The Philter

We lost another titan this week: the great Ed McMahon, who elevated sucking up to the boss to an art form. Ed was known to enjoy the occasional adult beverage, and once or twice may have shown up for work slightly lit. Thanks to some guy on YouTube for posting the following:

At the beginning of this clip, Johnny claims that Ed was not really that much of a lush, but that they played up that side of his personality for comedy purposes. Maybe so. But if ever there was a job that could be done well while drunk, Ed’s was it: sitting on a couch laughing loudly at people’s jokes. With any luck, he’s back at it today, sliding down one seat so Frank Sinatra can sit down with Audrey Hepburn and Jesus.

(with apologies to Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings)

Much is being written and said today about Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office. But no one ever talks about the nights, and they may be more important, because when you get right down to it Obama is a romantic figure. Most of us who supported him would admit, if we were being honest, that it wasn’t Obama’s policies or ideas that swayed us so much as the fact that we think he’s awesome.

I don’t mean that as criticism. In fact, I think a big part of a president’s job is to embody the things we aspire to be. The presidents we remember are all romantic (in the old-fashioned sense) and/or heroic figures of one kind or another: JFK, Washington, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Reagan (not a hero to me, but to many).

A piece I read yesterday called “David Brooks: How Obama Seduced Me” got me to thinking: That’s really what Barack did. He seduced us, as a nation, at a vulnerable time in our history. We were on the rebound. Our last long-term relationship had not gone so well: The guy had come from a prominent family, looked prosperous, and said he was “compassionate.” Then he turned out to be a dumb, lazy, abusive sumbitch addicted to invading random countries and with a penchant for giving unwanted backrubs to world leaders. We were hurt, and we were depressed, and then along comes this smooth-talking stranger with a thousand-watt smile. We fell hard and threw caution to the wind.

Some members of the family didn’t like it (especially that uncle from South Carolina). They wanted us to play it safe and marry the icky old guy. But we were in love, and ready to take a risk, so we went for it.

Now a few months have gone by, and it’s time for a bit of sober reflection. To stretch the metaphor a bit more, we married this guy after a very brief courtship. After the honeymoon you have to settle down to the daily reality of actual life, and naturally things aren’t going to be perfect. It’s hard to avoid having a tinge of disappointment creep into our evaluations, because we projected all our hopes and dreams of what a president could be onto Obama, and there’s no way he could have lived up to it all.

The real question is, are we happy with our choice? At the end of the day, would we sleep better knowing that McCain or Hillary were in the Oval Office? I don’t think so. Barack is our guy—he has his faults, and so do we, but I believe we can make this thing work.

On the reading front, after spending a couple of weeks struggling through William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, I ripped through Charles Bukowski’s Factotum in one day. Faulkner may have been a Literary Artist of the Highest Order, but I’ll take Bukowski any day; he wrote to be read, directly and succintly and without pretense. He was a drunk, a lech, and just generally kind of an asshole, but was unflinching in his portrayal of these things. He was often accused of being a misogynist, and when you read him you can see why; but to be accurate he was more of a misanthrope, or a nihilist, and like many nihilists a damaged romantic at heart. He once said, “I have died nine-tenths, but keep the other one-tenth like a gun,” and he was getting at something there; even in his darkest portrayals of life at its most desperate, there is a hint of poetry and a glimmer of something like hope.

Anyway, as public service I would like to present the following passage, which is Chapter 31 of Factotum. It neatly sums up Bukowski’s style and themes, and can save you a lot of time if you read it instead of his collected works (which were many). Enjoy.

The “J.J.” stands for Jean-Jacques, did you know that?

Thanks to the magic of the Internet and a spot of good luck, I managed to get myself into the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz last night to see the great J.J. Cale. (Without conscious intent, I seem to be moving alphabetically through my list of Bands I’ve Not Yet Seen; a few weeks ago it was Cake at the Fox Theatre, next maybe it will be Calexico?) Since it was a will-call deal there is no ticket stub, and in a few days I’ll probably forget it ever happened; so I wanted to jot down a few impressions while I still have them.

J.J. Cale is low-key with a lowercase “l.” If you look up “mellow” in the dictionary, you see his picture, except he’s got his head down and you can’t really say for sure if it’s him. Onstage he looks like he’s putting out almost no effort at all, though clearly a lot of work has gone into his songs and a lot of skill goes into his playing. He spent most of the show half-sitting on a comfortable stool, coaxing lazy shuffles and tasty licks from his guitar and singing, sort of. He doesn’t sing the songs so much as insinuate them. There are blues singers, blues shouters, and blues talkers, but there aren’t many blues whisperers like J.J. Cale.

The Old Man writes,

I used to think of bloggers as really hip & up to date, but now blogging seems so 2007. For 2008 we got Facebook & now for 2009 Twittering.

Since I never got into blogging, I certainly have no involvement with Facebook or Twittering, and tend to view them as a further debasement of the currency of the written word.

But I’d love to see you post your thoughts on these things.

And you know, I’ve been meaning to do so for a while now. It’s true that blogging has started to seem sort of quaint and archaic, that the real action has shifted to technologies offering even more instant gratification. I have made a personal policy decision to steer clear of these things, and here’s why.

Usually I only write about movies to point people toward the really great ones or to warn them away from the really awful ones. I had hoped that today’s entry would be one of the former, but instead it must be the latter.

After ducking it for two years, I finally summoned the courage to view David Lynch’s most recent film, Inland Empire. I had been afraid of it because a) I worried it would continue the accelerating downward spiral that had afflicted Lynch’s work ever since Wild at Heart, and b) it is a big film, almost three hours long.

But after revisiting Twin Peaks my affection for Lynch was restored to such an extent that I approached Inland Empire with cautious optimism. The cast includes a number of old-timey DL favorites such as Laura Dern, Harry Dean Stanton, Diane Ladd, and Grace Zabriskie, as well as Jeremy Irons and Nastassja Kinski. In interviews, Lynch waxed enthusiastic about the possibilities digital filmmaking had opened up for him, and about the positive impact of transcendental meditation on his creative life. It seemed just possible that Inland Empire would mark a return to form for a filmmaker whose work once brought me a great deal of pleasure.

This combination of words popped into my head last night for some inexplicable reason, causing me to giggle foolishly for several seconds. So in an idle moment this morning I deicded to consult Ye Olde Internete to see who else had had a similar experience, and what they’d done about it.

It didn’t take long to find this picture, which was posted on Flickr by someone calling him or herself “givepeasachance”:

It was followed by a note that says:

Bloggers: I don’t mind you posting this, just please provide a link back to this page. Cheers.

Which I have now done. Over and out.

I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions, per se, but one of my goals for 2009 has been to downsize the towering pile of unread books in my office. This formation is caused by the simple fact that it’s so much easier and faster to acquire books than it is to read them. Why can’t anyone do something about this? Where are the books in pill form we’ve all been waiting for?

More or less at random, I began this program by cracking open the irresistably titled The Mystery of the Mind, by the equally well-named Wilder Penfield. I don’t remember exactly when I added this to the collection, but it was some years ago. I’ve always been interested in the brain as a subject, and a blurb on this back of this book promised that Penfield’s “lucid writing and depth can be appreciated by the lay public.”

I recently had occasion to read Charles McCabe’s brilliant The Good Man’s Weakness, an authoritative treatment of the many aspects of a single topic: alcohol, which another noted authority, Homer J. Simpson, called “the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” It concludes with a section on hangovers which inspired me to set down all I’ve learned on the subject in my years of study, in the hopes it may be of use to some of you young people out there in Cyberville.

Handled properly, a hangover need not be terribly unpleasant, and can even be somewhat enjoyable. Ideally, hangover management begins the night before. There are several things you can do when drinking heavily to minimize the next day’s suffering, though most of the time you’re not going to do them, because the whole point of boozing is to forget about things like being prudent and planning ahead. Still, I’m going to list them here, just so I can say I didn’t leave anything out:

Over the last week many pixels have been devoted to reproductions and discussions of this picture of Michael Phelps. The wide dissemination of this image—to which I have now contributed—compelled Phelps and his anointed press representatives to issue a fawning, overblown apology that made it sound as if he had done something really terrible, like publicly plucking the eyes out of puppies with a fork. This whole affair demonstrates a couple of things.

One is the continued stunning hypocrisy of a society where one intoxicant is not just tolerated, but celebrated—where a famous person can be well paid for endorsing a particular beer or vodka—but where being photographed indulging in a different intoxicant, arguably less harmful and certainly less physically damaging, has the potential to end an illustrious career.

Another thing it proves, though, is that highly paid flacks often have little or no imagination. I look at this photo and I don’t see a smoking gun (as it were); I see an image that can be interpreted in a number of ways, even if you concede its authenticity, which is always in doubt in the age of Photoshop. Here are three possible explanations:

• What Phelps is actually holding is a decorative but poorly designed candle holder where the flame has consumed all of the oxygen inside, creating a vacuum that caused it to attach itself to Phelps when he leaned over to smell it. What we are seeing here is Phelps struggling valiantly to remove the offending object from his face.

• Rather than sucking something out of the bong, he is in fact filling it with air from the freakish lungs that helped him win eight gold medals in last year’s Olympics. This air has magical healing powers and is intended for a 9-year-old leukemia patient.

• In order to impress a girl he met at the party, Phelps in trying to suck himself inside the bong and swim in the bongwater.

That’s just off the top of my head, and I’m not even a professional spinmeister.

As I was writing this, I learned that Kellogg’s had dropped their endorsement deal with Phelps, which seems cowardly. If they had any guts they’d put the picture on a Wheaties box, but replace “News of the World” with the words “Breakfast of Champions.”