranoid schizophrenia), and after he checked out of Bellevue he hopped on a motorcycle, rode straight to Nashville, and cut this haunting album on a 3-track recorder, playing all the instruments himself. I was one of maybe a thousand people who bought this album when it came out in 1968. I think I must have read the entire Ballentine Adult Fantasy series (that would be guys like Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell, William Morris, Lovecraft, etc.) to this album when I was 14.

15. Tom Rush, The Circle Game. Boston folkie Rush has a laser-accurate eye for talent, and this 1968 album features first-ever recordings of songs by Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, and Jackson Browne (he is, as someone once said, the only man who should be allowed to sing Joni Mitchell songs), capped off by the double-whammy of Rush's own "Rockport Sunday" and "No Regrets."

16. The Incredible String Band, The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter. (1968) The ISB are a highly acquired taste, but you've got to love an album with a 13-minute song about an amoeba!

17. Autosalvage, Autosalvage. (1968) This is officially the most obscure record on this list. Autosalvage was a short-lived Greenwich Village art-psych-avant-rock band, whose one album was bought by me and maybe three other people back in 1967. The singing's a bit weak, but it's one of the most musically inventive Lp's of the Sixties, and features medieval instruments amidst the wailing guitars.

18. The Beastie Boys, Paul's Boutique. (1989) The BB's least commercially and most artistically successful album, thanks to the Dust Brothers' incredible production. No music, just an endless construction of samples from Hendrix, Curtis Mayfield, the Beatles, to name a few. (Plus, I felt it was essential to have two albums on this list with the word "boutique" in their title.) [UPDATE: Oop! This one actually is on the Rolling Stone Top 500 list. Oh, well, I'm allowed one. Although truthfully I might have put The Band (1969) in this slot had I known!]

19. Frank Zappa, Hot Rats (1969) There was a lot of Zap to choose from -- "Uncle Meat," "We're Only in It for the Money," or "Burnt Weenie Sandwich" could easily have made the list. But this one, perhaps the first example of jazz-rock fusion, rocks the hardest. Mostly instrumental, with chopmeisters like Ian Underwood, Sugarcane Harris and Jean-Luc Ponty wailing their brains out. Plus Captain Beefheart on vocals!

20. Buddy Holly, The Buddy Holly Story (1959) My brother Jeremy gave me this album when I was 13. Although I was completely obsessed with the Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, Dylan etc., this collection of music from a decade earlier completely blew me away. The greatest 50's rock and roll, with apologies to Elvis. And speaking of Elvis...

21. Elvis Costello, Armed Forces 1979) Hard to pick a best Elvis C. from his Stiff/Columbia peak years, but this one wins because it's got Nick Lowe's "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?" on it.

Three Short Pieces About My Father.

So I mentioned my father's last years of senility to Rob Shearman the other day (god, I'm such a pathetic name-dropper), and it started me thinking I'd like to write something about him here.

One.

My dad ran a paint company until the early 1950's when, shortly after the death of both his father and his first wife, he sold the company and determined to devote his life to art. He attempted painting, but wasn't much good at it. His talents lay elsewhere. He had a knack for business and organization, and a vision for the future of art. So he started an art gallery, right on the cutting edge of modernism, displaying abstract expressionists such as Milton Resnick. In a Midwestern industrial town like Cleveland, this sort of thing went over like a lead balloon, and most of his exhibitions were met with derision by the press and the public.

So my dad up and moved the gallery (and us) to New York City in 1961. He quickly moved past "traditional" painting and sculpture (even the non-representational kind he had favored) toward a new type of art that utilized leading-edge technology. As a gadget freak, and someone whose early life was greatly shaped by the industrial revolution, he had a fascination with the nexus of art and science. During the Sixties he presented exhibitions of kinetic art, light art, "op" art, and even the first-ever gallery exhibition of computer-generated (CG) art. In 1968 he presented the first exhibition of video art, called (perhaps a bit snarkily) "TV as a Creative Medium," which ultimately led him to the conclusion that art had outgrown the boundaries of conventional exhibition space. Two years later he closed down the gallery and created Electronic Arts Intermix, a nonprofit organization for the support and distribution of video art. EAI distributes works by artists as diverse as Nam Jun Paik, Ed Emshwiller, and Jean-Luc Goddard.

Two.

My dad was born in 1903, in Ohio, a few weeks before the Wright Brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk in the same state. He remembered the day the Titanic sank (people were out in the streets crying, he said, even in Cleveland). His parents took him to visit Charlie Chaplin's studios, and home movies exist of the family taken there. He spent part of the 1920's living in France, and became enough of an expert to write a book about the restaurants and wines of the south of France. During this time he reputedly had an affair with Josephine Baker, who supposedly broke up with him when she learned he was not actually French.

In the 1930's he spent time in Weimar Germany and saw the effects of the hyperinflation there. He used to tell the story of going to a restaurant in Berlin and, not knowing exactly what to order, handed the waiter a five-dollar bill. This resulted in the staff bringing him mountains of food, more than he could possibly eat. Finally he had to tell them to stop bringing food, but a few minutes later the waiters rolled out another cart of entrees, explaining "They just devalued the mark again!"

He played tennis with the Marx Brothers in Hollywood in the 30's. He lived through the Great War and WWII, and of course Korea and Viet Nam.

He had seen so much. And when, near the end of his life, his mental faculties began to slip away, we in the family were kicking ourselves that we had never gotten a first-hand account of the details of his life (something he himself had done with many artists and intellectuals with his trusty color video recorder a decade earlier). But by then it was too late. My father had taken a left turn into some strange forest of tangled memories, never to return.

Three.

In the last 15 years of his life, my father started taking up causes. The first was the Pritikin diet, which was the first low-fat diet. He met Pritikin and stayed at his institute in 1976, and became convinced that people were poisoning themselves with butter and other fatty foods. He quickly became one of Pritikin's main proselytizers, and would never hesitate to criticize the eating habits of his immediate family if they did not live up to the Pritikin principles.

In 1977 he was extremely disturbed by a book called "The Limits to Growth." This book was a godsend to compulsive worriers, as it used detailed computer models to predict that the planet would run out of oil, food, and just about everything else by the year 2000. The book has undergone two revisions but, like any good End of Days soothsayer, it is still making the same dire predictions, albeit on a slightly altered timetable.

My father worried even more about the proliferation of nuclear arms, a fear that was exacerbated by the Reagan arms buildup of the 1980's. He was in his eighties by then, and he increasingly devoted all his energies to the cause of nuclear disarmament. He made documentaries, joined organizations, and rallied people to aid the movement. He worried endlessly about the possibility of nuclear war. Ironically, a few days after his death, in 1989, the Union of Concerned Scientists turned back the hands of the Doomsday Clock for the first time in 20 years.

I've known other powerful men like my father who in old age become convinced that mankind is hurtling toward destruction and become obsessed with saving the world. Perhaps this is their way of fighting the knowledge that oblivion will soon be upon them. Or perhaps some misguided sense of vanity makes them refuse to believe that the world could possibly survive without them. Whatever the reason, they, like my father, seem desperate to put their mark on this world before they depart it.

My father believed that his work for disarmament was the most important thing he'd ever done. He was quite wrong, of course, and all his worrying about some impending nuclear holocaust was completely futile. In the end, it was his love of art that did the world the most good.

Holy fuck.

My friend Len Wein's house burned this morning. The good news is that Len and Christine and Michael are all okay. The bad news is is that they lost their dog, half their house, and who-knows-how-much of Len's priceless collection of comic book art. Holy fuck. I've called Len but, no surprise, have not heard back. Thinking about driving over there.

I gotta get me one of these...

At last, I can convert my old, obsolete Beta tapes to new, obsolete HD-DVDs!

Okay, so it's really one of many great April Fool's jokes on ThinkGeek.com. My other favorite: The Kenner EZ-Bake Disc Drive!

Thanks to Scott Sava for the heads-up.

This just in from BBC News...

This aired on the BBC news show "Panorama" on April 1, 1957:



And the punchline: when huge numbers of viewers wrote in wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti trees, the BBC replied: "Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best."

This is why I love the British.