GREATEST MOVIE CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME #4: MICHAEL CORLEONE

I don't want to get into a big 'best' vs. 'favorite' argument, but Michael Corleone is the best movie character ever. If you can pull an argument like 'the Greeks didn't write the best tragedies', respond, but frankly, I needed an easy choice in this list to get through this, so don't dispute me. Really, I'm trying, honest.

Stinkrock, pt. 2

Earlier this month, I traded emails with a guy who was interested in the stinkrock moniker. I gave him my spiel, and asked for pictures of his cats. Well, he came through, big time, and has a lot to say about rock and roll.

I get a big charge about hearing strangers talk about rock 'n' roll, and this cat owner says some brilliant stuff about it, so I include the bulk of his email here. Good on you, man.









Hi There Stinkrock,
Thank you for a vey nice letter. Yes, I do recall the term
stinkrock as per 60's rock. It had not occured to me. I think it is very unique,
unlike so many others I've seen.
I am enclosing some pictures of Rocky & Stinker, since you asked.
Stinker was born in a junk yard, and as a little tyke, used to stare
at me from a distance. This went on for 2 years, till I was able to
handle him while eating. He took a great liking to Rocky, who I fell
in love with at a cat shelter, Grateful Paw...Stinker weighing 12 lbs, would roll Rocky who weighs 16lbs, a muscular animal, like he was nothing. Something looked right to me. Till Stinker was bitten in the paw and needed to be
hospitalized for a month and a lot of money. Too late, you are no
longer running free in the junk yard. So it was at a park only, and he
was wild. Weeks later, he surrendered. So here we are now, the three
of us live out of my van, yes ...van, and they go to the park everyday
and come back to me almost right on scedule. In Commack we live. So at
this moment, i am 53, Rocky 10, Stinker 5. From the way I handle them,
they are a comedy duo...very funny. I've had 2 strokes from industrial
accident........long story. So there you have it. I am a extreme lover
of the Rock & Roll scene....1957-1987.........Favorite album by far is
'to our childrens children...moody blues & Today....Beach Boys. Jimmy
Page is the guitarist for all early Rolling Stones...did you know
that?...........ELO..........all pop, like monkees..motown,
philidelphia sounds.............The greatest artistic achievement for
mankind is Rock & Roll...a mans greatest achievement is the Pieta, by
Michealangelo. There is no end.......................Thanks for the
nice letter. If you feel like giving up the name, well......consider
me..................

Posting frequency

I realize that the blogger police have got together and recommended that good blogs update frequently. Well, I'm blowing it all out in one night. You know what? Read slow.

(Yeah, I know it should be 'slowly', misanthrope. Eat me.)

the stinkrock pulitzer

it goes to andre the giant. I don't know exactly what for, all i know is that any award i give out here is going to be called the 'stinkrock pulitzer'.

And Andre wins it for this.

JANUARY

January's over and I'm back. That wasn't a hiatus, that was a mourning period.

Turkmenbashi, the dictator of Turkmenistan, died in December. 'My favorite dictator' is not an attractive turn of phrase, especially for a man who had such a repressive dictatorship, but I gotta admit: If I was running a country and was completely insane, I don't think I could do a better job than Saparmurat Niyazov. January was the month of mourning, because he renamed it after himself.

The fact is, I would love to be a dictator, just so I could write my own job description. So when I run my country/island, here are three things Turkmenbashi did that I would do in a heartbeat, and only because he thought to:

'(3) He banned opera. This one's so obvious, so simple, that no run-of-the-mill dictator would remember to. Opera's like ballet with no sex appeal; I can see ballet fan leg-fetishists who suddenly go blind having fun at an opera, but that's about it, gone.

Also: my dad's a big fan of opera, and he'd be *pissed* if I got rid of it. It makes up for the fact that he bought an SUV recently. I bet dictators have a lot of daddy issues.

(2) Turkmenbashi wrote a book called the 'Ruhnama' full of his own bullshit to be taught in schools and replace history texts. Yeah, yeah, boring, easy dictator stuff. The beautiful Turkmenbashi twist? He also made it part of the driving test.

If Graham Chapman and Terry Jones hadn't left this mortal coil, I'd bet my weight in gold that Monty Python were running Turkmenistan after I read this.

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*UPDATE* Terry Jones isn't dead. Jesus, that was a terrible mistake.
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(1) Turkmenbashi built a statue of himself that rotates so that it always faces the sun. That is *beautiful*.

more wine?

For the next three days, diners in NY, LA, Chicago and Batcrab Creek, IL dining at select Italian restaurants may receive a free glass of wine to promote the second season of the HBO series 'Rome'. Because what says Italy like a glass of wine with your pasta, even if that wine is made in California? It's as if they're saying, "If you ever find yourself a little drunk and watch Rome! It's a little better when you're drunk!"

This is a fantastic idea. for the next Stinkrock-related release in 2007, I'm going to give away a pint of the cheapest, brownest booze ever to roll off a truck in the back corner of the parking lot of the all-night liquor store by the truck driver who's leaving his wife next week anyway.

It's as if I'm saying "Get drunker than you ever have in your life. the next day when you're imprisoned on your couch and you're trying to eat your way out of a coma-over, listen to *this*!"

Booze = "pay attention to me." That's stinkmath.

Spiders on drugs

I've been trying to kick caffeine over the last several months, and it's been a hell of a shift. i'm the caffeine spider, and you're the thc spider.

Yes, i know it's a joke.

stinkrock

so I'm trying to figure out what the hell to do with this here blog in 2007. I haven't written (or attempted to anything as good as Waved Rumor's last post in a long time, and probably won't. It's easy and fun to get bombarded by content and struggle to find any voice to say something without fear of being repetitive, 'cos the kids like it shiny and new. I think I unwittingly assigned myself a 'what does stinkrock mean to me in 2007?' homework assignment.

I'll admit I've lost steam on making music. There's so much good music being made, and better yet there's so much good music that has been made. Fatigue has definitely rounded the square edges in my brain, but on a much greater scale I've encountered songcraft and sound that's helped shape my life. I've always assumed there'd be a point I'd reach where I'd eventually stop playing so much and listen more to other voices. Music, after all, is communication, and other voices are stronger and readier than mine.

Then today I got this email:

-------------------------------
Hi,
I want to know who stinkrock is....I wanted to use that name as a
handle...I have 2 cats, Rocky & Stinker.............Do you really want
this name? Please write.
-------------------------------

It's a friendly note, but there was something about that phrase "do you really want this name?" that got to me.
So I wrote, and I realized I didn't want to relinquish the Stinkrock handle or the Stinkrock music or the Stinkrock idea just yet. Here's what I wrote:

I'm afraid I'm a bit married to it and have a lot of subscriptions coming through it, so I'm going to hold onto it. What does it mean to me?

Stinkrock is a musical genre that describes rock bands who ignore slickness and scaleability for viscera and experience, 'warts and all' as they say. It's named after the second release by the legendary Minneapolis bar band The Replacements, which was called 'Stink' (released 25 years ago; jeez I'm getting old). To me it describes the devil-may-care-but-doesn't attitude that I find to be the quintessential ingredient in what makes the music in my life and times pure. Sure, I got into bands in college to meet girls, but then you get the bug, and you stick with it for something more.

But Stinkrock is an attitude, not just a sound. I don't know how well you know your rock 'n' roll history, but back in the '60s being in a rock band was hard. You could get a deal from a record label pretty easily but you were still scorned. Frank Sinatra's Reprise label put out rock'n'roll records but do you know what Ol' Blue Eyes said about rock and roll? He said, " Rock 'n Roll is the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear." And you know what? He was right. rock and roll *is* brutal, ugly, desperate and vicious.

Or at least it's supposed to be. In recent years it's been tied into fashion and really gone off the tracks. So for me, holding onto the name is a wisp of a notion that the spirit of rock and roll hasn't completely disappeared. I hope you can understand.

Sorry if I prattled on too long, it's an unseasonably warm day in New York City and I found my way into a drinking establishment a little earlier than I'd care to. Anyway, Stinker and Rocky (particularly Stinker) are great cat names, and I hope you can find a suitable combining alternative. Have you considered rockstink? Or stinkerrock?

Thanks for listening. Send pix of your cats if you have them, I like animals.
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In retrospect, it's a pretty annoying response, and I don't expect to hear back from Name Withheld. But that's my peripatetic brain at work.

So I'm going another year. And if I get pictures of those cats, you'll be the first to know.

GREATEST MOVIE CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME #3: BEETLEJUICE

"I'm the ghost with the most, babe."

Ask me any day, and I will tell you that the music, movies and pop culture that you love hooks you when you're 15-16 years old. There's no stronger reference.

When I was 15, my friend Andy bought an Amiga, the first computer ever built to sample audio and video. This was in the late 80s. The first thing he did with his machine was to load in audio of Michael Keaton's turn as beetlejuice. I'd go over to his house and he had created the first ever Beetlejuice sampler. We'd wander around high school perfecting our Beetlejuice voices reciting lines like 'ooh la la - what do we got here? The Maitlands....cute couple. Look nice and stupid! ha ha ha ha ha. '

Beetlejuice is the best movie ever made about death; it takes the comical view that the whole experience is a bureaucracy, and getting to die gracefully requires the ability to work through a DMV. The Maitlands (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) get assigned a caseworker, unsuccessfully try to haunt their own house, and puzzle over The Handbook for the Recently Deceased. This was Tim Burton in his Beatles '65 period; he had just made Pee Wee's Big Adventure, he went on to make the best Batmans. This period ends, btw, when he made the hilarious and completely misunderstood Mars Attacks!, and reinvented himself as a Johnny Depp vehicle. (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was on cable today, and it's unwatchable. It's absolutely terrible.)

Michael Keaton is the funniest guy who ever showed up in movies in the late '80s. Michael Keaton is easily the best Batman ever committed to celluloid; he steals every scene he's in in Tarantino's Jackie Brown, but he absolutely kills as Mr. Mom and Beetlejuice. This movie was reportedly not even supposed to be a comedy; it was going to be a morbid drama about death until Michael Keaton started ad libbing his scenes, and as a result, it's the only gallows humor screwball comedy I can think of.

Anyway, Keaton's only got a few scenes in this flick; about 30 minutes when the Maitlands first enlist his help, he lets spew a monologue that makes me fudge my shorts. The guy's scene the Exorcist 167 fuckin' times, and it keeps getting funner every single time he sees it. And in the big showstopping number at the end, when Winona Ryder (in the quintessential 'I can't wait until you're 18 so I can fantasize about you legally' role) agrees to marry him to save the Maitlands from her family, it gets amazing.

So what the hell happened to Michael Keaton, anyway?

happy new year!

hey occasional stinkrock reader,

What a mindbending AC/December. I barely survived, but I'm more alive than ever. Best wishes to you in '07.

I'm a listmaker, but I have no lists. Instead, I've got three things to share to kick '06.

#1: This was the most fascinating thing I saw this year. Malcolm Gladwell sits with guys who think they've hit on a formula for making movies into $$. If the video doesn't load the first time, refresh the page. If you still can't see it, email me.

(This is a long clip, but it's required viewing. Carve out the time.)

#2: My favorite rock band of the 20 o-o's is Mclusky, and Andy Falkous, the lightsabre cocksucking bluesman who ran that band has finally resurfaced with his new project 'Future of the Left'. Check out the first two songs at their myspace page and get in on the ground level. As always, remember that the best bands can't afford to be professional musicians.

#3. Did you ever see Cool Hand Luke? Read the interview with the original Luke. Build your life and make '07 a good year.