Scared Yet?

Turner Classic Halloween

DOCTOR X (1932): This pre-Code, two-strip Technicolor horror movie certainly has its place in history, though the director, Michael Curtiz, the auteur of Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and umpteen Errol Flynn pictures doesn't really seem in his element. You don't get the feeling you'd like to have, that, when Lionel Atwill is crooning his dialogue about cannibalism and the effects of the full moon, that the director is practically drooling and giggling. Despite your expectations, Atwill, as the title character, is the hero: a sort of benevolent, tenured mad scientist who gets his Hercule Poirot on while helping the police track down a mysterious serial killer terrorizing New York and helping Fay Wray avoid becoming the next victim. He is said to be brilliant, but his big plan for identifying the killer seems to be to keep gathering suspects in a closed room and re-enact the murders until the actual killer can't stand it anymore and has to step up to show how it's really done.

In my favorite scene, the most obvious candidate, who has managed to fend off suspicion because he has one arm too few to be a really good murderer, reveals that he can temporarily construct himself an artificial arm with the "synthetic flesh" he has invented: having welded big, fake hands onto himself, he piles handfuls of glop onto his face, turning himself first into a ringer for Leatherface and then, after it hardens, a cross between Rondo Hatton and John Barrymore's Mr. Hyde, while murmuring "Synthetic! Flesh!" as the lab machinery creates streaks of light and a humming sound that's like a theremin from Hell. I would probably enjoy the rest of the movie more if it didn't devote so much time to a wisecracking newspaper reporter who turns out to be its weird excuse for a romantic hero. Monsters and wisecracking big-city newspaper reporters are two of my very favorite things to find in an old movie, but I've never seen an old horror movie that I thought really benefited from the presence of one, and the fact that this one is played by Lee Tracy, the all-time supreme practitioner of those roles, just makes it worse. It just makes you realize how badly he fit in, the way a singing cowboy probably wouldn't in a monster movie, maybe especially if he were played by Roy Rogers.

MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSUEM (1933): Curtiz, Atwill, and Fay Wray all reunited for this one, which was the last major studio film made in the two-strip Technicolor process, but this time Curtiz had better luck connecting with his inner grave robber. And although it technically features a newspaper reporter, she's a goil, and played by Glenda Farrell, thus making her an honorary scream queen and wisecracking saucy blonde, which makes her a better fit with the genre. I have no idea who first came up with the idea of a killer who encases his victims in hot wax and displays them as sculpture, but whoever it was, he was cooking with gas that day. It might seem like as highly specialized a horror gimmick as there could be, but by the time I was a kid, it was such a perennial that I think I may have first seen it used in a Get Smart episode. (By that time, it had been given an updated twist by Curtis Harrington in the 1967 movie Games, in which the corpse that's been turned into a sculpture looks like a George Segal.) The rich, weird-looking color photography works like gangbusters on this material, especially in the hard-to-top moment when the menaced Fay Wray smacks Arwill across what she thinks is his face, and it breaks apart to reveal what's (literally) underneath.


THE VAMPIRE BAT (1933): This early talkie was made on a low budget by a Skid Row outfit called Majestic Pictures, which managed to lease some sets left over from James Whale horror movies for Universal. It's since slipped into the public domain, and the print TCM ran is bluish-tinted and scratched and choppy in places. May no one ever attempt to restore and remaster it; it has a juicy old school charm that partly derives from the fact that it looks like it was dug out of a tomb. It opens with some silent scenes of a worried-looking old booger scuttling around his village after dark and casting nervous looks up at the sky, before cutting to a scene of the local bigwigs having a parlay, which kicks off with maybe the best possible first line for this kind of film: "But how else can we explain these terrible deaths?" Drops you right into it, don't you know.

Melvyn Douglas, taking a short break from making out with his girlfriend in a room full of smoky test tubes, takes the skeptical view regarding the old fogeys' talk of a plague of vampirism, but the vampire believers dig their heels in: "But the bats, man! The bats! Big ones!" Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray are in this one, too, but the secret star is Dwight Frye, the hunchbacked assistant in Whale's Frankenstein and the Renfield to Lugosi's Dracula. Here, fleshing out his screen identity as the Crispin Glover as his day, he is Herman, the overenthusiastic village idiot who jumps at the chance to impress the town doctor, Atwill, by showing that he knows how to open a window. Blind to his neighbors' increasing anxiety regarding parasite-infested bloodsucking flying things, he draws undue attention to himself by insisting that he hangs out with bats a lot and finds them quite cuddly. After that, thing turn out about as well for him as if he'd sent the prosecutors on the McMartin preschool trial a copy of his monograph celebrating the work of Henry Darger.

ISLE OF THE DEAD (1945): Because he was the embodiment of the greatest of all the classic movie monsters, and also Dr. Seuss's the Grinch, I have loved--that's the word, loved--Boris Karloff for as long as I've had intense emotional attachments to total strangers, many of whom, like Karloff, were dead before I learned their names. Isle of the Dead was one of the three movies Karloff made with the producer Val Lewton, after Lewton's earlier horror pictures had earned him his reputation. I've read that Lewton wasn't thrilled with having Karloff's services pressed on him by the studio, but that he came to value him and that Karloff was proud of their work together. I'm not sure that Lewton's first reaction was wrong, though; his best movies stood out from the pack because of the quiet, naturalistic, yet atmospheric settings made the creepiness that much more unnerving and the shocks that much more surprising, and with Karloff on board, you can't help but brace yourself for something ghastly to happen from the get-go.

I do think that this is the least of their collaborations, as well as being arguably the only one that's a pure horror story, having to do with the fear of premature burial and an ill-fitting bunch of people thrown together by a quarantine on a Greek island that's one big graveyard. Carlos Clarens wrote of Lewton that, "like the best producers in Hollywood, his stamp is stronger than that of his individual directors"; that's the conventional wisdom, I think, but I sure do like the movies that Jacques Tourneur directed for him than the ones that others directed for him, and this one was directed by Mark Robson. Karloff does get to wear a nifty curly hairpiece and a snazzy uniform, but the film apparently had a troubled production that was interrupted by Karloff's need to have back surgery, and the storyline feels so haphazard that it's not surprising to learn that the script was originally titled after a character who didn't even make the final cut. This, and the Lewton-Karloff Bedlam, are among the only films I've seen that feature Jason Robards, Sr., the actor whose existence obliged his son to start out billing himself as "Jason Robards, Jr." The son, who made his own name as the premier interpreter of roles created by Eugene O'Neill, had a triumph early in his career in Long Day's Journey Into Night, playing a man whose drunken disgust is partly fueled by contempt for his father, an actor who could have been a great artist but settled for becoming a well-paid hack. O'Neill based the role of the father on his own old man, but based on Robards Senior's work in these movies, I'm thinking that his son had a little something himself to draw on.

WHITE ZOMBIE (1932) and I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943): These two films comprise the "classic" body of films dealing with old-school, pre-Romero zombies. I Walked with a Zombie is a Val Lewton-Jacques Tourneur movie, which in its first few minutes establishes first the gracefulness of its style, its literary ambitions (the screenplay incorporates echoes of Jane Eyre), and its endearing, slight embarrassment at what the filmmakers, by accepting the studio's offer to build a movie around that title, have gotten themselves into. ("I walked with a zombie", the lead actress, Frances Dee, says in voiceover at the beginning, then giggles: "It does seem an odd thing to say. If anyone had said that to me a year ago, I'm not sure I'd have known what a zombie was..." A few minutes later, she's on a boat and listening to Tom Conway deliver a well-written, mood-setting speech about how the area isn't beautiful--"It all seems beautiful because you don't understand. Those flying fish--they're not leaping for joy, they're jumping in terror. Bigger fish want to eat them. That luminous water--it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies, the glitter of putrescence..."--that only seems stilted when you realize that, for budgetary reasons, you're not getting to actually see the flying fish or the luminous water.) It's a fine film, only about a thousand times more skillfully made, better thought-out, and more technically accomplished than White Zombie, a cheapie independent made by hustlers who skimped on most everything so they could put most of their money towards a check that would attract Bela Lugosi, still fairly fresh from his triumph in Dracula.

It's really White Zombie that I'm a sucker for, though. There's a line of cant familiar to anyone who's read much about horror movies, about how lack of polish and even technical incompetence can help a horror movie, make it more believable in its artlessness, and at the same time more frighteningly illogical and irrational and disorienting. This argument should be used very sparingly, but I think it's true of White Zombie, as it's true of the original Night of the Living Dead. The movie is so grubby that you have expect to see fingerprints on the film, and though there are shots of laborers in a mill that recall Carl Dreyer's Vampyr, I'd be shocked if the director, Victor Halperin, had seen Dreyer's movie even if it hadn't only come out a few months before. Basically, what the movie has, and about all that it needs, is Lugosi, as a voodoo master named Murder Legendre, at full potency. With I Walked with a Zombie, Lewton and Tourneur managed to make white wine from an unpromising batch of grapes, but Lugosi is pure moonshine. Generations of bad jokes and impressions inspired by even worse movies haven't dented his ability to mesmerize the viewer with his bizarre mix of theatrical hamminess and deranged conviction in his own magnetism. But only under certain circumstances: when the movie surrounding Lugosi was merely cheap and shoddy, as was most of the time, he could seem exposed to ridicule, and if you didn't laugh at him, seeing him try to hold onto his dignity might just cause you to feel sorry for him, which must have been the last thing in the world he'd have wanted. But a context as weird and tainted as White Zombie could give him the leg up he needed to gain access to a nightmarish realm that a Surrealist would have donated a lung for, even when he was working with a director who, needing a few seconds of a close-up of Lugosi making with a pop-eyed mesmeric stare, could be counted on to use the take where he blinks.

THE GHOUL and THE WALKING DEAD (1936): Karloff comes back from the grave in both of these features, which otherwise bear little similarity to one another. The Ghoul was a British film, and features a dull, stiff-upper-lip hero and heroine along with a number of more colorful character types--Ernest Thesiger, Cedric Hardwicke, and, in his movie debut, young Ralph Richardson-- who seem to be auditioning for secondary parts in a Dickens novel. (Notified that the hero is insisting on sticking his nose in where it doesn't belong, a lawyer huffs, "No doubt you will succeed in making a painful interview intolerable.") Karloff plays an ancient Egyptologist who dies in the first few minutes of the movie and is entombed; then, not having really died after all, he comes back, and, enraged to discover that the sacred jewel that was supposed to guarantee his resurrection has been stolen, he lumber around looking for the thieves so he can wreak vengeance upon them, without so much as taking the time to click his heels over the fact that he's not dead yet. The movie has incantations and blood rites performed in praise of "heathen gods" and an old-dark-house set-up, but the fact that, title and appearances to the contrary, there isn't really anything supernatural going on gives it the feel of an unusually stately episode of Scooby-Doo.

The Walking Dead is cheap-looking and fast but American and offers its pasteboard chills with a measure of slang and pizzazz. Directed by Curitz for Warners Bros., it attempts to deal with a complicated social problem: if you brought an executed convicted murderer back to life, how inconvenient would that be? What if the murderer had actually been framed, and the people in a position to decide what's done with him, in his resurrected form, were the same people who'd gotten him wrongly convicted and killed in the first place? Ka-ching<>Frontline report on Cameron Todd Willignham.

Karloff gives a touching, quite performance as the sad sack in question, a music-loving born loser who, having been revived by electricity thanks to Edmund "Kris Kringle" Gwenn, has a shell-shocked, melancholy air, as well as a salt-and-pepper hairstyle reminiscent of the one worn by Humphrey Bogart as a resurrected mad scientist and murderer in The Return of Dr. X, not one of Bogie's favorite roles. Given a second chance at life, he is no shape either to enjoy himself or take part in the debate going on around him about his eventual fate: all he can think about is why, why would anyone have wanted to single him out to destroy his life, and so he goes looking for the men who did this to him to ask them. Not yet a murderer, he manages to go out of the movie with clean hands: whether he would do his enemies any harm, he doesn't get the chance to, because the mere sight of him rattles them so badly that, in their haste to get away, they go backing out of windows, running in front of speeding trains, etc. A director with a looser rhumba seat than Michael Curtiz might have had a whale of a slapstick black comedy on his hands with this material. As it is, I found it too diverting to mind much when it flirted with the idea of finding religion at the very end.

And while I'm almost sort of kind of on the subject...



Last Tuesday, Glee ran its Rocky Horror Picture Show tribute episode, and a few days ago, I finally got around to watching it on my DVR, and in between, all hell broke lose about it, mostly among people who have a lot more invested in both Glee and Rocky Horror than I ever have. But there was one thing about it that bugged me enough to make me want to write about it, and that was the show's apparent conviction--which it seemed to take on faith would be shared by its audience, which is not exactly short on teenagers--that Rocky Horror isn't age-appropriate material for high school students. Which raises the question: who the hell else is it supposed to be age-appropriate for? When the stage version, which first opened in London in 1973, came to New York in 1975, it closed quickly after inspiring a spate of dismissive reviews that called it a watered-down rip-off of more cutting edge off-Broadway works from the late '60s and '70s; the movie, which came out a few months after that, tanked upon release, for the excellent reason that it blows, Tim Curry's heroic star turn aside. The late Veronica Geng cited it as an example of "a true believer movie, a movie for insiders" that "assumes too much...taking our assent for granted"; even when "the assumptions are outrageous", she wrote, such movies :are dull, because they deal in extreme complacency--nothing has to be explained or justified." (Written more than thirty years ago, that could be the obituary for Fox News.)

Richard O'Brien, who created the original show, threw together a bunch of ideas about transgression and release and subversion that had filtered down from experimental theater and art movies and glam rock, and while he couldn't make anything new, or good, out of them, he did manage to scramble them into something that gave lots of kids access to a dumbed-down version of those ideas, to about the same degree that, say, the Alice Cooper of "Only Women Bleed" made a dumbed-down version of radical feminism the basis for a Top Forty hit. In the process, O'Brien and Curry and company gave lots of lonely kids a totem they could rally and build a social life around, which I do think is sort of sweet. (The fact that they celebrated their shared discovery of this tribute to iconoclastic individuality by memorizing the fucking thing and reciting the lines in unison, complete with props, is sort of something else, but who am I to talk? It's not as if I were inventing Cubism or something when I was seventeen.) On Glee, Will Schuester was allowed to make Geng's point in the most loving possible way when he shared with us his insight that Rocky Horror isn't about “making an audience accept a certain rebellious point of view,” but was, rather, intended to provide reassurance “for outcasts, people on the fringes who had no place left to go but were searching for some place, any place, where they felt like they belonged.” Having just spent the whole show preparing for a high school production of a musical that he now realized was not okay for high school students, he then announced his solution: the gang would do Rocky Horror, but not for an audience, just for themselves.

As a big fan of Vanya on 49th Street, I don't want to shit on the concept of theater artists doing working for themselves, but this strike me as, what's the word, fucking gutless. At various points throughout the show, the kids offered suggestions on how to change the show to make it more "modern", but if there are things that would make this thirty-seven-year-old show "problematic" for a young audience today, it's the things in it that aren't sufficiently modern, but the things that were always muddled, because Richard O'Brien muddled them. ("Mommy, are we supposed to like the man who just killed that other man with an axe?") But if there's any reason to perform the show for a teen audience--and, I'd insist, there's no reason to perform it for anyone much older, and it was the misguided belief that there was something there for mature viewers that made it a commercial failure with the mass audience in 1975--then it ought to be performed for a whole fucking high school auditorium of them, to give aid and comfort for the little freaks in the bleachers. Having the "outcasts" who are the show's stars perform it just "for themselves" was the show's ultimate statement of circle jerk narcissism. It amounted to a declaration of exclusivity, though based on what the characters was saying, it was hard to know whether it was okay for the kids to privately perform this material that was unfit for their school peers because they, unlike the other kids in the school, were hip enough to handle it, or because, having been exposed to the script, they were already beyond saving.

Don't Tread on Me. Tread on Her, Over There!

A couple of days ago, I was thinking about writing something about Tim Profitt, a volunteer campaign coordinator for Rand Paul's Senate campaign, and his carefully thought-out decision to stomp on the head of Lauren Valle, a 23-year-old activist associated with MoveOn.org, as she was trying to punk Rand by presenting him with some dumbass "award" for his devotion to corporate interests as he was on his way to a debate with his Democratic opponent. (It was a tag team effort: Mike Pezzano, a Tea Party activist described by Gawker as a member of "Lexington’s Rand Paul Meetup group and is an 'assistant organizer' for Kentucky Open Carry, a group that wants to make it legal to carry firearms openly and in public,” can be seen in the video that quickly circulated on the Internet and TV news, holding Valle down so that Profitt could stomp on her head at his leisure.) I wasn't sure that I had anything interesting to say about it, though. I'm still not sure that I do, but the whole thing bugs me, on a couple of different levels.

One is simply that I'm mystified by this new conservative practice of doing something ghastly, seeming to apologize for it, and then, not merely retracting the apology in practically the same breath, but reiterating your belief that you're really the victim here. I don't mean like when Trent Lott, for example, says that things would have been better these last several decades if we'd had a segregationist president when it would have counted for something, is surprised when this expression of his true beliefs, which he's never made much of a secret of and which have actually been a selling point for much of the electorate he represents, gets him in a world of shit, crawls on his belly to atone, and then, when this insincere but hard-fought attempt to save his career standing fails to take, reverts to whining about how he didn't do a goddamn thing wrong. That's how it's always been done, but characters like Joe Wilson and that John Tower wannabe motherfucker who apologized to BP for their having to deal with those Chicago mobster thumb-busters at the White House or Profitt race in and out of their insincere apologies on their way to sending out their fundraising letters, asking for support in this, their time of martyrdom, with a haste that redefines one's previous conception of the word "unseemly." It raises the question, why do they even bother, and I have no good answer for this. Clearly it isn't done to get on the good side of anyone who's angry about what they did; you'd think they'd worry about pissing off the people who are ready to embrace them for speaking truth to power or whatever is supposed to be admirable about their juvenile bullshit, who presumably want them to show their toughness and resolve.

All I can figure about Profitt--whose apology for his actions, issued shortly before he told a reporter that Valle owed him an apology, was of the especially pathetic "I'm sorry you got the wrong idea and thought it looked bad when I dropped a sledgehammer on that guy's nuts" variety--got a shock when he saw the video himself (Oh, Jesus! That does NOT look good! Better call Mom, better call Mom...) and wanted to make it perfectly clear that he was not the kind of guy who thought it was okay to stomp women in the head, before going on to stress that this woman had it coming. Profitt described Valle as ""a professional at what she does, and I think when all the facts come out, I think people will see that she was the one that initiated the whole thing."

There's an awful lot of contemporary political assumptions tucked inside Profitt's confident belief that "people" will naturally agree that he was right to use whatever force it took to "subdue" Valle once they know that she was a "professional" liberal activist, unlike the honest amateur patriots of the Tea Party. Actually, what it sounds like is a train wreck between the worst of two worlds. Valle's little prank was lame, unfunny, and dim-witted, not to mention lethally smug. There's no shortage of things to be said against Rand Paul, and she managed to come up with a method of appearing to say one of them that was guaranteed to make opposition to the candidate look like the province of dickweeds, both to his supporters and a lot of the unconvinced. It would have taken a spectacularly misconceived act of sheer, stupid brutishness to make her appear sympathetic, but damned if Profitt and Pezzano weren't up to the challenge.

In the process, they exposed the trembling fear and sweaty desperation underneath the bluff, confident exterior of Conservatism on the March in the Age of Obama--and that, I think, is why this video has proven to have such power to resonate and such a long shelf life in today's rapid-fire news cycle. Back when I was a young'un, hanging out on the playground and playing the dozens with J. J, and Freddie "Boom Boom" Washington, the whole point was to try to get some overheated, tongue-tied loser to throw a punch, thus revealing the limits of both his cool and his verbal imagination. Profitt and Pezzano didn't need to engage Valle in debate; they could have ignored her, just as Rand could have best deflated her little gag by accepting the award, smiling, suggesting that she get a job or better material, and dumping his prize in the waste basket on his way in to the debate. But Profitt and Pezzano took one look at her and had a vision of her getting a dopey little video she could use to make fun of their hero--and that was enough to make them lose their shit! They decided then and there that the most important thing in the world, the way they could best prove their heroism to their candidate and their campaign, would be to do whatever it took to prevent her from getting that video. That's how they handed the news cycle a video of two members of the Rand campaign stomping a woman into the dirt. In retrospect, the flaw in their master plan is obvious, but people who are capable of constructive long-term thinking aren't likely to want to see Rand Paul elected to national office.

Yesterday, Talking Points Memo tied the stomping incident to something that happened a couple of weeks ago in Washington state, when a 72-year-old man was charged with assaulting a 23-year-old woman who was one of a group that was protesting Dino Rossi's Republican campaign for Senate, a goofy-sounding protest that involved "wearing bags over their heads and holding a sign that looked like a check." The man said that things started with him trying to remove the bag from her head so that he could take her picture. Why? Maybe he figured that, if he knew what the protesters looked like, he could prove that they, like Valle, had connections to some group like MoveOn.org--in which case, maybe he shared Profitt's weird line of reasoning that you discredit a liberal activist if you can show that she has ties to liberal activist organizations. Throw in the story of Joe Miller's people handcuffing a reporter, and the rush by right-wingers to explain that this, too, was an honest attempt to "protect" the candidate (from someone whose job description they quickly redefined as that of a "liberal blogger"), and these citizens' arrests and outbreaks of aging males whomping on young women threaten to become the primary image of this election year, the way that one of the primary images of 2004 became "liberal"-looking people and those in suspect T-shirts being ejected from cherry-picked crowds of ebullient Bush supporters. It's certainly a defining image for the Tea Party movement, that group of self-described free-spirited anarchists who want all you damn kids to turn off that fucking music and get off my lawn!

One for the Road

I have a soft spot for semi-frustrated, semi-frustrating artist types who leave behind a wealth of good stories about them as if to make up for the fact that they're never going to do as much with their talent as it once seemed as if they might, such as the hero of John Scheinfeld's documentary Who is Harry Nilsson? (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him). The title is a little cute, but Nilsson, whose best-known album was called Nilsson Schmilsson, and who followed that up with one called Son of Schmilsson, which in turn was followed by a collection of standards, orchestrated by Gordon Jenkins, called A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night, might have approved of it. As a singer-songwriter, he had a weakness for whimsicality that was offset by a rough edge that could come across as endearingly grumpy or obscenely nasty, depending on hard he pushed it. At the same time, his voice, especially at the start of his career, was very sweet, sometimes overripe, and before he let his hair and beard grow out and untended, he had an angelic look to go with it. His first real hit was the title song to Midnight Cowboy, and the first time I heard it, I thought he was Glen Campbell.

Nilsson grew up dirt poor, dropping out of school after the ninth grade and mourning the father who abandoned the family when Harry was three. In the documentary, Nilsson can be seen musing that, once he decided to become a musician, he just assumed that the necessary people would detect his talent and "discover" him. He sounds rueful about his own naivete, but something like that actually kind of happened to him. He had been hanging around the music business for most of the 1960s when his 1967 Pandemonium Shadow Show attracted the attention of the Beatles, whose public testimonials to his genius made him, if not any more popular, sought after and temporarily bulletproof in the industry. Apparently Harry never appreciated the irony that his two hit singles, the other one being "Without You" from Nilsson Schmilsson, wer written by other people. In between those records he cut an album of Randy Newman songs, and people in the documentary marvel at his capacity for generosity towards other songwriters he admired, but neither of those songs were especially indicative of the kind of talent he displayed in his own compositions, and it might have irked him a bit that "Everybody's Talikin'" sounds a lot like one of his own songs, "I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City", which would have made a pretty fair theme song for Midnight Cowboy itself. According to Nilsson, he had been brought on board to provide a song for the movie, but the filmmakers had already started using "Everybody's Talkin'" as a filler track during editing, and by the time he set to work, "they'd gotten used to it." (It may also have gotten to him a little that "Without You" was originally by Badfinger, a Beatles imitation band who Paul McCartney not only liked but signed to Apple.)

Praising Nilsson Schmilsson in 1971, Robert Christgau noted that it was Harry's first album of new material in over two years and wrote, "if only every artist could learn to mark time until a good one was ready." This is fairly funny, in light of an interview with the producer Richard Perry that didn't make it in the movie but is included among the bonus features on the DVD. Perry says that Harry only had a pile of "doodles" to show for all that time between records and that the day before they had studio time booked, the two of them pounded the pavement all over L.A., fruitlessly searching for some decent material. The work of shaping Harry's doodles into the songs on the album was done on the spot, in the studio. Nilsson, who appeared on the cover of the album unshaven and in his bathrobe, cultivated an image of indolent laziness that may have been a cover for his increasingly serious drinking problem. He may have made similar use of his shyness, which, along with his devotion to studio recording effects, was his excuse for never performing live once he no longer had to.

Harry was one of the villains of Albert Goldman's biography of John Lennon, which portrayed him as the devil on Lennon's shoulder during the Lost Weekend period in the early '70s when John--separated from Yoko Ono, hassled by the Nixon administration (which wanted to throw him out of the country as an undesirable alien), and at a creative cul-de-sac after the solo peak of the primal scream album--was rampaging around New York with a drink in each hand. (As a fan of his early collection Freakshow and his book about Lenny Bruce, I think that Goldman deserves more credit than he gets from the rock writers who regard him as pure vampire, but it does seem likely that someone who cited one of the most famous--scripted--lines from A Hard Day's Night, Ringo's telling a lady who asks him at a party if he's a mod or a rocker that he's a mocker, as an example of the Beatles' famous spontaneous wit was not put on Earth to write John Lennon's biography.) Lennon produced Harry's 1974 covers album, Pussy Cats--a compellingly weird, exciting piece of work, but as many an appalled witness in the movie points out, you can hear Nilsson's voice unravelling as you listen to it. Lennon's last big professional favor to Harry was to browbeat RCA into renewing his contract, even though he was pretty much spent and not bringing any money in. A few years and a couple of dud albums later, they paid him off to get rid of him; Harry, typically, and unconvincingly, told everyone who might have commiserated with him that he was thrilled to have the money.

The movie is very sweet, and a nice rebuttal to the picture of Nilsson that appeared in the Goldman book. Anybody who touched as many lives as Nilsson did while as drunk and stoned as Nilsson could get must have done some damage to people, but nobody interviewed here can remember any, besides the to-be-expected, head-shaking accounts of late night phone calls and being dragged kicking and screaming into ill-advised partying expeditions. At some point in the midst of his downward career spiral, Nilsson met an incredibly pretty young Irish girl in an ice cream shop and talked her into marrying him incredibly, the marriage took, and they spent his last several years together, turning out a procession of incredibly pretty kids, who of whom is seen remembering his 1994 memorial service, where she heard some stories about her dad that she enjoyed but thinks might not have been appropriate for a ten year old. Who Is Harry Nilsson is enlivened by some choice snippets of the very-little-seen Son of Dracula, a 1974 film ("The First Rock and Roll Dracula Movie!") starring Harry and Ringo Starr that, from the looks of it, may well deserve what reputation it has as perhaps the biggest ever waste of celluloid, a lively TV commercial for Pussy Cats, and a primitive-era music video for "Coconuts" (which Tarantino unearthed for the closing credits of Reservoir Dogs) featuring the Nairobi Trio. Sadly, nothing is said of Skidoo, Otto Preminger's acid-casualty comedy from 1968, in which Harry not only played a small role as a stoned prison guard but, as part of Preminger's flailing attempt to achieve counterculture hipness in a movie starring Jackie Gleason and Carol Channing, was employed to sing the final credits.

Pop Quiz: Which of These Things Blows My Mind the Most?

That Debra Winger is playing one of Gabriel Byrne's patients on the new season of In Treatment; that I didn't know that Debra Winger was playing one of Gabriel Byrne's patients on the new season of In Treatment until she walked into his office; or that the character who does the episode write-ups of In Treatment at the A.V. Club decided that he'd better refer to her as "award-winning actress Debra Winger", for the benefit of all the readers he imagined must have seen her walk into Gabriel Byrne's office and think to themselves, "Who the heck is this old skank?"

The 40-Year-Old Stripper

Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury made its debut on the comics pages of the nation's newspapers forty years ago today. I missed it, being very much younger than the strip's target audience at the time, and I have no idea exactly when Mississippi's biggest newspaper, the Clarion-Ledger, began carrying it. (I'm guessing that it probably wasn't before the mid-70s, when the paper changed editors and embarked on a serious effort to shake up the quality of its reporting and remake its image. In 1983, when the Clarion-Ledger won its first Pulitzer, Time magazine couldn't help mentioning that, twenty years earlier, "When 200,000 people marched on Washington... to urge 'jobs and freedom' for blacks, the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger noted the rally dryly but reported the litter-clearance effort the next day under the headline: WASHINGTON IS CLEAN AGAIN WITH NEGRO TRASH REMOVED." ) I do remember the very first time I really looked at a Doonesbury strip. It was in late 1976 or early 1977, shortly after Gerald Ford lost the presidential election to Jimmy Carter. Perhaps because change was in the air, I had decided to get really serious about the comics, and to make a point to examine every strip in the eight-page Sunday section, except for those, such as Brenda Starr and Prince Valiant, which were clearly not supposed to be funny, and whose raison d'être I consequently found elusive.

That first Doonesbury strip that I tried to appreciate--well, it was a Duke strip. Which is to say that it starred Zonker's Uncle Duke, who was of course based on Hunter S. Thompson, and who, during Ford's presidency, was depicted as serving as the United States Ambassador to China. I have just listed, in rapid succession, three things that I did not know at the time. To understand the strip, it would have been useful to have known all these things, but I went into the deep end of the pool thoroughly ignorant of all of them. What I saw was this: a balding man with a cigarette holder was lying in bed, talking on the phone to Henry Kissinger--who, in turn, addressed him as Duke-- trying to make him feel better over the end of his time in the White House. At one point, the balding man asked "Henry" if he'd filled any of the prescriptions he'd recommended that would help him get through these troubling times. Henry replied that, no, of course he hadn't, every drug on that list was illegal. Hey, replied the balding man, so was bombing Cambodia. ("Duke, I need to go...") Right from the start, I got off on the wrong foot with it, thinking that the balding man must be Kissinger--he looked nothing like him, but what did I know--and that it was the unseen party on the other line who was "Duke." Because I was already acquainted with the mechanical use of familiar celebrity references by TV comedians and other purveyors of low-hanging fruit to provoke recognition laughter from audiences eager to feel hip, I immediately deduced that he was talking to John Wayne, the only famous person I knew of who was called "Duke." If you take a minute to try to ponder how much comic logic there might be in a very poorly drawn Henry Kissinger being counseled by John Wayne to take illegal narcotics to cheer himself after an electoral defeat, maybe you can get some sense of how much ground I would need to clear, in terms of extending my knowledge of the world and remaking, at a tender age, my assumptions about how both comic strips and political humor worked, before I could make head or tails out of Doonesbury.


I did get there, thank God, and pretty quickly, too. By the time I was in junior high, I had collected all the trade paperbacks, which featured samplings of the daily and Sunday strips, and also the pocket books, which contained all the daily strips, including those that were (sometimes inexplicably--I immediately think of the time that Mark Slackmeyer took Henry Kissinger, yes, him again, to lunch at McDonald's) not thought to be up to snuff for inclusion in the trade papers. So I had a solid grounding in Trudeau's cast of characters, not to mention a perhaps unhealthy appreciation for satirical jokes aimed at people and events that I was way too young to have had much reason to care about. Trudeau's jokes could be hilarious and was a big part of the draw for my snotty young self, but thinking back on it now, I realize that it was the people who kept me hooked. The story of Joanie Caucus's evolution, through the seventies, from runaway wife to day care worker to college student to failed Congressional candidate to Congressional aide, kept me particularly riveted, especially the wordless, jokeless series of daily strips that revealed her in bed, for the first time, with her future husband, Washington Post reporter Rick Redfern. I haven't read the whole thing again in ages, but it lingers in my mind as a nearly peerless example of how a popular artist can use a character's storyline to chronicle the changes in society without reducing her to a string of Barbara Kruger-style slogans and placards. But then, even when Trudeau was content with being a wise guy, his strongest jokes were often those that grew out of his readers' understanding of his characters. One of his most controversial Watergate-era strips, the one where a rabid Mark practically turns into a werewolf while gleefully declaring into a radio microphone that a not-yet convicted John Mitchell is obviously "Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!", was also one of his most widely misunderstood, but then, only regular readers could fully appreciate Mark's delight in having his worst assumptions about the president's men confirmed.



Most comic strips that have lasting value make it either on the strength of their characters or a tremendous degree of graphic excellence. After Trudeau returned, in 1984, from an almost two-year sabbatical, it became clear just how much he was a character guy. When he hung up his "Gone Fishing" sign, and even before that, it was easy to imagine that Doonesbury would lose its effectiveness in the Reagan years, and that such characters as Zonker would not easily transcend their faddish status as Snoopy for post-counterculture potheads. The most remarkable thing about Doonesbury since then has to be how well Trudeau has managed to keep the characters aging and keeping up with the latest political issues and cultural trend while remaining true to them as, well, characters. (Not the least surprising development along the way has been the degree to which the war-lover B.D., not one of the more complex characters in the early years, has become almost the soul of the strip, as the subjects most intrinsic to his being have failed to become any less central to our political lives--and as he's suffered more and more from that miserable fact.)

I'll admit that, for me, the biggest disappointment has been the way the strip has developed since the mid-80s. Before Trudeau called his time out, it was a common thing for people, Trudeau very much included, to point out that, for all it's creator's sharpness and wit, he couldn't draw worth a damn. I never understood this. As a draftsman, Trudeau has always had his limitations, but for the dozen of so years of the strip's existence, I think he worked around them brilliantly. This was the period when, as more than one critic put it, Trudeau seemed to churn out the strip with the help of a Xerox machine; the usual strip would use one image and repeat it from frame to frame, with only slight variations, or no easily detectable variations at all. Apparently, some people who were desperate to find a flaw in the strip settled for deciding that this was somehow cheating, but I thought it gave the strip a beautiful formal austerity that created a dry environment in which the wildest jokes could really explode. When Trudeau returned to work, he started shifting perspective and throwing in different points of view, in a way that never felt necessary to the jokes and was often just distracting as hell. It also sometimes gave him the chance to show off the limitations of his drawing in a way that his old cookie-cutter style never did. I've often enjoyed the hell out of Doonesbury in the past 25 years, and I've never stopped wishing that the Trudeau of thirty years ago was still drawing it. But that's a quibble, and maybe the crowning proof that I've been a cranky old bastard, going on about the good old days and the subsequent fall of man, since before I graduated high school.

It should also be mentioned that the comic strip hasn't been Trudeau's whole career, though his side projects have mostly served to pound in the fact that he was born to be a newspaper cartoonist. His big shot at launching a TV franchise, A Doonesbury Special, a 1977 cartoon on which he shared writing and directing credits with the independent animation legends Faith and John Hubley, had a great deal of charm, but even when it was made, it was a nostalgic salute to the strip's earlier days for diehard fans who'd get a kick out of seeing the characters move and speak--the closest that Trudeau ever came to producing a Snoopy phone. And some of his other stage and TV projects just showed how obvious and smug his humor could seem when disconnected from the warmth provided by his feel for character. His big non-Doonesbury triumph was the HBO miniseries Tanner '88, which he, as the provider of the scripted foundation, and the director Robert Altman made on the run, video-guerrilla-style, threading the ongoing narrative around the events of the 1988 presidential campaign as it was happening. Working in those conditions, Altman and Trudeau brought out the best in each other, which shouldn't have been a surprise: the theatrical improviser and the topical satirist were both creatively excited by the same kind of challenges. In an interview that appeared in Slate yesterday, Trudeau acknowledges that most of the major newspaper strip cartoonists whose work seemed roughly contemporaneous with his--people like Gary Larson, Berkeley Breathed, and Bill Watterson, all of whom actually began their careers a decade or more after Doonesbury first appeared--have retired from their strips, and writes the obituary for his own form: "There's not much future in being a strip artist now. That's quite a turnaround in fortunes, because presiding over an established syndicated comic strip used to be the closest thing to tenure that popular culture offered. If I were starting out now, I'd probably continue on the graphic design trajectory I was on before I got sidetracked with comics. Colbert-like TV would be OK, too, except you have to be brilliant. I advise young cartoonists now to get into graphic novels—or head for Pixar." It could well be that, in his timing, he really lucked out. So did we.

Their Gang

Several weeks ago, around the time that the Republican leadership unveiled its quickly forgotten reboot of the Contract with America, I was watching the panel discussion on ABC's This Week. Paul Krugman, in a swing away from the offering of opinion to the simple stating of fact, said that while one can quarrel with the Democrats' approach to solving our national problems, the Republicans simply aren't being "serious" on any level. George Will, managing to sound as if Krugman had just called for a budget-busting, tax-payer-funded government study to determine whose fault it is that Will's children are homely, sniffed that "They would disagree", and then shut down that line of argument with one of his trademark glibly dismissive quote lines about how not everyone who disagrees with you is a fool or a knave. It was a moment for Will's show reel, not because he said anything worth saying, but because the combination of his supercilious manner and his precise choice of words showed why he's had such a long, successful career as a partisan TV mouthpiece. His show of umbrage at Krugman's poor manners in saying the Republicans are not serious was enough to prevent anyone from pointing out that saying that they would disagree with that assessment wasn't the same as saying that he would disagree. He might even just think that the Republican leadership and candidates are predominately fools and knaves.

Elsewhere, Will has "supported" the Tea Party by writing that "As the year began, we were warned that tea partiers would not play nicely with others – would not abide by the mores and outcomes of the two-party competition. It is, however, some anti-Tea Party 'moderates' who exemplify repulsive politics this year." Will is referring to those Republican candidates, such as Charlie Christ and Lisa Murkowski, who lost their primary elections to Tea party upstarts but, rather than skulking off to lick their wounds, decided to run as independent or write-in candidates, thus endangering the prospects of the candidates with little R's next to their names on the ballot. Will himself could have been bred in a petri dish from a culture distilled from Tea Partiers' slighting references to "the elitists", but he thinks that the Tea Party will help the Republican Party win back the House and then maybe help them take back the country, and that's all that really matters about them. Will, who began his career as a "conservative"--a key part of whose shtick was the way he used to try to set himself apart from the tacky American party system by labeling himself a "Tory"--has, for a long, long time now, been simply a professional Republican, and the worst sin he can imagine in the public sphere is not know-nothingism or intellectual dishonesty or selfishness or bigotry but putting anything, whether it's personal ambition or broader concerns such as "the good of the country", before the vital importance of concentrating power in the hands of the Republican party.

It was only two years ago that many self-identified conservatives, and even what seemed like a majority of financial interests and campaign contributors, were lining up to declare that, for the good of the country, it would be better if someone other than any of the available Republican candidates were allowed to run things for awhile. This wasn't simply a matter of everybody loving a winner; the Supreme Court and the party itself had moved heaven and earth to install the boss's son in the Oval Office, a pretty little fellow who believed he was a tough guy who had vowed to do nothing with his eight years except cut taxes with a meat ax and encourage people to turn to God and be "faith-based" instead of asking for government services and regulatory protections, and then, when the economy cratered on this silly creature's watch, his solution was to alternately brag about his optimistic nature, as if he wanted everyone to clap their hands to show that they believed in fairies, and sullenly denounce those who had carelessly listened to him when he'd urged them all to buy houses and join the ownership society.

Back then, all those twenty-four months ago, one heard a lot about how, if this wasn't the moment that destroyed conservatism, then maybe it would be good for the Republicans; they'd led the country off a cliff through their commitment to a flawed ideology and their tolerance of loons and bigots, which wouldn't play in an increasingly multicultural society. By pulling back, looking inward, and purging its ranks of ideologues and maniacs, it could return healthier, stronger, and ready to play its role in a new bipartisan political environment. In some extreme cases, there were reports of lifelong professional Republicans bitterly repudiating those who had used the politics of resentment and coded and not-so-coded racist appeals to lead their party to victory in the past. The most surprising of these sermons came from P. J. O'Rourke, who has some claim to being the anti-Dennis Miller, since if you go far enough back in his career, you might have caught O'Rourke actually saying something funny. In a Weekly Standard screed published shortly after the 2008 presidential election, O'Rourke bemoaned the fact that, by failing to make it absolutely clear that the Republican party loved the shit out of black people, it had given non-whites and even white people of a reasonable bent the wrong idea and failed to make them see the light.

"Sensible adults are conservative in most aspects of their private lives...People are even more conservative if they have children. Nobody with kids is a liberal, except maybe one pothead in Marin County. Everybody wants his or her children to respect freedom, exercise responsibility, be honest, get educated, have opportunities, and own a bunch of guns." Warming to his theme, O'Rourke wrote, "There was no need to piss off the entire black population of America to get Dixie's electoral votes. And despising cracker trash who have a laundry hamper full of bedsheets with eye-holes cut in them does not make a man a liberal. Blacks used to poll Republican. They did so right up until Mrs. Roosevelt made some sympathetic noises in 1932. And her husband didn't even deliver on Eleanor's promises." In his darkest hour, he was even capable of doubting the perfection of the Gipper his dead self: "Reagan managed to reach out to blue collar whites. But there his reach stopped, leaving many people on our side, but barely knowing it."

You might think that a man who shakes his head sadly at those voting not-Republican because he knows that they actually are on the Republicans' side but don't know it would be horrified, or at least scornfully amused, with the Tea Party hordes who took to the streets to howl about how they didn't want the government to have any role in providing health care, because if that happened, it would mess with their beloved Medicare. You would be mistaken, and now that O'Rourke has had two years to think about it, his views on those who don't fall in line with the Republicans has clarified itself somewhat. They didn't get the wrong idea because of any miscalculations or pandering to racist shitkickers on the part of Republican candidates. It's just that non-Republicans are, well, monsters: "They don’t just hate our Republican, conservative, libertarian, strict constructionist, family values guts. They hate everybody’s guts. And they hate everybody who has any. Democrats hate men, women, blacks, whites, Hispanics, gays, straights, the rich, the poor, and the middle class." That's comprehensive enough that I guess O'Rourke thinks that all Democrats hate themselves. Thank God O'Rourke has enough love for everybody to keep us all covered.

Okay, maybe he wasn't ever funny. I swear I remember there was something cute he wrote about the opening of Epcot Center, back in the early '80s, when he must have still been in his early sixties, but maybe my brain had been softened that day by a too close study of TRON.On the other hand, I was intrigued by seeing Christopher Caldwell's byline next to the title "The State of Liberalism". I used to see Caldwell's stuff in Slate and New York Press and sometimes in The Weekly Standard, whenever I picked it up at the newsstand when I was feeling guilty for not paying greater heed to all those articles that appeared like kudzu during the '90s and Bush the Dauphin's first term about how it was the place for political writing that was fun and provocative, fat and sassy. Most of the shit I saw shoveled there was the work of mere Republicans, but Caldwell seemed genuinely conservative, as well as smart and funny. I haven't seen his stuff in a while, and I haven't read his book yet, but I'm sure it's one of the smartest and most thoughtful of all the works trying to help us make sense of how to handle all these Muslims who insist on living in the same countries as non-Islamics. (No, seriously, I am.)

Caldwell may still count as a real conservative; the man who, back in 2000, wrote that, by getting elected, George W. Bush had given his father the great gift of no longer counting as the stupidest American president of all time still has enough connection to non-partisan reality that he is unafraid to write: "Well before George W. Bush presided over the collapse of the global financial system, a reasonable-sounding case was being mustered that he was the worst president in history." And Caldwell does know how to read an election. Twelve years ago, when the Republicans marched to their doom after a year spent trying to get Bill Clinton's penis impeached, Caldwell wrote an article about how things were not going to go the way that Newt Gingrich wanted them to, an article that included long-term analysis regarding the way that the party's Southern Strategy was fated to produce diminishing returns as the country turned more racially mixed and the South itself turned more progressive, as well as an admission that the party of family values struck many as more Addams than Cleaver: "It’s understandable that voters have found Republicans 'frightening,' given the dovetailing of southern Republican antigovernment rhetoric with that of right-wing terrorists."

So it's surprising that the thrust of Caldwell's new article is that there isn't anything remotely frightening about the Republicans in the age of Tea Partiers, birthers, and an official policy of legislative nihilism. "American conservatives, most notably the activists who support various Tea Party groups, have a great variety of anxieties and grievances just now. But what unites them all, at least rhetorically, is the sense that something has gone wrong constitutionally, shutting them out of decisions that rightfully belong to them as citizens. This is why many talk about 'taking our country back.' ” The unstated part of that is, the constant talk of "taking our country back" has nothing to do with racial anxiety, xenophobia, or even the sincere if deranged belief among Republicans, which was made perfectly clear during the Clinton years, that Democrats are so un-American that none of them can have a legitimate claim to having been elected President of the United States. Though Caldwell knows better than to share that last view, he may be winking in its direction when he argues that Obama was elected purely as a "protest" candidate, someone whose only purpose was to let voters chastise the Republicans for having grown corrupt and tolerated having George W. Bush, only the purest exemplar of ideological Republicanism in our times, as their standard-bearer.

As Caldwell sees it, Obama screwed up by mistaking his landslide election as some kind of mandate to actually do the things he said he'd do on the campaign trail, instead of sitting patiently for a sadder and wiser republican party to run a better candidate against him to reclaim the White House, and thus forced the electorate to take up arms against him. There may be some truth in this, though I think it flies in the face of not only the rapturous response to Obama's election, which was a little over the top if people were only trying to tick off the Republicans, as well as the fact that the insurgency against Obama was well under way and frothing at the mouth, starting with Rush Limbaugh's boasts that he was rooting for the president to fail in a time of national emergency and the screaming on cable news about unfair coddling of losers who couldn't pay their mortgages, well before he'd had any chance to show that he was too big for his britches. Caldwell is simply lying when he writes of Obama, "No president in living memory has compiled a slenderer record of bipartisanship. It is often said in the president’s defense that Republican obstructionism left him no choice. Today, this is true — and it has put an end, for now, to the productive part of his presidency. But it was not true at the time of the stimulus in early 2009, when the president’s poll numbers were so stratospherically high that it appeared risky to oppose him on anything." It was obvious from the first days of Obama's presidency that the greater risk, as far as Republicans were concerned, was to not oppose Obama on anything and be branded a Republican in Name Only by Rush 'n Sarah. The blanket opposition to Obama was not just premature but retroactive, with all the protesters blaming Obama for TARP and the bailouts that were initiated under his predecessor, not to mention the right's newfound eagerness to have the vapors over the budget deficit that, as Dick Cheney put it, had been proven not to matter, at least to Republican minds, by Ronald Reagan.

Caldwell blames the Republicans' pre-Obama woes--the fact that they, not to put too fine a point on it, destroyed the economy and were punished for it at the ballot box--to the rise of "ideological conservatism":

Republicans’ future electoral fortunes will depend on domestic policy and specifically on whether they can reconnect with “small-c” conservatism — the conservatism whose mottoes are “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” and “Mind your own business,” and the opposite of which is not liberalism but utopianism. The Bush administration was a time of “big-C” Conservatism, ideological conservatism, which the party pursued with mixed results. As far as social issues were concerned, this ideology riveted a vast bloc of religious conservatives to the party, and continues to be an electoral asset (although that bloc, by some measures, is shrinking). Had gay marriage not been on several state ballots in 2004, John Kerry might now be sitting in the White House.

Ideological conservatism also meant “supply-side economics” — a misnomer for the doctrine that all tax cuts eventually pay for themselves through economic growth. The problem is, they don’t. So supply-side wound up being a form of permanent Keynesian stimulus — a bad idea during the overheated years before 2008. Huge tax cuts, from which the highest earners drew the biggest benefits, helped knock the budget out of balance and misallocated trillions of dollars. To a dispiriting degree, tax cuts remain the Republican answer to every economic question. Eric Cantor, potentially the House majority leader, told The Wall Street Journal that if Democrats went home without renewing various Bush-era tax cuts (which they did), “I promise you, H.R. 1 will be to retroactively restore the lower rates.”

Until recently, supply side was political gravy for Republicans. It confirmed the rule that in American politics the party most plausibly offering something for nothing wins. In the 1980s, the New York congressman Jack Kemp was the archetype of an ambitious, magnanimous, “sunny” kind of Republican who let you keep more of your taxes while building more housing for the poor. Democrats who questioned the affordability of these policies sounded like killjoys. In a time of scarcity like our own, calculations change. Today your tax cut means shuttering someone else’s AIDS clinic. Your welfare check comes off of someone else’s dinner table.

Deficits in the Obama era are a multiple of the Bush ones, and the product of a more consciously pursued Keynesianism. But that does not absolve Republicans of the need to find a path to balancing the budget. With some exceptions — like Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, a Kemp protégé who has laid out a “Road Map” for reforming (i.e., cutting) Social Security in coming generations — Republicans have not adjusted to zero-sum economics. There is certainly no credible path to budget balance in the “Pledge to America” released in late September.

Yet the case against supply-side economics can never be airtight or decisive, and Republican tax promises will probably help the party this year. That is because taxes are not just an economic benchmark, but a political one. The public should not expect more in services than it pays in taxes. But the government should not expect more in taxes than it offers in representation.

What this seems to mean is that, while it's true that the Republicans' addiction to tax cuts wrecked the country and can no longer be indulged, it still plays well--but the Republican leaders have really learned their lesson now, and will behave themselves once they have been restored to power, and would have to anyway, to please the Tea Partiers who are taking over the party from within and to whom the old guard will be beholden. This strikes me as a pretty dubious assumption, especially given the Tea Partiers' obsession with taxes, which led them to embrace a name that identifies them as tax protesters at their core. There is a deep spike of wishful thinking here, which is summed up by Caldwell's invocation of the late Jack Kemp, the original acolyte of supply-side economics, and a very sweet and somewhat dim man whose genuine concern for the poor and devotion to programs for affordable housing, not to mention his actual belief that supply-side theories would benefit people at all economic levels, made him a figure of fun among his party fellows when he was alive, and now make him a sad, shining example of the road not taken to thoughtful conservatives.

Caldwell believes that the Tea Party may "reform" as well as regenerate the Republican party, even though there is much evidence that many of them want to restore and extend the worst Republican ideas of the past thirty years and throw in some even worse ideas, from even further back, that they have rescued from the dusty archives of the John Birch Society. The key to his attitude towards the Tea Party may be found in his mixed feelings about Sarah Palin:

It is in the context of class that Sarah Palin’s two-year career on the American political scene is so significant. She “almost seemed to set off a certain trip wire within the political class regarding access to power,” as Rasmussen and Schoen put it. But it is not an ideological trip wire. The Alaska governorship that catapulted Palin onto the national scene requires dealing with oil executives and divvying up the money from their lease payments. It is a job for a pragmatist, not a preacher. Palin has sometimes opposed big government and sometimes favored it, as became clear when journalists discovered that, contrary to Palin’s claims, she had been slow to oppose the wasteful Alaskan “Bridge to Nowhere,” which became a symbol of federal pork.

The controversies over Palin are about class (and markers of class, like religiosity), not ideology. She endorsed several underdog insurgent candidates who wound up winning Republican primaries in the spring and summer. How did she do that, when few observers — no matter how well informed, no matter how close to the Republican base — had given them a chance? Either Palin is a political idiot savant of such gifts that those who have questioned her intelligence should revise their opinion or, more likely, she is hearing signals from the median American that are inaudible to the governing classes — like those frequencies that teenagers can hear but adults can’t.

This talent alone does not make Palin a viable national leader. But until Republican politicians learn to understand the party’s new base, Palin will be their indispensable dragoman. After November’s election, the party will either reform or it will disappoint its most ardent backers. If it reforms, it is unlikely to be in a direction Palin disapproves of.

If you detect a note of condescension in that--imagine how long it might have taken him to decide that "teenagers" would be the best word with which to replace "dogs" in his second draft--just remember: when Republicans, and serious conservatives foolish and desperate enough to place their hope in Republicans, use the "C" word in reference to those they hope will vote as they wish, and pit their untutored wisdom against the uncomprehending members of "the governing classes", they intend a compliment. They have seen people behaving stupidly and selfishly as a prelude to voting Republican, and they want everyone to know that they're fed up with the snooty elitists who don't appreciate what they recognize as the natural ways of the working class. I've said it before and I'll say it again: as a bona fide product of lower-working class America, and a genuine Southern white man to boot, I'm getting really tired of well-off Republicans trying to get on my good side by identifying not being smart enough to have figured out that Medicare is a government-run program as an intrinsically working class quality.

This Format Will Self-Destruct in Thirty Years

This is the kind of news that, depending on your first reaction to it, dates a motherfucker: Sony has officially ceased production on the cassette-playing Sony Walkman. At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall writes that the machine, which in its day "managed to provide -- right up against your ear -- a surprising degree of audio fidelity" but adds that "let's be honest -- today it looks like kind of a joke." Whatever, Josh. I don't mean to come on like one of those outdated-format fetishists who build online shrines to their collections of 8-track tapes, but when I found out about this, I didn't think about how lame the Walkman has become but how exciting it was when I first got my hands on one.

This was early in 1985, which should tell you everything you need to know about where I've always been positioned on the high-tech cutting edge, given that this was about the same time that CDs began taking up real space in record stores. There were a few years there, which neatly overlapped with the period when yuppies were replacing their vinyl collections with shiny steel discs, when cassette tapes were my recorded format of choice, just because I loved the experience of bopping into a shop in the mall, buying the latest release, popping it into my player and bopping out again to check it out while scarfing a nutritious lunch of waffle fries. I even remember that the first tape I ever listened to on the thing was Neil Young's After the Gold Rush and that the second was Captain Beefheart's Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller), and I think the third was either UB40's Present Arms or Randy Newman's Trouble in Paradise. After that, my memory gets a little hazy, but suffice to say that, for most of the '80s, my music buying habits were largely determined by whatever was sitting in the $2.99 pile in front of the store. Do that regularly for a few months and it won't be long before you find yourself using the word "eclectic" to describe your musical taste in your personal ads.

Both the cassettes and the players were flimsy and rickety contraptions, but none of that mattered as much as the combination of portability and privacy--the fact that you could walk down a city street or sit on a bus (or, in my case, wander aimlessly through a rural Mississippi hellhole so barren of life that every hiccup seemed to echo like the sound of artillery in the mountains) with your own personal soundtrack booming in your head and nobody to tap you on the shoulder and inform you that they did not share your enthusiasm for Timbuk 3. For those of us who grew up with no means of listening to music except for a living room stereo that looked like an above-ground tomb with a tone arm, it was a real Brave New World moment. I got my first portable CD player sometime in the mid-90s, but I still had a Walkman around, because I still had a lot of stuff that I couldn't get on CD. When I bought my last cassette player, which must have been nine or ten years ago, my favorite diversion during long train rides was listening to tapes of This American Life. I was still sometimes using it five years ago, by which time I was feeling a little sheepish about being seen in public with my Discman. (I still don't have an iPod.) By then, the little door had come off and I had to hold the player in my hand so that the tape wouldn't fall out. I knew it was time to retire it when I got aboard an elevator at CBS and someone twenty years older and more out of touch than myself began cooing over my broken-down old Walkman, asking what it was called. It looked so strange to her that she thought it must be the latest thing.

I'll Be Your Punching Bag: The Juan Williams Story

I wasn't going to say anything about NPR firing Juan Williams because he went on the Bill O'Reilly show and said that seeing Muslims in their full festive Halloween get-ups aboard an airplane always makes him glad he has his Depends on, because I suffered from a deep lack of interest in the whole thing. I guess that, to me at least, Juan Williams is as close as someone can be to the anti-Rick Sanchez. When Sanchez got in trouble, I wrote that I didn't think I'd ever seen any of his work in context, yet I'd seen so many clips of him behaving like a high school drama major playing Al Pacino in ...And Justice for All ("This whole cawtroom is out of awder!") that I had him tagged, perhaps unfairly, as a jackass. I've probably heard Williams on NPR scores, maybe hundreds, of times, and based on his work there, I'd never formed any opinion of him and can't remember a single blessed thing I've ever heard him say. I gather than, when he appears as a favorite guest on Fox News, in the role of the black guy who works for the liberal media but isn't so brainwashed that he can't see that these conservative folks are pretty darn common sensical about things, he lets it all hang out a little more, as when, last year, he referred to Michelle Obama as having a "Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress thing going."

But then I saw this, and I had to acknowledge this great moment in "WTF?":

This is evidence of one-party rule and one sided thinking at NPR that leads to enforced ideology, speech and writing. It leads to people, especially journalists, being sent to the gulag for raising the wrong questions and displaying independence of thought."

Williams, whose name is on the companion book to the great PBS series Eyes on the Prize, and who by many accounts was an actual journalist before he settled into being a soft, gaseous hack, must know in his bones that public broadcasting in thie country is not a Stalinesque enclave of an extreme left wing thought experiment. It is a house organ for the reality-based community, and if anything, it might be too quick to freak out in reaction to anything that pushes the crazy envelope. On Fox News, if you say something that redefines crazy, they make you Employee of the Month, but only if you're crazy in the right ideological direction. But now that Williams has lost one source of income, he's going to be needing those Fox News checks even more. If he thought the gang at Fox News had a lot of good points before he got fired, they're going to be looking like a rainbow in springtime to him now. It'll be interesting to see if the bookers at Fox News will decide that he's more or less valuable to them as he tries to ingratiate himself with them by abandoning his old, "I'm a liberal, but..." persona and turns into a slavering conservative werewolf. Or maybe it won't be interesting at all. If anyone could turn into a boring werewolf, my money would be on Juan.

Juan's firing has set off a lot of hand-wringing and soul-searching among the kind of good liberals who listen to NPR so devoutly that they may have actually written away for transcripts of their favorite discussions, and who seem blithely, goofily oblivious of the truth that Juan himself put his finger on immediately: NPR wanted to fire him, just as CNN almost certainly wanted Rick Sanchez gone. (After the line about Michelle Obama, the network asked him to stop identifying himself as being associated with them in any future appearances on Fox.) Being stuck with an employee who you don't know how to get rid of is something that happens in all walks of life; I've had jobs in two different workplaces where the bosses were all but praying to strange gods and sacrificing chickens over the situation (no, I was not the employee in question), and it's always amazed me at how much pride the undesirable elements always take in being somewhere they're not wanted, Williams apparently included. Maybe people who think that NPR was too quick to fire Williams aren't asking the right question, which is, what would you do if you woke up some morning and discovered that Juan Williams was on your payroll (or, to put it another way, if you discovered that the fine journalist you'd hired more than ten years ago, on the strength of the work he'd done when he was young and hungry, had deteriorated as badly as this). Seriously, what are you supposed to do, wait for the guy to rob a bank?

Incidentally, one of Williams's defenders, William Saletan, has actually compared him to Shirley Sherrod, pointing out that Williams said what he did in the course of telling O'Reilly that he wouldn't go as far as O'Reilly has been lately in his claims, which all but cleared the room on an episode of The View, that "the Muslims" attacked us on 9/11 so now we have to fight "the Muslims". (In response to those who are offended by this, O'Reilly has been known to ask if they would have objected to it if he'd said, during World War II, that the Japanese attacked us and that we were fighting the Germans. Given that comparison, and the fact that the 9/11 hijackers and their masters did share a common nationality, shouldn't O'Reilly actually be saying that the Saudis attacked us? Or would that not press the right kind of buttons with his audience? But I digress.) But Sherrod--bravely, I think--admitted to having experienced feelings that might be called racist, in order to tell a story about how she overcame those feelings and learned that they had no place in the performance of her job. Williams, in order to seem reasonable to a man proudly expressing unrestrained bigotry, didn't so much admit as boast of his own instinctive feelings of bigotry, apparently to try to seem human and reasonable while attempting to establish a demarcation line for the exact level of acceptable anti-Muslim feeling in this place in these times. Likening the two strikes me as a little unfair to Sherrod, even if you think that NPR jumped the gun.

Dream a Stupid Dream of Me

I love South Park and treasure its place in our world. Trey Parker and Matt Stone are blessed with instant access to that part of themselves that most people start to tamp down or misplace sometime as they pass out of adolescence, the part that can see the absurdity in anything and encapsulate that absurdity in an image or a one-liner or give it that extra push into outright insanity. It's true that, sometimes, their determination to see absurdity where absurdity might not exist has led them to come across as just churlish and dopey, as in their take on Al Gore and climate change, which is based on a position that can be accurately boiled down thusly: "Ooooh, Al Gore is such a tight-ass douchebag loser, and he's always crying about global warming, which can't even exist, because tight-ass douchebag losers cry about it!" But, for most of their career, even when they've hit a wall, their work has usually at least had the idiosyncratic appeal of representing an intelligent, unusual person's point of view.

The latest South Park episode, "Insheeption", was built around their take on Inception. The show's take on the movie can be accurately summed up as, "Ooooh, Inception is so confusing and doesn't make any sense and the people who made it think that makes it cool," which strikes me as neither the most original nor accurate response one could have, but there are some laughs in there, even if the richest occur before it swings away from a Hoarders spoof into Inception territory and after it veers back out into a cameo by Freddy Krueger. I remember being surprised at how fast they managed to get their response to the movie out there, but I can't say that it set off any major alarm bells. Now comes word that Stone and Parker have apologized to the creators of the CollegeHumor website for similarities between the episode and the web video "Inception Characters Don't Understand Inception".

Parker and Stone's response to the whole mess strikes me as quite honorable, under the circumstances, especially compared to that of journalistic or literary plagiarists such as Ken Burns repertory company stars Mike Barnacle and Doris Kearns Goodwin: they readily conceded having turned to the CollegeHumor video and other parodies of Inception, not to steal their jokes outright but to get a feel for the dialogue and situations in Inception that they wanted to make fun of. A comparison of their work and the other parodies would seem to bear this out. The problem, and what's really, really depressing about it is that, assuming that Parker and Stone are expressing themselves at all accurately here, the South Park guys decided that it was worth devoting an episode to bashing Inception without actually having seen Inception. This has resulted in Stone being quoted, in the same article, as saying of Inception, “It was like, ‘Let’s parody the gobbledygook – because honestly, that movie – all those explanations, and explanations of explanations,” and then, of the parody video they built their episode around, “We thought their joke was that a lot of those lines were actually in the movie, and they were banging them against each other, and showing that the ‘Inception’ characters didn’t even know Inception." In other words, instead of deciding on their own that Inception was absurd and then showing us all what absurdity they'd seen in it, they decided that it must be absurd because all the hip young comics were making fun of it and, deriving their knowledge of the movie from the jokes they'd heard others make about it, actually devoted an episode of their show to parodying the parodies. And people say that Christopher Nolan is too cerebral!

For fans of the show like me, this is probably the most distressing development imaginable. I mean, I always thought that Parker and Stone had their heads up their asses about Al Gore and climate change, but the thought never crossed my mind that they hadn't read Earth in the Balance or seen An Inconvenient Truth. I thought they'd studied the arguments and somehow found them unconvincing or found the tone so do-gooder whiny that they rejected their own brains' conclusions that the arguments were actually convincing. Now I can't help but wonder if all that "ManBearPig" horseshit came about just because the guy with the skateboard and the piercings who delivers their lattes told him that his buddies all agreed that Al Gore is uncool. Probably not; probably Parker and Stone are just getting a little tired after doing this stuff for fifteen-odd years, and are having trouble accessing their bullshit detectors as easily as they used to, and so are depending on younger, newer comics to tell them what's absurd in the culture and what's absurd about it. That would go a long way towards explaining why, so far this season, they've devoted themselves to going after such serious threats to the republic as NASCAR and Jersey Shore. Maybe this is the moment when South Park finally goes all Saturday Night Live on us and turns into an Institution.

Apparently, I Bought This, #2: "Jay J. Armes, Investigator"

["Apparently, I Bought This" is apparently an annual feature of The Phil Nugent Experience]

The cover of Jay J. Armes, Investigator, an as-told-to written by Frederick Nolan that was published in 1976, shows a photo of a stocky-looking man with a face set in a teeth-baring squint and ill-fitting hair that has to be real, because nobody would pay good money for a wig that looked like that. He is kneeling behind a Rolls Royce and holding a shiny steel gun in the shiny steel hook extending from his right sleeve; another hook is hanging from his left sleeve. Somebody at Macmillan Publishing had high enough hopes for the book that they sprang for an actor who is dressed as if he's the Rolls Royce's chauffeur but who is probably meant to look like some uniformed officer of the law to strike a pose in the background, holding a rifle and looking at some bad scene off-camera. The book opens with an italicized passage from some unidentified, omniscient force telling us that we're about to read about the world's greatest private investigator, that he "works out of El Paso, Texas" and "isn't anything like Longstreet or Mannix or Cannon or Harry O any of that kiss-kiss, bang-bang crowd cardboard cutouts on television", and that, if that isn't enough right there to blow your mind... well, as Armes himself puts it, as soon as the italics stop and "I" takes over the job of filling these pages: " You could look upon my hooks as a handicap, I suppose, although I never do. not anymore."

Armes writes (or told Frederick Nolan to write) that he was born Julian Armas, one of five kids in a family that lived in a lower-income area near El Paso called Yselta. "We weren't rich and we weren't poor, just everyday normal." He hoped to grow up to be a doctor until, when he was twelve, his hands were blown off while he was messing around with some "railroad torpedoes", and "all those dreams were shattered, literally blown to bits." Because Jay J. Armes is, appearances to the contrary, only human, at first he took it pretty hard: "Tears of self-pity would fill my eyes, and I would look at the huge balls of cotton-stuffed bandage on my arms and hate the things beneath them. How he learned to get over his despair and returned to the land of the living is as fully detailed as everything else he has to say about his family background and inner life: "Then one day I realized how totally selfish I was being." The next thing you know, the El Paso Times was writing up young Julian's inspiring story under the headline, "HANDLESS NEWSPAPER CARRIER, 12 YEAR OLD". The article is reprinted in full for the reader's delectation.

As a raconteur, Armes has a couple of recurring tics that seem to say a lot about how he looks at the world. There aren't many things he can tell you about himself and his habits without presenting them as evidence of his dangerous, thrill-a-minute lifestyle. "I always lock my car doors," he writes, because "there have been a lot of assassination attempts on me, and I have no intention of making it easy on the next would-be killer." (I remember that, back in the mid-70s, my mom always locked her car doors, and not as a safeguard against the next surprise attack by ninjas.) He likes to list his possessions and all the James Bond gadgetry he's had specially made for him, and even when he won't deign to discuss it, he still wants to remind you that he's rolling in it. He says that he once talked "a world-famous New York surgeon" into performing "the delicate operation in which the intricate mechanism was grafted into my arm" which allows him to "fire the gun hidden in my right hook." After he demonstrated this on a TV talk show, the host pointed out to him that his "secret weapon" wasn't so secret anymore. "I just smiled. I didn't tell him about the other arm, and what special equipment is built into it, or what it's for. Nobody knows but myself and the man who installed it, but you can be sure of one thing: it cost a lot of money."

Much of the book consists of Armes recounting many of his most spectacular "capers". In the memoirist's equivalent of premature ejaculation, he leads with the case that made him enough of a celebrity to be doing TV talk shows and scoring book deals: in 1972, he recovered Marlon Brando's son Christian, who went missing under confused circumstances while the actor was involved in a messy, long-running legal feud with the boy's mother. (Armes stresses that it's because the case made the papers that he can talk about it at all: "It's one thing to tell you that I have worked for King Faisal or the Burtons or Richard Widmark or Howard Hughes. It's quite another to give you specific information about their problems and how I handled them. The Brando case was a little different...If the client elects to make his case and my part it in public, that's something else entirely. Until he does, it remains private." Armes, who spent some time in Hollywood trying to break into the movies after he'd dropped out of high school at fifteen, claims that "Bud" Brando personally phoned him from Paris to ask for his help: "He came straight to the point, as always." One look at a map, a trace run on a Volkswagen bus, and the chartering of a helicopter later, Armes is in Mexico, getting the drop on a gorge full of hippies ("The woman had no brassiere on.") and scooping up his package, just in the nick of time. ("It was Christian Brando and he needed a doctor.")



I first heard of Jay J. Armes when I saw "Hookman", the sixth season season opener of Hawaii Five-O First broadcast in 1973, a year after the Christian Brando caper, the episode was the closest that Armes ever got to living out his Hollywood dreams--or maybe it was just the only time he succeeded in getting somebody to film it, given that he seems to have been living out his fantasy of himself as a movie hero ever since he moved back to Texas. He played a villain, a former bank robbery who lost his hands in an accident for which he blames the cops responsible for his capture, one of whom is, of course, Steve McGarrett; once out of prison, he sets about trying to execute each of them, leaving behind the murder weapon, a rifle with the dead man's name engraved on it, at each scene. The episode, which Armes once insisted to a reporter had been designated "the best show ever on TV" by the Library of Congress--granted, this would have been long before Buffy the Vampire Slayer first went into production--is designed as a showcase for Armes to show off all the cool things he can do with his hooks. (His only dialogue, a brief, taunting phone conversation with McGarrett, was likely recorded by another actor.) "Hookman" does stay lodged more firmly in the memory than other Hawaii Five-0 episodes; it has a gloriously full-bodied tastelessness that's almost worthy of a classic EC comic. Armes contributes to that just by his presence, but a lot of the credit also goes to whoever came up with the opening scene and whoever had the balls to say, roll with it: Armes shoots his first victim while the guy is leading a funeral procession on his motorcycle, and in the chaos that follows, the coffin flies out of the hearse and onto the street, which freaks out the widow.

In 1977, after Armes had been written up in People and other magazines, a line of toys was made in his graven image. I never had a Jay J. Armes doll myself, and I don't remember ever having known about them at the time, but if I'd seen one when I was a kid, I think I'd have been proud of myself for knowing, thanks to that Hawaii Five-0 episode, who he was. For a spell there, he was as close as you can come to being a real-live comic book character, like Evel Kneivel or (especially if you grew up always knowing who he was) Muhammad Ali. In 1976, Gary Cartwright published an article in The Texas Monthly in which he tried to strip Armes of his word balloons and four-color printing and expose the man behind the hype. You will not be surprised to learn that Cartwright found that Armes had a penchant for exaggeration and in many cases appeared to be an outright fabulist, and that he tended to lie about little things like his age and how many big wheels in the show business were vying for the chance to build an entertainment empire out of his daydream existence. The big surprise may have been the person Cartwright managed to register faint echoes of inside the self-generated myth: someone who started life feeling that he had so little reason to have any self-esteem, and that had part of that taken from him, that he had to turn himself into a cross between Mike Hammer and King Kong just to get up in the morning.

Armes, who had been telling people that his parents were Italian and French and that his father ran a grocery store, was actually Mexican-American; his father worked in someone else's grocery store, and young Julian may not have even spoken English before starting school. Cartwright had little difficulty finding people in the area who remembered Julian Armas before he lit out for Hollywood, and who remembered him when he first came back--in "an old, raggedy-topped Cadillac with a live lion in the back and a dummy telephone mounted to the dashboard." A typical witness notes that Julian "had changed. He was always sort of a bully, but now he was very obnoxious." A doctor who remembers Armas coming back from Hollywood and regaling the girls with stories about how he'd lost his hands in the war offered a more sympathetic assessment: "There are many people in Ysleta who think of him s a phony, and by most standards perhaps he is, but I don't think so, because I understand the motive behind his behavior. I have respect for Julian. For most people, losing both hands would be the end of the show; for him, it was the beginning. The other things, the name change and claiming to be Italian, that's compensation...not only for his physical handicap, which is really an asset to him now, but for the psychological stigma of being a member of the much persecuted and chastized Mexian-American minority in Texas, which can be a problem even to the most intellectual minds." In light of this insight, one line from Jay J. Armes, Investigator takes on a new degree of fascination: Armes writes that when he decided to become a private detective, he asked the El Paso sheriff for a letter of recommendation and was initially turned down, because, he says the sheriff told him, "We need more private eyes like we need more wetbacks."



When Cartwright's article was reprinted in a paperback collection of true crime stories from Texas Monthly< he tacked on a brief afterword in which he conceded that his sizzling expose hadn't stopped Armes's career in its tracks. Cartwright wrote that this "only goes to prove that Hitler was right: If the lie is big enough, people will believe it." That's a little overwrought; Armes doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Hitler, but Knievel and Reverend Ike and others who exemplified what Pauline Kael, writing in 1974, called "the seventies mountebank's transcendence of satire." I hadn't thought of Armes in quite a while before I saw his book on an outdoor table in front of a mission, and I was surprised to discover, when I got home, that he's still alive and, at 78, still plugging away at his legend, maintaining a flashily designed website that both touts his and his son Jay J. Armes III's professional services and promises fans that movies and comic book series based on Armes's life are almost certainly on the way. ("If the project comes to fruition, Jay J. Armes will be the first "superhero" based on a real live person." Sorry, Blue Beetle!) Cartwright may feel that Armes pulled off a major long con, but others may wonder. The guy was poised to go national in a big way, and then he just had to settle for being the Batman of El Paso. It's as if Jay Gatsby had made his fortune only to crawl back to North Dakota, and there's a decent chance that Armes could have broken big into the entertainment business if he'd gotten an agent and relocated his base of operations to Los Angeles when the iron was hot. But Cartwright's doctor thinks he knows why that wouldn't have really offered him any satisfaction at all: "Julian lives here in the Lower Valley because these are the people he needs to impress. In a better part of town the rich gringos would look on him as just another crazy Mexican."