Movies - May 30

The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001) Directed by Takashi Miike, who gets talked about a lot by film geeks, so I figured I ought to see something by him. Bad choice. This seems to be nothing but an exercise in silliness - family opens a guest house in the country but all their guests die, there are musical numbers and claymation sequences, but it looks like they just made it up as they went along. Judging by the trailers included on the disc there appears to be an entire genre of this sort of half-assed amateurish crap, movies made up entirely of cliches. I don't need to see any more movies that are all cliches, but unfortunately it seems to be an established artform now. And it's so much easier to do. 3/10

Freebie Month

This month I got a surprising number of things for free, spotting them while on my way home on my bike. Here is what I got:

Two heavy duty pruners (kind of like scissors with a hooked blade and two-foot-long handles - for cutting tree branches up to a couple of inches diameter) - one old one in good shape, one newer super-heavy one with a geared-action blade. The latter had a handle that wouldn't stay on any more because, after much consideration and careful thought, the previous owner decided not to take 30 seconds to sharpen the blade but instead to force the dull thick metal edge through the wood until they wrecked the tool. It had formed what is called a "wire edge" on the end of the blade about a millimeter thick instead of coming to a sharp edge like you need on any cutting tool. I sharpened the blade and fixed the handle on with a nut and bolt and a couple of washers.

Three big packages of fiberglass insulation, too big to carry even one on a bike so I dashed home and zipped back with the car, expecting to arrive in time to see someone tossing them into a van. 24" wide R11 insulation, maybe $40 each.

Concrete bird bath. This was the only thing that didn't have a "free" sign next to it but it was by a bag of pop cans on the curb, and you don't put a broken concrete bird bath out by the curb unless you are trying to get rid of it. It's a pretty fancy one, with a motif of two standing herons on the pedestal and cattail pattern on the bowl, like they are standing under a bunch of cattails that spread out over their heads. It's broken at the bottom where it bells out to form a base - they made it hollow underneath, but so hollow that at some points the concrete is less than a half inch thick. It broke the whole bottom section off pretty cleanly, and it will be easy to put it back together with mortar, and fill in the hollow bottom with mortar as well, so it won't have any reason to break again. Again, impossible to carry on a bike but I didn't think there was as big a rush getting back to it with the car, and I was right.

Movies - May 29

El laberinto del fauno [Pan's Labyrinth] (2006) Excellent acting and overall well-made. I was apprehensive about all the rave reviews it got from people who usually like exploding robot movies, but it is an intellectual cut above the usual action fantasy. Very Spanish, full of blood and sorrow, interesting to see but not the sort of thing I really go for. 8.5/10

Movies - Recent Viewing

Something to Sing About (1937) Watched with Donna. Jimmy Cagney is a rising Hollywood star who must keep his marriage a secret. Produced, co-written, directed and music by Victor Schertzinger and, as often in similar cases, there is something just a bit off about it all. There are a few fairly good musical numbers, an occasional bit of snappy dialogue or amusing conception. Moderately entertaining, for the most part. 6/10

Random Harvest (1942) Ronald Colman marries Greer Garson while he has amnesia, then gets his memory back and forgets her. A full-blown classic melodrama which makes you forget the absurdity of the premise with a well-structured plot and appealing characters. There's nothing wrong with this at all, though it is a bit thick for modern tastes. Deserves greater recognition as a fine example of the genre. 9.5/10

Annals of Klepsis by R. A. Lafferty

I try to re-read a Lafferty novel once a year. I doubt that I shall live to see the day he is fully appreciated as one of the great writers of the 20th century, inventor of a unique literary style, a sort of doggerel prose. His books aren't the sort of book that you can say what they are about; they contain more ideas, more characters, and more things happening than a dozen normal stories, but only the uncertain things are certain. It doesn't really convey much about the book to say that Klepsis is a pirate planet without a history which provides free transportation to all one-legged irishmen, that all its kings still live as ghosts each in his own tower of the castle, that the residents of Klepsis celebrate an Old Fashioned Slave Sale by barbecuing a whale whole, or that most plants and animals but only one type of short-tailed human have the ability to jump spontaneously from one planet to another. Lafferty creates a sort of simultaneous duality in many of his books - some things or people or worlds there are actually two of, which are often impossible to tell apart although they are opposites and one may be invisible. Slaves own their purchasers. it may be the end of the world or the beginning, and everything may be just an image in the mind of a hunchbacked dwarf who has been asleep for two hundred years or in the mind of the one-legged ghost of the planet's pirate founder. Depending on which Lafferty novel I read, I sometimes only read a page every few days just because there is so much in it. I have quit recommending R. A. Lafferty since I don't believe he is a taste which can be acquired. If you are supposed to read something by him, you probably will.

Movies - May 24

Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938) Excellent cast fights its way through a rather contrived, maudlin plot which serves as the framework for an outstanding Irving Berlin retrospective. Alice Faye is always enjoyable to hear and sometimes amazing - it's just incredible the voice that comes out of that little gal. I have never really enjoyed Ethel Merman, but it seems she was once quite a cutie and she really swings it here, putting across some hot numbers - including one in a scanty spangled devil costume a far cry from her monolithic "Mame" period. For my money they could have dropped the plot entirely and done a straight revue but still 8/10.

Last night I finally got to see The Great Rupert (1950) after some 20 years since I first heard of it. Produced by George Pal, featuring a stop-motion animated squirrel, starring Jimmy Durante and ingenue Terry Moore before she got creepy. Not as squirrel-centric as I had hoped, with just a few short sequences, but it's an entertainingly eccentric novelty/christmas movie. You can't go wrong with Durante, and there is a surprise appearance by Frank Cady as an IRS inspector. 6.5/10

I got to see The Great Rupert because the price of the Comedy Classics 12 disc DVD set is now down to $4.95 on Amazon, and I finally felt I could justify getting it. There are a number of good things on it, many I haven't seen, but way too many East Side Kids movies. I just didn't feel like I could pay nearly $20 with shipping, but for under $8 I no longer had any qualms. I am looking forward to the inevitable decline of the DVD to push the set of 50 Sword and Sandal movies down to a reasonable level in the near future.

Movies - May 22

Hercules Against the Moon Men (1964) My all-time favorite Hercules movie - I think this is the third time I've seen it. Oiled-up hero must defeat eight foot tall rockmen to rescue princess from the Mountain of Death before her blood is used to awaken the Moon Queen who fell to Earth in a meteor 300 years earlier. ?/10 - not really rateable.

Movies - May 21

On the Avenue (1937) Watched with Donna. It's pretty tough to find anything that can follow the amazing opening number, with Alice Faye in what appears to be an astounding BLACK RUBBER DRESS!!!! but the Irving Berlin tunes, splendid gowns, and gigantic moving sets are excellent all the way through. The trivial plot could be sleep-walked through even then, and the Ritz Bros antics usually irritate rather than amuse, but I find anything sung by Faye or Dick Powell highly listenable. Proceedings are enlivened by numerous characters including my birthday twin Sig Rumann as, of all things, a professor of the trapeze. 7/10

Movies - May 20

Ten Canoes (2006) Watched with Donna. Engrossing, beautifully presented tale of ancient life in Australia. Highly satisfactory. 10/10

Movies - Recent Viewing

Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) Slight "find the magical object" plot interrupted by irrelevant musical numbers and a pointless soccer match between cartoon animals. Seems to lack any unifying viewpoint or direction. This is the extra-long restored edition and was a bit of a chore to sit through. 4/10

Think Fast, Mr. Moto (1937) Peter Lorre the action hero, dashing around backlot chinatowns after archfiend Sig Rumann, my birthday twin. Pretty entertaining, its twisty plot enhanced by the short appearance of Moto's compatriot played by the attractive Lotus Long. Mr. Moto movies are much more watchable and exciting than Mr. Wong or Charlie Chan. 7/10

Happy Feet (2006) "Oddball becomes savior" story consisting entirely of "recognizable" situations and characters - i.e. one long string of cliches punctuated by roller coaster rides. This is almost made up for by magnificently spectacular animation and absolutely brilliant musical numbers. There are moments of pure genius - entirely unconnected with the story. Plot 4/10, music and presentation 10/10

Movies - May 13

Mädchenjahre einer Königin (1954) Starring Romy Schneider, a romantic fantasy about young Queen Victoria which preceded and inspired the Sissi films which made her famous. Very pleasant and nice, not at all challenging. 7/10

Wisconsin Death Trip (1999) I bailed out after 20 minutes of this entirely unnecessary film. A series of re-enactments based on the well-known book, which I feel should have been left at the "You know what would be cool to do..." stage. Donna is still watching it as I write.

Movies - May 12

Troy (2004) A very good movie could be made with these production values and an entirely different script. A post-LOTR take on someone's phoned-in description of the Iliad. Good actors in secondary roles, lots of swooping shots of vast armies, and dismal soap opera dialogue that makes you want to see more killing. Even the promised nudity was only Brad Pitt's butt. After an hour I asked myself "How long IS this thing anyway?" and was sorry to learn I had another hour and a half to go. One thing you can always count on, the Ancients speak with a British accent, because it's so classical. 3/10

Movies - Recent Viewing

Watched with Donna:
After Tomorrow (1932) Directed by Frank Borzage. Light drama, young couple must surmount obstacles to their marriage. Starts off peppy but got rather tiring by the end. Didn't really recognize anyone in it, which is rare. A good Mother's Day movie, because the two mothers are pretty awful - his is a whining manipulator, hers a bitter adultress. 5/10

Frenzy (1972) Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. He seems to have taken the opportunity in this, as in Marnie, of showing just what a pervert he was. Kept our interest the whole time but it seemed a bit uneven, with comedy relief a little too overdone. He made worse movies. 7/10

Watched alone:
The Sissi Collection: Sissi (1955), Sissi, Die junge Kaiserin (1956), Sissi, Schicksalsjahre einer Kaiserin (1957) Starring Romy Schneider, light popular fare depicting episodes from the life of the 19th century Empress Elizabeth of Austria. I like seeing foreign films that aren't supposed to be "cinema," because popular culture can tell you things high art can't. These are well-crafted escapist costume entertainment with a little conflict, a little romance, a lot of pageantry, and very large dresses. Each is more spectacular than the last, and the third concludes with an amazing scene in Plaza San Marco in Venice with thousands of extras in full costume. Good clean fun, beautifully filmed in dense brownish Agfacolor; pure reds and blues, muddy greens and fleshtones. The third seemed a lot brighter. 8/10

My Punk Rock Life Part Two

A bar called Malfunction Junction started hosting a band called The Jonny III which, even though it wasn't punk rock, was very popular with whatever punk people there were in town. Other local bands played there too, and it became the punk club. It was a few blocks away from my apartment. It had a DJ booth and somehow I managed to convince them to let me play my records there, with free beer in lieu of payment. There was nowhere else in town you could hear the stuff I was playing, and I believe I enhanced the proceedings. I also found it a place to practice my one true talent at the time, being as obnoxious as I possibly could, not just in the DJ booth but at all times. I did try to torture the listeners by playing some pretty horrible records, and sometimes when people requested a song, I would play a different song by the same band. They would jump up and start dancing, and then realize it wasn't the right song, then dance half-heartedly through the rest of it. I had a weird Italian single by a guy called Bobby Solo, Saro Un Illuso (It's An Illusion). I always made it the high point of the evening, giving it a big introduction through the microphone as if it was the greatest thing ever, then played this goofy '60s Italian pop song. Har har. The night a new DEVO video was being shown on Saturday Night Live, everything stopped and every person in the place crowded up to the bar to watch it, to the bartender's complete mystification.

One of the regular bands at the Junction was the Violators and they put on the fiercest, rockin'est show. They were actually competent musicians playing mostly original songs and they hit it hard and fast. Tom Pop was a vital, magnetic figure, serpentine and vibrating, thin as a weed. He loved to smash his microphone to pieces. Tom became my best friend and I became in a minor sense the Fifth Violator, drawing their gig fliers and doing Tom's stage makeup, which got me into the gigs for free. Before the development of the Mosh Pit, which turned rock shows into a big Boy Fight, boys and girls could actually dance together or with each other, or all by themselves. We'd pogo, hopping up and down, and sometimes a couple of guys would slam dance, smashing into each other. Commando Man was always up for slam dancing. One night two strange women showed up at the Junction, dressed as a french maid and a nurse with a whip, and they danced only with each other, the nurse whipping the maid. They were the hit of the evening for sure.

One remarkable figure who participated in the scene was Lilly Rose, one of Denver's most visible transsexuals. Somehow she got a pretty decent band together and played a few shows as Lilly Rose and the Thorns. I ended up palling around with her quite a bit for a while, even designing a cover for a single that never got recorded. One night, when she was between boyfriends, she informed me that it was a choice between me and another guy. That kind of freaked me out and I wasn't around for her to hang out with any more. She had a song which included the line "I'm afraid of catching your disease." One night at the Junction she asked me to have a drink with her and I declined. She said, "Oh, you're afraid of catching my disease." I agreed and that was that. This was a couple of years before AIDS so that wasn't the disease she meant. I just didn't want to think about what being her boyfriend would entail.

A gig which stands out in my mind above all others, and which deserves to be recorded, was one which never happened. Lilly Rose and another band or two were to play the Club Aeroplane, which had never had a punk show. It was a really neat streamlined International Style place, with big windows and neon. Not a super classy joint but one with a pretty normal clientele, and they obviously didn't know what they were getting into. I took the bus and got there pretty early when people were first arriving. Suddenly there was some sort of bustle, Lilly and her band got on stage and started playing even though there was hardly any audience. they had played for half a minute when the lights went out. Cut off. Thrown out. Lilly told me somebody from the club had seen somebody giving somebody a blowjob in the parking lot - I don't know if that really happened or not, but it probably did. What's certain is we were a bunch of freaks and monsters to them and they panicked. Something just came over me, and I cussed the whole place out, and they just took it. Looked mad as hell but they didn't give me the thrashing I deserved. Lilly treated me like a hero for that. Commando Man was there that night, and Club Aeroplane was a touchstone for us; we were veterans of the same campaign.

In my memory it was the Violators that were the heart of the scene at that time - maybe it was just a year or so but it seemed timeless, a panorama of adventure that they try to make movies about, "one wonderful summer when everything changed." The Jonny III were more popular and played more shows because they were more mainstream. There were other bands like the Aviators and Defex which we Violators, of course, despised. Not that I had anything really to do with the Violators and what they were, but they were my band more than any other could be. They were all just decent people. Shawn, the guitarist was more in his own space, but Rich, the bassist, and Tom were pretty close and we hung out a lot. The drummer is to me a blank. I know they had one, and I knew him, but who he was I can't recall. Tom was a really good friend to me. I later moved out of town, then moved back, and he sought me out. He'd call me up or just come by my place once or twice a week and drag me out for coffee and make me live in the world for a while, and I really valued that. He liked good movies and good books and could converse intelligently about them. He liked the movie Village of the Damned, identifying with its images of children with terrible powers keeping the adults in subjection, so I copied the picture and lettering from the paperback of the novel for one of their fliers, with the gig info stuck in sort of offhand at the bottom. When I drew fliers I wanted something that didn't look like the halfassed cut and paste garbage everyone else was doing, something that would stand out. Tom kept his own life separate from the times we were together, and he told me a few crazy things about himself which I still don't know if they were true or not. How he lived I don't know but when we were together we just had a real good time. None of us seemed to do drugs or even smoke cigarettes, or drink anything more than watery bar beer at the shows; we were just burning up inside with the energy of youth and onstage Tom was an inferno. The Violators tore the place up, knocked it down and stamped on the pieces, laughing. Tom's bands were always outstanding, and his songs were sharp and fierce. He thought about and wrote songs all the time, and they were full of his intelligence and wit. I don't know if he or his work could have stood up to real fame, but not everything has to be nailed down or pasted in a book to be valuable. Some things burn fast and bright but you remember them the rest of your life. See, that's why I don't like to reminisce, I am practically weeping here.

End of Part 2

My Punk Rock Life Part One

I've never been one to indulge in nostalgia. I say it's because I am too busy living now to spend time looking backward, but really it's because I have been afraid of what I would see. Now, for some reason, I have opened that box and I can't do anything but watch all the sins and evils come rushing out - leaving nothing behind but a small fluttering thing called hope. Man, that's good writing.

*****

It's a fact - I was a punk before you were a punk. I quit being a punk before you were a punk, maybe before you were even born. This is my story, a story of punk rock days in a most unlikely spot, Denver Colorado.

I wasn't interested in popular music much in high school. The Rolling Stones and REO Speedwagon and whatever else people talked about had nothing for me. When I went to a record store I would start at one end and go to the other end, looking at every single record trying to find something interesting and unusual. I tried to cultivate an interest in oddball and prog-rock bands like Gong and Magma, but the one thing that really appealed to me was Tangerine Dream, because it bore no resemblance to conventional music. I was fortunate in seeing them perform live - three guys standing with their backs to the audience in front of big black boxes, flipping switches and pushing buttons, filling the air with oceans of sound. I did not care to rock or to roll, and the hippie drug culture seemed rather horrible, though to this day a paisley-skirted hippie chick is to me a dream of romance.

My mother married a man named Lou Snapp, whose sons Greg and Jerry lived in a hippie house next to a little record store called Wax Trax in a row of two-story brownstones, just off Colfax opposite the Ogden Theater. Greg and Jerry, their friend Dooley, and a changing cast of characters lived in archetypical hippie squalor, with an antique medical mannequin in a gynecologist's chair proudly on display in the front window. There was never anything in the refrigerator but a big jug of cheap wine, and I suppose they lived by dealing drugs and general theft and hustling. They had arranged to hook into the in-store sound system of Wax Trax and were awakened each day by Love Is The Drug or some such decadent gay/newyork sounds. I went to a party with them at Wax Trax one night, but it was all sort of creepy people standing around talking, so I just got good and drunk and staggered home. Wax Trax looked more like a porn shop than a record store with only a tiny display window in which I recall seeing a weird looking little 45 record, silver ink on dark blue paper, with a picture of the Queen of England and a bunch of cutout lettering like a ransom note. It was the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen, but I didn't know it.

One night I was watching TV and there must not have been anything on because I was watching 60 Minutes, the weekly lite news program, and they did a report on a weird thing going on in England called "punk rock." They showed some concert footage of what I now suppose were the Sex Pistols and The Damned, and even subtitled it so we would know what they were screaming about. I was amazed, simultaneously repelled and attracted. I kept it in mind to find out about this punk rock thing. I never thought to shop at Wax Trax, and bought most of my records at a normal chain store called Peaches. Someone there must have been fairly on top of things, because I bought my first punk rock records there in days to come. I bought a twelve-inch Sex Pistols record with a stark black and white cover there and took it home and played it and didn't know what to think. I thought it was an album, but it only had a couple of songs on it. I had no idea there was such a thing as a twelve-inch 45, so I was playing it at 33 rpm. I figured it out eventually, and there didn't seem to be much improvement, but I would play it again occasionally to try to figure it out, and I guess it just clicked after a while and I began to like it. I don't recall now what the songs were. There was a whole section of 7 inch imports at Peaches which was basically the Punk Rock section and I got all sorts of stuff there. They must have just bought a package from a distributor, which also included some domestic items. Their stock slowly diminished and they never replenished it, and I eventually shopped elsewhere. A couple of the lamer, unlistenable items I got there were a single from a band called The Police who looked cool but sucked, and one dreadful pompous thing from a guy who called himself Johnny Cougar, whose pretentiousness has not yet abated, even though he goes by his birth name of Mellencamp.

I somehow found out about a Punk Rock show to be held at a gay bar called The Broadway, and determined to attend. I didn't know what to wear, but I figured I should try to be as weird as I could. If you've seen the movie Velvet Goldmine, and cringed at the protagonist's first pathetic attempt to be "glam," well I was worse. I had seen a movie called The Rocky Horror Picture Show - I went to the very first showing in town and liked it enough to go again to the very last showing, confident that I would never have another opportunity to see it - and it seemed to me to be the sort of weirdness I should try for. I had shoulder length hair at the time, so I shaved my legs and wore short short cutoffs and ripped up panty hose, lipstick and eye makeup. I was some kind of sight alright. The band that played that night was called The Front, and they did a couple of Sex Pistols songs I recognized. The big mistake the venue made was in serving the beer in bottles. People immediately began smashing their empties on the concrete floor until it was a sea of broken glass. Someone came around feebly sweeping it to the edges of the room until there were dunes of brown glass against the walls. All in all a grand success. At their next punk show they served in plastic cups.

I soon derived a more official punk style from the photos of the Sex Pistols and Elvis Costello I avidly studied. I had dressed myself from thrift shops for a long time and there was plenty of good stuff to be had, sharp suits and pointy shoes, or just crazy and inexplicable items. I would change my clothes three or four times a day. I kept buying records. They seemed to have discarded the rules about what a record could be - seven inch records didn't have the huge hole that 45s used to and were likely to be played at 33 and have two songs per side, and sometimes they were in strange bright colors, with swirls and glitter. There were ten-inch records, and twelve-inch 45s. The covers had a crude garishness, trashy and threatening compared with the soppy airbrushed slop that was rock art at the time. Even if you didn't play them, they were exciting, especially if you were in a dead space like Denver, a sort of sink hole of culture from which you could peer out and wonder what it would be like to live someplace good. I learned they had British music magazines at the library and went once a week to read NME and wish myself in London where you could just walk into a club and see The Clash or The Damned like it was a normal thing to do. I must say to Denver's credit I rarely got yelled at from passing cars and never once was personally bothered by anyone despite my efforts to appear as bizarre or unconventional as possible.

I waited anxiously for the Sex Pistols album to be released, and when it finally came out the local stores only ordered a few copies which immediately sold out. It was out and I couldn't get it - all I could do was look at the display copy some stores kept, that amazing garish thing, and crave it. When I finally got one it was as if I had found a missing part of me. Crazy but true. I felt I understood their essence. People seemed to think they were "making a statement," but I could see that making a statement was one of the things they were cruelly mocking. They weren't trying to send a message or change people's thinking or revolutionize music or anything else. They were just kicking all that crap into the gutter and ridiculing all the people who were trying to pin things on them. That's why the second wave of punk bands, British and American, with their political posturing, seemed so pathetic to me - I was and am a Punk Rock Purist, a Sexpistolist. I kept encountering music that seemed to have real purity, Shadow by The Lurkers, The Day the World Turned Day-Glo by X Ray Spex or Jocko Homo by DEVO, and when I heard their next record it seemed as if they had taken music lessons. When DEVO's album came out it seemed so pale and watery compared to the blunt derangement of Jocko Homo - they were playing pop songs, what a shame. Still, I bought and played all the records I could and felt uneasy when I couldn't swim in sound.

Somehow I started hanging out with some people in the nearby college town of Boulder, strange since it was a good drive away and I had no car. I guess I must have taken the bus. They were a sort of joke band called The Dancing Assholes - at least I thought it was a joke. They pretended they were a band, and every few weeks found a place to practice, making a lot of racket and getting kicked out. Ultra Vulture, Connie Clit and David Berkowitz. The Vulture was a weird looking creature who wore odd hats without having a talent for it, and a black leather jacket no matter how hot it was out. Whatever was under her clothes you didn't want to know. She gave me my "punk rock name." I was named after her laundry room, Kenmore W. Dryer. The W. was for washer. Almost anyone could play punk rock, or so you'd think, but the Dancing Assholes were just awful. They played a few gigs as a novelty band and Connie and I had a fumbling fling, then we just called it off and I never saw them again.

A few local bars and clubs occasionally tried out a "Punk Rock Night" but rarely repeated the experiment, although it was never as riotous as those shows at The Broadway. One guy who was always there, and deserves to be remembered, we called Commando Man. He wore an army jacket and boots, and a helmet. It was so uncool it was kind of cool. He was not in any other way memorable, except by just being into the music and being a real good guy. The last time I saw him, years later, I asked how he was doing and he said sadly, "I've been kinda depressed since Wally Wood died." Wood was a comic book artist, most notably for EC comics. I had the presence of mind to say, "At least John Severin is still hanging in there," naming another EC artist, and that seemed to cheer him up a bit. Commando Man, you are not forgotten.


End of Part One

Movies - Recent Viewing

Apartment Zero (1988) Eccentric psychological thriller set in Argentina. Watched with Donna, who seems to enjoy these feel-bad movies a lot more than I do. 7/10

Ping Pong (2002) A good example of a unique Japanese artform: focusing on an obscure competitive endeavor to make it into an epic struggle imbued with good-hearted humor and profound philosophy. I have never seen such a stirring depiction of the way well-matched competitors transport each other into a transcendent realm of pure existence. And it's about high school table-tennis. Not entirely great but its high points are splendid. 8.5/10

Work History

Because people seem to enjoy reading about the suffering of others, I have decided to record some of the highlights of my employment history, focusing on the worst bosses I ever had.

I fell by accident into the printing trade at a time before the rise of the copy shop. If you needed something printed, you went to a small print shop like the Sir Speedy I worked at for a short time. Sir Speedy was a franchise chain operation, and the middle-aged mom and pop who ran the shop bought into Sir Speedy all the way. Sir Speedy was their religion, the Sir Speedy manual was their bible, and the annual franchisee convention was the highlight of their life. Everything was done the Sir Speedy Way, even if it was completely stupid or insane - like operating a printing press in dress pants, a white shirt and a necktie. They were duplicitous and manipulative, but the wife was the worse of the two. She always carried pictures of her dogs and loved to tell you about them. When one of her pet customers came in, she began showing off for them by ordering me around in a high-handed manner which was almost laughable except that it was me being ordered around. The only good thing about the job was that one of the best thrift shops in town was in the next block.

I worked at a Kinko's copy shop in the early years of the company's development, when employees were shown a training video featuring the company founder, Kinko Himself, demonstrating the right and wrong way to do things. It was one of the most pathetic and retarded things I had ever seen, and I did not hesitate to say so - marking me for doom. I learned from that job to beware of employers who saw themselves as socially progressive. There was a profit sharing program I never understood, and monthly staff meetings so we could come to work on our off hours to eat bad free pizza and talk about our job. Because of these institutions, the owner seemed to feel her conscience was permanently salved, and operated her stores under a form of Stalinism. Except for the monthly meetings, she rarely set foot in the store except to execute a purge. Every few months, heads would roll. I avoided all efforts to place me in a position of responsibility, and awaited my turn. When my time came, the owner said, "I don't think you WANT to work for the McDonald's of copies," and I could only agree.

One shop I worked at was a cooperative venture of a number of hospitals to print their forms and paperwork. Half of the time I engraved nametags for hospital staff using a bizarre and incredibly noisy Hercules Engraving Machine, the rest of the time I joined the other three pressmen. The shop was capably operated by the foreman, but the "boss" was an absurd character whose position was clearly a sinecure obtained through cronyism. His name was John Smith, and he looked like a cartoon turtle whose catchphrase was a whiny "...I've been sick." He knew nothing about the work we did, and only entered the back shop when he had some stupid idea that would screw everything up. The foreman would take the least important people off their jobs and for the rest of the day we would do some idiotic makework task which would ultimately be abandoned as unfeasible. Any time you went past John Smith's office you were likely to see him sitting at his desk, immobile, staring at the wall. His crowning idiocy was in placing his daughter in co-foremanship of the shop, a woman whom I liked a lot as a person but who as foreman created only strife and chaos. She had her own ideas of how things ought to be done and refused to co-operate with the printing foreman who actually knew how to do the work. As engraving machine operator I fell under her command and had to attend her weekly hour-long staff meetings until the day I finally said, "You know, I have work to do and there is no reason for me to be here," and walked out. I eventually quit as a direct result of the stress of having to cope with that woman's whims and notions, and I wrote a letter to the directors of the company explaining that. I never knew if that changed anything. I worked with some really great people there and was sorry to have to leave.

The boss who for many years held the title of worst boss I ever had was named Myron Ellingson. He ran a foilstamping and diecutting operation which was purely Dickensian. It was tucked into an empty corner of a vast old industrial building and I was the only employee. Myron, his business partner, and the partner's wife who acted as secretary stayed in the office by the loading dock all day doing who knows what. The loading dock was for the paper box printing company that occupied the opposite corner of the building - huge presses larger than a city bus rumbling away all day. All the machinery I worked on was ineptly converted from decrepit devices designed for other purposes. The product was cardboard picture frames for photographs of middle-school sports teams, and my job was to imprint a football, baseball or soccer ball in the corner in silver foil. This is one of the few jobs I had in which I felt I was contributing absolutely nothing positive to the world. Certain aspects of the job required me to bend over and down into the press to remove and lift out a forty-pound hot iron plate half a dozen times a day, which messed up my back and my knees pretty badly. Myron wasn't really a bad person, but what made him a bad boss was his inability to say anything positive, ever. On payday he would secretively slip me my check and scuttle away. Eventually I told him I would get my check from the secretary in the office. I hated to see him debase himself like that. Once I did such impressive work on a diecutting, embossing and foilstamping job for the paper box company (cutting and embellishing cardboard boxes for locally produced smoked salmon) that he accidentally blurted out "Good job!" He immediately looked ashamed of himself, as if he had said fuck in front of a nun. He managed to de-incentivize me to a remarkable degree and the day I said to him "I don't think I can keep coming in here any more," he didn't seem to mind.

I have written elsewhere about the worst boss I ever had, a person of astonishing qualities whose business model was a naive fantasy, and whose ability to function on a daily basis was questionable at best. I have never known anyone less qualified or able to run a business, or anyone who smelled as horrible. She was a perfect example of the ignorant and inept boss who feels insulted and threatened by an employee who is even slightly capable or knowledgeable. I shall let it pass with just these few remarks. Thank you for reading.

Movies - May 2

Amityville 3D (1983) I figured this would probably be the worst Amityville movie to watch and I was right. Since it was on TV it was only in 2D, but I still really enjoyed seeing things needlessly pointed or thrown at the camera. I was really just waiting for the fire-breathing rubber monster from the commercial. Not much happens until the last 15 minutes, mostly people freaking out over doors that won't open, and flies buzzing around very frighteningly. Nonsensical. 1.5/10

The Secret Power by Marie Corelli

Marie Corelli was an extremely popular Victorian author of occult and metaphysical romances, and many of her books were reprinted in inexpensive odd-size paperback by flying saucer guru Ray Palmer's Amherst press, of which this is one. This was a VERY hard book to finish because it is so atrociously written. People are constantly delivering impassioned monologues about LOVE. Still I wanted to see where she would go with her protagonists, a male supergenius living in a hermit shack in California who created some sort of superweapon to end war forever, and a female supergenius in a palace in Italy who created a fabulous airship to find the legendary Brazen City in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Not nearly as exciting as it sounds - sometimes I could only read a couple of pages before becoming exhausted at all the dozens of exclamation points. Pretty awful, especially compared with the readability of Steinbeck.

Books I Never Meant to Write

While poking around in my filing cabinet I found this list of book titles and blurbs. I have no idea when I wrote it or what I had in mind when I did.

One Lonely Broad - Simon Spite, Hatemaster, gets his kicks from killing chicks. "Brutal and ugly" - Librarian's Journal

Murder Out the Ass

Stupid Little Bitch - She only had one thing on her mind, but she didn't know what it was.

The Thing From Space - No-one knew what it was or where it came from, they only knew it was here.

Swamp Robot - An escaped convict and a lusty negress come face to face with the inexplicable

Hillbilly Homo - Luther didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground, but nobody seemed to mind, least of all the Sheriff!

Butcher My Baby - Simon Spite, Hatemaster

Pardon my Chainsaw - The wild, poignant and gory adventures of an emergency room intern

The Monster In Your Nose - The nation's number one health hazard may be clinging to the inside of your nostrils!

The Awesome Power Of Your Fists - Learn how to get anything you want using the world's oldest management tool

Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! - Ripped from the pages of tomorrow's headlines, the shocking story of the fed-up generation

Rustlers from the Stars

I'll Kill You, You Bastard (Hatemaster)

The Burning Wind - A stirring novel of forbidden passions unleashed, "Has all the ingredients." - Book Review Weekly

Garden of Love - Strips away the veil of secrecy and lays bare the until-now hidden secret world of vegetable passion

The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck

One of his less-known and more hard-edged books. It's just a bunch of people on a broken-down bus, but each one is a unique and fully-realized character. Eventually there is something a bit admirable and extremely human in even the worst of them. Steinbeck is always easy to read, and always impresses me by creating such depth of place and character.