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Anne C. Heller and the World She Made

Ayn Rand and the World She Made
By Anne C. Heller

Hoo-ha! That Ayn Rand was one wacky broad!

Too many miserable Russian winters left the young proletariat Ayn shouting "NYET!" and she fled to America before you could say "borscht." Ayn hit Hollywood soon after and got a job schlepping for C.B. DeMille, wrote a couple books and BAM! she started Scientology.

Just. Like. That.

OK. None of that is really true. I'm still trying to digest this book. Rand remains a love/hate beacon for folks with overlapping interests in philosophy, politics and economics. This isn't the hagiography that Rand's contemporary cultists may have hoped for. It is a great read for those thinkers still on the fence about Rand - or those inclined to take their icons warts and all.

And Anne C. Heller is quite the babe. She kicked ass on the Daily Show. I fell in love and we were married soon after. I'm enrolling in architecting school soon.

Click here to read the humorless Rand folks grumblings about Heller's spot on the Daily Show.

"The end of the civil war was near..."

In honor of Larry Storch's 87th birthday; a portrait by my all-time favorite artist Drew Friedman. From his excellent book "Old Jewish Comedians."

And on that note...

"Robert Altman: the oral biography" by Mitchell Zuckoff

Robert Altman: the oral biography
by Mitchell Zuckoff
Alfred A. Knopf 560 pgs.

Robert Altman will always be the patron saint of "serious" Hollywood actors. Name-above-the-title types would work for scale(1) to bathe in the fragrant pool of eau-de-genius. In reality, some folks found the experience less than ideal. To a screenwriter, Altman may have been the Antichrist. He saw a script as more of a suggestion, a jumping-off point that was a necessary evil used to lure the money changers to the table.

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend ..." Overheard in Hollywood restaurant by someone who now works in a video store.

Altman's legend was of a shrewd guy shaping a career outside the bounds of Hollywood influence, creating largely improvised films. He made it all up as he went along, in a free-for-all collaboration between a paternal, weed-loving director and a reliable stock company of hot starlets and craggy-faced guys.

And, um, Huey Lewis's wiener.

This book doesn't contradict the idea of an almost wholly actor-centric director. But the tale told by some Altman vets (notably "Seinfeld's" chrome-domed nemesis, Bob Balaban and "Laugh In" poet, Henry Gibson)- reveals a less hagiographic take on the well-trod legend. Altman gave competent actors the freedom to add whatever they could bring to the set. Sometimes that meant doing whatever the hell you felt like and sometimes that meant keeping things closer to what was on the page.

In either case, Altman ran a pretty freewheeling enterprise. For all his anti-Hollywood stance, Altman basically partied like a rock star for most of his career, occasionally reigning things in to look good for the money men in the suits. Mercurial, moody and sometimes -inexplicably and inappropriately- mean, Altman's career is pockmarked by burned bridges and failed projects that left him scrambling for cash as his bankability oscillated wildly in the years between the career-launching "M*A*S*H" and his final work on the film version of "The Prairie Home Companion."

Somewhere in mid-career Altman helmed "Popeye", a decidedly left-field choice for a potential blockbuster film. After "Superman: The Movie" studios scrambled to jump on the comic-book movie bandwagon. Hence, someone thought a quirky, melancholy comic-strip smelled like a blockbuster. At the time, "Popeye" was whispered to be a colossal financial disaster, but it was actually a fairly successful film. Still, it was something of a personal calamity for Altman who had "troubled artist" tattooed across his head forever after. "Popeye" may be worthy of its own book. Robin Williams, in full-on spazz mode, with giant latex arms, on a sprawling set built in Malta. Malta? Only God and Robert Altman can explain why, but the most likely reason was because it was a remote island and not exactly accessible to those pesky MBA/spreadsheet guys.

Altman's failures were almost as colorful as his signature films. When Hollywood closed the door on him, he wasn't above shooting a Nixon film with a bunch of college kids enlisted in the name of some kind of wacky artist-in-residence sojourn. He took a failed off-Broadway play and shot it almost verbatim with 16mm cameras and very little money. Altman typically painted himself as a Hollywood outsider, but he rarely eschewed the yachts and high-living and was not above moves like stunt-casting Lindsay Lohan alongside Meryl Streep. Or giving his kid a crew job, and billing the studio considerably more then he paid him and pocketing the difference. Altman's diamond-to-shit ratio is pretty decent. The gems in his oeuvre are some of the most enjoyable films ever made and while the turds can be amazingly bad, they are still interesting in a W.T.F? manner.

Altman and most of his friends and family(2) cooperated in putting this book together. Which would seem to be a bit of a no-no as far as objectivity. To his grand credit, if the author pulled any punches, it's hard to imagine what was left out. It's a "warts and all" biography.

(1) "Scale" refers to the minimum pay dictated by the Screen Actor's Guild, the dominant union for proto-socialist, fellow-travelers like Tim Robbins (and his ilk.) As of this writing that means about $1000-$4000 usd per week. Which ain't exactly chicken feed. By comparison, a union carpenter can make $700-$1000 usd per week, depending where he is located.

(2) Conspicuously absent is Faye Dunaway. Who -it is strongly hinted- had an affair with the director that almost trashed his marriage.

I'll Just Leave This Here...

W.T.F. Dylan?

Bob Dylan has apparently gone stark-raving-mad and it is a joy to behold.

"Christmas in the Heart" -Dylan's 47th album- is a raggedy collection of Zimmy singing corny, old-favorite, holiday songs delivered with nary a hint of irony and rasped out in his deliciously, shredded voice.

And it is awesome. This is the most unexpected holiday treat since Bing Crosby answered the doorbell and invited David Bowie in for the still-inexplicable-to-this-day "Little Drummer Boy" duet.

The highlight of "Christmas from the Heart" is a raucous take on "Must Be Santa" that sounds like it would be right at home on a Pogues record. It's a mindbending Klezmer/jug-band party stomper. (See the video here. Embedding disabled)

This is probably the most left-field thing Dylan has done since his alleged embrace of Christianity resulted in the underrated "Slow Train Coming." Dylan deflates that entire brush-with-Jesus episode (and more) in the entertaining and enjoyable "Chronicles: Volume One."

Likewise, if you watch Scorcese's documentary "No Direction Home" the "Minnesota Man of Mystery" persona that has followed Dylan since time began, seems less like the master plan of a self-promoting folkie, then the result of overzealous fans and overreaching journalists. In the film, he scoffs at most of the absurd assumptions made about his intentions over the years. Maybe it's another mysterious "persona" on display, but if so, it's cynical and smart and coming from a guy who apparently knows how to laugh, while rolling around the bed with this crazy mistress we call fame and fortune.

In other Dylan news: in a recent interview with the British Classic Rock(1) magazine, KISS fire-breather, Gene $immons, claims that Dylan's wacky greasepaint get-up during the "Rolling Thunder Revue" was directly inspired by KISS (see photo above.) Like Gene says; 'If you don't believe me, you can ask him yourself.'

Yeah, dude. Like, I got him on speed-dial.

Sounds plausible anyway. Who are we to argue with the Bat-Lizard?

(1) The interview doesn't seem to be online. I read it for free in Barnes and Noble (which is kind of like the Internet; lots of free stuff to read and no obligation to buy anything.) Anyway, it's a good magazine if you are interested in whatever happened to Starz or need to fill in the holes of your knowledge of Thin Lizzy. Or maybe you wonder when that Trigger album is being reissued. That little tidbit is filed under "Best News of the Century!"

Why You Should Continue To Steal Major Label Music From The Interweb

Too Much Joy is a band from Scarsdale, New York that have been around since the 80s and are still occasionally active today. They were ubiquitous at various NY/NJ clubs back in the day, but probably suffered a bit commercially by being hard to categorize; a bit too gritty for the power-pop crowd and a bit too poppy for the glory days of alt/grunge/whatevs. They were a good rock and roll band, a commodity that is hard to market. I was a big fan of their Warner Bros. album "Mutiny" which featured an inexplicable cover of the Records' "Starry Eyes" and a tempered sense of humor that made you smile without seeming too jokey.

As we all dance around the bonfire that engulfs the burning skeleton of the big time music business it's easy to forget that large sums of money still flow into buildings shaped like records and into the pockets of large corporations like Warners, Sony et al.

And while a certain percentage of that money may make it into the gilded pockets of a hand full of high-profile artists, most mid-level, orphaned bands we all know and love, never see a penny. And they are usually (technically speaking) in debt to the tune of (no pun intended) millions of dollars.

Big-time media royalty accounting is the stuff of legend.(1) Most musicians know that music royalties are not going to pay the bills anymore. This is the reason that so many artists -folks who previously put a lot of effort into releasing new music- have turned to churning out cover records (Bob Dylan, Hatebreed, Matthew Sweet etc.) They've just given up making new music. The real money is in "publishing" and that income goes directly to the songwriter, NOT the performer like a lot of people assume. Songwriting royalties are automatic and compulsory (roughly 7 cents per song, per record sold, more or less.) What you get for actually recording those tunes is subject to the whims of the record companies.

These days, it's all about merch and touring and it's getting harder to make a buck. For a bunch of guys setting out in a van, a slight uptick in gas prices might make the difference between profitability and coming home broke.

But -as Too Much Joy's Tim Quirk documents here- it's still a bizarre and complicated business. The new "revenue models" for artists and musicians are still in the experimental stages at best. Sure there will always be someone, somehow raking in music-derived money from big corporations, but for tons of mid-level "baby bands", it's an open question.

(1)Sketchy financial practices are not limited to screwing over hippies and punk rockers. For a look at how Hollywood uses "creative accounting" click here to read about Art Buchwald's legendary problems with Paramount over "Coming to America."

"The Ten-Cent Plague" by David Hajdu

Ever since Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavilier & Clay" mainstream publishers have released a slew of books (see:"Men of Tomorrow") chronicling the rough and tumble world of the nascent New York funny book business. Scrappy Jews like L.E.S. brawler Jack Kirby, Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman were the (now) marquee names driving the creative side of the biz but behind-the-scenes were crazy bastards like porn publisher turned DC/National head Harry Donnenfeld and M.C. Gaines, the father of Mad magazine's reluctant honcho Bill Gaines. Like the cutthroat competitors of the nearby rag trade, comic book biz was all about ripping off anything and anybody that looked like a winner and doing it cheaper and quicker to boot.

A bit of debunking the standard Bill Gaines' story is the centerpiece. Any comic history fan knows the story of the EC comics empire collapsing (Mad magazine being the sole survivor) under the specious social science of Fredric Wertham's book "Seduction of the Innocent" - and how Gaines famously melted down on live television while trying to defend his gory and gorgeous line of sleazy horror books. You may already know the story but it's seldom visited in the kind of calm detail found here. Wertham was a quack looking to sell a book on the evils of comics while Gaines has always been portrayed as something of a white knight by comic book fans. Hajdu's version spins away from the usual canon. Gaines isn't exactly made out to be a bad guy but Hajdu doesn't buy the martyr stuff either. He acknowledges the artistry of the EC books but seems close to siding with Wertham that Gaines really was something of a sleaze monger. Well, of course he was. But they were some damn fine, sleazy comic books.

Apparently, this book is the impetus behind John Landis' intentions to make a movie out of Gaines' life story (starring Seth Rogen if you believe the digital internets.) This book would be the best primary source for such a tale.

Very cool cover by Charles Burns too.

"Vintage Games" Bill Loguidice & Matt Baron

Vintage Games: An Insider Look at the History of Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, and the Most Influential Games of All Time. By Bill Loguidice & Matt Barton

This authoritative history of video gaming covers a lot of bases (all of your bases?) A detailed overview incorporating orphaned gaming models (like text games1) and old-school platforms without neglecting the modern world of internet-driven orc hordes. "Vintage Games" reads a bit like a textbook in heft and style, yet enough enthusiasm filters through that it manages to be authoritarian without being dry and academic.

The book is organized around roughly chronological examples of what I am now officially designating "meta-games." In the wake of every Pac-Man or Donkey Kong, the floodgates release look-a-likes that share certain strands of DNA with slight variations on the originals. Sometimes you get a Pac-Man rip with little pizzas in a maze. Then again, doesn't every platform jumper owe a bit to Donkey Kong?

The book is apparently an off-shoot of the author's neat website Armchair Arcade dedicated to vintage games. Lots of cool stuff there, including a few chapters that were cut from the book. They also pointed me towards this site which runs 8-bit Nintendo ROMs in your browser. Brilliant idea. (and totally illegal I guess, but what-the-hey...)

(1)Yeah, I know text games are still around. Check out some recent examples at the Interactive Fiction Competition.

"Columbine" by Dave Cullen

"Cafeteria" by Jon Haddock

"Columbine"
By Dave Cullen

Most of the stuff you remember about Columbine is likely bullshit. The endlessly repeated memories and factoids that persist to this day were fished from a shallow river by a bottom-feeding media. Remember the doomed Christian girl, bravely witnessing for Jesus with a gun pointed at her head? That didn't happen. The Trench Coat Mafia tales had little to do with reality. The shooters - Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold - were not gay, Goth outcasts seeking vengeance against cruel jocks. They were relatively popular - good students with ample friends. They came from stable two-parent homes in a prosperous community. Yet Harris was almost certainely a textbook psychopath. Klebold was a fucked-up and suicidal kid along for the ride.

They did frequent Hot Topix, play Doom and listen to Rammstein. But while such lapses in taste may be responsible for pregnant teenage girls with bad tattoos, they can't be blamed for serial killers with axes to grind and arsenals aplenty.

And - as the book makes clear - Columbine was less a successful shooting rampage than a failed bombing mission. It was done by a pair of inept amateurs with delusions of grandeur. Harris and Klebold's original plans were much larger and ambitious. The shoddy, homegrown bombs that were designed to bring the building down were mostly failures. Having access to the "Anarchist's Cookbook" does not make somebody an evil genius.

Cullen describes how a daisy-chain of inaccuracies were fed to the media and gave them exactly what they needed to sell papers with little regard for accuracy or logic. A witness repeats sketchy, third-hand information to the press which is seen by other witnesses who then pass that skewed reality on to other media outlets. There were two-thousand witnesses to the Columbine shooting, it's a textbook worthy example of the unreliability of eyewitness accounts.

"Columbine" treads a cautious line recounting the lives of the shooters. Painting them as larger-than-life monsters - as ersatz Manson heirs - would create martyrs for the creepy death-metal crowd that canonizes John Wayne Gacy. Making them pitiful and sad would piss all over the graves of their victims. Cullen does a good job mixing a sober and journalistic worldview with a novelist's knack for telling a compelling story. This isn't a tabloid "TRUE CRIME" book. "In Cold Blood" or "The Executioner's Song" are more apt comparisons.

The important stuff here might not be the survivor's tales or the confused response from law enforcement. It's how the incident was re-purposed and retold according to who was doing the telling and - more importantly - why they were telling that story.

The closest thing to the "real story" is between the covers of this book.

You Should Not Have a Cow.

"The Simpsons. An Uncensored Unauthorized History"
By John Ortved

I seem to recall vague chatter a few years ago about Matt Groening writing a book chronicling his version of Simpsons history. Maybe the mildly unflattering portrait presented here will get him off the couch. If what I hear is true, the couch is made of thousand-dollar bills woven together with the finest 24-karat gold thread. So it's understandable if a guy gets a little comfortable.

The standards set by contemporary oral histories - say Legs McNeil's "Please Kill Me" or George Plimpton's seminal "Edie"- invite a minimum of first-person incursions by the author. John Ortved injects his own point-of-view way too often and with a fist full of ham. It doesn't help that his insights tend to be a tad bush league and snarky. It's like the Comic-Book-Guys have taken over the asylum. Or maybe it's exactly like the comments section on a Simpsons website. I have never seen an episode of "24" but does it really "endorse" torture like Ortved says? And Homer Simpson mistaking Stephen Hawking for Larry Flynt is pretty goddamn funny but is it the "best single joke they ever came up with?" Was there a voter referendum about that? Maybe I missed it. It's OK if Douglass Rushkoff wants to hold the Simpsons crew responsible for funding the uber-conservative Fox News Network (d'oh!) but subsequently loading the text with others who parrot that overambitious trope is a bit of fair and unbalanced mongering that would make Bill O'Reilly proud.

An array of familiar names from Conan O'Brien to Rupert Murdoch go on record but notably absent are the folks who also take the biggest lumps; Groening, James Brooks and long-departed producer Sam Simon. Predictably no one is exactly rushing in to defend them.

The idea that Groening hogs too much credit (and makes too much money) has been internet fodder for years and it's not entirely fair (even if Matty-boy owns up to it in his "aw-shucks" regular guy way.) The show has obviously grown to be quite a mammoth, collaborative undertaking that no single person can take credit for it. Still, it started with Groening's aesthetic, his quirky voice and his clean, deceptively simple drawings.(1) It's the TV equivalent of an internet start-up. Simon and George Meyer et al may have made the show a powerhouse of yuks but they jumped on the bus a few exits down the turnpike.

And day-to-day music guy(2) Alf Clausen rates a single mention? WTF? Likewise, the various efforts by the voice cast to up their remuneration gets a lot of ink but other than that they are not really part of the story here. It's really about the writers and a truckload of them have contributed through the years. And that is probably the way it should be. The Simpsons might be a cartoon but it's a writer-driven show and this book makes that abundantly clear. The book (expanded from a Vanity Fair piece a few years back) feels rushed. Typos and redundancies appear a bit too often.

I'm still waiting for Groening's take but I'm not holding my breath. Reservations aside, this is a good enough read. I plowed through it in a single evening. Problem is that this book will probably be the final word for a while - a lackluster effort like this is likely to discourage anyone else from attempting to do a "fair and balanced" look at the show. Too bad.

Footnotes:
(1) Saying Groening can't draw - stated more than once in the book - is idiotic and missing the point. It's like saying Charles Schulz can't draw because Charlie Brown was just a circle and a couple squiggly lines or that Walt Disney was a fraud because he didn't actually draw Mickey Mouse.

(2)Danny Elfman is responsible for the wonderful theme song but Alfie is what it's all about when it comes to actually scoring the series episodes...and he contributes much to the various parodies and diegetic music that you hear in each episode.

Goats, Boxes, Staring...

George Clooney stares at goat.

A strange pair of random, head-scratching movies landed in the multiplex this week. "Men Who Stare at Goats" & "The Box" are big studio flicks mining the territory usually reserved for quirky "indie" fare.

"Men Who Stare..." chronicles a strange (and roughly factual) convergence between black-ops military tacticians and the kind of strange pseudo-pscience usually featured on late-night radio shows devoted to psychic spoon benders.

George Clooney is quite a hoot as a shadowy military contractor convinced he possesses psychic powers that allow him to reconfigure clouds while clouding men's minds. Kevin Spacey, Ewen McGregor and Jeff Bridges show up as fellow mystic warriors of varying degrees of sincerity and ability. It's a psychic sausage-fest with nary a significant female speaking role in site (except for a hot-tub montage featuring ample cleavage.)

"Men Who Stare at Goats" is a rather peculiar old-fashioned comedy. It's akin to those 1960s wide-screen extravaganzas peppered with weighty actors in fluffy roles. Lightweight? Perhaps, but it's nice to see a leisurely comedy that doesn't cram jokes down your throat at a million miles an hour. Maybe that makes for a less-than-stellar joke per dollar ratio - compared to any Judd Apatow vehicle of recent vintage, say - but it's still pretty damn funny

"The Box" is the film director Richard Kelly should have made after his cult-fave rabbit from hell opus, "Donnie Darko." Kelly's spasmodic aesthetic would have better served had he followed up with this instead of the entertaining (and over-cooked) "Southland Tales." I liked "Southland..." quite a bit. It's a sprawling, overblown mess of a flick but it's also entertaining, weird and quite funny in places -although sometimes it's hard to tell if bringing the funny was intentional or just a byproduct of so many strange ideas crowded into such a small space.

"The Box" takes a story by Richard Matheson (seen in a vastly different version in the John Landis "Twilight Zone" feature film) and elongates the quirk and weirdness a bit too thin for a full length flick but for at least half the film it works quite well. These folks definitely live in the same world as the Darko family. Hell, it looks like they live on the same block.

Many mysterious folks parade in and out of the story like refugees from "Twin Peaks" but ultimately the more wildly the narrative spins, the less interesting it becomes. Like "Twin Peaks" at its best, "The Box" has its moments. You would be hard pressed to say what exactly is going on at times but when it treads the line between slightly off-kilter suburban banality and full-tilt weirdness, it can be satisfyingly unsettling. Like -dare I say- "The Twilight Zone."