Ladies and Gentlemen
—
The Phil Hendrie Show!

By Lars Trodson

I was googling down the radio dial some months ago —
searching for something, anything, to listen to — and
I only had to briefly and lightly touch upon any show I came
across to know I didn’t want to visit very long.

I
heard the grating voice of Laura Ingraham saying — "…and
that liberal blowhard Ted Kennedy —" Click.

Millionaire Rush Limbaugh saying — "…and what
the liberal media elite won’t tell you about Ted Kennedy
is —" Click.

The subtle voice of Howie Carr wafted over the airwaves,
"… and Ted Kennedy down there in Washington —"
(heard with sound effects of a beer being poured.) Click.

Sean Hannity (who is still upset the verb ‘Hannitize’
never, ever caught on) reminded listeners, "…while
trashing Judge Alito, Ted Kennedy must have taken the time
to forget Chappa-" Click.

I then heard Mike Savage asking people to "…tell
Ted Kennedy that liberalism is a mental disorder…"
Click.

Bill
O’Reilly offered the enlightened position that
"…Ted Kennedy is a pinhead —" Click.

Matt Drudge took the time to tell his listeners that "…Clinton
defender Ted Kennedy fell on the floo-" Click.

Ann Coulter, the lawyer, can never forget that "…Harvard
kicked Ted Kennedy out of —" Click.

Click. Click. Click.

Oh, my God! Really! Ack! Who has time to listen to any of
that? I’ll save you some time: liberals are terrible
people, awful people, with no morals, (if not downright treasonous).
Don’t vote for them. There. I’ve saved you hours
of valuable time this week.

And then something strange happened. I stopped googling.
(I know, I know; I’m just using that word because it
amuses me). As I was about to go on to the next station, I
hesitated in order to listen to the strangest interview I
had ever heard on the radio.

A kid by the name of RC Collins, who claimed to be a military
cadet, was complaining about having to go to a concert in
a classmate’s car, which he considered beneath him when
his own parents had a BMW at home they wouldn’t let him
drive. I could not for the life of me make heads or tails
out of the conversation, but suddenly, inexplicably, I started
to laugh. Not just mild little titters, but body-rocking convulsive
laughs.

What was this?

It was, ladies and gentleman, Phil
Hendrie. And I found him on the dial at 930 AM, WGIN
out of little old Rochester, N.H. at 10 p.m. each weekday.
Hendrie’s syndicated show is based out of California.

Now, after my first initiation to Hendrie, I went back night
after night to further my understanding of this incredible
show, and each night the same, odd thing happened … I
could not stop laughing at these truly odd, twisted interviews
Hendrie was conducting over the airwaves. First, I couldn’t
fathom where he actually found these whackos and second, I
couldn’t imagine why they stayed on the air so long.
Like the guy on an anti-drug crusade who was found with a
pound of pot in the back of his truck — a stash he later
blamed on his own son to get out of the charge. Or the man
who claimed that all men should have the DNA of their children
tested as a way to get back at their wives.

These people stay on the phone with Hendrie long enough to
get some calls from outraged listeners, and the responses
to these callers are truly demented. The conversations are
almost insanely entertaining — and way off-color sometimes,
I must say — and each night I have to take the headphones
off because rather than falling into slumber I tend to be
laughing myself further awake. So I have to quit about 90
minutes in.

It turns out there is a secret to all these interviews. It’s
shtick, for sure, but great shtick, done with heart and soul,
and I was, in fact, even more in awe of Hendrie’s talent
after I found out how he actually pulled these things off.
I won’t tell you what it is — you can find out easily
enough on the Internet — but I suggest you listen in
for a few sessions just as I did before you get too knowledgeable
about the whole proceedings.

I think Phil Hendrie is one of those great and true American
entertainers. He’s the descendant of Edgar Bergen and
Sid Caesar and Red Skelton and Flip Wilson and anybody else
who had the notion that comedy can come in many different
voices and guises. He’s a guy who has obviously honed
his craft over the years, paid attention to what he’s
doing and how he’s doing it (just like those earlier
guys), and is committed to the idea that if you spend any
time at all listening to his show he’s going to give
you your money’s worth. He should be an American institution
and I think in some comedy circles he may be considered as
such.

Give The Phil Hendrie Show a listen (and turn your political
education over to the local issues in your town rather than
listening to those national shows) — and phone in to
tell Hendrie you want to hear ‘We Built this City (On
Rock and Roll’) by Jefferson Starship sometime. I’ll
be listening in, amused to no end, with what he has to say
to that.

Lars Trodson can be reached at larstrodson@comcast.net.
Any and all criticisms about the blandness of radio do not
apply to the great local station WSCA-LP, 106.1 on your immediate
FM dial.

Drowning in the cultural sea

By Lars Trodson

OK, I get it — enough with the “Brokeback Mountain”
jokes already. Anybody who can fire off a joke about this
gay cowboy-themed movie I’ll give you credit: you can
hit the side of a barn door. Good for you. But now, please,
I beg you, find another obvious culture target and move on.

Listen, I’m not above the fray: The other day I said
to my friend, in a faux Southern accent: “I just wish
I could quit you.” So freakin’ hilarious. It was
right then I knew I was in trouble.

I
am gently trying to ease my way out of this super-saturated
TV/broadcast/podcast/phonecast world we live in (sometimes
successfully, sometimes not) precisely because of its oppressive
nature. I’m begging my wife to cancel the cable, in part
because everything seems so bizarrely similar in that digital
world. I don’t expose myself to a lot of any of that,
but if I’m sick of hearing “Brokeback Mountain”
jokes, imagine how anyone who listens and watches a fair amount
of these entertainment or talk shows must feel.

Everything sounds and looks like it’s in a continuous
loop: If I start watching the news, I can flip the channels
and it seems as though every network is talking about the
exact same thing. Why do they each send their own reporter?
If I turn on CNN, there is Wolf Blitzer. Every time.

I caught a snippet of an entertainment magazine the other
day and they were interviewing one of the “Desperate
Housewives” and the host says “Is she desperate
to win a Golden Globe?” Ugh. How many times do you think
some writer or host has slipped in that word when talking
to one of the stars of that show? How do you think the stars
of that show must feel when they hear it? For the millionth
time?

SPLIT!!! Pitts call it quits

I mentioned the other day that I have spent years oblivious
to the charms of Jennifer Aniston, but now she annoys me —
and it isn’t even her fault. Everywhere I turn there
she is — with some oblique mention of him. "Is Jen over
Brad?," "What didn’t Brad tell Jen?,"
"Jen moves on," "Why hasn’t Jen moved
on?," "Jen talks about life, love and friendship,"
(ugh), "What will Jen do next?" and the always enticing,
"Jen and Vince; The real story behind their friendship."
Ugh. She’s in the supermarket tabloids and glossy magazines
and in the newspapers and in every other movie released this
year. And the odd thing is, every time I see her on the television
I witness a young woman so coiled up, so closed up by all
this megawatt attention, that she isn’t really terribly
interesting any more. I don’t blame her — so, for the
sake of her sanity and mine, leave her alone and let her become
a human being again.

Angelina Jolie romantically linked to Kim Jong Il

It seems as though no phrase — no matter how well-turned,
no matter how trite — will now get buried under an avalanche
of undue attention. The other day I saw a photo of Angelina
Jolie — a woman who, for whatever reason (because I don’t
know her, obviously) — strikes me as charming and intelligent
and reasonably grounded. But in this photo she was referred
to as "Brangelina." Oh, boy — here we have the
nexus of him again, that man, and her, and a new version of
an already tired contraction that was used all those years
for Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. Brangelina. It doesn’t
work. You can’t say it. Stop using it.

Same thing with the "Brokeback Mountain" stuff.

From what I hear — because I haven’t seen the movie,
although I will — is that it is a lovely, touching, heartfelt
movie that’s managing to survive upstream in the deep
sewage of our well-worn sexual insecurities.

Because, you know that — heh heh — every time we regular
folk — ha — talk — ahem — about gay male sex — ha ha
— in this country — heh — we try to make — ha — light
of it — cough — because, you know — hee hee — we’re
not gay and — heh cough — and — heh — well, you know —
cough — we’re not gay — cough.

So what we get from the mainstream yukmeisters out there
is a stream of Humpback or Bareback Mountain jokes, over and
over and over again and I’m already sick of the poor
movie even before I’ve had a chance to reasonably make
up my own mind about it.

And just like all those "Bareback Mountain" jokes,
I’ve run out of steam. I was thinking of trying to end
this column on some witty note, but then I realized the whole
enterprise was most assuredly not very funny to begin with.

Lars Trodson can be reached at larstrodson@comcast.net.

Negative
reality

By Lars Trodson

When I was maybe 13 or 14 years old I stood in line at a
boat show in Providence, R.I., and, when it was my turn, received
an autographed picture of a Playboy Playmate. Oddly, one of
the things I remember most about the encounter was that she
spelled my name right. When I was growing up, no one ever
spelled my name right.

I have long forgotten who the Playmate was, but I remember
it was a black and white picture, and she was a pretty blonde.
I put it in the top drawer of my desk with a lot of other
junk and it has long since vanished; lost to the garbage bin
of history.

It served a useful purpose, though, because I could say to
friends who came over to the house that I knew a Playboy Centerfold.
This was usually followed by a negative frathouse reply, but
when I produced the picture the encounter was proved. I would
still be good-naturedly called a jerk for embellishing the
relationship, but a moment or two was nonetheless taken to
look over the picture and debate the physical aspects of our
mutual acquaintance. Give me a break on this; we were teenage
boys.

What’s
important about this story, in so much as it is important,
is that a photograph was used, and acknowledged, as proof
that something happened. I had met a Playboy Playmate and
no one disputed that because you could see it with your own
two eyes. She had signed it, written my name, and so there
it was.

No more. A photograph — one of the great tools of journalism,
one of the great methods of recording history as it has happened
— would no longer be taken as proof-positive that anything
had happened. There isn’t a kid at the age of 13 or 14 who
wouldn’t come back after looking at what I once used as evidence,
and say: "What’d you use, Photoshop?"

This all came to mind when I read a recent story in the New
York Times about how networks use computer generated images
to insert some product placement into TV shows. There, in
the photo, was a depiction of a couple of actors from "Yes,
Dear" and a coffee table in front of them. Here’s how
the New York Times described it on Jan. 2:

"Viewers of last April 25’s episode of the CBS show
"Yes, Dear" may have noticed a box of Club Crackers
sitting on a living room coffee table, next to a plate of
cheese. What they did not know was that the box did not really
exist, at least not on the set.

"The Club Crackers box was inserted into the scene through
virtual product placement, a process that uses computer graphics
and digital editing to put products like potato chips, soda
and shopping bags into television programs after the shows
are filmed or taped. As with traditional product placement,
producers can sell screen time on their programs to advertisers
eager to reach consumers who now have the ability to skip
traditional commercials using digital recorders like TiVo.

"According
to PQ Media, a media research firm, spending on product placement
totaled $3.45 billion in 2004. Of that amount, $1.88 billion
was spent on television, $1.25 billion on movies and $326
million on other media. While digital product placement has
been around at least since the 1990s, when it was introduced
largely for greater flexibility in featuring various brands,
it has gained traction on network television recently as advertisers
increasingly look beyond the traditional 30-second spot to
reach consumers."

It’s fast becoming very easy to simply not trust our eyes:
I see the box of Club Crackers, but I also know it isn’t really
there. How does my brain learn to process and accept this
conundrum? Should it even bother, or simply relax and get
used to the idea that everything might be fake?

Last year the movie version of the beloved Christmas tale
"The Polar Express" came out. The movie, which was
poorly reviewed — largely because the computer-generated
people in the movie looked creepy (an assessment with which
I agree) — and because it had padded out what was essentially
a very succinctly written fable.

It was strange, though, when the actors tried to explain
the process of the filming, which was something called "captured
performance." This meant their bodies were wired up,
the movements recorded on a computer, and then those detailed
records of the bodily movements were used to create the computerized
"performances" on the screen.

I remember thinking: Why didn’t they just film the actors?
What is this business of recording the movements, then recreating
them through a computer? It was as though the performances
wouldn’t be considered real unless they had been replicated
digitally. And from what I saw of the film, neither the actors’
movements nor their faces looked real at all. (But it does
beg another question: When a movie created entirely inside
a computer finally gets put out on DVD, in what dimension
does that movie actually exist?)

I think it is a very tricky thing to start altering the reality
around us. We need to trust what we see, of course, but we’ve
already started to question that. I can understand and even
appreciate the cleverness of using this new technology to
send a message to consumers, but it reminds me of that line
in "Jurassic Park" — a movie reference that is
appropriate enough — when Jeff Goldblum asks if even though
something can be done, should it be done?

Some self-governance is needed here. There are all kinds
of things that can be done, but should we, for the sake of
how we relate to our world, and how we fix our own place in
it? A thousand years ago a sailor could get across the ocean
by looking at the stars and trusting what he saw. There was
no questioning the reality of the stars, or the information
they provided. The same stars are there, but these fixed points
almost seem antiquated now, obsolete — certainly not terribly
sophisticated or fancy — and we certainly don’t use them
to find our way in the world any more. We have a GPS for that.

Well, I wish I still had that Playboy Playmate picture. Not
that I have any affection for the photo, or the woman in it,
but so many years have passed since I first got it, and I’ve
been faked out a million times by what I thought I’ve seen
since then, that I’d like to see the picture again just to
make sure that that brief adolescent encounter I thought I
had actually happened.

Lars Trodson can be reached at larstrodson@comcast.net.

Lars
Trodson archives

Of
Calvin & Hobbes, Andy Capp and Van Gogh

By
Lars Trodson

It’s a strange world, inside those little boxes on the comics
page.

This was brought to mind a couple of weeks back when my friend
Don Kerr wrote in his column "The
Culling" about the creator of Calvin and Hobbes
who walked away from it all 10 years ago. I liked what Don
wrote, although I disagreed with it, and it got me to thinking
about this odd three-paneled landscape that causes so much
passion among people. More on what Don wrote later, but first:

As a newspaper editor for many years, there are several things
that can really destroy an editor’s day and they are a) screwing
up the lottery numbers, b) screwing up an obituary (not a
minor thing), c) not running the crossword puzzle answers
and d) making a decision to stop running a particular comic.

Newspaper editors have now more or less opted out of this
last debate. When the time comes to crease out a comic, editors
usually do a reader’s poll to see which comic comes out on
top, and then they can throw up their hands and say: "It
wasn’t my choice!"

I suppose if you lament how fast our world is changing then
one can always look to the comics page for reassurance that
there are some things that never really change. Some newspapers
are still running "Peanuts," which I find both disturbing
and sad. Other comics such as "Beetle Bailey" or
"Family Circus" became family affairs, in which
a child of the creator has taken on the mantle of pushing
what is an anachronism — taking what is essentially a 1930s
radio sitcom, say, such as "Blondie" — and wedging
it into the 21st century. Somehow.

I can remember, in my 20s, laughing out loud to a comic called
"Bloom County" but other than that they never really
made me laugh. In my childhood, when I did read the page both
in the daily paper, which back then was the evening edition
of the Providence Journal, and in the Sunday paper, I found
it a playground full of boozers, misogynists, awkward slapstick,
hedonism, treacly sentimentality and tedious soap operas,
such as Prince Valiant, which gave you the scantiest of plot
developments possible in a few panels of ink.

People
my age will recall the sweet surrealism of "Nancy,"
penned by the estimable Ernie Bushmiller, which chronicled,
even in my day, the hapless exploits of two youngsters trapped
inside the obstacles posed by growing up in the Great Depression.
Sluggo may have been anti-social, but he really didn’t impress
me as much as H. Rap Brown or any of the other firebrands
parading across the news pages in 1968.

At some point, in the early 1970s, came "Doonesbury,"
which was difficult to digest. I didn’t quite get the "Guilty!
Guilty! Guilty!" liberalism of that strip at the time.
I wasn’t drawn to it. Rather, each night at the dinner table
in my house I was exposed to the points of view of my father,
the former Marine, who was a conservative Republican, and
my mother, who was a Connecticut liberal and who had hung
a small poster on the cupboard of the kitchen that said: "War
is not healthy for children or other living things."
You can imagine the conversation.

My dad, in those long-gone days of the middle 1960s and early
1970s, was also a drinker (a very, very bad habit he gave
up in 1972), so the late-night brawls of Andy Capp both fascinated
and repelled me. When Andy walked home in the middle of the
night intoxicated I didn’t necessarily find that funny, I
kind of used it to validate my own landscape.

It
was around this time I noticed that an abnormal amount of
drinking went on in the comics page: Gen. Halftrack of "Beetle
Bailey" was always swilling a martini while ogling Miss
Buxley. Hagar the Horrible always seemed to have a mug of
beer, there were the genial domestic hijinks in "Hi and
Lois," in the "Wizard of Id" there was a court
jester who was constantly smashed and the overstuffed reporters
in "Shoe" had a tree-loft bar where they always
seemed to retire.

I thought, this is a very strange atmosphere for a child.
I imagine things have changed, however. But when I looked
at the comics page the other day there was some offhand swearing
(In one comic some kids are watching TV and one says, "This
program inhales." In the next panel, the mother says
to the father "I told him not to use the S* word in front
of the other children." At first I thought the word was
"shit," but then I realized it was "sucks."
No matter, vices still abound on the comics page.

Given that so much of the behavior on that page is mummified
and unfunny, it is no wonder my friend D. Allan Kerr of "The
Culling" fame writes with admiration about how the artist
behind "Calvin and Hobbes" decided to split the
game at the top of his craft.

Comics artists, much like politicians, don’t know when to
leave the stage. Perhaps they are congenitally unable to,
so it is a relief and an anomaly when one decides to break
from the pack.

But to say, as Don did, that this is a stamp of artistic
integrity is a bit off the mark. Bill Watterson apparently
dropped the insanely popular strip in 1995 and walked away.
I have a vague memory of the child and his stuffed animal,
but since I didn’t read it I never became a fan. I was too
busy emulating my heroes in "Shoe" to notice what
was going on.

Don writes: "The truth is, the artist has to eat and
pay bills to survive. And yeah, it’d be nice to get some appreciation
every once in a while, too. The trick is in doing so without
selling yourself out. That’s why Bill Watterson should be
an inspiration to anyone with any serious artistic inclination."

One has to get rich and famous to walk away from it, and
then of course, once you are rich, it isn’t much of a sacrifice.
Later I learn from Don that Watterson didn’t exactly chuck
it all, he allows, in his artistic purity, his publisher to
issue anthologies of the work, which have sold upwards of
30 million copies. If he really wanted to impress me he’d
stop the machinery altogether and let it live unsullied, as
a little strip once published in your local paper. If you
really were passionate about the strip you could go to your
local library and Xerox that day’s comic out of each daily
edition of the newspaper and collect it that way, I suppose.

Now, Don and I have had a million conversations about the
role of the artist and how much one should commit to the cause.
He and I have always diverged on one simple point, and it
is one that he repeats in his column: "It’s lovely to
romanticize the lonely painter/writer/musician/whatever holed
up in an inner-city apartment or isolated cave, churning out
works of brilliance for the sake of creation, unsullied by
ambition or avarice. We celebrate the concept of the uncompromising
artist, the pure idealist, but who among us is willing to
make the sacrifices such commitment requires?"

Well, a lot of people, including the celebrated Mr. Watterson,
to answer that last question. He was holed up in his garret
drawing strips before he became rich and famous, I would imagine.
But no one, I don’t think, celebrates the artist who works
in obscurity; he’s not really a valid character to emulate
because the end result is unhappy; it means all that work
didn’t pan out. That’s not a good goal.

But what I find, on occasion, is that I marvel at someone
like Van Gogh, whose creativity never wavered despite lacking
that external validation so many of us require — well, that
all of us require in one form or another, no matter what we
do.

To
continue to pursue your singular vision, and end up with a
body of work, despite poverty and despite madness is, to me,
one of those odd miracles of nature. What I, personally, take
away from that is the idea that if Van Gogh can attack an
empty canvas under those circumstances then I certainly can
look at a blank screen and attempt to write despite the fact
I’m feeling a little blue. But I don’t prefer this story.
I wish Van Gogh had gotten known and made a little money in
his own lifetime.

So I’m not rooting for anyone to enter the Posthumously Famous
Hall of Fame. I hate the idea of true brilliance never getting
the proper recognition it deserves. Despite the incredible
opportunities out there for people to work and to write and
to paint, it still happens.

I understand Mr. Watterson walked away from it all, but he
was a millionaire when he did that. Good for him, but I don’t
celebrate and admire that guy so much as I do the guy who
must have taken his idea, this Calvin and Hobbes idea, and
drafted it and refined it and kept at it when no one was looking,
when no one knew if it would ever see the light of day.

Lars Trodson can be reached at larstrodson@comcast.net

Read
more columns by Lars Trodson.

What one man can accomplish

An appreciation of
Arthur Miller          By
Lars Trodson

Arthur
Miller came out of that great American era of steam and muscle
and steel, the 1930s, when the direction of the world could
seemingly be changed through conversation or a nightstick.

Both the world and Arthur Miller outgrew that notion. Miller,
who died Feb. 10 at the age of 89, wrote new plays with great
consistency right up until the end of his life, but they had
stopped having any critical or artistic import.

The school of agitprop, the headmaster of which is Clifford
Odets — agitating and propagandizing — was moralistic and
straight and the world has become wobbly and inconsistent.
Arthur Miller, sadly, seemed antiquated even before he had
gotten old.

But, but …

As the world has become more erratic, Willie Loman and Miller’s
"Death of a Salesman" seem more fixed in it than
ever. Its moral center remains both permanent and eternally
accessible. "A man is not a piece of fruit," said
Willy Loman.

You should not just throw him — or a great work of art —
away. Willie Loman (low-man) is still with us, the sadsack
who tries to make good, the schnook who gets stampeded by
an uncaring and voracious society. It’s just that we don’t
see him on stage so much any more; he’s now usually the first
contender booted off the latest reality show.     FULL
ARTICLE

Lars Trodson has been writing and editing for newspapers
for almost 20 years,
has had several plays produced, and writes
for regional and national magazines.
He can be reached at
larsdoodle@aol.com.

Hilary Duff redefines ‘creative artist’

By Lars Trodson

The revolution began subtly.

In announcing an upcoming concert at the Verizon Wireless
Arena in Manchester, NH, a press release contained a quote
from Miss Duff that has sent seismic rumblings through the
artist community.

The Duff quote has artists such as Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon,
Aretha Franklin and, yes, even Barbara Streisand, shamefaced
at their antiquity and many have reportedly gone into seclusion
to think about their future in the creative arts.

"I give up," Ms. Mitchell is reported to have said.

The press release states, and we quote verbatim here: "If
you thought you knew film, TV and pop music star Hilary Duff
before, think again. Her new, self-titled Hollywood Records
album … shows the remarkable growth spurt she has undergone."
The press release was issued Dec. 7, 2004.

It is the following quote, attributed directly to Miss Duff
in the Verizon Wireless Arena press release, that has caused
this outpouring of grief in the worldwide artistic community.

"Compared to the first album, when I wasn’t confident
enough to make suggestions, this time around I was very involved,"
said Duff about the recording process of Hilary Duff. "I
worked with the songwriters, telling them what was happening
in my life, and what I wanted to sing about. If I thought
it needed to be more heavy, more rock, I said so. I feel that
this record is so much more me. I can’t wait for people to
hear it."

Poets and writers across the world found themselves staring
at blank pages of paper wondering why, for years, for decades,
for a lifetime, they had done all the heavy lifting themselves.
Why hadn’t the lightning bolt of inspiration hit them, as
it has, once again, the incredibly beautiful, rich and talented
Miss Duff?

"I used to tell people my inner thoughts, what I was
feeling," said Joni Mitchell when reached one afternoon
in Montana. "We would be talking, reading, singing, playing
guitar all night long. Sometimes I’d take what I said, or
what Bobby said, or Joanie, and I’d craft a little poem. Sweat
blood for it. Write out … each … little … fucking …
word."
The anger was palpable and Miss Mitchell’s cigarette was vibrating
between her fingers.

"And then I could either get the tune right away, as
though I had dug it up out of the … out of the earth. There
I go again trying to find just the right word, the right phrase.
But sometimes it would take weeks to find the right riff,
the tone, the…"

But the words, no longer angry but simply defeated, trailed
off, as wispy and ephemeral as the shadow of her cigarette
smoke.

On the fax machine at Aretha Franklin’s office was a message
containing the titles of some of the new tunes from the Hilary
Duff album. Franklin, her hands quaking, read the words: "Weird",
"Haters", "Do You Want Me", "Rock
This World" and "Fly."

"When I read this song title ‘Weird’," said the
Godmother of Soul, "I think that Hilary must have been
feeling kind of weird that day. I don’t think it, I know it.
I feel it. It just comes right through and hits you between
the eyes. ‘Haters.’ A word like that, you know, that kind
of word just doesn’t trip off the average person’s tongue.
You need a special, what is it, a special… Oh! How I wish
Hilary was here so I could tell her what I was feeling! She’d
know!"

There was even a vicious argument zipping back and forth
on every possible mode of communication between the members
of such diverse bands as Green Day, Good Charlotte, Velvet
Revolver, the White Stripes, Tenacious D, Metallica — even
such old stalwarts as Bon Jovi, Van Halen and Aerosmith —
all of whom had a member claiming to have helped Hilary shape
the words "Rock This World."

"For years, man, we were fuckin’ tryin’ to put how we
felt and what we were doin’ into fuckin’ words, man, and I
was talkin’ to Hilary, man, saying I just wanted to fuckin’
shake it up," said rocker Fred Durst. "And she fuckin’
lays down the hammer and fuckin’ says, Freddie, I know it,
man, it’s like rockin’ this world, man. When I get on stage,
she says, I just want to rock this world. And, of course,
whew! Man! There is was! It was like every single moment in
rock history rolled into fuckin’ one, man! Wow! Now three,
four fuckin’ generations of rock bands, man, now have a fuckin’
voice. We’re fuckin’ free! I can look around and say to these
other guys, you know what we’re doin’? We’re rockin’ this
world! Rockin’ it! Only somebody like Hilary could put it
together."

"I’ve never seen anybody convey their feelings to the
actual creative team the way Hilary Duff does," said
legendary producer Clive Davis. "I used to listen to
Miles Davis, or a Lou Reed, and they would try to tell a reporter
what they were trying to accomplish — and it was laughable,
really. They stumbled and stammered. But not Hilary. She’ll
say, ‘I’m sad.’ Or: ‘I’m hungry.’ Or, ‘Where’s my iPod.’ And
then we have a brand new shiny song."

Lohan

But just as the genealogy of this monster revolution seemed
clear, it was not. Movie star and budding pop idol Lindsay
Lohan said to Access Hollywood, "I was the one who pioneered
this %&*#."

But in true artistic fashion, Lohan didn’t let her emotion
go to waste. She immediately huddled with a team of writers
and producers in Los Angeles. She told them her feelings,
and they pounded out a crushing dance groove for the new single.

Lohan’s "That Bitch" should be in stores soon.

Media bloviators suck wind on Election
Night

Bill O’Reilly VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22) — Your image as a bombastic crusader for morality may be harmed by an underling who rejects your crude romantic advances. Don’t let sexual misconduct and blatant hypocrisy dissuade you from spouting phony platitudes about family values. A substantial cash payoff should convince her to shut up.

By Lars Trodson

The results are in and it’s true: The old, white media bloviators
on the networks have served more time on TV than the oldest
member of the ancient Soviet Politburo, where it was patriotic
to die in office just after passing one’s 90th birthday.

As the election night dragged on, the white, white-haired
pundits wheezed and huffed through their arid analyses, all
of them puffing out of their suits like so many blow-dried
penguins.

Larry King looked so tired as he tried to figure out what
Wolf Blitzer was saying he had to prop his head up by resting
his chin on his hand.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews set a record for describing each new
non-event as "interesting." "This is so interesting,"
Matthews told his audience 1,042 times, one time for each
viewer, apparently.

CNN’s Jeff Greenfield, who had obviously been listening to
Joe Scarborough on MSNBC, sleepwalked through his analysis
and looked a bit ashen. Blitzer, in a moment of confusion,
gave electoral college votes to "President Kerry."
As cadaverous as Fox’s Brit Hume looked, he still looked better
than the Gollum-like Carl Cameron.

The only fun of the night: the dagger-like stares emitting
from Andrea Mitchell’s eyes every time Scarborough interrupted
her to offer another pearl of wisdom on MSNBC. The only problem
for Mitchell was that Scarborough, as annoying as he is, was
right most of the time.

And where was the ubiquitous Howard Fineman? Obviously blowdrying
his beautiful copper-colored hair and rethinking his plans
to join a Kerry admin. Maybe he can call the White House and
convince the Bushies he wasn’t THAT much of a Kerry sycophant.

Two soldiers write about
the depravity of war

One of the burning questions of this political season is
whether John Kerry participated in or was witness to acts
of depravity while a navy officer during Vietnam. The question
has opened up old wounds — wounds not quite yet healed —
from 30 years ago. Kerry testified before Congress in the
early 1970s and repeated what some of his fellow soldiers
had told him about atrocities committed during battle.

But the very nature of the debate underscores, as it should,
the insanity of war. War creates an atmosphere where decent
people are thrown into a cauldron of madness, where the rules
of engagement change overnight, and where opportunities for
inhuman behavior present themselves when they otherwise, in
a less violent world, would not.

It
is easy for us, on the sidelines, to condemn what happened
at Abu Ghraib prison, or at Buchenwald, for that matter —
because we were not there. Would all of us have acted just
as inhumanly, as we would like to believe we never would?
That’s the scary thing. Or would we have risen above the actions
of the mob to be the voice of sanity? We don’t know.

But while we consider the question of whether John Kerry
is telling the truth or not, we can listen to two different
accounts from two different wars, both of which unveil the
sense of anger and chaos that war can cause. One, from the
Civil War, is told by an unnamed Connecticut soldier who recounts
a disgusting episode of casual bigotry. And the other is from
World War II veteran Lenny Bruce, who unleashes a torrent
of lingering resentment during a drug-besotted concert in
1962.

Did John Kerry witness acts of depravity during Vietnam?
Maybe, maybe not. But he had many brothers in arms who, unfortunately,
had.

This is from an issue of the Connecticut War Record, published
in 1864:

The 21st (Conn. Volunteers) were ordered on board the
Transport "John Farren," but were subsequently disembarked
and returned to their position in the ‘Rifle Pits.’ We were
again ordered to embark, and returned to the boat for that
purpose. Arriving at the wharf we found that through some
misunderstanding of the Quartermaster, the ‘John Farren,’
which was laden with all our baggage, had been completely
loaded down with negroes and their baggage. The way those
darkies and effects were transferred from the boat to the
shore ‘was a caution’ to the ‘poor emancipated Africans.’
After the negroes were all disembarked our men were ordered
on board to unload the baggage, and mounting the hurricane
deck, where it had been packed away, they charged upon the
confused mass of African possessions and commenced transferring
them in a very unceremonious manner to the wharf. The scene
which followed baffles description – and I doubt if the history
of the whole war can present a like scene, or the Emancipation
Proclamation of Father Abraham ever called forth another such
sight. Feather beds fell like snow flakes, only rather more
forcibly, upon the heads of frantic searchers for ‘their own’
household goods. Bedding, clothing, all manner of domestic
goods, filled the air and fell like rain in one confused and
inextricable mass. Wenches displaying the pluck and muscle
of a Hercules in giving punishment to some luckless darkey,
who in her fruitless search for her undiscovered property
had invaded the rights of another.

Hooped skirts were hurled gracefully from the deck to
come down enveloping some corpulent wench, and adding to her
wrath, already rampant. Some were crying, some laughing, some
fighting, and all wrangled amid the shower of ‘bag and baggage,’
which ‘mingling fell.’ And thus we left them, to be subsequently
conveyed to Newbern, but if they ever live to sort that baggage
they will exceed the average length of African longevity.

Yes, well. And this is a report from the liberators.

On Dec. 4, 1964, Lenny Bruce performed at the Gate of Horn
nightclub. "Let the buyer beware," the emcee intones,
probably for two reasons. Bruce was known not just for his
comedy, but for his well-known use of obscenities. At this
concert, he also seems to be quite stoned.

Nonetheless, even under the influence, Bruce could be funny
and devastating. Here, he is slashing, as he asks the question
"Why are Americans hated everywhere?" He answers
it by recounting what he says happened between American soldiers
and the Europeans who were needing some of the things the
Americans carried. It isn’t a happy tale, nor was it meant
to be.

"I
think I did a little more traveling than anyone in this audience.
I think I’ve been on more invasions than anyone in this audience.
I was on six. I made some real daddies. I was on a cruiser
called the USS Brooklyn. I was a 2nd class gunners mate. I
was [unintelligible] from ’42 to ’45 July — that’s when Germany
fell, in July. Doing it’s dirty. They hate Americans everywhere,
do you know why? Because they fucked all their mothers for
chocolate bars and don’t you forget that, jim. You don’t think
those kids have heard that since 1942? ‘You know what those
Americans did to your poor mother?’ They lined her up those
bastards — your father had to throw up his poor guts in the
kitchen while he waited out there and that master sergeant
schtupped your poor mother for their stinkin’ coffee and their
eggs and their friggin’ cigarettes. Those Americans. That’s
it, jim. That’s all they’ve heard, those kids. Those kids
are now 23, 25 years old. The Americans. There’s the guy that
did it to my mother. Would you assume that they would say
‘There’s the guy who fucked my mother. Thank you, thank you,
thank you. Thank you for that and for giving us candy?"

Lenny Bruce was arrested later in that performance and today
it’s easy to ask: Was Bruce arrested for swearing, or for
saying things like the above which you could imagine were
the things no one, ever, wanted to hear?

War makes people do things and say things they’d rather never
have done in the first place and it certainly makes them do
things they’d just as soon forget.

One way, of course, to avoid this heartache is to not put
people in this terrible and unfair situation in the first
place.

Writer following his heart, living the dream

By Lars Trodson

There’s a great expression I recently heard: "Feeling
9/10." It means your mood is upbeat and carefree, something
like you felt the day before the terrorist attacks on 9/11
— hence the name. I think it’s just a terrific turn of phrase.

That’s what I was feeling the other day. I was driving on
Goodwin Road up in Eliot, Maine. The snow had melted and the
brown grass had emerged and it looked like the end of winter
in New England. I went past the working farms, and the sky
was blue and my little pickup was just puttering along.

I was headed into Portsmouth to see my former colleague and
friend John Breneman, who has stepped out of the workaday
world to pursue the dream of writing humor for a living. We
were going to spend the morning talking about the fulfillment
of a dream and the craft of writing.

Just months ago Breneman had nothing but an idea. He wanted
to write full-time. Over the years, he has written a column
called "Fake
News" where he combines a factual event with his
own flights of fancy, and local readers may know him from
that. He was a regular contributor to the old ThumpCity web
site, which also included Chris Elliott. But those endeavors
proved only enough to scratch the itch.

We had talked over the years about the kind of commitment
it takes to fulfill a dream. It’s almost impossible today
to keep that dream on a part-time basis; you must dive into
it headfirst and keep kicking and screaming and scratching
and fighting until someone either hears you or no one wants
to hear you any more. Particularly in the creative arts. We
were working at the same newspaper when I left to write a
book, and John followed — and I do not mean that in any other
way than in the chronology of things — just a few weeks later.

It
takes no small amount of courage to leave a comfortable job,
particularly one you’re good at that pays the bills. Once
Breneman turned 40 it would have been even easier to simply
settle into that groove and say it was a little late to change
horses. But when he was searching for something to do in life
long ago, his father Ernie gave
him some advice: Write stuff. That phrase rattled around in
Breneman’s head until he could ignore it no more.

Just several months into his pursuit, Breneman now has a
web site devoted to his clever and funny writings. It’s called
The Humor Gazette, and it is already creating a buzz in the
extremely populated world of ‘zine writing. The fact that
his creation is getting linked up to other well-known comedy
and satire sites certainly means he’s onto something. You
can find out what I mean by clicking on www.humorgazette.com.

The web site was originally intended to be a kind of warehouse
for the volumes of sketch pieces, humorous jabs, word-plays
and verbal pratfalls that he’s been crafting for quite some
time. But now it’s taken on a life of its own. He’s being
helped by his web master, a young man named Jeff
Raper, and Breneman has made a commitment to keep his
web site updated and topical. One day Breneman showed me all
the html code that sits just behind the clean and bright graphics
of his web site. So, I said to myself, that’s what the mind
of a comedian looks like.

On the day we talked, Ralph Nader had just entered the presidential
race. Breneman, who is nothing if not smart, conflated Nader’s
history as an auto safety pioneer with his political ambitions
and wrote a piece called "Crash-test
dummies endorse Nader." You’ll be mistaken to think
this kind of joke is obvious; you try to come up with it first.

This is my take: Much of the humor writing today is either
quite precious or downright unfunny. As an example, when was
the last time you actually laughed at something a radio D.J.
or a morning TV talk show host said? Not very recently, I
would imagine. Or: When a writer launches into a "humorous"
piece on NPR, I begin a mental countdown as to when the author
will begin his or her supposedly clever tangent to the original
topic — which always starts right on time — and then wait
nervously for the piece to wrap up with its intended ironic
and literary conclusion.

I suppose it isn’t fair to build someone up by negating the
talents of others, but the point is comedy, as the famous
man once said, is hard.

Breneman did not, by all accounts, start out as a funny kid.
He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to a father who was
a successful advertising executive and a mother who shared
his penchant for collecting antiques — something both parents
put to good use when they opened up their own shop. (They
now own two G. Willikers
toy shops.) "We had a big house and a big yard and a
creek in the back," Breneman said. A house they bought
in the little neighborhood of Gibsonia was filled with old
stuff, including an old-fashioned candle-making machine and
a printing press — which was later used to do promotional
material for the antique store.

In 1972, Ernie Breneman had had enough of the rat race and
decided to move. He investigated several different locales
and the family settled in York, Maine — "sight unseen."
The kids didn’t want to move, "but then we looked up
Maine in the encyclopedia." The Breneman children, there
are three, had never seen the ocean and when they first came
upon the water it was high tide and they looked at each other
and said: "Where’s the beach?"

That’s a funny story, but Breneman says he does not have
"Pennsylvania, pre-age 10 memories of comedy. My first
memories of being a sapient individual come from baseball."
He was a Pirates fan — Stargell, Clemente — "and I
became a voracious consumer of all things baseball. My dad
called me a walking encyclopedia." He was a shy kid,
not loud. His mother Jill said he was an observer. "I
didn’t say much," which he said he preferred to "voluminous
pie-hole ramblings." (Which is more my style.)

High school, in York, is where Breneman’s first comic impulses
manifested themselves. In English class, teacher Daniel Beetz
told Breneman his writing was "strange, but good. That
was not lost on me." A news-writing class he took in
high school led to assignments, and Breneman said he "did
an off-beat piece about the wombat. I just liked the sound
of the word." The original article combined factual details
and also "fake news" about the wombat. Right there
you have the direct linear descendent of what Breneman does
today.

The production side of the school newspaper, by the way,
was so enamored with what he had written they named the paper
"The Wombat Weekly." There’s nothing like a little
outside validation to give you confidence, and that’s what
happened. A class in broadcast journalism led to the production
of "fake news bits" for a school TV news program.
Breneman was named literary editor for the school yearbook,
and he was quite right when he said: "There are some
people who carry the load on the yearbook" and quickly
adds: "I wasn’t one of them." He wrote a poem, "Ode
to a Wombat."

After graduating from Colby College, there was the proverbial
trip around the country in a van with a friend. "We picked
up a hitchhiker and there was something about attempted murder
so he was the last hitchhiker," Breneman said of the
trip. "When we got back it was very much like: Now what?"
And his father gave him that advice, "Write stuff."
The elder Breneman knew the then-editor of the York Weekly,
Patti Hart, who gave Breneman his first professional gig,
writing sports for the York Weekly, back when it was an independent-minded
newspaper.

The career proceeded amiably, on a pleasingly upward arc,
with a five-year stint in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where
he wrote a humor column, and then a return to the Portsmouth
Herald, where Breneman was the much-lauded Sunday editor.
He also wrote his fake news pieces there.

But…but. "I needed to make the time to do what
I love to do. Something was burning more brightly inside of
me and that was the humor," he says. "There was
frustration of not doing what I was really meant to be doing."

He had put a book together, pitched it, and received enough
encouragement to "give me a taste." And so, rather
than stew, rather than stay with the conventional and then
look back at a life where the chance was not taken, Breneman
left his job and immediately began work on his writing.

Now he is watching The Humor Gazette make a little splash.
"My numbers are so tiny, but to watch them grow and watch
them spike is exciting," he said.

Breneman is still working on the book, several in fact, and
he hopes to make it into the Holy Grail for all fiction writers,
The New Yorker (and has in fact received a couple of encouraging
responses from that magazine). But in the meantime he continues
to add fresh satire to his site, which, in the main, is a
worthy addition not just to cyberspace but to the cultural
life here in Portsmouth. It is John’s hope, it is indeed my
hope, that Portsmouth will be known as the home of this original
and funny and sharp collection of writings.

"People say comedy is a difficult thing and I agree
with that," said Breneman. "But the reason I know
it’s what I should do is because it’s easy for me." Maybe
so, but interrupting a career to pursue whatever dream one
may have is not so easy. Good for him. And, by the way, good
for us.