Art of the cover: Talk nerdy to me — Hot date for the holiday

Not those Go-Gos.

I’m gonna spend my Christmas with a Dalek,
And hug him under the mistletoe
And if he’s very nice, I’ll feed him sugar spice
And hang a Christmas stocking on his big left toe
And when we both get up on Christmas morning
I’ll kiss him on his chrome implanted head
And take him in to say hi to Mum,
and frighten Daddy out of his bed!

The Go Gos. “I’m Spending Christmas With A Dalek.” Les Vandyke and Johnny Worth*. Oriole CB Records. 1964. Limited edition picture sleeve shown here.

*The same person. Mr. Vandyke created the production credit to make the outfit seem bigger.

69 Days of Wonder Woman: Day 36, Muppet connections

Now this is the quickest way to my heart.

One-way ticket, express train. Complementary snacks and beverages.

Lynda Carter appeared on Episode 36 of The Muppet Show as herself, Lynda Carter. As with the Roger Moore “Bond” episode, where he appeared as himself, much to the consternation of the cast who were hoping for spy action, the Muppets’ running gag was to continually try to draw out Wonder Woman.

Appearing in a sketch as Wonder Pig, Miss Piggy asks Lynda if she regrets not bringing her costume along. All the Muppets take superhero lessons to impress Wonder Woman and Fozzie learns the value of bullet-deflecting bracelets.

Another Muppet venture, the Children’s Television Workshop, referred to the character of Wonder Woman in the recent Sesame Street “Preschool Musical” episode (a parody of High School Musical), when little Mariella up there sang about dress-up and how it made her in to someone else, someone that reflected the dreams and desires of who she wanted to be. Mariella spun until she changed in to the above outfit, and she remained in her superhero costume for the rest of the sketch.

Yesterday, Paolo was taking Corinnette back over to the coast for school, so I slid down to C-town to keep Miss D some company. We watched Muppets Take Manhattan on the television and folded laundry. “Sea Breeze Soap — Use it so you don’t stink.” It was truly wonderful. Besides the great writing and the actual entertainment value, I think that what makes the Muppets special for me is their relatability, their familiarity, and the comfort of their consistency. Maybe this is part of what has made Wonder Woman, too, an enduringly popular character, a standout hero in the genre, and a classic element of how we tell certain types of stories: if a girl is going to triumph, then she is Wonder Woman. “You’d have to be Wonder Woman to get all that done!” There is something special about that.

I need to give her credit for this: people love Wonder Woman, not only in comics but also in her pantheon of moving viewing material. They come back to her again and again and feel retro and nostalgic about it. I respect that, because I have things that I, too, love in that way.

Burroughs Month: If we controlled television, then we control America.

via D Billy over on And I Am Not Lying.

Rat: The movement is developing a different definition of news, a different description of what is important. If we controlled a television station, our news would be substantially different than Walter Cronkite.

Burroughs: If we controlled television, then we control America.

via comicallyvintage.

R: What would it mean if we had one station? We could, like the German SDS, make a demand for TV time. And then escalate our demand to a whole channel. What would happen if we got a channel?

B: We got to get them all. As soon as we get them all, we control this whole stupid middle class. We’ve got America.

(Rat Magazine Interviews Burroughs, 1968.)

This is an almost quaint discussion in retrospect, yes? Imagine if states gave a shit about the television. They do not, because they themselves are at the mercy of the same true boss that has come to wield all the power in this particular method of public communication.

Apaga la tele. Viva tu vida. Buenos Aires, Argentina. edit: Valpairiso, Chile.

It seems, to me at any rate, that the control of television has gone not to a political group, who are too busy eating one another alive like a coil of very stupid snakes, but to a far more sinister agenda: the networks cede over all to the dollar. They don’t care how you think and vote, or even if you think and vote. They prefer you complacent, uninformed, and unquenchably thirsty for high-fructose corn syrup. They don’t want you to support your local politician nor overthrow your government. They only want you to Buy Things. As long as you’re doing that, as long as you are spellbound by product placement and commercial breaks, the in-between drama of any particular channel is of utter unimportance to the true bosses. Keep up the good work: I’ve got my new diet pomegranate 7-up jampacked with important antioxidants right here beside me, so I know I sure am!

Note on the pictures: According to D Billy on the excellent And I Am Not Lying, both these illustrations come from an old Aquaman Big Little Book called “Scourge of the Sea.”

Movie Moment and answer to yesterday’s Blake trivia question: Manhunter (part 1) and nominal review of Red Dragon

ATTN: Spoilers like a bat outta hell. Stop if you’ve never seen nor read Red Dragon and Manhunter and are the kind of person who yells at people on the internet for posting spoilers of things that have been out for decades.

I was relaxing after dinner and I suddenly remembered yesterday’s random Blake trivia — forgot about that!

Okay, soooo, I used this picture yesterday in the “Tyger” post …

… because it comes from Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986). This is part 1 of its Movie Moment because I need to cover technical aspects a different day. Today I want to just sort of compare Manhunter and a more recent adaptation of the same fucked-up and riveting material. Manhunter is the original filmed adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon (1981), in which the writer William Blake plays a very large part of the dissociative disease that leads the antagonist to kill and sets off the action of the novel/film.

Manhunter, the original Red Dragon screen version.

In 2002, a different adaptation, whose title was the same as the book — Harris’s novels have a weird and haphazard history of screen-arrival in Hollywood — was released in light of the success of the year before’s screen adaptation of Hannibal (novel: Thomas Harris, 1999; film: Ridley Scott, 2001), a rather late-breaking sequel to the infamous film version of Silence of the Lambs (novel: Harris, 1988; movie: Jonathan Demme, 1991).

Red Dragon, second adaptation.

A totally different animal, not even attempting to remake in part the cinematic masterpiece that is the color-drenched, painstakingly-framed Manhunter, the alternate more recent film is what I consider a sloppy adaptation of Red Dragon. It is nothing like the very-admirable entry into the Harris genre that is Hannibal, which despite the replacement of Academy Award-winner Jodie Foster with Academy Award-nominee Julianne Moore as the infamous “[Hello,] Clarice” Starling managed, I think by virtue of Sir Anthony Hopkins’ reprisal of the sensationalist character of Dr. Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter combined with Scott Free productions’ attachment to the project in the wake of smash-hit Gladiator, to make quite the box office splash. As it ended up, that success was deserved.

Check out Vegetarian Times in the background. No. 1 favorite Hannibal still with A Bullet.

The Red Dragon revamp that followed it the next year, on the other hand, falls short of its predecessors due to cocky casting and the hasty pudding nature of the picture. It is almost unfair to stack it against such a stunning piece of eye candy and psychological discourse as Manhunter. But I’m going to anyway.

“The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed In Sun” — William Blake. Blake’s illuminated print-making process is actually still partially guessed at, as he never troubled to write down most of how he did it. Another post — I promise.

The novel Red Dragon, the first in the Hannibal Lecter series of books by Thomas Harris, has as its main detective not Clarice Starling, but rather a young FBI mindhunter named Will Graham. The book and 2002 film take its title from the antagonist’s personal inspiration (and devil with whom he dances) for his transformation to what he views as a higher being. This is a highly detailed, uniquely gnostic series of ritual murders which the “bad guy” bases around Blake’s work, particularly his illuminated manuscript print “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed In Sun.” The killer calls this multiply murderous, cleansing-by-blood process “Becoming.”

This antagonist is called the Tooth Fairy by the press, a name he loathes, but he’s tipped to the reader early on — by his preferred nomenclature as the Red Dragon — to be a shy and cleft-palated industrial photographic-development-expert named Francis Dolarhyde. Francis is an abused and orphaned soul with an unfathomably deep dark side due to psychosexual torture in his upbringing.

Meanwhile, young Will Graham is a bummed-out “good guy” chilling in Marathon, Florida with his family on the beach, trying to get his mojo back after unhappily closing the toughest case of his career as a profiler with the FBI: arresting former friend and consultant, reknowned psychiatrist, classical music fan, and noted long pig gourmand one Dr. H. Lecter — M.D., Ph.D., hella murderer.

As the action unfolds, the already tightly-strung Dolarhyde — who, as the Red Dragon, writes in supplication to Dr. Lecktor/Lecter appealing for help in his quest to purify his weak flesh and Become, further enmeshing the good doc in the plotohs — finds his demon not only hunted by highly-skilled semi-retired agent Will Graham and the FBI, but also must elude his own dark side’s brutal orders when he suddenly finds himself in an unlikely and empathetic mutual attraction with a plucky handicapped co-worker and falters in his faith in “Becoming.”

This complex character is played equally well by Tom Noonan in Manhunter and Ralph Fiennes in Red Dragon. Noonan gets the edge for creepy wordless scenes such as rasing his head to the sunlight like an animal drinking in vital and engrammed diurnal directives; Fiennes has the advantage in the all-important following tattoo-revelation scene and Red Dragon cry of chagrined triumph at tabloid reporter and luckless human torch Freddy Lounds (Steven Lang, 1986; Philip Seymour Hoffman, ’01: winner Hoffman on that one — ♥ that dude’s freaky energy 4eva-evah).

YOU OWE ME AWE.

Totally disturbing scene.

Tormented by the demon with which he wrestles, Dolarhyde attempts to steal and eat the original Blake painting which has been, in his mind, masterminding his murders. He believes that by consuming the painting, he will stop the voices, visions, and impulses torturing his brain with which he valiantly argues.

He finds himself particularly rising in opposition to the Red Dragon’s orders that he murder Reba (infinitely worthy and perpetually underused Joan Allen plays her in Manhunter while shiny-eyed dope Emily Watson —I know it’s an unpopular opinion but this chick bugs the hell out of me — got the role in the revamp), the outspoken, sexually bold blind woman from the photo labs with whom he has fallen in love.

Punch Drunk Love, Cradle Will Rock, me shaking my head and saying “Boo.” (limited theatrical release)

Dolarhyde is a sadder, sympathetic and strangely more touching, conflicted character than the early Lecter (or even his later and in my book cheaply slapped together Hannibal Rising incarnation) and much more relatable than Dolarhyde’s equally compulsive 1988 series successor, Buffalo Bill — “it puts the lotion on its etc” — are ever portrayed to be, yet because of Dolarhyde’s disorderly mind and act-driven kills, the Red Dragon as a predator has scenes that are in some ways more resonantly chilling than any of the often-quoted histrionics hailing from either star of Silence of the Lambs‘ gruesome sideshow.

As an example, in the above screencap, the Red Dragon side of Francis’s beaten, slavish personality makes the nervous newly-dating Dolarhyde give blind Reba McClane a drink of water from a glass with not only ice floating it but also the anciently misshapen and hideously rotting false teeth of the author of his schizophrenia, Dolarhyde’s dreadful dead grandmother, which dental implements he fits in to his own mouth and bites his victims in a frenzy during his kills. (Hence the hated nickname.) That part is not a-okay with me.

Forensic expert showing an FBI-Atlanta PD task force meeting a plaster mold of Gramma Dolarhyde’s choppers.

Um. Yeah. All that biting and teeth stuff? And the yells from the Red Dragon and his grandmother to murder Reba before he accidentally tells her how they have him trapped in his own mind? That’s fucked up. And oh, god. When those teeth knock against the glass as Reba thanks him, raises it to her lips, and sips, there is not a cringe-free face in the room.

So. In Manhunter, the first jump of Red Dragon from novel to screen, Will Graham is played by William Petersen, and Brian Cox plays Lecktor — not a typo. The film spells it this way. (You may recognize my darlingest dearest awesome Mr. Cox, pictured below as “Lecktor,” from Rushmore, The Ring, or Supertroopers — he is a personal fave from Way Back).

In 2002’s adaptation of Red Dragon, Edward Norton performs the part of Agent Graham with Sir Anthony Hopkins reprising his role as Dr. Lecter. Hopkins did get to have a little fun, for once off of his familiar smug game of “fava beans” and psychological bullshit, because this whelp of a wolf among the lambs has just recently been chained in the Red Dragon storyline.

The Lecter of Red Dragon is still a young and relatively vengeful Lecter, pacing a gym on a harness and leash for mandatory exercise to keep the other prisoners of his psychiatric facility safe (no mask just yet), unthinkably pissed at Graham for having caught him several years earlier, even lunging for him in an unguarded moment of rage — Lecter is not yet completely at home in the role of Fucking With the Po-lice as is the maturing character encountered in Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal.

In spite of Hopkins’ fun stretching his wings, I still feel that Brian Cox plays him with a hair more dignity and better-hinged chilliness than Hopkins does, which gives Lecktor, vs. Lecter, that slender shoot of a just-germinating seed of polish-mixed-with-go-for-broke-ruthlessness which is so necessary for the character’s believable development in to who he is by Hannibal. I think Hopkins saw the chance to finally show the less-controlled, animalistic side of a character he’d been at home playing as an after-the-fact “tyger” — caged and angry but a careful planner — for a long time and jumped, maybe too high, at the opportunity for this gamier potrayal. Just an opinion.

“You think I’m stupid?”
“No, Dr. Lecter. I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“But you still caught me.”
“You had certain … disadvantages.”
“Disadvantages? Such as … ?”
“You’re insane.”

You are correct to recognize Petersen from the original, Las Vegas-set television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Fun fact: for Halloween 2002, the producers deliberately teamed William Petersen up in his role as Gil Grissom, the brilliant but troubled detective able to get in to killers’ minds, in pursuit of a nemesis freaky killer performed in the October 31st episode by Tom Noonan (Francis Dolarhyde, aka the Tooth Fairy) as a nod to their parts opposite one another in Manhunter. Noonan played a demented illusionist, escape artist, and master magician known as Zephyr. Near retirement, the Zephyr still had some scores to settle and a lot of pyrotechnic sleight-of-hand tricks up his sleeve before he was ready to call it a day. The episode actually ends in delightful ambiguity, but I will not spoil it.

Special thanks to wetpaint, a CSI: fansite, for the screencaps.

I used to wonder with great conflict why, having lost someone special to me to a real life version of this type of shit, I am okay with fare such as the Lecter film and novel shenanigans, CSI:, and the like when I am so vehemently opposed to so-called “true crime” and often even discussions of such stuff in company or on the news. I will leave the room on certain topics and I don’t consider that burying my head in the sand — I have seen all I want to see for now of what people will say “needs to be reported” like as some kind of lesson.

Fiennes and Watson in Red Dragon; my professor friend and I looked nothing like this during our deep conversation (below) — I just felt like I had not shown enough stills from it as opposed to Manhunter.

Not too long ago, I wound up one day in deep, private conversation after a where-am-I-going-in-life conference with a former professor I dearly love about Harris’s novels and perhaps Patrica Cornwell’s, or some line very similar, and I confessed that I felt conflicted about my reading of that type of material because of things I’d dealt with in the past. He surprised me by saying he’d also lost a friend to violent crime growing up and despised, as I did, the cult of violence and serial-killer-admiration that seems to grip the tabloid television shows and bestselling non-fiction shelves. Yet he, too, read with genuine enjoyment many series of fictional genre crime thrillers. He said that, like me, he’d often disgustedly questioned himself as to how he kept both opinions in balance, and why he differentiated between hating the one and being all right with the other.

We need this hero.

He said he’d read a great scholarly article just a few years earlier, and I cannot remember the writer he quoted because I am garbage and frankly slugging a margarita on the rocks right now (it’s hot where I live), which forever answered our question for him.

This psychological scholar and literary critic posited that the murder mystery — all the detective thrillers and suspense novels and cop vs. boogeyman films the genre spawns — even with a detailed portrayal of a base, disturbed and seemingly random monster like Lecter or Dolarhyde as their antagonist — far from the feeding of dark fantasy that we anxiously supposed, serves instead a need in humanity to see our fears realized (as we had already done in reality) but the conflict then resolved.

Couldn’t go the whole post without a Silence of the Lambs scene.

What he basically said was that every time he and I watched CSI: and Grissom caught the Bad Guy, or read a James Patterson book on the beach and cheered as Alex Cross brought in his latest nemesis, we were solving our friends’ murders and seeing the people who disrupted our lives brought to task for their wrongdoing. We were gaining our much needed closure. Even people who have not suffered loss but empathetically and logically fear it because they love people in their own lives and understand that the possibility of these lives being taken by cruel injustice is never far away, seek and enjoy that same positive resolution to this basic human anxiety as it plays out in genre crime fiction.

Lecter caged and contained, kept in by the Forces of Good and therefore shut up like a witch in a well of a fairy story. (temporarily in this case but you get my drift) The people of the village are Safe.

It blew my mind, and I almost wanted to reject it because it was so far from my self-loathing castigation, but it felt very true. I know he was right. I am no longer so guilty nor constantly probing myself for some latent and despicable, prurient interest in fictional depictions of things that in real life have caused me pain. I understand now that I am actually acting out in my mind, against a cathartic and safe backdrop, the conflict and agonized anxieties from which I shy away in real reports on the news, and deliberately seeking through a book in my hands a satisfactory resolution which will lay my mind at ease that justice has been reached — and, by extension, that justice can and will be reached in reality.

That strayed pretty far afield from Blake and Manhunter but I’m kind of not sorry.

All of this entry’s screencaps come from kpannier and thewadingegret on the lj; rottentomatoes forums; and personal grabs here and there over the years.

Teevee Time: Tonight, tonight won’t be just any night, or, Ready to get “Lost” … Final Ed.

Portions of this entry have appeared before.

When I overhauled my life last year, I discovered that I am not a big guy for the television (except for 30 Rock, though even that I just periodically catch up on using the hulu), so I — without fanfare or officialdom but just mainly and casually — quit it nearly altogether in favor of holing up under the covers with a book or lurking in the batcave on the computer. However, the one show I stopped watching but have never stopped thinking about is Lost, the final episode of which airs tonight.

Nevermind the crisp and bullocks. Give me that rum. Mmm — Dharma Initiative-y.

I’ve mainly kept up this year and now I find myself looking down the barrel of the final episode. The thing is, almost literally everything in my life has changed since I first heard about and, a few months later when it premiered, began watching this show. I mean everything. Like, other than my gender, I have changed pretty much every other aspect of my life. I’ve had a child, earned a degree, married, moved, moved again, split up, shook up, sometimes I even throw up, overhauled career and self, set new goals, I mean, jeebus — I’ve been all over the map physically and emotionally since I first tuned in to this program.

L to R: Almanzo Wilder, Nellie Olson, and Laura Ingalls “Half-Pint” Wilder.

(Not pictured in the above shot: Velociraptor cyborgs and the ghost of Abraham Lincoln’s clone. Yes, clone — the Good One. The Evil One went rogue and was shot by government agent and island native John Wilkes Boothe. Oh, historical snap! Eventually they killed the Good One too and his ghost haunts the island now because it is all just Agent Mulder’s dream.) I remember one time a friend telling me that he’d hit rock bottom and I agreed I’d done the same — but we also concurred that suicide was for neither of us an option because then we would never know what happens on the last episode of Lost. Does Gilligan pick Ginger? Or Mary Anne?? Aw, just kiddin’, rabid Losties. He picks the Skipper, duh!

Who is a pretty princess?? Daniel Faraday is a pretty princess! I ♥ this character in an embarassing way, the sort of way for which I would mercilessly mock others.

It is sobering to consider how different a person I am now than I was when this interest began. I cannot even begin to count the ways, and it’s actually starting to freak me out. So now I am preparing to throw on pyjamas, pick up pepperoni pizza, and slide on down to Gorgeous George’s with the kidlet to watch the finale of Lost, and, in a wider sense, take another step toward closing what has been a very tumultuous chapter in my life.

Catch you on the flip side. (“See you in another life, brutha.”)

Spoiler: I can’t believe Darth Vader is Charles Widmore’s father.

Mean Girls Monday: Talk nerdy to me, another Star Trek edition, by way of introducing Kevmo’s awesome new “Project: NerdTrek” blog

My grandmother is having a Bad Day so while she’s taking a nap I’m going to throw some stuff up really quick and then when she’s awake again, I’m afraid I will be definitely tied up.

A dear old friendoh who is a funny, clever, and all-around smashing good family man has started an intriguing and fun new blog called Project: NerdTrek over on the blogger. Kevin’s plan is to watch all the various Star Trek franchise viewing material in stardate order, hopefully squeezing in an episode a day. I look forward to keeping up with him and encourage my fellow nerds to follow, too! (I have also linked to him in the new and improved categorized blogroll on the right of the page.)

Oh, but he would, Mr. Spock.

Check Kevmo’s stuff out, and, in the meantime, please send vibes that my grandmother’s mind will — since I think it cannot at this point fully rethread itself — at least be set at ease by some well-earned rest.

March Madness: Marian Stafford, Miss March 1956

The lovely and talented Marian Stafford, Playboy‘s Miss March 1956, is adorable and also full of all kinds of noteworthiness.

Photographed by Ruth Sondak.

First, Ms. Stafford was the first gatefold model to get a three page pull-out centerfold: the real deal, the whole fold-out enchilada. This has obviously become a trademark of not just Playboy but a widely-copied staple of the porn mag world as a whole. Way to go, twinkie!

Unusually, as you can see from the above caption, the lead credited photographer of Ms. Stafford’s shoot was a woman. Ruth Sondak seems to have been an active New York photographer on whom I am having trouble finding complete biographical data.

I found this link to an interview about Greenwich Village anti-Vietnam War protesters, which had circa-70’s pictures credited as being taken by Ruth accompanying the article, and a 1993 NYT obit that included a picture of a famous educator that was photographed by Ruth in New York in 1972. The links to the photos in both the obit and the war-resisters’ page were no longer active, so I can’t even say I have seen other pictures by her other than these of Ms. Stafford. That’s about all I got on that angle so far. I’ll keep digging.

Okay, so you may be wondering why Ms. Stafford is ripping up a TV Guide in the two color shots of this spread. It’s not a Sinead O’Connor protest or anything — Ms. Stafford was first “discovered” on the boob-tube in the audience of a show, and became a main stage attraction herself not long after.

This month’s Playmate is a little girl with big television aspirations. Her name is Marian Stafford and she packs a lot of woman into 5’3″. She wants to be an actress, but so far most of her TV experience has been confined to smiling prettily in commercials for products like Tintair, Pall Mall and Jantzen; she has helped advertise Revlon on The $64,000 Question and RCA Victor on the video version of Our Town. She has had a walk-on in a Kraft Theater production and small speaking parts in two Robert Montgomery shows. (“Playboy’s TV Playmate,” Playboy, March 1956.)

But her most unique television experience is as a human test pattern for Max Leibman spectaculars, where she spends hours before NBC color cameras during rehearsals and is never seen by the audience. (Ibid.)

Ms. Stafford did make it back in front of cameras, regularly appearing on shows such as The $64,000 Question and Treasure Hunt. Her adorable pretty-princess looks and sweet nature also scored her the part of Mistress of Ceremonies on the 11-episode children’s story hour show The Big Fun Carnival in 1957. Get it, girl!

One of the coolest parts of this issue was a short story by Ray Bradbury titled “The First Night of Lent,” about a good-natured and laconic Irish driver named Nick whom a writer employs while he is working on a screenplay in Dublin. The driver gives up drinking for Lent and becomes a reckless maniac, incapable of sorting through the richness of life’s sensory overload and focusing on one thing at a time: he needs alcohol to make it through the day, because the Irish are such finely tuned, sensitive beings that sobriety is an innavigable misery to them. At the end, the screenplay writer gives Nick money and begs him to start drinking again. It’s a mainly classist and racist but still kind of fun story, and Ray Bradbury is my all-time favorite sci-fi writer of all time* so I let him off the hook, cultural pride notwithstanding.

excerpt from the googlebooks. give it a spin, dudes, and please consider writing to your congressmen urging them to protect free lit on the net! LIBRARIES FOREVER!

Marian Stafford is one of the few playmates to model both as the gatefold and cover girls. Do you get the cover idea? The bunny is a producer watching her do her NBC color-test job. Super-cute. Again — get it, girl!

*Nickel in the mail to the first person who gets the “all-time-favorite of all time” movie line reference.

Teevee Time: the X-Files, “Bad Blood”

X-Files, Season 5, Episode 12: “Bad Blood.”

While investigating a series of bizarre exsanguinations in the sleepy town of Chaney, Texas, about 50 miles south of Dallas, Mulder kills a teenage boy wearing fake vampire fangs, whom he “mistakes” for a vampire by pounding a stake through the boy’s heart.

The young man’s family is now suing the FBI for $446 million, and Mulder and Scully are brought before FBI Director Walter Skinner to tell their versions of what happened. Prior to making their reports, Mulder and Scully attempt to get their stories “straight” by relating to each other their differing versions of what happened during their investigation.

(combination of the wiki and the imdb)

Sheriff Hartwell: You really know your stuff, Dana.

(Dreamy music. Scully smiles goofily and the scene shifts back to real time)

Mulder: Pffft! Wh–? “Dana?!”

Mulder: He didn’t even know your first name.
Scully: (pause) … You gonna interrupt me or what?

Mulder: Oh, no-no. You go ahead … Dana.

Scully: Mulder, are you okay?
Mulder: [drugged] “Who’s the black private dick who’s a sex machine with all the chicks? Shaft! Can you dig it? They say this cat Shaft is a bad mother —

Mulder: (singing) — shut yo’ mouth! I’m jus’talkin’’bout Shaft!”

(Scene shifts back to real time)

Mulder: I did not.

Guest stars were Luke Wilson (Home Fries, Legally Blonde, The Royal Tenenbaums, Old School, bloated phone commercials that remind me that age comes inevitably for us all, and that ripening is not always kind even to handsome Hollywood guys you once wanted to boff that you thought would stay hot forever) as Sheriff Lucius Hartwell and Patrick Renna (“Ham” in The Sandlot!) as Ronnie Strickland.

Mulder: It’s all true.
Scully: Except for the part about the buck teeth.

(repeated line): I was drugged.

Gillian Anderson voted this her favorite episode of all time.

Valentine Vixen: Julie Michelle McCullough, Miss February 1986

I am so glad to be able to share two super-special gals with you today. First, brooding and sensitive Cheryl Kubert from earlier in the day (R.I.P. and I wish her many hopefully joyful and educational returns to this earth after her unhappy retirement; that’s what reincarnation is for), the solemn, petite brunette with tall skis and deep eyes, and now — for something completely different! — ebullient and absolutely adorable blonde ray of sunshine Julie Michelle McCullough: model, actress, stand-up comedienne, and maligned-but-triumphant victim of sitcom scandal. Take it away, buttercup!

Photographed by Arny Freytag.

“I’ve always felt that I have little eyes, a mouth full of teeth and ears that I call elf ears. They kind of poke out.” That’s her opinion. We certainly didn’t notice any flaws when Julie McCullough showed up for our salute to The Girls of Texas last February. In fact, we tucked her ears under a Stetson and put her on the cover. It was the first time she’d ever seen a copy of Playboy.

Although she was born in Hawaii, Julie was then, and is now, living in Texas. But as the daughter of a Marine Corps lifer, she has moved around a lot. “It bothered me when I was younger, but as I look back, I appreciate it, because it taught me how to get along with different types of people. If you make good friends, you never lose them.”

During most of her childhood years, Julie thought she wanted to be an artist. “I really love to draw,” she says, “but I could never see myself as a starving artist. So I realized art would have to be more of a hobby than a career. And then, in high school, I started entering pageants, and I got a couple of Miss Photogenic awards. And everybody would tell me, ‘You should try modeling; You should try modeling.’ And all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘Hey!'”

Playboy’s cover picture, and the less covered picture inside the magazine, caused a furor in Julie’s home town of Allen, a rural community 26 miles north of Dallas. A local pastor, announcing that he planned to preach a sermon on the subject, was quoted as saying — we kid you not — “The easiest thing to do is jump on Julie.” He went on to say that he saw her appearance in Playboy as part of a larger problem, that of “general moral disintegration in the fiber of the nation.” (“Return of the Cover Girl,” Playboy, February 1986.)

While working as a model, she was also honing her skills as an actress and had landed a part on television’s sitcom Growing Pains, featuring Kirk Cameron. He unfortunately shared the opinion that the easiest thing to do was jump on Julie, it seems, because he used his pull with the network to have her summarily axed off the show when he learned she had posed for Playboy, accusing the network of tacitly endorsing pornography by continuing her employment.

Because Mr. Cameron was the breakout star of the show and a teen heartthrob who kept the network flush with sponsors (his charming smile conveniently moved hot amounts of Noxzema pads and Snickers bars to both cleanse and satisfy), they went along with his wishes and terminated the object of his objections.

McCullough appeared in eight episodes until she was fired in 1990, which stemmed from series star Kirk Cameron’s conversion to evangelical Christianity, a conversion that, according to “The E! True Hollywood Story” episode focusing on the show, served to alienate him from his fellow cast members, as he did not invite any of them to his wedding. He accused the show’s producers of promoting pornography. (the wiki)

Sez Ms. McCullough now:

[Kirk Cameron] thinks if I read science books that I’m going to hell. I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints … the sinners are much more fun.* And a lot more interesting than some book-burner who is still having growing pains! I am at peace with God. Kirk thinks people like me are going to Hell; if I do, then at least I’ll go well-informed and well-read!

(Ms. McCullough’s myspace.)

*That is a reference to the Billy Joel song “Only the Good Die Young,” about young Virginia, a Catholic girl who starts much too late. Rock on with it, Ms. McCullough! Good people quote the Beatles. Great people quote the Beatles, Queen, and Billy Joel.

Contemporaneous with her being fired from Growing Pains, Ms. McCullough was also stripped of her crown as Wilmington, NC’s “Azalea Queen” for posing for Playboy. Sheesh. I try to keep shit to myself, but I really feel the need to address Mr. Cameron’s and the people of Wilmington’s position on this issue. Leaving aside for now the fact that the lord decreed we enter this earth naked and that nudity is a major factor in procreation, which what good man can decry?, let us address the point where it seems people feel it ill befits a person of “good” moral fiber to celebrate the physical gift of their bodies. As a hippy-dippy meditative and soulful Christian who has thought my way deeply and thoroughly through these issues and can confidently and guiltlessly balance both Playboy and my beloved monthly The Way of St. Francis without throwing out the baby with the bathwater, loving-the-Word-but-thanking-God-for-earthly-forms-wise, I can only cite and gently suggest a review of Matthew, chapter seven.

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the plank that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a plank is in thine own eye?

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the plank out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye. At Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and the region across the Jordan, Jesus was talking to the multitudes gathered there after hearing of His message and of His healings to beseech them to not become like the pharisees and hypocrites who think they are above sin. (Matthew 7:1-7.)

Mmm-hmm. This is an earnestly serious ethical issue. I’m not playing about the no more judging stuff. It’s just like Blessed Mother Teresa said: “If you judge someone, you have no time to love them.” And which one do you think Jesus would rather you worked at doing? Get with the program!

Today, Ms. McCullough is a well-received and widely admired stand-up comedienne who continues to act.

Some of her film and small screen credits include The Golden Girls, Beverly Hills, 90210, Jake and the Fatman, the Drew Carey Show, The Blob, and Harry and the Hendersons.

She is also a published poetess, with a number of anthology and private publishing credits to her literary name, and she was on a basketball team with Casper van Dien of Starship Troopers fame (I ♥ Heinlein and Johnny Rico forever). According to the imdb, she began working full time in 2006 as a stand-up comedienne. She has performed, if the wiki can be trusted, at such well-known venues as the Palms in Las Vegas and the Laugh Factory in L.A. Right on!

In conclusion, it is a widely known but nonetheless hard and bitter truth that, frankly, haters gon’ hate. All love and good wishes to Ms. McCullough and her sunny resilience!

Tonight, tonight won’t be just any night, or, Ready to get “Lost”

When I overhauled my life last year, I discovered that I am not a big guy for the television (except for 30 Rock, though even that I just periodically catch up on using the hulu), so I — without fanfare or officialdom but just mainly and casually — quit it nearly altogether in favor of holing up under the covers with a book or lurking in the batcave on the computer. However, the one show I stopped watching but have never stopped thinking about is Lost, the final season of which begins tonight.

Nevermind the crisp and bullocks. Give me that rum. Mmm — Dharma Initiative-y.

I had not seen the last few episodes of last season, but the rabid fandom of the show means that excruciatingly detailed episode descriptions (and conspiracy theories) abound on its very own wiki, so I read all those and I feel pretty caught up — and both smug and confused as to what it all means.

Who is a pretty princess?? Daniel Faraday is a pretty princess! I ♥ this character in an embarassing way, the sort of way for which I would mercilessly mock others.

The plan for tonight’s reintroduction of E’s regularly viewing television, just like an actual social human being, is this. Gorgeous George and the kidlet and I are going to meet up for dinner at the pub, come back here and enjoy us some geeky season premiere action, and then I am hitting the hay early because I have my first sub job tomorrow, about which I am very nervous. Catch you on the flip side! (“See you in another life, brutha.”)

Edit: “4 8 15 16 23 42 are all Yankee retired numbers.” via RiverAveBlues on the twitter, one of my most trusted, beloved, good-humored and APPARENTLY like-minded baseball resources.

Daily Batman: Kapow!

Still from Batman: The Movie (Leslie H. Martinson, 1966).

Robin: The Joker!
Chief O’Hara: Devilish clown prince of crime — oh, if I only had a nickle for every time he’s baffled us!

Shiver me shamrocks, Chief Darby O’Stereotype, but faith and begorrah, the little Robin is getting his pert ass beat. A little help?

Ahren Hertel: “Forward.”

Art by Ahren Hertel from his MFA thesis project “Forward,” exhibited at the University of Reno April 13-24, 2009.

“Her animal friends,” via bunnylicious; all other pics via creepmachine.

Official site.

Many more pictures from the exhibit here and here.

Photograph by Justin Sullivan

Hertel became known for his surrealist paintings with childlike and cartoonish characters, but the work that forms his master’s thesis is in a much more realistic style while still being recognizable as his. (“‘Forward’ by Ahren Hertel art reception.” Sullivan, Justin. April 16, 2009. Metromix Reno.)

You can also find Mr. Hertel and pictures of his work on the myspace, where he links to some of his past gallery shows and lists “History, things decaying,” and “alley ways with tons of fire escapes” as his general interests. Sold!

Bonus mega high-res portrait of nearly-lifelong obsession, Patron Saint and role model Sherilyn Fenn as Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks:

Beginning to look a lot like “X”-Mas

Picture via littleredhead on the tumblr: many more X-Files features to come thanks to her screencapping wonderfulness!

“Amor fati.”

גם זה לטובה

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.

Daily Batman: Miss Kitty workin’ it, social networking edition

Name: Miss Kitty
Sex/Age female, 23
Location: Gotham City, United States
Current Mood: workin’ it! 😉

Robin: Good job that love stuff doesn’t work on me — I’m way too young for that sort of thing!

Yes. Yes it’s age that’s the stumbling block. …

Batman: What about Robin?
Catwoman: Hmmm. . . I know. We’ll kill him.

Robin: Holy caffeine!

(all stills and quotes from “Catwoman Goes to College,” Batman, Season 2, Episode 49. Original airdate February 22, 1967.)

Daily Batman: Dick Clark and the Dynamic Duo

Dick Clark: (opening apartment window as Batman and Robin climb past) Hey! Who’re you?
Robin: He must be new in Gotham City.
Batman: He’s from Philadelphia.
Dick Clark: How did you know?
Batman: You dipped your dipthong. People from Philidelphia are known for that.

Robin: We’re Batman and Robin. The crimefighters!
Dick Clark: Oh. Are you a vocal group?
Robin: What?!
Dick Clark: I thought perhaps you might be a singing duo.
–“Batman”, Season 2, Episode 1: “Shoot A Crooked Arrow.” (Original air date September 7, 1966.)