Love has everything to do with it

Last week, Arthur Lee, frontman of '60s psychedelic legends Love, died of acute lymphoblastic leukemia at the age of 61.

I had heard on Sirius recently of a New York benefit concert having been put together by Robert Plant, Yo La Tengo, Ryan Adams, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah to raise money for Lee's medical expenses, so I was aware that he was ill. I just didn't know how bad it was.

Love's 1967 album Forever Changes is widely considered one of the greatest of its era, and remains hugely influential nearly 40 years later.

I remember Love because my brother Jack had their first three albums: Love, Da Capo and Forever Changes and we would listen to them from time to time.

The Da Capo album contains a song with some of my favorite lyrics of all time: Seven and Seven Is:

Seven and Seven Is
by (Arthur Lee) Love

When I was a boy I thought about the times I'd be a man
I'd sit inside a bottle and pretend that I was in a can
In my lonely room I'd sit my mind in an ice cream cone
You can throw me if you wanna 'cause I'm a bone and I go
Oop-ip-ip oop-ip-ip, yeah!

If I don't start cryin' it's because that I have got no eyes
My father's in the fireplace and my dog lies hypnotized
Through a crack of light I was unable to find my way
Trapped inside a night but I'm a day and I go
Oop-ip-ip oop-ip-ip, yeah!

One... Two... Three... Four!


I listened to their Greatest Hits album this week and some of Love's music is still ahead of its time. I for one, will miss Arthur.

Con Job!

I just got back from the San Diego Comic Con International where I had an awesome time. This one had some of the best panels I've been to in a while, all thanks to Mark Evanier. Each year he does the Jack Kirby tribute panel and you know, pretty much you hear the same things said each year, but this year was different for two reasons. First, Mark had Jack's lawyer there and showed first the Johnny Carson Tonight Show clip where he called Jack the "King of the Con Men" and then the clip from a week later when Carson made his only known apology on the air. Great stuff all that.

The second reason was another seemingly odd panelist choice: Neal Adams. As some of you may know, I had a run in years ago with Neal where he screwed me over pretty good and forever tarnished how I feel about the guy as a person, so I was a little apprehensive when I saw he was going to be on the panel. Mark always asks the question, "What was your first impression of Jack Kirby's art." Neal gave what even Evanier said was most likely, "the best answer to that question I have ever heard." It was a 5-10 minute soliloquy on Jack Kirby's artwork that was amazing in how it encapsulated about 20 years of Jack's career and the impact of his art on comics and on other artists. It was well thought out and passionately delivered. Neal even dropped the F-bomb when discussing how DC had treated Jack. It was amazing.

The second extraordinary panel was the John Romita Sr. spotlight; just Mark and John talking. You go to enough cons and you hear enough artists speak and you rarely hear something new about the business, but Romita delivered information and insight into the comics of the 60s, 70s and 80s that I have never heard from anyone before. Yeah, I'd heard about his first Daredevil pages and how Stan Lee made him look at Kirby books and start over because he just didn't get how to do superhero comics.

But I hadn't heard about how he ended up loving Daredevil and wanted to stay on the book and make it one of the lines biggest and how upset he was when Stan pulled him off the book to draw Spider-man. I'd never heard how terrified of Spider-man he was and I'd never heard Mark's insight that in retrospect, given the artists at Marvel at the time and how few of them Stan Lee trusted, Romita was the only guy at Marvel who could have taken over Spider-man when Steve Ditko quit.

And I'd never heard anyone talk about the disappointment the people at Marvel felt when they discovered that the new batch of young artists they had been grooming for years to take over the company were really not interested. Romita was shocked when Barry Smith quit Conan; his generation would never have left steady income like that. And Romita was doubly shocked when they offered The Fantastic Four to Jim Starlin and he said, "No thanks." It was unheard of to turn down the best-selling book in a company if it was offered to you.

And I'd never heard anyone at Marvel admit that they were giving books out to artists that had no right doing books; artists that were years away from being ready and artists that would never be ready because they simply were not good enough.

There was even more from Romita, but I'll leave it at that. That was the two best comics panels I saw at SDCC.

I also sat in on the Veronica Mars panel and my god is Kristen Bell adorable. We learned that season three will have three mysteries, not one, and that they will run one after the other. Obviously they are doing this in case they get the ax mid-season. They will be following the Gilmore Girls and need to keep the GG audience.

I didn't spend much money and I didn't buy any art, though I was tempted. I did pre-order the new James Bama book that is coming out in October and will feature all of the Doc Savage covers and many of the reference photos for the Docs. It covers all of Bama's artwork, commercial and otherwise including the Aurora monster kits, movie posters and the like. The special edition also comes with an hour-long documentary on Bama that I saw about five minutes of during a panel and which looks amazing.

The only downside to the con was my wife once again looking at the prices on silver age books and asking me which ones are in my collection. She is seeing dollar signs everywhere. Bummer.

Is All Garbage Sacred?

Now that President Bush has legitimized through veto the sanctity of one type of garbage (embryos slated to be thrown in the trash), will he be protecting all forms of garbage? Certainly he is telling us all that our lives are worth less than garbage. And some people still support this nut job.

The Glory Days

These are the glory days of adult TV. Right now we have Rescue Me, Deadwood and Huff all with new episodes. It don't get much better than that.

Alex Toth

One of the greats of comics died over the weekend, supposedly while sitting at his drawing board. For an artist, that's a pretty awesome way to leave this world, but awesome is a word that always described Alexander Toth.

I think I first became aware of Toth in the 60s watching Saturday morning cartoons. I never really paid much attention to the artwork in cartoons until Johnny Quest came out and the artist who designed the series actually signed the show; his signature actually appeared at the end of each episode. No, it wasn't Alex Toth, it was the late, great Doug Wildey, but Wildey's signature in a box got me to start reading the credits of other shows and one name showed up over and over: Alex Toth.

From Space Ghost to Space Angel, from Birdman to Hot Wheels, Toth was everywhere. The Hanna-Barbera non-funny animal style was Alex Toth's style. Clean distinctive characters created using the minimum number of lines required, that was Alex Toth.

Oddly I never noticed that the same guy was drawing comics for DC. His comic work at that time was much more mainstream, much more detailed than his cartoon work; until he did the comic book for Hot Wheels.

I remember really loving the Hot Wheels comic book and not knowing why. I eventually figured out that it was because of Toth. After that book died, Toth was doing all sorts of work for DC, from war stories to horror to super hero. His Black Canary was an amazing piece of minimalist work, as was his Black Hood work for Red Circle Comics. I never grew tired of Alex's work, but there never seemed to be enough of it. He worked so sporadically that each story became a mini-event all on its own.

Toth was one of the greats of comic art and the industry is diminished by his loss. Thank you Alex for all the wonderful years of amazing artwork; thank you for being such a large part of my childhood. We will miss you.

A Matter of Trust

I don't know how many people out there get the Candorville comic strip in their local newspaper (for that matter how many people out there even read a local newspaper?), but Candorville has quietly gotten more and more political over time. Today's strip is extremely timely and deals with a matter of trust and the outrageous serial lying of the Bush administration.

For those who don't care to follow the link:

First Panel:

Lamont Brown sitting watching his TV.

Caption: 2004

TV: We're not spying on anyone's phone calls without a warrant. Trust us.

Second Panel:

Lamont Brown sitting watching his TV.

Caption: 2005

TV: OK. We're spying on calls without getting a warrant, but it's only a few terrorist suspects. Trust us.

Third Panel:

Lamont Brown sitting watching his TV.

Caption: 2006

TV: OK. We're spying on every single phone call made by almost everyone in America, but we're not listening to the calls.

Fourth Panel:

Lamont Brown sitting watching his TV.

TV: Trust us.

Candorville creator Darrin Bell can be followed through his Candorville.com website. With Boondocks on hiatus, Candorville is doing a great job of picking up the slack.

Wall Blow Me Down!

Let me see if I have this straight: It was wrong for Israel to build a wall between their country and the Palestinian areas to keep suicide bombers out, but it is OK to build a wall between the United States and Mexico to keep gardeners and lettuce pickers out? My god the so called leadership of this country is surely messed up!

Do the Limbo!

How low can you go?

So, the latest polls put Bush's approval rating at 29%. Using our previous formula where we start with his approval rating of 90% (that was right after he swore he wouldn't politicize the thousands of Americans killed on 9/11 and then posed in front of the American flag at ground zero politicizing the death of thousands of Americans), and remembering that those of us in the 10% who saw the sham of Bush's 9/11 rhetoric and didn't approved of this jerk-off back then, have not changed our minds, we can once again do some math:

90% believed the bullshit
-29% still believe the bullshit
------
61% have seen the light

61% of Americans now know they were wrong, they were duped. That's an even sadder number than before, but I think this president has the ability to go even lower. Given that the 29% poll was taken before we learned that the NSA has amassed the world's largest database of every phone call made for the past five years by 200 million Americans, I'm sure we are going to soon be looking at Nixon-type approval ratings.

We may soon get to the "angry villagers carrying torches storm the castle (White House)" phase. God I'd love to watch that on TV. Of course, Fox News won't be covering it; there'll be a coed gone missing somewhere that will be a much more pressing story.

CSI Yie Yie Yie Yie!

How can one show be so bad? So bad that you, and everyone you know who watches it, only do so to make fun of it? No, I am not talking about Thursday night’s CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the excellent William Peterson/Marg Helgenberger show that started the flood of forensics shows which now dominate the TV landscape. I am referring to its first sibling, CSI: Miami, the train wreck masquerading as a cop show; you know, the most watched show on Monday nights?

I'm not going to mince words or beat around the bush here, I'm going to be upfront and perfectly candid about by opinion of this show; in a nutshell, CSI: Miami is one of the worst shows on TV. That said, I never miss it.

From the absolutely cheesy unrealistic pastel-lit sets, to the golden-orange filter they shoot most of the exterior scenes with, to the wooden acting, the "my aren't we so hip you want to puke" bogus plot devices, David Caruso's refusal to look at anyone he is talking with and his OCD-like glasses on-glasses off routine and "chop it in half" reading of sentences ("And Frank, divorce...can be murder", "It's a drive-by...Miami style", etc.), to the horrid excuse for writing, this show is a disaster from beginning to end.

Well, from shortly after beginning to end, 'cause the show does have one thing going for it, and that's a dynamite credits sequence complements of The Who. Every episode starts out with a crime being committed and David Caruso as Lieutenant Horatio Kane and one or more members of his posse (Emily Procter as Calleigh Duquesne, Adam Rodriguez as Eric Delko, Khandi Alexander as Dr. Alexx Woods,Jonathan Togo as Ryan Wolfe or Rex Linn as Detective Frank Tripp) showing up at the scene to supposedly investigate it. I say supposedly, because there is never much real investigation happening on this show. As the opening sequence comes to a close, Caruso will stare off into space as he talks to one of his people, then turn to the camera and either put his sunglasses on or take them off. This is usually done in the pause he inserts into his sentences. Like, "It's not an accident..." (puts on glasses), "...It's murder." And then Roger Daltry screams! It's his scream from near the end of "Won't Get Fooled Again" and it is the beginning of a killer montage sequence that contains the credits. It ends with Pete Townshend slamming out one of the most famous guitar riffs in rock history, the song's end.

Masterful credits on a masterless show.

I've already hit on most of Caruso's odd antics, but he also sports one of the creepiest smiles I've ever seen. Another Caruso quirk is he has this strange way of standing in profile so that it looks like he is falling over when he isn't, like in the bizarre picture to my left. He also likes to stand in a three-quarter view with his hands on his hips, pushing his coat back and then switch forward legs and do it again; it's hard to explain but even harder to watch with a straight face. Once every show he seems compelled to say to someone, "Here's what were going to do, were going to..." whatever. It is all so annoying.

Emily Procter's Calleigh is about as wooden as they come. Her emotions show only as quick snapping barbs. It's almost as if she has removed herself from the show emotionally and is only there for the paycheck. Given the quality of writing, that might be a smart move on her part. She plays a charmless southern belle with an alcoholic father and zero love life, who some seasons comes off as a gun nut and others as just a soulless, sexless automaton.

Adam Rodriquez used to not bother me so much. In the early seasons he was always paired with the excellent Rory Cochrane as Tim "Speed" Speedle and he worked well as the straight man for Cochrane's droll humor. Rodriquez is a strange one; it's hard to tell sometimes what emotion he is trying to project. This might be just bad acting, or it might be that he is as confused by what his character is asked to do as the rest of us are. His main function in the show seems to be getting laid by women who end up dead, getting busted for drugs, providing a sister for Horatio to sleep with, and getting pissed off at the other team members.

If any member of the Miami team is going to drive you up a wall it's Dr. Alexx Wood played by Khandi Alexander (who I remember liking in News Radio). Every CSI has to have someone chopping up the bodies and that's Khandi's role here. Actually her real purpose seems to be to add "heart" to the show. She calls nearly every body on her slab "baby girl" or "baby boy" and whines and moans over their loss of life. The first writer to add this to her personality must have thought they were adding some much needed compassion to the show, but now, like Caruso's OCD-antics, it seems like something tacked on to a one-dimensional character; it sounds phony and trite and it's just annoying as hell.

Jonathan Togo as Ryan Wolfe was added to the show when Rory Cochrane smartly begged to be cut loose (The departure of Rory, to my left, may have been when the series "jumped the shark," or it may have been that Rory saw the shark before any of the rest of us did). Wolfe was a patrolman who used CSI to get off the street, only, like most of the characters here, he still carries a gun and uses it. On the real CSI, the one in Las Vegas, there is always a clear distinction between police and CSI; CSI are not cops, they are scientific investigators. In Miami, with the exception of Dr. Wood, everyone carries a gun and acts exactly like a cop. I have a feeling the writers don't really know what CSI stands for.

Rex Linn plays Detective Frank Tripp and is not really a permanent member of the cast (he doesn't appear in the show's splashy intro), though his part is getting bigger each season. He at least is supposed to be a cop, so I don't mind seeing him with a gun. Tripp is one of those right-wing, law and order types, who live in a black and white world. The writers seem to be mellowing him this season, smoothing off some of his rougher edges and it's helped, but not much. I still wince at most of the lines he reads.

As annoying as the cast of characters is, the real problem with this show is the writing. It sucks. No, really!

On the real CSI people sometimes confess at the end of the show, or they don't. Sometimes after gathering evidence throughout the hour the suspect is told something to the effect of, "You don't have to tell us you did it, the evidence tells us you did." On Miami, they rarely have any real evidence.

I remember one episode where a woman was questioned about a dead body on a boat. She was connected through phone records and when confronted said something like, "Well sure we called the guy. We are looking to buy a boat and we answered his boat ad in the paper. He was asking too much so we dropped it." Calleigh then mentions that they found lipstick on a glass on the boat and the color looks the same as the lipstick the woman is wearing. This is pretty thin stuff folks, the color seems to be the same? Does the woman tell the CSI to stuff it? Does she ask for a lawyer? Does she say there are thousands of different colors of lipstick on the market? No, she says, "OK, we went to the boat and my boyfriend killed the guy." Say what????

If this were an isolated incident I might, might I say, let it pass, but it isn't an isolated incident. Week after week the suspects confess at the drop of a hat. The writers have to have them do this because this group of CSIs is completely lacking in any skill at crime investigation and if people don't just admit they did it, no one is ever going to get caught.

All of this said, I never miss it because when the train begins to crash, I can't help but watch it!

The More Things Change...

Well, you know how the saying goes. A few items ago I shared some pictures from many, many years back of a costume party I held at the first house I ever lived at after moving out of my parents house. At the time I shared the picture above of my partner Baron Mrkva and his girlfriend (now wife) , Kelley. Well over the years Baron and I have kept in contact, but not in real close contact and we have let so many years pass since we last got together, that neither of us remember how many years ago that was. Pretty piss-poor for good friends and once business partners. Well, we got together this past weekend.

I have season tickets to the Los Angeles Avengers Arena Football League team and this weekend they played their next to last game of the season at the Staples Center. I had been wanting to get together with Baron for a long time and this seemed like a good enough excuse. We could drink expensive beer ($10 a glass), eat expensive hot dogs ($4.75 a pop) and watch the Avengers play that unique game of indoor football that the Arena League has been showcasing for 20 years.

Baron is a graphic artist and does advertise- ments, sales literature, direct mail, packaging, displays, videos, multi- media and websites, or so the brochure he left with me says. It's a really nice piece of work. In it, to make his different points about selling, Baron takes on a number of persona: himself, a mad scientists, the Godfather and finally, this guy a little above and to my left.

There may be some gray streaking the long hair and there may be more wrinkles than in the past, but ol' Baron still makes a pretty good raging barbarian.

I tell ya, some people never change!

A TiVo Twofer? Not Quite

I got email yesterday for the new TiVo Series 2 DT DVR.This is not to be confused with the announced TiVo Series 3 HD boxes that will be out, sometime in the future. No, this is a standard Series 2 TiVo with a second tuner (DT stands for "Duel Tuner"). It also has built in Ethernet support for networking into your home network.

I love TiVo, but I'm not gonna get one of these new boxes for a number of reasons. Why will I not get one, let me count the ways:

First and foremost is it is not at all cost-effective for me to purchase one. I have a standard TiVo Series 2 in my living room with lifetime service I paid $300 for two and a half years ago. I'm not going to jettison that box for one that is costing me, well, I don't know how much it is costing me, but 1 year of it is buried in the $254 price of the box. I have a TV in my bedroom, but it is an HD TV with a Moxi HD, Duel-Tuner DVR attached. I'm not going to lose HD recording capabilities just to get a TiVo in my bedroom.

Second, I have friends who have the DirectTV Duel-Tuner TiVos and they love them, but the TiVo is their DirectTV box. It really has two separate feeds into the recorder; the TiVO Series 2 DT is not my cable box (unlike the Moxi HD in my bedroom), so I have to provide the two video feeds. It's fairly simple to split a cable feed, but my cable box only had one input feed, so I can only pass one of the video feeds through my cable box. This means that although the TiVo has two tuners, only one of them is going to have the good stuff, the 60 or so movie channels my cable provides. This seems more than just a slight hassle.

Third, already mentioned above is the Moxi in my bedroom is HD. I hate the Moxi box and would trade it in in a second for an HD TiVo with duel tuners.

Fourth, right now you can only get it if you got a special email from TiVo (and I think most existing customers did). It has a direct link that puts one in your shopping cart. Only thing is, when they come out for everyone I think they might have a rebate or two, not that this will change my mind any.

I was really jazzed to see that TiVo is not sitting around waiting for the Series 3 to roll out and is creating new products. I just don't think this is the right product for me.

You Can Fool Too Many of the People Too Much of the Time

So, the latest CNN and Fox News (boy is that a misnomer), polls put Bush's approval rating at 32%. At one point his approval rating was 90% (that was right after he swore he wouldn't politicize the thousands of Americans killed on 9/11 and then posed in front of the American flag at ground zero politicizing the death of thousands of Americans). I think it is safe to assume that those of us in the 10% who saw the sham of Bush's 9/11 rhetoric and didn't approved of this jerk-off back then, have not changed our minds and believe that this man is a criminal who ought to be thrown behind bars (preferably in Guantanamo). So lets do some math:

90% believed the bullshit
-32% still believe the bullshit
------
58% have seen the light

58% of Americans now know they were wrong, they were duped. That's a pretty sad number, made even sadder by the facts. Thousands of Americans dead in Iraq for no purpose, thousands of Americans dead in Hurricane Katrina for no reason, an immense National fortune divvied out like party favors to his friends (the looting of a nation), the retreat from clean air, clean water in the name of corporate profits for his friends, the squandering of the goodwill built up over centuries by this country all in the name of greed, and perhaps worst of all, the death of the dream that was America. There is no longer much hope here, unless it is the hope that you were born into one of the top financial 1% of the country and are reaping the obscene profits.

If you are, I hope you enjoy your blood money. How many pieces of silver is that?

A One of a Kind Guy

So I'm still looking in my office for a rock concert poster when I come across the illustration to my left: Duck Dogers. It's by Mahlon L. Fawcett. Lonnie to his friends and it's one of the many illustrations that Lonnie gifted me over the years.

Lonnie first came into my circle of friends during the Mayhem days (No, I wasn't ripping bodies apart, Mayhem was a comic book I was co-producing at the time). My partner, Baron Mrkva, and I sent some artwork and ad copy to a local shop for Mayhem #1 and this huge, hairy, wild-eyed maniac comes running out of the back room, going, "You guys got a book? You really got a book?" Lonnie and Baron and I became instant friends.

Lonnie even bumped another of our friends off the back cover of Mayhem #2 with a great cloud-city, spaceship kinda thing which you can see to my left. This is a good example of the kind of energy and guts Lonnie had with his art. Baron and I noticed some heavy black lines in the yellow trail coming out of the ship on Lonnie's piece and we took it to him and asked if he would take out the black. Instead Lonnie grabs this heavy red marker and began making the swirling red pattern on the trails you see today. Both Baron and I had eyes bulging out of our sockets when he did that, cause at first it looked like he was going to ruin the piece. But Lonnie had amazing confidence in his own work and the result, as you can see, was great. Lonnie is creative as hell, and undisciplined as the day is long, but when he does settle down and draw, he is a wonder.

Lonnie was also one hell of a model maker. Lonnie bought models but didn't build what is in the kit. Instead he used the parts in the kit along with index cards, paper, bottle caps, and anything else he could find to build something truly unique. His apartment always smelled of burning plastic since one of his joys was melting model parts with a cigarette lighter to create something new and unusual.

Lonnie also did some work on another comic book that I had a small part in, Wild Think. My Mayhem partner Baron Mrkva and a good friend, Burt Griswold ran Wild Think. I was there, but I put up no money, so had little say in the final book. I think we were all over at Lonnie's small apartment one day when he pulled this piece out of a pile sitting on the floor by the chair he always worked in. It was so striking that Burt wrote the scene into the first issue of Wild Think because we had to use this cover.

The last time I saw Lonnie was a few years ago at the San Diego Comic-Con. He was working in the Jim van Hise booth. Lonnie did some work over the years for Jim, but other than that never really made much of his art. It is truly a shame as the guy can draw like a bat out of hell!

On Ode to Black and White

You could hardly see for all the snow
So you'd spread the rabbit ears as far as they'd go
Pull up a chair to the TV set
"Good night, David; Good night, Chet."

Depending on the the channel you tuned
You got Rob and Laura - or Ward and June
It was oh so good and felt so right
Life looked better in black and white.

Cable was something you used on your car
When the battery was dead, or you didn't get far
Nobody'd heard of remote control
To change the channel you went for a stroll.

Not many channels but always something to see
Until midnight came and no more TV
Just a test pattern that shrunk to a dot
Until 7 am that's all that you got.

I Love Lucy, The Real McCoys
Dennis the Menace, the Cleaver boys
Rawhide, Gunsmoke, Wagon Train
Superman, Jimmy and Lois Lane

Patty Duke, Father Knows Best
Our Miss Brooks and all the rest
Donna Reed on Thursday night
Not a dysfunctional family in sight.

I want to go back to black and white
Everything always turned out right
Good guys always won the fight

In God they trusted, in bed they slept
A promise made was a promise kept
They never cussed or broke their vows
They'd never make the networks now.

But if I could, I'd rather be
In a TV town in '53
Like Mayfair, Pixley or Mayberry

I'd trade all the channels on the satellite
If I could just turn back the clock tonight
To when everybody knew wrong from right
Life was better in black and white.

Getting Ready for the Con!

I have been going to the San Diego Comic-Con since 1976. I haven't made it every year, but I've made it most years. Every year I see the Souvenir Program Guide and I go, "Dammit! I didn't do a piece of art for it again!" Many a year I have sketched ideas for the Program Guide and not gone any farther. This year I said, "To hell with that! I'm doing it!"

And this year I actually did.

The above illustration is my entry for the Guide. This is the 50th anniversary of The Flash and of Gumby and of me, so we are all together arm-in-arm. Yeah, I could have put a background on it, and I could have improved all of the figures, and yeah, this picture proves once again that I can't ink worth a damn, but I had fun doing it anyway. And I feel good about completing something for once.

I wonder what the picture I do for next year's Comic-Con will look like?

She Don't Lie... She Don't Lie...

So this week I'm searching through the closet in my office looking for a poster to a rock concert I attended a long, long time ago. I don't find it, but I do find pictures of a costume party I had almost as long ago. That's me as Robert E. Howard's Soloman Kane (hard to believe that back in those days I thought I was fat!). Anyway, the pictures got me thinking about costume parties I have attended. I know there have been a number of them, but I really only remember two.

The first one was the "First Annual Muscoy Comic-Con and Costumed Booze Party." All of the pictures in this item were taken there. It was held at the first place I moved into when I moved out of my parent's house for the first time (yeah, I went back a few times!).

My comic book publishing partner, Baron and his girl friend, Kelly, were in attendance as Conan and his wench (I'll let you figure out which one is which). We were a young, partying bunch, but I doubt if we did more than drink and smoke pot at the party. We were not normally the "hard drug" kind of people and we liked to stay way from anything that was too addictive.

Our good friend, Brian Grasser was in attendance as Tarzan. If ever a guy's name predisposed him to smoking a hell of a lot of pot, I think it was Brian's. Brian was a good guy and we used to spend whole weekends at the house he shared with his brothers, drinking beer, smoking pot, listening to music and playing cards. We played a lot of Black Jack in those days; all night sessions were not unusual, with people taking turns being the dealer/house. We played a lot of dealer's choice poker in those days too.

I don't even remember the names of the guys who came dressed as Thor and Green Arrow, it's been that long, but even parts of this party are a blank to me (though I do remember I got laid more than once that night!).

It's the other party I remember so vividly.

It was a good ten years later and I was living in a Los Angeles suburb and I used to party with a lot of the people I worked with. One woman and her husband in particular were always great fun to be with. They liked the same obscure music I did and when I would party with them we would drink and smoke all night long and never get too out of hand. That was because we would also do cocaine; their cocaine.

About a year later they invited my girl friend and I to a party at their house, a costumed party. We dressed up in rented costumes as jesters and expected to have a grand old time with some great people. It didn't happen. From the moment we got there the party had a strange vibe. People milled about the host couple in swarms, that would fill a room and then disappear. Whatever was going on we were not a part of it. I saw money changing hands on the sly and people disappearing and reappearing and after a while I got it. We were about the only people at the party not begging the hosts for some coke.

We sat there and watched the desperate looks on people's faces as they wheeled and dealed their way into the back bedrooms where the cocaine was plentiful. Everyone at the party was completely consumed by their need for the drug.

We left early and we never went back, nor did I ever do cocaine again. I never wanted to be one of those people who couldn't enjoy themselves because there needs were controlling them.

She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie. Cocaine.

The Specter of Spector

Every few months we are treated to the specter of Phil Spector, a guy so totally whacked, he thinks this is a good look for him. Now there are many things I could say about Phil and his long, and for the most part, illustrious career, but when I see this picture I don't think about that Phil. I think about the album National Lampoon's Radio Dinner, a compilation of the best of the once nationally syndicated National Lampoon Radio Hour.

The album has a lot of funny bits, all written by the late, great, Michael O'Donoghue and the still great Tony Hendra, but interspersed with them are bits of what is called Teenyrap. Teenyrap was written by the terrific Christopher Guest and it features the sounds of two teenagers in conversation at a party.

They speak to one another of the new era of peace coming to the planet and how the cosmic forces are being aligned for peace by George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh album. Their pretentiousness knows no bounds.

Fade in to the sounds of clinking glasses and bottles and background conversations...

Girl: Hey, you know, if we got this thing together, you know, everybody started buying the album, man, we could probably get rid of Nixon and his whole pig trip, man. We could get somebody in there man, like...

Man: Oh, that would be really far out, man. You know, like, incredible...

Girl: Oh, it'd be great. You know...

Man: We could get Robbie Robertson to be Secretary of War. You know, that would be so far out!

Girl: Yeah, he'd make everybody wear undershirts though, man...

Man: I know, but he could...

Girl: I know, man. People like Garcia. Like, Jerry Garcia, like, and have him in charge of giving out downs, man...

Man: Or, you know, Phil Spector. He could , you know... I don't know, he could lower the net.

Girl (not so sure): Lower the net? That sounds OK...

Man: Well, somebody has to do it. Not me.

Fade out.

Red Rock West

One of the films I have on auto-record on my TiVo is John Dahl's Red Rock West, which is a great introduction to the work of writer/director John Dahl and modern film noir. I can't think of another modern writer/director who better understands the technical, visual, and literal concepts of film noir, than John Dahl. He assembles a great cast of wonderful actors, places them in a unique small Texas town set, films mainly at night, and adds in just the right amount of murder, double-crossing, lust, mistaken identities, secret pasts, hidden agendas, sex, danger, violence, and humor. The result is a magic film about what happens when the honest meet the dishonest and what really matters most in life to some people.

Michael (Nicolas Cage) is a truly nice guy, an honest man, who through a case of mistaken identity gets involved with a murder plot. He has a chance early on to get out of town with some money that is not his, but that there is no way he could give back. If he just takes the money and runs, he is fine, but he can't; he can't because he is a nice guy and he has to try and set at least some of this mess right before he blows town. In doing so, things get bad, then they get worse, and then they get even worse. As the plot propels you along, every time you think things could not possibly get worse, they do as Michael gets deeper and deeper involved in a web of murderers and thieves. All Cage really wants to do is get out of the town of Red Rock, but no matter how often he leaves, he keeps getting pulled back.

Cage is wonderful; you can see the weight of every pained decision on his face, his heavy-lidded eyes. Also fine is the late, great J.T. Walsh as Wayne, the bar owner who wants his wife killed. Wayne is open and honest about his shortcomings, a different type of bad guy than you are used to seeing. Laura Flynn Boyle plays wife Suzanne with great style. She runs from hot to cold with ease; one minute you think she needs protecting, the next you need protection from her. You don't know till the end what is really important to her.

Dennis Hopper plays hired hit man Lyle with his usual intensity and adds a stiff-necked, jerky movement physicality to the character that makes him creepier than your average Hopper lunatic.

Like most noir films, Red Rock West deals with the people who populate the ugly underside of society. This story of an innocent stumbling into the morass of lies, deceits, and double-crosses that these people inhabit will grab you, and keep you guessing until the very end. The film also speaks of the inevitability of some acts, of how once you start down a path, you can't get off of it until you reach the end. Sometimes doing the right thing, may not have been the right thing to do.

We'll Remember You Forever Eddie....

But not like this!

Wow, none of us are quite what we used to be physically, but when did Eddie Van Halen turn into a toothless old homeless man who has spent too many years in the sun? This is almost as shocking as the Nick Nolte mugshot from a few years back.

Is Valerie Bertinelli a succubus, 'cause it looks like she sucked the life force right out of Eddie before she left?

Seriously Eddie, you need to take better care of yourself, you look really stressed. I know David Lee Roth is going to be looking for a new job soon; is that what's bothering you bunkie?

(Special No Prize for those who can identify the source of this item's title without resorting to an Internet search!)

Help Save Air America Phoenix

On March 1, 2006, the Air America Phoenix station was taken off the air by a Christian broadcasting company. This was a “dark” day for progressive talk radio in America. I would not be the least surprised if this is the beginning of a overall strategy by the religious right to get progressive stations that they don't like off the air.

The former staff of Air America Phoenix has negotiated a deal to resurrect operations at a new home effective April 3, 2006 but they need your help! They must immediately raise money to cover their operating expenses out of the gate. Their goal of $500,000 will guarantee them a home for years to come.

You can donate to the “Save Air America Phoenix” fund online directly by going to their website and clicking on one of the donation buttons. Each person or business who donates can have their business logo or personal message permanently displayed on their new web site, www.gotStation.com, that will commemorate you, the true patriots who rallied to their cause. This is like “buying a brick” and having your name and message inscribed on it. Instead their “building” is the web page and the “bricks” are the pixels.

They are also accepting just straight donations.

This is just another attempt by the pro-Bush forces to silence opposing views. Don't let it happen. If you can afford it, donate today. If you can't afford it, we all understand what it is like trying to get by in Bush's decimated economy and you have our sympathy.