BB #14

I've been good this Christmas, so She Who Must Be Obeyed (the Editor) is letting me post Cully's cover to #14.

Blue Beetle #10 and Shellshocked

Both the new issue of BB and the trade collection of issues 1-6 are out today. Comments, questions, etc, feel free to hit below or at the forums I generally frequent: Comicbloc and Something Awful.

Various Congratulatories

During light blogging, and to show how everybody loves either Kung Fu or Monkeys, therefore Kung Fu Monkey has friends on both sides of the spectrum.

Congratulations to Ezra Klein for the big-ass Op-Ed in the LA Times about Universal Health Care. Study after study has shown that Universal Health Care is fiscally more efficient and it's better for corporations and small business. If you're one of our friends locked in 1968, scream "socialism" all you want, but the numbers say you're lying. Come, join us in the 21st Century. There's HDTV. It's cool.

Oh, and for me, small point -- it's the right thing to do. I think it's wrong for you to lose your house when your kid gets cancer. Call me nuts.

Back to Ezra -- seeing as I remember him from a frighteningly short amount of time ago as "that wonky kid up the street at University", his big-stick swinging in the public policy world is impressive. Congrats, you little bastard.

On the other hand, our friend Warren Bell has been recess-appointed a board member for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I worked with Warren back in the day in Hollywood way. Warren writes for the various conservative spots; in fact, his essay defending the term "chickenhawk" fired me up to write "Lions Led By Donkeys", which catapulted me intothe stratosphere of C-list blog fame and is still not only the most read and linked piece here, but is sadly more relevant today than when it was written. (Warren sent me a lovely e-mail thanking me for the immense amount of hate mail he received. Classy guy.)

All this to say: although he does have this odd hobby of hanging out with the wingnuts, I've worked with him, and his priority is making good TV. He is, in point of fact, a fine television writer. Partisan witch-hunting is a Bush Administration trademark, and shouldn't become ours. When somebody pushes an agenda in their media job, like, say, the cretins at ABC, well then they deserve both barrels. Warren is a committed guy and fair guy, and he'll do a fine job in the post.

Virgil Goode, on the other hand, is a primitive scumfuck. Happy Holidays.

Happy Holidays

Have been travelling, will be travelling, so best to you and yours. Light blogging returns later this week.

Ah, Chomsky paperbacks in the airport magazine shop. I'm in Canada all right.

Boats Johnson and the Standing Ovations

Back in the early days of this blog, I wrote a little post called "Learn to Say Ain't." Setting aside the fact that John Tester and Jim Webb and other campaigns in 2006 validate me as a media genius, there's the bit in there about "Boats" Johnson, the road comic who taught me how to tell gun control jokes in Montana.

I got this in the e-mail this week:

Hi John,

My name is Sam Johnson, son of Mike "Boats" Johnson. I just wanted
to send an email saying I recently read your blog about saying aint
and how you told the story of my dad in Wyoming. Every now and then
I come across a mention of my dad online.. or hear new stories from
people that knew him and they really cheer me up and make my day. I
love seeing that he did or said certain things to make a lasting
impression on people.

I am not sure if you know.. but unfortunately my dad died in January
of 2004 from liver failure due to another bone marrow transplant.


If you have any other stories I always love to hear them.

Seeing as he changed my life and career, hell yeah.

Eighteen odd years ago, in the dying embers of the comedy boom , every Chinese restaurant and sports bar had a Comedy Night. This was a natural, if intermediary, step in the evolution of nightclub entertainment. Bar owners had just discovered that stand-ups were cheaper to book than bands, but had not yet sussed that karaoke was even cheaper.

Subsisting well under the HBO-level strata, but mining that rock for all it was worth, were the one-nighter booking agents. They strung together tours of these one-night gigs in the hinterlands in order to make the trips profitable for the comics and affordable for the clubs. There was no way in hell a comic was going to drive to Klamath Falls to do a $200 one-nighter. But if it were the Saturday on an Albany/Corvalis/Eugene/Roseburg/Klamath Falls run for a $1000 plus hotel, well then, that's a week worth travelling for. These agents would also rep you at the regional conventions for college entertainment, folding the two aspects of the trip together for maximum profitability. Name a community college in the Pacific Northwest, and I performed stand-up on one of their cafeteria tables.

My original one-nighter agent out in the Northwest was Donna Richards, a real sweetheart who eventually moved into the travelling gameshow and Christian comedy market (and made a killing, might I add). However, this is not a story about one of Donna's considerately constructed comedy runs.

This is a Tribble Run.

David Tribble -- who may still be doing this, for all I know -- ran the one-nighters in the Northern Colorado/Wyoming/Utah/Idaho region. You may note that the states I just cast together constitute a helluva lot of "region." You would be correct. For David's rule of thumb was: if you can make the trip in one day, that was a legitimate connection. That is, if Monday's club was no more than a day's drive from Tuesday's club, then it was fair game. Tribble, however, always held that a "day's drive" could be a full day. As in ten hours of driving. Overlapping radii of six hundred miles each, for each gig.

Now, I'm not really complaining. I met a lot of great people I never would have met working just the mainstream clubs, saw some of the most beautiful parts of America, and I was making a hundred bucks a night to tell half an hour of jokes. This was not a bad life.

At least Tribble was, when I worked for him, honest. There were runs where the booker would lure you out to just north of Bumfuck, British Columbia, you would drive seven hours a day, and when you arrived in the tiny woodland towns you would discover that the gigs had long since ceased to be. Comics won't take these tours without the full week, so the booker would "forget" that the gigs had fallen through. As alluring as Alert Bay is, it isn't high on my list of freebie tourist destinations.

(True Alert Bay story #1: the other comic and I are checking into the hotel. A bystander remarks "Hey, you must be the comedians!" I'm pleased: "That's great you recognized us! They must really be promoting the show!". To which he answers "Nah. You're the first strangers off the ferry in a month. You must be the comedians.")

(True Alert Bay story #2: I'm on stage, and a sullen guy in the front row has a full wrist-to elbow cast on both arms. Fifteen minutes in I stop. "Listen, I'm sorry, I have to ask. What the hell happened to you?"

"Well, my girlfriend called me an idiot, and I was drunk, so I punched the wall and broke all the bones in my right arm."

A beat. "What happened to the other one?"

"When I punched the wall it hurt so much, and I got so mad, I punched the wall again with my other hand. Broke that one worse."

At which point a small, high voice from the back pipes up. "You're still an idiot."

"Will you SHUT UP!"

My routine, at that point,was not just fluous. It was superfluous.)


Back to Boats. He was my headliner, and had taken great pity on me during my first Tribble run. His "Learn to Say Ain't" lesson came at the end of our brief tour. Up until then, however, he'd been no less sweet -- charming, funny, relaxed, comfortable with every audience we stumbled across. A lot of comics made impressions on me when I was touring, but I think Boats really set the vibe I went for with the rest of my career: odd little stories, a feeling that you were hanging out with the guy rather than watching him perform. Let's just say, if you're going to be a college-aged Boston Irish physics geek driving across Wyoming, doing jokes for Mormons and rodeo folk, you can do no better than having Boats Johnson as your mentor and guide. He was also eminently practical, with a ruthless business sense born of being a freelancer in the comedy scene.

Which brings us to Rawlins, Wyoming. Rawlins is midway between Cheyenne and Rock Springs.

I repeat. Rawlins is midway between Cheyenne and Rock Springs ... yet at the time was still infinitely more desolate than even that sentence can convey. We actually had to drive into town along the train tracks, as the off-ramp from Route 80 was being repaved. By convicts.

We park at the hotel where we're performing that evening. There is no wee poster on the front door, bearing our faxed/photocopied headshots. There is no notice on the front door that a show even exists. There is no front door.

"This place is under construction. " I not only don the Captain Obvious hat, but give it a jaunty tug. Boats strings together a marvelous combination of invectives. We enter.

The manager of the establishment tells us he'd "forgotten" to call Tribble and inform him that the hotel and bar were being renovated. The manager had a fine motive for forgetting: he'd signed a contract for X months, and when the audience attendance didn't result in commensurate drink sales, he didn't want to cough up that $300 bucks a week for the funnymen. Contract's a contract however. What's an entertainment mogul in Rawlins, Wyoming to do? You'll see.

He led us to the attached sports bar where we'd be performing. As stipulated in the contract, there were audience tables set up. Two tables. Sandwiched behind band saws and stacked drywall. Add a stage -- a slab of plywood atop four cinder blocks. The lighting was a bit spotty, the nova-white construction lamps refracted through the -- I shit you not -- plastic sheeting draped from the half-finished ceiling and walls behind the stage. At least it covered the 2x4 studs.

Boats nearly throttled the manager. "What the hell is this?"

The manager smiled and shrugged. "Hey, if you don't want to do the show ..."

Ah. Ahhhhh.

There's an old road rule. If the manager pulls the plug on a show after you've made the drive, he still has to pay you. But if you pull the plug, no harm no foul, no pay.

The manager leaves us to stew. No promo, no audience, no room to speak of ... son of a bitch. I'm waiting for Boats to make the call. We're talking two days of driving for no money if we bail. He looks around the rest of the "complex."

The bar itself was finished, a cut-out hole in the wall with a bored ex-high-school quarterback pulling Coors. At the bar, oddly, were two respectable-looking thirty-year old in suits. What the hell were they doing here at six o'clock, drinking in a half-finished basement --

-- Sally.

Wearing the traditional late 80's sports-bar waitress garb of bicycle pants and t-shirt, Sally was ten pounds of classic American Midwest pulchritude poured into a five pound bag. You would gladly charge the Russian encampment, straight into the teeth of hot .50 fire, screaming "Wolverines!" if it meant liberating Sally from the other side of the razor wire. She had a high-country complexion, a visage so radiant and pure that if Scarlett Johansson were to cut off Sally's face and caper onscreen wearing it as a macabre skin-mask, you would consider it an upgrade.

Both men were plainly in love with her.

Boats walks up to the bar patrons. "How's it going, guys. I'm Boats, the comic for tonight." The gentlemen are "Rob" and "Dave". Two local professionals. Unfortunately, they're about to leave. Can't stay for a show. Not that they knew there was one.

Without missing a beat, Boats turns to Sally. "You're working the show, right?"

Sally shrugs. "Well, sure, if there's a show, that means bar's open and I'm working."

Rob and Dave sit down.

As it turns out, it was a damn fine show. We escorted Rob and Dave to the front table. We bought the first round. I did my half-hour, Boats did his hour. We both got standing ovations.

The manager, literally swearing under his breath the entire time, pays us. We each tip Sally $25 bucks, retire to Boats' hotel room with a bottle of stolen Johnny Walker, and the man schools me on how you never, ever let the fucking suits win.

Oh, and always have a dick joke. Just in case.

Thanks, Boats. Next one's on me.

Transformers Teaser Trailer

Well, that ought to make a buck or two.

Welcome to the New World

Two things bring our exciting Futurian Existence into focus:

1.) My TV round-up below was linked to by both Warren Ellis, angry ideaspace god of transhumanism and Red Bull, and the Maclean's magazine website. Macleans is essentially the Time magazine of Canada.

Pageviews inbound from Warren are running 3 to 1 over inbound from Macleans.

2.) I was watching this video of Scott Kurtz -- who is producing his own animated show based on his own very popular webcomic -- in his animation studio in Montreal, talking to his Quebecois clean-up artist who doesn't speak English. I was interrupted by an IM from the Portugese-speaking artist of my DC comic book, published in New York. He's emailing me issue #11's pages from his studio in Sao Paolo.

This isn't what my guidance counselor in high school talked about.

TV Fall Season - Post-game

Just updating the calls I made earlier. Your opinions and special finds should make the Comments far more interesting than the post.

BSG -- Not part of the original post, but Jesus Haploid Christ, that is some damn fine televisioning that deserves remarking upon. Consider it remarked. Watch the box sets, catch the new eps. That's how you go about the business of televising.

UGLY BETTY / STUDIO 60 / 30 ROCK -- In order: good for them, I'm still not watching/ if you think it's gotten better, you're high / Only for Baldwin, but worth it. Now, onto the essay questions.

DEXTER -- the very sales model for doing high-concept in 13 episodes. The sister character shows symptoms of irrational bitchiness usually reserved for network TV women (see JERICHO, below), but not to a fatal effect for the show. The stand-alones were all good, the meta-story is both intriguing and being closed off in a satisfactory way ... not making me giddy like LIFE ON MARS, but hey -- trust the Gene Genie. All told, a good investment of entertainment attention.

HEROES -- somehow got cheesier and better, which is no mean feat. Downside: I can not summon even the slightest interest in evil-stripper mom storyline. And that's saying something, considering anything described by the phrase "evil stripper mom" gets spotted ten yards. Upside: why yes, those are old-school cliffhangers. Why yes, you did manage to advance the meta-story in satisfying ways, consistently giving us answers without jerking us around. Bonus points -- the cheerleader can act, Glasses Guy does good ambivalent villain, Peter turned out to be much more interesting than I anticipated, and ... Hiro's. Fucking. Sword. First storyline closed off, but with some hanging threads, new storyline initiated for the winter return. Tick and tick, HEROES shows mastery of what all television will look like very soon, even if the networks are doing this new scheduling solely by accident.

JERICHO -- a conundrum. On a structural level, another excellent example of the new balance in TV. Are there big mysteries, such as "Who dropped the bomb?", "Who is the Magical Negro working for?", and "Where was Skeet Ulrich for those five years?" -- and no, not where was the actual Skeet Ulrich, I mean his character, but hey, I understand your confusion. Why yes, there are such mysteries. At the same time, each week clocks in with serial perfection. We need medicine/we find medicine. The bad guys come/we send the bad guys away. There's been a murder/we catch the murderer. Worth watching for this mastery. The web supplements are nicely done, too.

Bonus for Brad Beyer, playing Stanley, who now has a job on any show I work on, ever. What a find. They're not using him as much in conjunction with the Ulrich, as Beyer really works the "best friend you wish you had" vibe to its full extent, while Skeet's Jake doesn't seem to really deserve that kind of pal. Yet.

On the other hand, JERICHO's starting to show the seams of being on CBS. The female characters are really, really awful.

I kind of like Pamela Reed as the nosy, judgmental mom, as she's playing precisely the small-town mom who motivates you to move away. She's nails on a chalkboard, and that's a valid choice. But the best example of the sort of standard "moms/girlfriends or dysfunctional crimefighters" vibe all CBS women fall into was the ep where the Blackwater-style mercenaries were coming. While the heroic caucasian menfolk were having a stand-off on the bridge, the girlfolk were getting hammered in the bar, dreaming about one of the girls' missed wedding. Now, that's a valid storyline, but that juxtaposition was miserable. The women even comment that "something's happening". Yeah, there's a squad of heavily armed men who are going to come in here, shoot all of you in the face and take your penicillin. That's a bit distracting from mooning over the hope chest, no?

Not a single woman with a gun? Not a single Hispanic American living in KANSAS for chrissake? Meanwhile, the women have a very thin trigger on the "fly off the handle" setting. Constantly hurt, angry, resentful to well-meaning guys, except for the fun little Science Girl (GO, SCIENCE GIRL!) who suddenly disappeared for three weeks while Ulrich weaved his Skeet-alicious magic over Bad-Extensions Girl. I must give full credit to Mrs. Kung Fu Monkey for calling out this constant bullshit shrill characterization. I am generally clueless about such things, wrapped up in metastory and Beyer-crush as I am. But when you take the time to parse it out, it's a serious and serial problem in television, and a particular weakness of CBS.

Also, the shmaltz is climbing. At first it was reserved to that magnificently awful "feelings" music that kicked in whenever Pamela Reed decided to talk to anyone. But the return in the finale of a missing character, at precisely the moment he did so, was not just deus ex machina, it's like the machina was a frikkin' robot who was in charge of running the universe according to specs designed by an omnisicent parallel universe bastard OCD son of Newton and Copernicus.

It feels like some bit of arc-planning went awry in the middle of those first 11, something went out of balance and certain elements sloshed to one end of the arc. No idea how it happened, but I damn near quit the show right then and there despite my affection for it. Status: on probation.

LOST: ... oy. And I say this with friends on the show. But oy. Unlike many people, I think the flashback structure is still useful. But look at what we got for flashbacks so far:

1.) Jack's marriage fell apart, and he was obsessive. No new information, or even anything different from previous flashbacks. Really nothing to do with the mystery of the island.

2.) Turns out Jin knew a lot more about Sun's infidelities than he let on, some Sun responsibility issues ... pretty good, and new information. Although his mastery of tactics reveals why Sayid was an interrogator and code-breaker in the Iraqi army as opposed to, say, a combat officer.

3.) Locke worked on a commune, accidentally screwed the potgrowers there, and then couldn't kill a day player. Which is not all that surprising. Him not killing people. As he's a good guy.

4.) Sawyer's a con man with a heart of gold. REALLY?!

5.) Eko once broke his vow as a priest and killed some day players. Which is not all that surprising. Him killing people. As he's a killer.

Oh, and then in the episode proper, one of the top three coolest humans on the island dies. And there are other hatches. Which we already know. And more characters are introduced! Yay!

6.) Kate, the emotionally unstable criminal who can't commit to nice guy Jack, couldn't commit to nice-guy sheriff back in the day, either. Now, looking at her pattern with the childhood-boyfriend doc, and the sheriff, I can see the arc there. But .. jeebus.

The weird thing is, all these episodes were very, very well-written. Seriously, LOST has one of the best staffs currently working in television. But the decision to start in the Others' camp (regardless of a very cool reveal vis-a-vis the original crash) is like ... the audience is being told that this goddam story is interesting whether they like it or not, or regardless of whether it's interesting or revelatory or not. You like Hurley, a character we spent two years getting you to invest in? Tough glass titties, prole.* He'll be back in May. Look, more unnecessarily cryptic white folk!

At the moment I found myself thinking "Hey Jack, they want you to do spinal surgery on their evil leader. How about making a deal where they have to explain ONE SINGLE SOLITARY GODDAM THING ABOUT THIS ISLAND, and then you'll do it? Huh? Who on EARTH wouldn't bargain that?" I started to die a little inside. I understand that the castaways are in over their head, but it's like they've developed some sort of bizarre learned helplessness (as have we. Wait a minute, is this all part of the experiment --?).

You can stall on the A-story, or blow a flashback on straight characterization, but both? I have full faith that the back half of the season will set my retinas on fire. But at this point it's straight faith, a situation I'm never comfortable with.

Your kvetches, recommendations, etc. in the Comments. I'm psyched about the return of ROME. I'm already pantless. Err, in a toga. You know what I mean.









* heh. that one's just for me.

Apocalypto

You know, in screenwriting we say that an ending should be "unexpected yet inevitable", but this may be the first time in almost a decade I can say I actually got the "unexpected" part. (No spoilers in the Comments.) Apocalypto is magnificent. It's visionary in the old-school sense of "one film-maker's consistent vision.". So simple, but simplicity exercised with ruthless emotional efficiency.

It's not a masterpiece but a masterwork. A must-see on the big screen, and the script's got some subtleties in it, a narrative simple, yet rich ... just go. It may not be the best movie of the year, but it's the greatest if that makes any sense.

The only odd thing is, if you stick around for the credits, the evil bloodthirsty Aztec priest is identified as "Rabbi Liebowitz" and the rapacious immoral Aztec Royal Family are "King and Queen Goldman." Minor points.

Making Hit Shows

Like I'd know. My only hit show was the one that never aired. Go figure.

Anyway, while Ken Levine is off on vacation he's got Peter Casey explaining

how

Frasier

was created.

This is very spiffy, and seeing as I'm in the pre-Christmas draft sprint, I direct you toward it in lieu of any of my own paltry words. That said, we may have some interesting things to discuss in the New Year, as one of these movies I'm working on is the sequel to a much beloved film, and I'm sure you'll have questions about exactly how I ran it into the ground (preview answer: drunk, and cackling).

Freebies

Putting the final shine on a draft in a lovely hotel room. Meanwhile, Lifehacker has the 30 Essential Free Downloads for you, if you don't want to be Microsoft's bitch.