Andy Milligan is ruining me: A trash film fan finally meets his match

I’ve mentioned before how influential the Videohound Golden Movie Retriever was in shaping my cinematic tastes, partially because it alerted me to the existence of so many obscure films with wonderfully elaborate titles. I’ve been slowly tracking down my favorites over the past decade, always taking an unreasonable amount of joy in finding a terrible transfer of a film like Door-to-Door Maniac or The Severed Arm. When I recently discovered the long sought-after The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! tucked away in my beloved Internet Archive, I was beside myself. Little did I know that I was opening the door to perhaps the grimmest chapter in my life as a film buff.

See, TRAC!TWAH! was directed by one Andy Milligan. That didn’t mean anything to me when I started watching it, but it’s become highly significant in the subsequent weeks. Andy Milligan, as it turns out, is something of a notorious figure in the world of trash cinema. He started out making arty exploitation films (none of which I’ve been able to track down… yet) but is now probably best known for his peculiar brand of horror. He’s sort of a poor man’s John Waters, a gutter-dwelling auteur with a unique vision, an unmistakable style and a thirst for sleaze. The big difference is that Milligan lacked the playful wit and self-awareness that made Waters an icon. In its place lay a gaping chasm of bitterness and loathing.

By all reports I’ve read, Andy Milligan was a very unpleasant person. The product of a broken, abusive home (and, on a personal note, a native of my current hometown of Saint Paul), he was reputedly a mean, misogynistic sadist who used his art as an outlet for all of his worst tendencies. There are plenty of artists out there who fit that profile, but there aren’t many who approached their art so vigorously or viciously. Andy Milligan made movies like he was mad at the very existence of film. His cinematic world is an unholy marriage of spite and incompetence, but I’ll be damned if I don’t find it strangely compelling.

And “compelling” really is the only word for it. I don’t watch Andy Milligan movies because I enjoy them, or because I think they’re an important piece of my pop cultural education. I watch them because, now that I know they exist, I feel weirdly driven to subject myself to as many as I can. “Subject” is also the right word, because these movies are not fun to watch by any recognizable measure. Here are a few things you can expect from your average Andy Milligan movie.

Elaborate period costumes that feel slightly “off.”

Milligan apparently loved making clothes and proudly handled costume design for most of his films, despite being only OK at it.

Endless, breathless conversations with little to no bearing on anything.

In Milligan’s world, couples and families spend most of their free time talking and talking and talking in florid language about one of two topics: how much they love each other or how much they hate each other.

Exposition. So, so much exposition.

When they’re not waxing purple about love and hate, Milligan’s people are helpfully filling us in on back story with a heavy handedness that would make a Law & Order writer retch.

Physical abuse of a male invalid.

As I mentioned, Milligan was a real-life sadist. His dedication to filming his fetishes makes Quentin Tarantino’s obsession with ladies’ feet look downright subtle.

Really bad gore effects.

Onscreen gore was still coming into its own during Milligan’s late ‘60s-early ‘70s heyday, but his low-grade splatter wouldn’t have passed muster in even the earliest Herschel Gordon Lewis features.

Awful monster make-up.

Not every Milligan movie has a supernatural plot, but those that do tend to end up with somebody donning a really unfortunate werewolf mask or goofy vampire teeth.

The darkness.

I think I’ve covered the figurative darkness of Milligan’s films already, but they’re also physically dark, to the point that it’s often impossible to suss out what the hell is happening onscreen. That’s not always a bad thing.

All of that might give you the impression that Andy Milligan made “so bad it’s good” movies. (I’m not a fan of that term in any situation, but getting into that would require too much digression.) That isn’t the case. Andy Milligan made bad movies, plain and simple. They aren’t fun to watch, nor are they memorable in the way transcendently bad films like Frankenstein Island or the Ed Wood oeuvre are. He’s the rare director whose films are improved by distraction. I often wash dishes or perform other household chores while tackling a Milligan.

Nevertheless, Milligan’s films are fascinating to me because they reflect an undeniable artistic vision. Nothing else looks or feels quite like an Andy Milligan movie. Guru the Mad Monk and The Ghastly Ones, to pick two random examples, are set centuries apart on different continents, and filmed with an entirely different cast. Even so, the production and tone of both films are so similar that they’re unmistakably the work of the same creator.

There just aren’t many directors who can place such an inimitable stamp so plainly across a three-decade body of work. When I think of truly distinctive directors like, say, Robert Altman or Frederico Fellini, I can usually also point to a slew of knock-offs and homages that get the style almost but not quite right. Even legendarily “bad” directors like Ed Wood and Bert I. Gordon, for all their distinctive trademarks, don’t stand nearly as far apart from their peers as does Milligan. I can’t even imagine how you’d approach making a Milligan rip-off, although it has been done. Odd as it may sound, I find that kind of dedication to one’s own artistic vision – even a cruel, monotonous, incoherent one – immensely inspiring.

I’m not alone in my unfortunate appreciation of Mr. Milligan. He’s inspired at least one book-length biography and a slew of blogs and essays. (My personal favorite is Joseph A. Ziemba’s dishearteningly thorough rundown of Milligan’s horror films for bleedingskull.com.) He also has a celebrity champion in Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn, who has dedicated a great deal of time and money to getting Milligan’s films back into the public eye. I’ve noticed that there don’t seem to be a lot of casual Milligan fans. There are those who remain blissfully unaware of his body of work, and there are those who become obsessed by it.

Once you have a few Milligans under your belt, you can even begin to find some pleasures in them. For instance, I don’t know if John Miranda’s bitterly unhinged performance as Sweeney Todd in The Bloodthirsty Butchers is really all that good, but seeing someone act with even a hint of nuance felt like a revelation after watching dozens of other Milliganders alternate between lifelessness and histrionics. Likewise, if I’d gone into Blood cold, it may not have made much of an impression on me. Seeing it after a string of even shoddier Milligan films, however, made its relative – very relative – competence feel like a blessed relief.

Note before you click: This is not just a clip. This is the entire movie. You may not be able to extract yourself once you enter.

So what do I want you to take away from this little essay? Hell, I don’t know. Maybe I just wanted to share the misery. Maybe this is my way of trying to get a grip on what I find so inspiring about this dreadful body of work. Maybe I just want to know that something has come of the hours I’ve dedicated to Andy Milligan while countless genuine classics remain unseen by my eyes. One thing I know for certain: there’s a full-length print of Milligan's reputedly unwatchable Surgikill up on YouTube right now that demands my attention. Please keep me in your thoughts and prayers.

Special thanks to my man Joe Gibson for alerting me to that Nicolas Winding Refn article, and for putting up with my regular Milligan venting on Twitter.

Four works of art inspired by an unwelcome growth in my head

There are some downsides to palling around primarily with artistic types – everyone’s broke, it’s hard to pull together a pick-up basketball team, your social media streams are clogged with Kickstarter requests, etc. – but there are plenty of positives as well. For instance, when I was diagnosed with a pituitary tumor last month, I was greeted with a humbling outpouring of love and charity from my friends and family. Support came in the form of food, flowers, cards, good vibes and, of course, artwork.

In the interest of spreading the love, here are four of the wonderful works of art inspired by my bout with brain surgery.

• I was initially diagnosed with a pituitary edenoma, which is a kind of benign tumor. Once the surgeons had me opened up, they discovered it was actually something called a Rathke’s cleft cyst, which has virtually the same symptoms and side-effects of its tumescent sibling but is both a little bit grosser and easier to recover from. I mention this because my friend Christopher “Patch” Conner’s immediate response to reading the phrase “pituitary edenoma” was to run it through an anagram generator. He came up with “a nude tiara poem.” A few hours later he wrote one. A few days later he recruited his guitarist friend Oren Rabinowitz to set it to music and record it. It’s a coffee shop head-bobber for sure.

• The multi-pronged creative force that is Oswald Hobbes also found a musical muse in my head, crafting an ambient soundscape called "Is Something on Your Mind, Ira." It kind of puts me in mind of Goblin’s soundtrack work from the ‘70s, which is of course a heck of a compliment.

• Oswald and his colleague/familiar Joe Gibson also invited me onto their delightful Audio Assault podcast, where we winnowed away an hour or so talking about brain tumors, Lou Reed and splatter movies. I also talk about what I wore to prom, the time I cut my toe half off and my personal bathing preferences. Must-hear stuff across the board, obviously.

• My godfather Jeff Wilcox – a working visual artist for four decades – is a reliable source of wonderful, weird imagery. He regularly posts photos from his Thrift Store Gallery series, in which he finds compelling objects at his local thrift store and juxtaposes them in intriguing ways. His latest was dedicated to me. It finds a young Justin Timberlake trouncing a circus clown and a hobo sailor in a creep-off for the ages. It is a thing of ineffable beauty.

The story of my pituitary tumor, as told by 'Simpsons' screengrabs

A few Thursdays ago I woke up feeling moderately hungover. This struck me as odd, since I hadn’t even had my usual beer with dinner the night before. When the feeling didn’t fade over the course of the day, I presumed I was coming down with whatever dread malady my son had brought home from day care this time.

I woke up Friday morning with no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt. It was a constant, pulsating ache that ran straight through my head from temple to temple.

The headache lasted all weekend and kept intensifying until finally I went to the after hours clinic on Sunday. The doctor there prescribed me some Vicodin and told me to see my regular physician if it hadn’t improved the next day. On Monday my family doctor examined me again, gave me a shot of pain medication and sent me for an MRI. By Tuesday the headache had faded somewhat, but I was still shambling around my office dizzy, queasy and on the verge of collapse.

That afternoon my doctor called me down to his office, where he explained that my MRI had revealed a macroedenoma – a small, benign tumor growing on my pituitary gland. It was located just behind my sinus cavity, pressing up against my optic nerve.

The next day I went to see a neurosurgeon (an actual neurosurgeon!), who confirmed the diagnosis and reassured me that these tumors were almost invariably benign and relatively easy to remove. It was about as routine as brain surgery can be, in other words. Still, it was imperative to have it operated upon quickly. Left unchecked, an adenoma can cause permanent damage to the optic nerve and play hell with the brain’s hormone production. Potential side effects include blindness and – no kidding – gigantism.

I’ve navigated a battery of physicians over the past couple of weeks, including neurosurgeons, optometrists, endocrinologists, opticians, family practitioners, an ear-nose-throat specialist and something called a “tumor nurse.” I’ve been uniformly impressed with their knowledge and professionalism. They’ve boosted my confidence to the point where I can hardly imagine anything going wrong.

The procedure, as I understand it, involves drilling into my upper gumline and slicing out the tumor, then plugging the hole in my sinuses with a chunk of muscle tissue extracted from my thigh. As unpleasant as that sounds, it beats the alternative method, in which doctors go in through the nose. That often leaves the patient with distended nostrils and an unsightly flap of septum hanging down. Heck, my neurosurgeon says that when he started doing this 35 years ago, the standard was to open up the front of the skull, lift up the brain and carve out the tumor. I can at least be thankful that they’re not doing anything that invasive.

When all that’s over with, they drill a little hole in my back to shunt off overflow spinal fluid, which can build up and cause complications following this kind of surgery. Then it’s off to a hospital bed for three to seven days of recovery. And no, sadly, they don’t let me keep the tumor after they’re done.

Once I’m out of the hospital, I should be back to relative normalcy within a week or so, although I have to refrain from strenuous physical activity for the next couple of months. That’s a real bummer, as I had planned to spend much of the summer running, playing basketball and chasing after my toddler. I do have to go in for extensive follow-ups, and if it turns out they didn't get all of the tumor on the first pass they'll likely have to zap my pituitary with radiation. I figure that would give me about a 75% chance of developing Incredible Hulkism.

Still, when all is said and done, it beats any of the alternatives. I’m just grateful that it’s nothing more serious. This is pretty much the best-case scenario when you get a call saying an MRI of your head has turned up something troubling. I’m also thankful that I have such a loving and supportive network of family and friends. I’m a little embarrassed by the outpouring of love and well-wishes I’ve received since this started. I’m not complaining, though, not by a long shot. Come Monday evening, you folks will have made me the happiest man in United Hospital’s recovery ward.

What I believe 'Mad Men' is about, courtesy of my Twitter feed

I have never seen an episode of the acclaimed dramatic series Mad Men. This isn’t due to any specific bias against the show (although I suspect it’s one of those things I wouldn’t get into as much as I feel like I’m supposed to). It’s more that my satellite package does not include AMC and there are several series ahead of it on my DVD must-watch list. Nevertheless, I’ve picked up quite a few details about Mad Men over the years, thanks largely to federal regulations requiring every person who watches the show to talk about it incessantly on Twitter. Using only information gleaned via my social media wanderings, I’ve pieced together this invaluable viewing guide for other neophytes who may wish to join the show already in progress.

A cool, stylized, animated opening sequence ripe for lazy parodies introduces us to Don Draper, a ludicrously handsome ad executive working for an agency called Sterling Cooper in early 1960s New York. Eventually he becomes a partner and the agency’s name is changed to Sterling Cooper Draper Somebodyelse. Don’s rise is unimpeded by his tendency to digitally pleasure every comely woman who crosses his path, but he still hides significant self-loathing beneath his slick Madison Avenue exterior.

Don has a wife named Betty and a daughter named Sally, or possibly vice-versa. Betty Draper, who is occasionally fat, is one of the most loathsome people who has ever walked the Earth. Don’s bespectacled* co-worker Pete Campbell is also in competition for that title, although his despicability ranges on pitiable. Don’s other co-worker Peggy Olsen, on the other hand, is a delightful human being who radiates ass-kickery and sometimes smokes marijuana. Speaking of narcotics, Don’s silver-foxy boss Roger Sterling took LSD this one time and it was pretty awesome. Also awesome: the red-headed curvaceousness of whatever Christina Hendricks’ character’s name is. Not so awesome: voiceover narration.

Most if not all of the abovementioned people drink heavily, engage in infidelity and were profoundly affected by the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Oh, and Annie from Community is in there somewhere too.

*I have been informed that the one with glasses is actually Harry, not Pete. This may invalidate my entire thesis. Apologies.

Lou Reed's 25 greatest songs (a thoroughly subjective selection)

It's Lou Reed's birthday, and that means it's time for my annual birthday blog. This being his 70th, I've decided to skip the irreverence and go with some full-on fanboy gushing. In the nearly two decades that Lou's been a big part of my life I've developed a go-to roster of favorite songs that could easily stretch into the hundreds. For this blog, I've culled the field to a lean 25, presented more or less in the order of my preference. (Here's a Grooveshark playlist for easy consumption.)

A couple of caveats: I'm excluding Velvet Underground songs and covers in the interest of making this list as as Lou-ish as possible. Feel free to disagree with me or make your own additions in the comments. And happy birthday, Lou. May there be many more to come.

Romeo Had Juliette (from New York, 1989)
Most short story writers would kill to pen one perfect opening or closing line. Here Lou Reed pulls off both in less than four minutes. (Respectively, “Caught between the twisted stars, the plotted lines, the faulty map / That brought Columbus to New York” and “Something flickered for a minute / Then it vanished and was gone.”) This scuzzy-sweet story of young loves, street corner hoodlums and urban decay is the essence of Lou. His wit, his poetry, his vitality, his eye for finding beauty in ugliness – they’re all showcased in one perfectly crafted masterpiece.

Street Hassle (from Street Hassle, 1978)
It was the late ‘70s. Everybody was doing rock operas. Not everybody, however, was condensing them into a single, string-driven 11-minute song packed full of death, drugs, prostitution, misogyny and junkie philosophy, with a little space left over for a Bruce Springsteen cameo. The dealer’s shockingly callous spoken word set piece in the middle (called “Street Hassle” on the album sleeve, making it the titular movement of the record’s titular song) is the highlight for me, but this is genius from start to finish.

Kill Your Sons (from Sally Can’t Dance, 1974)
What do you do when your parents commit you to an electroshock ward at age 17 in an attempt to cure your homosexual tendencies? Write it all up into a searing, sardonic howl of nihilistic numbness, of course. Lou was never punker than he is here, nor were many others.

Baton Rouge (from Ecstasy, 2000)
I count this as one of the saddest, loveliest songs I’ve ever heard. Lou fills this disarmingly honest reminiscence of a failed marriage with quickly sketched images both wistful and painful. Perhaps the most affecting element is the narrator’s not-quite regret upon seeing photos from his ex’s daughter’s wedding. As he momentarily loses himself in a fantasy of the all-American family he’ll never have (nor honestly want), the bittersweetness becomes almost unbearable. Maybe the most underrated song in Lou’s entire canon.

Magic and Loss (from Magic and Loss, 1993)
I hold Magic and Loss as the finest album about death anyone’s ever made. Whenever someone close to me dies, I make a point of sitting down and listening to it front-to-back as soon as I have the chance. The album as a whole, and this closing track in particular, goes a long way toward easing the pain. In my hour of darkness, I can’t tell you how reassuring it is for me to hear Lou repeating his gentle reminder that “there’s a bit of magic in everything, and then some loss to even things out.”

Caroline Says II (from Berlin, 1973)
I rank Berlin as one of the three greatest records Lou ever made, but the album is such an organic whole that it’s tough to single out any one song. This heartbreaker stands out as a severely damaged woman’s deceptively pretty send-off to the abusive husband she can’t abide any longer. “You can hit me all you want to / But I don’t love you any more.” Just devastating.

Like a Possum (from Ecstasy, 2000)
I can understand why some people might find 18-minutes of Lou Reed bellowing about possums over a droning, repetitive guitar riff unappealing. Those people are dead wrong, of course, but I can understand where they’re coming from. Personally, I can’t get enough of it. I have a pet theory that Lou’s much-maligned Metallica collaboration Lulu (which I’m on record as kind of liking) was his attempt at expanding the magic of “Like a Possum” across an entire album. Sadly, it didn’t quite work.

New Sensations (from New Sensations, 1984)
At its core, this is just an amiable ramble about this one time when Lou had a really fun day riding his motorcycle. Somewhere along the line, though, “New Sensations” becomes a whole lot more than that. Maybe it’s the production, the imagery or just the relative contentment in Lou’s delivery, but it winds up being an exhilarating anthem of feeling good and being free.

Sword of Damocles (from Magic and Loss, 1992)
It takes guts to face down the powerlessness of watching a loved one dying slowly. To do so as honestly and unflinchingly as Lou does here is just plain remarkable. “I’ve seen a lot of people die from car crashes and drugs / Last night on 33^rd Street I saw a kid get hit by a bus / But this drawn out torture over which part of you lives is very hard to take.”

Walk on the Wild Side (from Transformer, 1972)
At this point it’s almost enough of a cliché to turn me off, but it’s not for nothing that this remains Lou’s defining song after all these years. The lulling bass line, the skittering guitar, the almost-whispered vocals and of course the Colored Girls and their “doot-d-doot-d-doots” make it every bit the classic it’s cracked up to be. Unlike “Perfect Day,” whose ubiquity has finally made me weary of a song I once loved, this one will never wear out its welcome.

Dirt (from Street Hassle, 1978)
Street Hassle is hands-down Lou’s grimiest album (as well as my personal favorite). Aside from the title track, this is probably the nastiest offering on the record, a spiteful takedown of some unknown poseur. There’s something about Lou inexplicably quoting Bobby Fuller’s “I Fought the Law” in the middle of his tirade that sends chills down my spine every time.

Waves of Fear (from The Blue Mask, 1982)
A harrowing portrait of self-loathing, withdrawal and general misery set to a big, burly guitar riff that eventually devolves into spastic squalling. “I cringe at my tremors / I hate my own smell / I know where I must be / I must be in Hell.” What’s not to love?

Doin’ the Things that We Want To (from New Sensations, 1984)
A celebration of Martin Scorcese, Sam Shepard and the artists who make life worth living, this is an endlessly exhilarating tribute to creative genius. The opening verse, where Lou describes his reaction to watching a live performance of Shepard’s A Fool for Love, is a miracle of minute observation.

Wild Child (from Lou Reed, 1972)
Throughout the early ‘70s, Lou had a weird penchant for songs that strung together a jumble of grotesque character sketches and half-realized puns. (See also: “Andy’s Chest,” “Oh, Sweet Nuthin,” “She’s My Best Friend.” Heck, even “Walk on the Wild Side” could fall under that umbrella.) This is my favorite of the bunch, a darkly cheerful display of wordplay for its own sake. I’m especially fond of “I was talking to Ed, who’d been reported dead by a mutual friend / He thought it was funny that I had no money to spend on him.”

Last Great American Whale (from New York, 1989)
There are a lot of undeniably weird entries in the Lou Reed song book, and this might be the weirdest of all. It’s just your standard story of a story of an endangered, sentient, possibly amphibious whale who seems to moonlight as some sort of anti-racist superhero. Hearing this song for the first time when I was 15 confirmed for me that this Lou Reed cat was somebody I could really get into.

The Power of Positive Drinking (from Growing Up in Public, 1980)
This playful tribute to all things alcoholic is probably the straight-up funniest song in Lou’s repertoire. His snide portraits of various breeds of barfly are as universal as they are well-observed. Drunken self-justification doesn’t come much better than “Some say liquor kills the cells in your head / But for that matter so does getting out of bed.”

I Believe (from Songs for Drella, 1990)
The climax of Lou and John Cale’s brilliant, operatic remembrance of Andy Warhol is this furious piano ballad tracking Valerie Solanis’ botched assassination attempt. Lou’s decades-old indignation is palpable as he takes us inside multiple heads – Valerie’s, Andy’s and his own – in a plainspoken but complex pastiche of the day the Factory dream died.

The Last Shot (from Legendary Hearts, 1983)
Lou’s songs about his long and varied history with substance abuse are always winners for me. The casual matter-of-factness of this one sets it apart from most songs about kicking an addiction. Lou sounds almost blasé delivering theoretically horrific lines like “I shot a vein in my neck and I coughed up a Quaalude.” As the chorus goes, “When you quit, you quit,” and you can almost believe that it’s just that easy.

What’s Good (from Magic and Loss, 1992)
This preamble to what’s arguably Lou’s most powerful album sets the stage for all the confusion and soul-searching to follow, and still allows a little shimmer of hope to seep through all the cynicism. “What’s good? Life’s good (but not fair at all)” pretty much sums up the human experience as I see it.

Egg Cream (from Set the Twilight Reeling, 1996, though I prefer the version from the Blue in the Face soundtrack)
Childhood remembrances in Lou Reed songs are seldom positive things, but this salute to the quintessential New York beverage of his youth is buoyantly infectious.

Growing Up in Public (from Growing Up in Public, 1980)
The title track of an excellent album that’s often unfairly derided, this one features my all-time favorite pseudo-pretentious Lou Reed lyric: “They’re quasi-effeminate characters in love with oral gratification / They edify their integrities so they can prey on your fears.” Who else would have the temerity to slip that onto a major label rock album in the mid-1980s?

Temporary Thing (from Rock and Roll Heart, 1976)
Maybe the best of Lou’s numerous ‘70s “I’m Mr. Big Stuff” songs, this one is all swagger and sneer propelled by a sinister, insistent combination of piano and percussion.

The Heroine (from The Blue Mask, 1982)
This one is an anomaly in the Lou Reed catalog, and especially in the context of The Blue Mask. On an album that veers unpredictably between domesticity and depravity, the last thing one expects to find is Lou murmuring a murky seafaring metaphor accompanied only by a laconic guitar strum. But damned if it isn’t all the more effective for its incongruity.

Riptide (from Set the Twilight Reeling, 1996)
A grim, primal howl of guitar and macabre imagery churning along over Fernando Saunders’ perennially underrated bass work. It’s pretty cool that Lou’s gotten more and more metal as he’s grown older.

Lisa Says (from Lou Reed, 1971)
Lou’s cycle of “__ Says” songs are beloved for good reason, and this is the best of the pre-Berlin bunch. There’s not a whole lot to it, just a character sketch of a lonely young lady, but it’s one of the prettiest little songs Lou ever put together.

6 semi-obscure references the internet doesn't find as hilarious as I do

When the Washington Wizards recently fired head coach Flip Saunders, my first instinct was to rattle off a string of Twitter wisecracks about Flip’s early ‘90s tenure as coach of the minor league La Crosse Catbirds. “Wait a second,” I told myself, “Most people on the internet did not grow up in the greater La Crosse, Wisconsin area, where Flip’s back-to-back championships were the stuff of legend. Nor did most of your Twitter followers attend Flip’s remarkably half-assed basketball camp, the one where you shelled out good money to play in some pick-up games and watch Flip do a lot of ball-spinning tricks. Therefore, most of your audience will have no idea what you’re going on about.”

And so I kept my Flip Saunders-themed witticisms mostly to myself (mostly). There have been plenty of times, however, when my amusement over my many one-man in-jokes has gotten the better of me. If you’ve spent any internet time with me, here are a few choice references that may have caused your eyes to glaze over.

Quintet
Throughout the 1970s, Robert Altman cranked out an unstoppable parade of critically beloved, paradigm-expanding cinema classics. Quintet is not one of those. It’s generally dismissed, if not outright reviled, as one of Altman’s greatest failures, but I quite like it. It’s a post-apocalyptic story set after the second Ice Age, when most of humankind has retreated underground to obsess over a game called Quintet. The actual gameplay of Quintet is incomprehensible, but apparently it sometimes involves killing one’s opponents and royally pissing off Paul Newman.

Anyhow, any time it gets treacherously cold in Minnesota (which is fairly often), I crack a joke or two about trying to get a Quintet pick-up game going. I have no evidence that anyone has ever laughed at these jokes. I remain undaunted.

Dino, Desi and Billy
I just can’t understand how anyone can not find it fascinating that the pubescent sons of Dean Martin, Desi Arnaz and their Realtor formed a boy band in the mid-1960s. Even with the participation of genius producer Lee Hazelwood and the best bunch of studio musicians money could buy, DD&B’s blandiose covers of age-inappropriate tunes like “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and “Like a Rolling Stone” are nothing short of hilarious to me (and me alone, apparently).

Nathan Jawai
Nathan Jawai was a third-string center for one of the worst teams my hapless Minnesota Timberwolves ever fielded (seriously – the guys in front of Jawai were Ryan Hollins and Oleksi friggin’ Pecherov). He was also the first Indigenous Australian to play in the NBA. Ordinarily a doughy big man with a limited skill set is a guaranteed fan favorite, but Jawai’s lack of any discernible personality kept him from joining the ranks of Greg Ostertag and Robert “Tractor” Traylor. The few Wolves fans who even acknowledged his existence seemed mostly unaffected by it. Case in point: I once spotted Jawai shopping at a local Best Buy. It’s hard to miss a 6’10”, 280-pound Aboriginal Australian wearing a full Timberwolves warm-up suit, yet somehow my wife and I seemed to be the only people in the store who recognized him.

Personally, I found Big Nate’s brief presence in Minnesota delightful. I try to work his name into basketball conversations any time I can. Thus far he has inspired no more enthusiasm online than he did on the court.

Ornette Coleman / Stan Brakhage
OK, so these guys aren’t entirely obscure. Coleman and Brakhage are renowned within their circles as pioneers of, respectively, non-melodic jazz and non-narrative film. Still, Ornette Coleman and Stan Brakhage jokes are relative rarities in most circles that don’t include me. My usual riff involves me juxtaposing the formless nature of the artists’ work with the expected conventions of their genres. I might crack a one-liner about having an Ornette Coleman dance-off, for instance, or heap praise on the narrative complexities of Brakhage’s Mothlight. Heady stuff, I know. Hard to believe I haven’t found much audience for it.

Bob
Remember that great sitcom Bob Newhart named after himself? No, not that one. No, not that one either. I’m talking about Bob. Oh, you mean you don’t remember Bob? Don’t worry, you’re far from alone.

Me, I loved the first season of Bob. I have no idea if it would hold up for me nowadays, but I like bringing it up in online conversations as though it was some buried gem of ‘90s comedy. The rest of the internet seems nonplused by my references to the insanity of casting Bob Newhart as the creator of a hard-edged superhero comic book called Mad Dog, the comedic timing of supporting comics nerds Chad and Albie, or the timeless allure of Cynthia Stevenson in her “serving wench” uniform. Even worse, the web’s bizarre embrace of Betty White last year left me feeling betrayed and sick to my stomach. Everybody knows that meddling producers scuttled Bob’s second season by shifting the setting to a greeting card company and casting Betty White as Bob’s sharp-tongued supervisor. I just don’t see how the rest of you can forgive and forget a thing like that.

Sheb Wooley
Back when Twitter was first gaining cultural currency, parody celebrity accounts were all the rage. I was a big fan of fake Nick Cave, fake Christopher Walken, fake Bill Walton and several more. When the time inevitably came for me to launch a parody account of my own, I decided not to go after anyone too obvious, but I didn’t want to be pretentiously obscure either. I wanted to choose someone who’d make people say both, “I can’t believe someone bothered making a parody account for ___” and “Wow, that ___ parody account is surprisingly spot-on.” My perfect middle ground: @Sheb_Wooley, a Twitter account dedicated to the posthumous musings of the semi-beloved novelty songwriter, cowboy actor and Hee Haw regular.

For a while there, I counted @Sheb_Wooley as one of my proudest accomplishments. I focused on Sheb’s imaginary adventures on the fringes of the ‘60s and ‘70s Bakersfield and Hollywood establishments, making him a confidant of Clint Eastwood, Roy Clark and a wide array of my favorite character actors. (“When we were shooting ‘Josey Wales,’ I bet John Vernon $50 to eat a pair of cowboy boots. He only ate half of one but I paid up anyway.”) I found it all quite hilarious, but Sheb struggled to attract followers. His output pretty much petered out after a year, leaving 43 broken-hearted followers yearning for nonsensical anecdotes about Elisha Cook’s poker game and Buck Owens’ steamer trunk of mystery.

6 shameful things of which my writing has gotten me accused

I’ve been writing professionally for essentially my entire adult life. I’d like to think I’ve left most of my readers happy, or at least indifferent. Every now and then, though, I’ve managed to inadvertently plant my foot on some sensitive toes. Here are a few of the most heinous crimes against literature, decency and humanity of which I’ve been accused.

Basic racism
While penning a brief review of The O’Jays’ set at the 2003 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival for Where Y’at, I took specific note of the crowd’s infectious enthusiasm. Even though some would dismiss the O’Jays as a warmed over oldies act, I said, “this music obviously means the world to these people.”

A few days after the issue hit the streets, we received a letter from a local activism group cautioning us that “these people” could be interpreted as a dismissive slur against African-Americans. I was baffled at first, as the crowd in question was made up of folks of every color, creed, and stage of sobriety. On further reflection I got where they were coming from. It remains a useful reminder that no matter my innocent intention, it always pays to keep my potential audience's interpretation in mind.

Ignorance of railroad terminology
Not long after I started my first writing gig as intern reporter for my hometown newspaper, my editor called me into his office and told me he wanted to make me into “the Charles Kuralt of Monroe County, Wisconsin.” That entailed me taking a weekly trip to one of the tiny towns that dotted the county and writing a profile of the community’s history and culture, such as it was.

Some towns lent themselves to this format better than others. When I couldn’t come up with much to say about a place, I’d do my best to fill out my word count with trivia. When tasked with covering the generally charmless railroad town of Wyeville, for instance, I eked a few sentences out of the fact that the “wye” in the village’s name referred to a Y-shaped intersection of crisscrossing train tracks. Two days later my editor got an angry letter from the proprietor of the nearby Little Falls Railroad and Doll Museum. He explained in less-than-friendly terms that a wye was actually triangular, not Y-shaped, and that I should be sure I had my vocabulary straight before I included railroad terminology in any future articles. My editor wrote the guy off as a crank, but I had to admit the gentleman had a point. Then again, homeboy also ran a Railroad and Doll Museum.

Spreading anti-teacher propaganda
One of the toughest aspects of business copywriting is coming up with fresh spins on the same information week after week. During my stint as a copywriter for a women’s active wear retailer, I once wrote a lead-in for an early summer sale that went something like, “Once you’ve graduated, the end of the school year loses a lot of its excitement. (Unless you’re a teacher!)”

Later that week the company owner got an email from a woman who was outraged that we would perpetuate the stereotype of lazy schoolteachers spending their summer vacations slacking off on the taxpayers’ dime. That interpretation had never crossed my mind. For the record, I’m 100% pro-teacher. I just meant that they probably get a little bit excited to put another year’s worth of raucous students behind them. I mean, they do, right?

Oppressing Native Americans and/or Juggalos
When I started writing an article for MadeLoud about pop music’s shameful history of caricaturing and marginalizing Native Americans, I wanted to include a few positive counterexamples. I looked for Native American musicians who had found success on their own terms without being pigeonholed into roles predetermined by the white-dominated music industry. One of these artists was Anybody Killa, a Michigan-based rapper closely affiliated with Insane Clown Posse.

It didn’t take long for someone to misinterpret my intentions. A week later I got a message from a young Juggalo who wanted me to know that Anybody Killa was his own man and was going to be a force on the music scene for years to come. He was especially upset that I claimed that the most prevalent portrayals of Native Americans in recent music have come from non-Natives. I think he read “prevalent” as a qualitative rather than a quantitative term. He wrapped things up by telling me that it was a pointless article that probably shouldn’t have been written. I sent him a polite reply letting him know that we were really on the same page and assuring him that I wished Anybody Killa all the success in the world. I never heard back.

Exploiting a long-dead child-star
In 2009 my MadeLoud editor asked me to review Benjy Ferree’s new concept album Come Back to the Five and Dime Bobby Dee Bobby Dee, a tribute to the short, troubled life of ‘50s child star Bobby Driscoll. I liked the album so much that I immediately requested an audience with Ferree. The resulting interview is one of my favorites that I’ve done, a glimpse into the weird, wonderful mind of a talented singer-songwriter who’s really into old Disney movies.

I was taken aback a few weeks later when I got a message from a woman claiming to be Mr. Driscoll’s daughter. She accused me of exploiting her father’s memory by giving Benjy Ferree a forum and implied that I was an insensitive profiteer of other people’s pain. She also noted that Driscoll’s death was drug-related but not, as I’d stated, caused by an overdose. (I’d read “overdose” in several sources, but I changed the wording anyway.)

I’ll admit I felt sort of bad about this one, even though I firmly believe that I did nothing wrong. An arts writer’s job is to write about art, and Benjy Ferree’s album was one of the most compelling works of art I’d encountered in a while. Still, I can’t help but sympathize with a person who’s likely been contending with salacious, half-informed media accounts of her father’s sad decline for her whole life. I think Ferree’s celebration of Bobby Dee – and, transitively, my coverage of it – is respectful to the point of reverent, but that’s easy to say from this angle.

Golden Retriever ownership
After I moved from New Orleans to Chicago in late 2003, I started writing a monthly column for Where Y’at about the difficulties of readjusting to the Midwest after finally getting acclimated to the wonderful weirdness of the Crescent City. One of my early columns focused on the relative difficulty of entertaining visitors – Chicago offered plenty of activities, but it was a far cry from New Orleans, a city where nearly every corner hides something most folks have never seen before.

The Where Y’at message board soon received a lengthy diatribe from a young woman who’d recently made the reverse move, from Chicago to New Orleans. She accused me (with a certain amount of justification) of willfully resisting the charms of Chicago and over-romanticizing New Orleans. That was all well and good, but near the end of her missive, she characterized me as the type of guy who barreled around Lincoln Park in my shiny new SUV, trying to squeeze in a five-minute run for my Golden Retriever at the local dog park before heading back to my overpriced, lake-adjacent condo. I can handle criticism, but I really felt that crossed a line. Golden Retrievers are gross.