Stranded in the jungle

I'm forever finding old writing documents in dinosaur file formats that I can't open properly and have to reconstruct. My computers are always dying. I'm always running out of space on all my devices. I'm forever surrounded by stacks of books and notes I write to myself that get lost or go ignored. I'm like an important poet, but I'm not important and not a poet.

This is kind of poetic though; I wrote it in 1994 and I like it. It's kind of BladeRunner-esque.

"Come in," says he with a smirk and even, perhaps, a drop of wit.
"I've been expecting you all day, in fact, all of my life which, as far as I can remember, is all of today."
    
she pulls up a chair, accepting his invitation, but only as an afterthought.
"I ran out of places to run," says she.
"invariable," says he.  "charming."  she draws out a cigarette.  he lights it, suggestively.

I'm inspired now to write a bunch of small nonsense stories, just whatever can set a vibe and fit on a postcard.

If anyone wants one, send me your address! 

Write "postcard story" or something in the subject line, in case you're finding this years from now during the climate wars, and I can't remember anything because trauma is constant and half my day is spent harvesting water from–

Meanwhile, back in the States ..

Awhile ago I teased that I was about to fuck my life up something serious and yes, reader, that nebula is still pulsing. But as for what I intended that fuckery to look like, I stared at everything too long, and melted it. Such is the drawback of having LASER EYES. Sometimes if you focus too hard on things, you BURN THEM.

What I had intended was, as a brain cleansing detour en route to a bigger goal, to purge about half my stuff, put most of what remained in storage and move into a little interim apartment with virtually nothing in it but a stack of books, my cats, and a desk, and WRITE. But I was thwarted by how expensive L.A. got during the ten years I've been living in my little rent controlled gang territory turkey shack, and got ripped off by an opportunistic fake landlord, and decided to sort the Big Goal first and then shuffle some other stuff around in the meantime; the Big Goal has always been to throw a dart at an international map, and move. While I'll likely be in L.A. another year or two, I've thrown that dart.

Details to follow, when I've sorted things out a little more concretely.

But I've picked a city. Do not let me stare at it. Don't let me stare at it. Do. Not. Let me–

 

Meanwhile, back in the jungle ... 

Like if I'm going to get any serious writing done, I'm going to start with an empty desk, and about three days in I'm gonna have birds nesting in my hair and a crazy board with red yarn connecting Alternative Tentacles stickers to unraveling cassette tapes & photos of punks kissing; it's just SCIENCE.

Consider yourself WARNED.

Love, yours truly, your Replicant Laureate

 

escape from the "how's everything tasting" industrial complex

Ok, hey. For reasons, I'm seriously purging my stuff; I was browsing one of my regular thrift stores earlier, and items here & there kept catching my eye until I reality checked: "yeah, those things are cool because you picked them out. You just dropped them off here an hour ago, idiot."

It's not a perfect process.

Necessary though. I'm having a backwards midlife crisis. I've spent all of life so far making impractical decisions, and now I'm you know, fixing my credit (again). Where do you go to tune up your life? I've got no husband to leave. I still listen to punk rock. I left home young and have lived in some cool cities. The wild stuff is done & gone. Now how do I genuinely engage with adulthood without selling myself out? Who can sell me a brain cleanse? (If u say "ayahuasca" you're blocked. WTF do you think I am, a Noah Baumbach film?)

It's time for a rebirth (not in the "find god" kind of way. I've already found Satan, thanks). Can you sign up for some Freaky Friday type situation? put me in some nineteen-year-old's life for awhile - just long enough to go "oops, that was essential," to understand what parts of my life I need to keep, and what I should toss. The Extreme Immersive Marie Kondo Experience. I promise to be a rock star this time. I promise to lay off the acid & learn to skateboard. Just turn back time for me. I deserve it. I've been dealing with some SHIT. I'll come out of it cleansed. I better get everything I ask for, going forward. Cuz I'm still pretty jazzed with my inner world (no small feat) but right now my outside circumstances are a mix of fucking amazing and Entire Ring of Hell. I keep stepping into that hellevator in Angel, and exiting right where I went in.

But the nice things are quite nice, so I'm going to hell in a limo.

if I'd bought this car in 2015, I'd be there already

My show has theme days which is kinda cool - you know, for kids. 

I could live without Tracksuit Tuesday, but since Pineapple Fridays turned into Muppet Pineapple Fridays, cool, I'll play ... until recently when I saw on the call sheet "tomorrow is Disney show swag day!" Look, buddy, that's too much like a pep rally. I already work on a Disney show. What more do you want from me? That's like going to a restaurant and one bite into your food, being asked (by an actor) "how's everything tasting?" Oh man, it's excellent! thank you for choosing me to be a living ad for your restaurant for a second - I feel like I won the lottery!

(insert Garfield picture. Anyone one will do. Any Garf–)

Seriously, this "How's everything tasting?" thing happened overnight. I eat out a lot because (spoiler) I live in L.A. (great restaurants + nobody has any time.) One day everyone was asking the usual helpful, humble stuff like "how is everything? / can I get you anything else?" and the next day every waiter in L.A. was asking (mid-bite, always) "HOW'S EVERYTHING TASTING??" Let's skip "why?" for now and ask HOW? Did they all get a software update? I thought they were people, but who knows. WHO TOLD YOU THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA

I get what this is all about. Some restaurant owners went to a gross capitalist sales conference or something, and got a corporate pep talk, which was something like "KEEP YOUR CUSTOMERS ENGAGED IN THINKING POSITIVELY ABOUT THEIR EXPERIENCE AT THE RESTAURANT" - I mean, hold on, guys. Did you think ahead, did you realize two months later Umami Burger would be asking diners "So, everything's so delicious right!!!!!?" Wait, what??? What if I kicked my fork across the room and need a new fork? THIS ISN'T WORKING FOR ME

MAKE IT STOPPPPPPPPPPPPP

 

mom with a fork in 2017

Stop the capitalist carousel, I want to get offfffffffff

This is in no way what I mean when I say it's time for me to (barf) "engage with adulthood" .. I mean, JFC, I just bought Make Love! the Bruce Campbell Way. No way am I going to do the Wisdom Course (or ayahuasca). No way am I joining Scientology, or CrossFit.

I just want to be me, but BETTER.

More streamlined.

A more minimalist maximalist.

A more productive (ew), happier, calmer me.

 

New Spongebob collab just dropped

 

a short sweet list of people who are going to hell

*yawn*stretchstretch*

*breaks out the ole rusty snarkwriting muscle*

*takes a sip of water*

Ahem ... 

PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO HELL

(that you might not think of immediately – could be your neighbors, anybody. terrifying)

• Every landlord I’ve ever had
• Prison wardens
• Everybody who doesn’t read
• Dentists
• Boring people* **
• Cat slanderers
• Fruit stickerers
• Meter maids*
• Republicans
• The inventor of the car alarm
• People who say “irregardless”
• Shoe eschewers
• Birkenstock enthusiasts
• Morning people*
• Happy joggers
• AM radio talk show hosts
• Drivers who don't use their blinkers
• Anyone who owns so little music they don’t need to categorize it
• Bottle non-recyclers*
• Clowns*
• Cheaters (dictators, dopers, line cutters)
• Unannounced visitors*
• Perfume overdoers
• Basically most people who have never had a mohawk*
• Some popes, but not Pope Francis
• Leaf blower operators
• 50 item buyers in express lines, but that one’s pretty obvious
• Mark Zuckerberg
• Comic artists who don’t give women enough clothes
• Writers who don’t give women enough lines
• Producers who don’t give actresses enough money
• People who take up two parking spots on purpose
• Dog poop non-scoopers (obviously; one offense is sufficient though, which is important to note)
• Everyone (owners, investors, bus boys, mailmen, hosts) involved in the day to day function of restaurants that quit serving brunch fifteen minutes early (or ever, potentially) or serve fake maple syrup
• People over 30 who don’t own a Ramones album, unless they were raised by wolves
• Richard Spencer (made being a nazi fashionable; ruined the undercut hairdo) < duh
• People who sell their old punk t-shirts on eBay*
• Mimes (no reason)

*Some offenses can be lessened by campaigning to pass the ERA, recycling bottles, working at a soup kitchen, or writing an essay (pro or con) about the Oxford comma

**Meant in the literal use of the adjective "boring," not for ex. to indicate employees of The Boring Company

And it turns out Mitch McConnell is Satan, actually, so sorry if I just ruined your day.

Joe's dead phone

Jennifer Parker's pants, revisited

I hereby eat my words from the previous post, regarding Back to the Future, in which I claim Jennifer Parker v.2 (Elizabeth Shue) wears a lame reproduction of her original pants, as today I received my copy of Back To The Future: The Ultimate Visual History, and was able to pore over photos of Elizabeth wearing pants in BTTF 2, from which one can only conclude she was wearing the same pants after all, or if not the very ones, a close enough facsimile that they did not and do not deserve my mocking.  See for yourself (pic 1: Claudia Wells; pics 2 & 3: Elizabeth Shue)

Also, I attended the last day of We're Going Back 2015 and watched BTTF in the parking lot of Puente Hills Mall, timed so the clock tower lightning strike happened at 10:04 (or within a minute or so) and with a live Delorean chase by a van full of Libyan terrorists.  So many fan-driven Deloreans were in attendance, I kept losing count – at least 15, maybe half of which were time machines.

People were handing out "Save the Clock Tower" flyers, and the mayor of City of Industry announced they would be keeping the Twin Pines Mall sign forever.

I love Los Angeles, my weird home.

The Future Is Now

Back to the Future turned 30 years old this year. And October 21, 2015 is the future date Marty, Doc, and Jennifer travel to at the beginning of BTTF 2 (although Doc probably travels to 10/26/15 first). So right now the world is exploding with BTTF celebrations.

This is one of my favorite movies – I think it had perfect pacing, perfect casting, a perfect script. And Crispin Glover. And a Delorean ... which is a time machine.  Someone deserves a prize for thinking that one up. 

This, the week of the Back to the Futureverse 1985 future, is only happening once. So I only briefly tore my hair out with indecision before rearranging my finances to find $200 for a ticket to Back to the Future Film School, the last day of the We’re Going Back event.  I wish I could be rich and unemployed this week (I'm working on a show about time traveling teens!) so I could go to the whole thing, but I’m happy with what I was able to get – Sunday should be the best day for me: a full day of panels on the car design, editing, cinematography and so on, and then a screening of the original film at Puente Hills (aka Twin Pines / Lone Pine Mall) with some “surprises” (which I can only hope is code for a Delorean accelerating to 88 mph in the mall parking lot and then vanishing in a trail of fire).

Much has been written about the cast members who for various reasons were replaced with other actors during the filming of the trilogy.  First, pretty boy Eric Stoltz was originally cast as Marty McFly, and they were well into shooting the film before he was deemed a little too serious for the role and replaced with Michael J. Fox, necessitating reshoots of all of his scenes. And neither Claudia Wells (Jennifer Parker) nor Crispin Glover (George McFly) agreed to appear in BTTF 2 or 3, so George McFly was cobbled together with existing footage and an actor wearing prosthetics (for which Crispin Glover later sued), and Claudia was replaced with Elizabeth Shue. The last scene of BTTF was reprised for BTTF 2 as its sole purpose in the first place was to set the audience up for a sequel (that I’m going to propose no one had written yet at the time that scene was penned, since most of BTTF 2 has nothing to do with Jennifer & Marty’s kids and the story plays out kind of like “oh crap, we have to do something with the kids before we get into it, since we said so in the last movie”); said sequel segues from the first film with an overlap of that scene. In other words, the scene at the end of BTTF with Claudia Wells playing JP was repeated at the start of BTTF 2 with Elizabeth Shue as JP. They weren’t trying to fool anybody. But they did mimic the scene shot by shot, like Weird Al Yankovic’s “Eat It” and James Franco / Seth Rogen’s parody of that awful Kanye West video with Kim Kardashian on the motorcycle.

Ok, I’ll include it.

Anyway, the thing that fascinates me most about all this role swapping in Back the the Future is that the costumers were unable to find another pair of Jennifer Parker’s pants for the repeated scene.

At best, that's the acid wash variant. Maybe just pink pants with some plants drawn on.

Also they’ve done something terrible with Elizabeth Shue’s hair, but to be fair it was the ‘80s and there was nearly nothing un-terrible done to anybody’s hair.

‘80s hair:

This was a thing to behold. Bangs curling out and then downward and also another set of bangs going upwards. I remember girls coming to school with their bangs blowdried and hairsprayed in both directions but the rest of their (permed) hair still wet because what happened to it was irrelevant. My friend Scott used to refer to this as the "tree branch" hairdo. It was really a very exciting version of a girl mullet. No one wore hats in the winter. The hair was the main event.

Elizabeth Shue doesn't look that bad by comparison.

Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

That's the classic English pangram (sentence containing all 26 letters), one of few useful sentences I learned as a young kid and still remember, along with pneumonic devices "She made Harry eat onions" (the Great Lakes, west to east) and "Every good boy does fine" (treble scale).

The lazy dog sentence as far as I know arose out of a need to quickly test for stuck typewriter keys. The need to do anything efficiently (or at all) with a typewriter has gone completely obsolete, but pangrams are still good for trying out fonts, and for amusing word nerds such as myself.

I discovered the discotheque one in a photo app and then realized this was a thing beyond typewriters and typefaces, that people sit around coming up with them, and the sheer number of them far outpaces their usefulness.  I am not that much of a word nerd. The 26 letter ("perfect") pangrams are pretty much cheaters (examples: "Zombies play crwth, quj FDG xvnk" and "Jump dogs, why vex Fritz Blank QC?") insofar as you would define a sentence as loosely as: a thought that anyone sane would find a reason to utter out loud.

Once you allow some extra letters to sneak in though, you get some gems like:

Junk MTV quiz graced by fox whelps.
Both fickle dwarves jinx my pig quiz.
Jack, love my big wad of sphinx quartz!
Five quacking zephyrs jolt my wax bed.
Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
Fix problem quickly with galvanized jets.
When zombies arrive, quickly fax Judge Pat.
Watch "Jeopardy!", Alex Trebek's fun TV quiz game.
Foxy diva Jennifer Lopez wasn't baking my quiche.
Cozy lummox gives smart squid who asks for job pen.
Six big devils from Japan quickly forgot how to waltz.

.... all brilliant, I know, but the clear winner is:
"Who am taking the ebonics quiz?", the prof jovially axed.

Read it and weep.
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main source: http://clagnut.com/blog/2380/

love stories

I really couldn’t have less interest in this year’s big “romantic” film, 50 Shades of Grey. Creep city. What was the last really innovative love story? Amelie? … which isn’t really a love story, since they barely even meet at the end. It’s more of a character study, and a totally endearing one, but really not a love story.

Anyway, it’s nearly Valentine’s Day, so here I present my favorite oddball and under the radar love stories. Some are relatively minor subplots that I find particularly poignant. Some are unrequited. And even among the reciprocal love stories, they don’t all have happy endings because the story doesn’t really end at the onset, does it? But they are all great.

A Little Romance

Rocket Science

Rushmore

Starter for 10

Say Anything

Lucas

Valley Girl

Gregory's Girl

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

Benny & Joon

Mozart and the Whale

Harold and Maude

Sex, Lies, and Videotape

L.A. Story

Only Lovers Left Alive

Suburbia

Over the Edge

(possibly the best film ever made)

Starter for 10 may have a cult following of one person, me. But Benedict Cumberbatch is in it, so someone else is bound to figure it out.

And I may be the only person on earth who thinks Buckaroo Banzai is primarily a love story. Everyone who writes about it seems to think the plot is ridiculous or incomprehensible.

But I stand by it!

(edit) –

I really should have mentioned these two, even though Sixteen Candles concludes absurdly and the "love" story is possibly the least interesting thing about it ...

Some Kind of Wonderful

Sixteen Candles

And also The Princess Bride and Enchanted, which are so utterly ludicrous and perfect they belong in a category of their own.