Thomas Pluck's Blog, page 58

The Book of Mormon

My first anniversary present (paper) to Sarah was tickets to The Book of Mormon, and we saw it last night in New York. (my present was tickets to midget car racing, which was awesome). I’ve been a fan of South Park since before it existed, when I first saw the videotape of “The Spirit of Christmas” that was commissioned as a video Christmas card. I had some friends in the Disney and animation community who’d got their hands on it, and is still one of the funniest Christmas parodies ever made. The show has had its ups and downs, but the movies Trey Parker and Matt Stone have made are mostly terrific. South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut can still make me crack up. Team America: World Police is one of the few satires of the post-9/11 landscape. And The Book of Mormon is perhaps the most popular musical to say that in general, religion is just crazy shit someone makes up to distract people in horrible situations.

Now, the Mormons get poked fun at in this, but I don’t think their religion is singled out in particular, except to make the audience think why they are laughing at some of the off-the-wall beliefs of strict Mormons when their own beliefs are only slightly less ‘out there.’ Mormons are hardly the only target. American consumerism, symbolized by Orlando Florida, gets a heavy ribbing. The characters are sympathetic, but there is a lot of brutally cynical humor about the dire situation in some areas of rural Africa, such as the AIDS epidemic, violent warlords, and female circumcision. The performers are fantastic, and the humor works on many levels. I don’t know if many Mormons are going to see it, but I don’t find it malicious. In the end, the missionaries are flawed because they are human and entitled Americans, not because of their religion.

All the Broadway shows I’ve seen in order, from childhood are… Cats, Show Boat, Avenue Q, Spring Awakening, Spamalot!, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Hair, Young Frankenstein, Hairspray, and You’re Welcome America: A Final Night With George W. Bush. Not counting Will Ferrell- which was a one-man show and not a musical- I’d say Book of Mormon is hands down, the funniest, with Spamalot second. The best all around? I really liked the revival of Hair, and think the Hairspray musical was damn good (and better than the movie musical).

Tickets are still crazy expensive, but this one will be running for a long time. I hope they make an insane movie out of it. It is incredibly filthy, absurd, hilarious, endearing, and daring.

And speaking of Mormons, to read a free story of mine about two Mormons who ring the doorbell of the wrong man, check out We’re All Guys Here, at [PANK] Magazine.

 

Tagged: Book of Mormon, Broadway, Firecracker, musicals, South Park

Mark Twain Speaks?

I was discussing with my friend Andy the banjo-playing masonic assassin how pop culture references and jokes were nothing new, and how difficult it can be to understand stories and dialogue that use a lot of it, when I mentioned that Samuel Clemens’s pseudonym itself was a gag. It’s not arcane knowledge. Mark Twain is a riverboat nautical term for depth. They’d lower a knotted rope with a weight to measure depth, and call out how many knots went under, so the riverboat captain wouldn’t scrape bottom. “Mark one, mark twain, mark three…”

It was a cute nod to his past as a riverboat captain that would elicit a chuckle from those familiar with steamboats, and to everyone else, it was just a nice, clean and respectable name. Much better than Samuel Clemens, which sounds like Delirium Tremens.

There’s been a rediscovery of Thomas Edison’s footage of Mark Twain at his Connecticut home in 1909, which made me go looking for any audio recordings of Mr. Twain. Recordings existed, once. He dictated four wax cylinders of a novel, to experiment and see if he could write that way. He didn’t like it. Perhaps they were destroyed. A few others are mentioned, but no recordings are known to exist. The closest we get is a friend of Twain’s, a gifted mimic and impersonator, who recorded his imitation of Twain reading “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

Tagged: Mark Twain, Thomas Edison

Edge of Dark Water

One of my favorite books is The Bottoms, by Joe Lansdale, about a young boy growing up poor near the Sabine River. This story is also set on the Sabine, with teenagers yearning to break free from their blood families and make one of their own. It’s the kind of tale only Lansdale can tell. Southern gothic through his unique and absurd lens, characters as big and real as the dirty Sabine river that flows through the heart of it. I loved it, and was dismayed at how quickly I read it. I’ll go back and savor it a second time. Some called it Young Adult, as if that’s a genre now. Sure, older teens would like it, but it’s just a damn good story, with a lot of heart. I haven’t said a damn thing about the story, because it’s so good, like a dark American fairy tale, except all too real. You can discover it for yourself. It’s a lot more than any synopsis can capture.

I really enjoyed this one, and not just because the story grips you. I wanted to read more about Sue Ellen, and Jinx, and Skunk. Any time Mr. Lansdale writes about the folks of the Sabine, I’ll be there. But Sue Ellen has fire, and I hope she has more stories to tell.

Amazon: Edge of Dark Water

Tagged: Joe Lansdale, Reviews

Savages, by Don Winslow

Savages: A Novel

Fucking great book.

Millennials come to crime fiction at last. Don Winslow takes a realist’s look at the drug war and crafts a stunning Shakespearean drama (Titus Andronicus) on both sides of the border. The less I say about the book, the better. The shrapnel of the Iraq War, American narcissism, human tribalism, and the latest generation all come together in a fantastic story full of rich characters. Winslow reminds us that the kids are all right. It’s the adults who are the problem.

 

Tagged: Books, Don Winslow, Reviews, Savages

A Steady Diet of Bullshit

Theodore Sturgeon, a fine writer, once said that 90% of everything is crap. And if you view things objectively, you begin to wonder if Ted underestimated. When applied to advertising, the figure rises to 110%.

Anyone who says we do not need government regulation of business is not a student of history. Ever watch an old-timey Western where the snake oil salesman comes to town, selling liniments and tinctures that cure everything, but just alcohol and a few drops of whatever crap he can find?

Well, that may as well be the ingredients of most fitness performance enhancers, when you put them to the test of scientific methods.  ”They have created a disease called dehydration, and made these expensive and high calorie drinks to cure it.” Drink tap water. It cures dehydration. And it is nearly free, if you can find a damn water fountain.

Those Skecher’s sneakers that were supposed to burn fat? Bullshit. All they did was make you wobble and break your ankles. How many times have you bought something shoddily made, and it was easier to throw it away than to get your money back? That’s bullshit, too. Caveat emptor: Let the buyer beware. The term “sincere” comes from sin cera, the words for “no wax” in Latin. Roman potters would seal cracks with wax, and then you’d put hot water in it and burn your testiculi.

When I was a kid, I remember the outrage when Gerber’s “Apple Juice for Babies” turned out to be colored sugar water. All the horrible poisonings we fear from unregulated Chinese products, like the salmonella killing our pets, happened here too (Okay, maybe not the lead in baby formula, but close enough.)

Remember the salmonella in the peanut butter? We have very short memories when it comes to corporate malfeasance. New Jersey is one gigantic superfund site thanks to all the unregulated corporations dumping everything from automotive paint which poisoned the Ramapo mountains, to Radium for glow-in-the-dark wristwatches. But that’s just polluters. It’s the outright bullshit people use to sell products and then pay off the lawyers in a settlement that ticks me off. How about they refund you 120% of each and every product sold?

Now, scamming is an American institution. We love a grifter. Remember those “How to Stretch a Dollar!” ads in the ’70s, in the classifieds? For 50 cents and a stamp we’ll help you stre-e-e-tch your money! Tape two quarters to an index card and send it, and you’d get a gag rubber dollar bill in return. A harmless prank. But now we see it in everything from exercise shoes to pharmaceuticals, where they fudge the results to scam people for billions and often kill them in the bargain.

From planned obsolescence to the current crop of Wall Street investment managers who are nothing less than grifters playing the long con when they sell you an investment guaranteed to make them a profit and you loss, we are constantly fed a steady diet of bullshit.

And the worst part is? We like it.

 

Tagged: Rants

Feast Day of Fools

Feast Day of Fools: A Novel (Hackberry Holland)

James Lee Burke tells great stories about big characters. This is my first time reading of Sheriff Hackberry Holland, a Korean war vet and Texas lawman guarding a beautiful and blasted landscape on the border of Texas and Mexico. A kidnapped intelligence agent escapes from a brutal coyote who wanted to sell him to al Qaeda, and the Feds, a Russian arms dealer, and “Preacher” Jack Collins, a tommygun-toting force of fate converge on Hack, his deputy Pam Tibbs, and Ms. Ling, a Chinese woman the migrants call “La Magdalena,” who helped the agent cross. The story gripped me by the guts, and Mr. Burke’s lush yet quick-flowing prose kept me re-reading passages to savor them before I moved on. I’ve been an avid devoured of his heartfelt fiction since Black Cherry Blues, and after a hiatus, this book made me feel foolish that I’d ever stopped. Burke is as talented as he is prolific, and this is one of his best.

Tagged: Books, James Lee Burke, Reviews

Criminal Element

My comparison of Michael Mann and William Friedkin, and details on their battle for the heart of the gritty crime film in the ’80s, is up at Criminal Element.

Two of my favorite films: To Live and Die in L.A. and Thief, compared and dissected for your obsessive internet reading pleasure.

 

Tagged: Criminal Element, Michael Mann, Thief, To Live and Die in L.A., William Friedkin, Writing

Meat Loaf

I went to see Meat Loaf in concert with my friend Peter last night. The Loaf is 64 years old, and still belting out bombastic teen anthems with a voice full of heart and a belly full of steam.

Bat Out Of Hell is an iconic album of the ’70s, channeling teenage lust, angst and rebellion. We wore the grooves off it. The album art turns the act of teenage escape into Lucifer’s fall in Paradise Lost. I wasn’t a fan of the “sequel” with “I’d Do Anything for Love,” but this album and his other early work like “Dead Ringer for Love” still move me. I know a lot of you cringe when someone selects “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” on the jukebox, pinching their quarter until the eagle grins, but the opening guitar riff transports me the the wonder of childhood when days were spent exploring woods and rust-stained concrete factories on the back of a Huffy and nights with albums like this spinning while we sat around a fire pit on the patio, roasting marshmallows on sticks and potatoes in the coals.

Tagged: Meat Loaf, Music, Pita-San, When I Was Your Age

The Ballad of Ira Hayes

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“Call him drunken Ira Hayes, he won’t answer any more, not the whiskey-drinking Indian or the Marine who went to war…”

Wars battle on until everyone touched by them is dead.

I remember watching the last American soldiers leave Saigon. On television, of course. And likely years after it occurred, on April 30th 1975. The footage replays in my head. My young mind couldn’t comprehend the images, but with the long-range empathy of the innocent, I could feel its import, sensing the troubled minds of the adults around me. What’s that, Mommy? Viet Nam.

Maybe it was the succession of Vietnam War movies I saw in the ’70s and ’80s, like The Boys in Company C, but it always felt like the war raged on forever, and always had been. When I read Vietnam: A History, by Stanley Karnow, I realized that I was correct. At least from the perspective of the Vietnamese, that war began centuries ago and continued long after those choppers tumbled into the sea.

And it is the same with World War 2. Europe is rebuilt, though monuments and wreckage in the forests and along the shores remain; but the scars of warfare run deep within those who fought, those who suffered, and their families.

Ira Hayes was one of the Marines who raised the flag on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima, in the iconic photo. The government whisked those men home for photo ops, and many, including Hayes, suffered survivor’s guilt for leaving their buddies in the fighting. I didn’t think much of the film Flags of Our Fathers, but give it credit for dramatizing the reality behind the manufactured glory of World War 2. As the song states, Hayes died of alcohol poisoning and exposure. A tragic and lonely death for a war hero who served in the company of many forgotten heroes.

My great-uncles fought in the War, some in the Pacific, some in Europe, and one in both. Only two of them are still kicking. Jimmy- who I recently learned is actually my Uncle Vincenzo- and Dominic, who everyone has called Butch, since before I was born. My great-grandparents came over from southern Italy, the seaside city of Bari and the mountaintop village of Acri. (The priests and teachers wouldn’t accept Italian first names, so Dominic and Vincenzo became Butch and Jimmy.)

Like most soldiers, they don’t talk much about the War. Jimmy’s feet froze at the Battle of the Bulge. Patton’s tankers saved their behinds, he says. Butch proudly wears his medals, when a suit is required. Jimmy never has. Both of them are past 90, and are now widowers. They helped each other survive the Depression, and they visited my grandmother every Sunday morning for coffee, until she passed away six or more years ago. We were very close, and I try not to remember losing her. Now uncle Jimmy is deteriorating, and that same sadness wells inside me. So that’s why a depressing song about a war hero dying forgotten and alone is in my head this week. Uncle Jim is a generous, kind, hard-working man. Him & Butch worked as plumbers and roofers- just to keep busy- well into their eighties. He hunted until his eyesight faded, and gave me venison when his freezer overflowed with it. I’m planning to visit him this weekend, and I’m afraid it may be the last time I see my great-uncle, whose sly smile and pencil mustache, whose straight man humor and upright authority made him a giant to me.

The War will smolder on, in dying skirmishes and distant echoes of small arms fire, in my memories of my uncles Jimmy and Butch, and the stories of them that I will tell my own children. Like the unexploded ordnance buried in the woods, or land mines long forgotten, war touches us long after the last soldier is lain to rest.

Tagged: Ira Hayes, Johnny Cash, Song in my Head This Week, The Boys in Company C, Vietnam, When I Was Your Age, World War 2

s[PANK]ed

My short story “We’re All Guys Here” appears in this month’s issue of [PANK] Magazine. What does PANK mean? No one knows. It could mean to lightly spank, or to tamp down.

Edited by Roxane Gay, M. Bartley Siegel, and Brad Green, it surely stands for good poetry and fiction, and I’m proud to join the illustrious legions of the panked. I needed a good panking… go get yours.

Tagged: Brad Green, PANK magazine, Roxane Gay, Writing