Cryptozoology in the San Francisco Bay
SCENE: Treasure Island, that charming radioactive landfill eyesore sunk in the middle of the Bay, 11pm, the not-so-distant past

DRAMATIS PERSONAE: G-monsta, ChelleBelle

After mysteriously being drawn on to the Bay Bridge at the end of a night on the town, Monsta and Belle have found themselves leaning against a railing at a vista point with a radiant view (one of the few selling points of an island without many marketable qualities) of The City that Always Sleeps. The tide laps against the rocky, trash-strewn shore.

Belle: What is that?
Monsta: What?
Belle: That. That thing right there. [pointing]
Monsta: [Looks] You mean that whitish thing?
Belle: Yeah, what is it?
Monsta: I dunno. Trash maybe?

[Pause]

Belle: But it's moving.
Monsta: Prob'ly just the tide.

[Pause]

Belle: Yeah, but look, it looks alive. See, it just stuck its head out of the water.
Monsta: What? Nah, it's just the tide moving it. It's trash.

[Pause. Both stare down at the water.]

Monsta: Wait a minute, that time it did look like it stuck its head out.
Belle: I told you! Maybe it's some animal that got stuck in the rocks.
Monsta: Like what? It's not a seal or anything.
Belle: It looks like it's alive, though. It's moving its tentacles or whatever. It's trying to get unstuck!

[Both stare intently.]

Monsta: What the hell is that thing?
Belle: I can see its eyes. Can't you see them?
Monsta: It’s the Treasure Island Monster, is what it is. What could we call it? Umm… [thinking]
Belle: TIM!

[Both laugh. They continue to stare down at the rapidly moving mystery object.]

Monsta: If I was younger and dumber, I'd climb over this fence and go down there right now. [Thinks.] You know what, I'm too young to be saying stuff like that, goddammit.

[Monsta steps over the fence, and starts slowly down the treacherous rocks towards the water.]

Belle: No trips to the hospital, OK?
Monsta: Nah, I got it.

[Monsta gingerly makes his way over the slick rocks until he is 5 or 6 feet from the water. He stares carefully.]

Belle: Can you see it?
Monsta: Yeah. Yeah, you're going to be disappointed. It's just…
Belle: What? What is it?
Monsta: [Stares, cranes neck.] Um… well… [agitated] What the fuck is that?!

[Monsta continues toward the water.]

Monsta: If I can just get a little closer… [grunts as his foot slips between two wet rocks and he falls, scraping his ankle and scuffing his new orange & blue shoes.] I'm OK!
Belle: What? What happened?
Monsta: Just fell. This was a bad idea.

[Monsta is directly over the mystery object, which continues to move erratically and emphatically.]

Monsta: [Angrily, grabbing ankle.] WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT THING?!

[Curtain.]

See an Artist's Conception of the creature here.

The Problem with These Things
Sometimes I'll accidentally check this page to see if it's been updated, momentarily forgetting whose responsibility it is to update it. So far, there have been no phantom entries, but I can hope.

It's too freaking FFFFhot today to do anything meaningful, so here's this (apologies to ChocoBaby, who had to listen to this crap all through the movie):

Top Ten Problems I Have with The Goonies*
*all these years later, but having just seen it again

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere we go Number 10…

10. Why does the fat kid smash his food against the window when he sees the car chase? Nobody would ever do that.

9. Why do all the non-rich kids have to leave town just because the country club is expanding? Couldn't they have relocated, since presumably their parents still would have jobs?

8. Were there really pirates in Oregon? I don't remember ever hearing anything about that. I thought the were from, you know, the Caribbean.

7. Why are there 80s glass "lightning balls" in Mikey's attic, and why do they have wooden, ornamental bases? I thought that was supposed to be pirate stuff.

6. Why didn't Brand just steer away from the cliff on the little bicycle, instead of going straight off it? Duh.

5. Why does a bunch of kids banging on pipes cause a major public works meltdown resulting in disappearing faucets and exploding toilets?

4. What Andie plays on the organ bears no relation to what she's saying. Also, the printed music is a long, single line and she only plays chords. Also, A-sharp and B-flat are the same note.

3. Why did One-Eyed Willy build really cool waterslides into his hideout?

2. How does Mama Fratelli know to call the dead pirate "Mr. Willy"? Has she been following the scenes she's not in?

1. Why do the Fratellis make the Goonies walk the plank (and let them swim to safety) when only a few minutes earlier they were trying to kill them? And why, when Sloth comes to the rescue, do the rest of the Goonies jump off the plank anyway? And then why does Sloth throw the Fratellis off the plank? Now everybody's in the water.

Okay, I lied, there are more than ten…

0. Why do the Fratellis just walk up to the cops and turn themselves in at the end? Couldn't they either a) have walked in the other direction, or b) stayed on the freakin' pirate ship and made off with the loot?

-1. How do they know the jewels the Latina Stereotype Lady finds are worth enough to stop the construction of the golf course? Seems like that would be a lot of money. And who's to say Mikey's family doesn’t tell everybody else to take a flying leap and keep the dough for themselves? And wouldn't they be subject to a lengthy legal battle and probably be public property anyway because of their historic significance?

-2. How is it possible that Martha Plimpton and George Plimpton are related? That's almost as weird as Klaus and Nastassja Kinski. And doesn’t Klaus Kinski look like an evil mutant version of George Plimpton? What strange forces are at work here?

-3. Josh Brolin is Barbra Streisand's stepson and has probably seen her naked. This is more of an observation than a problem.

Note: C-Baby's answer to all of the above (except the naked Streisand one) is "IT'S A MOVIE… ABOUT KIDS… WHO FIND PIRATE BOOTY!"

New Lease on Life
So after 13 days of (self-magnified) suspense, the verdict is in, and your favorite WULAD/G-Monsta/G-Man/Gord/Eenie/JazBoy/Inker-Stinker is (for now) Not Dying. I'm reminded however of the scene in Hannah and Her Sisters where Woody's hypochondriacal TV producer is told he doesn't have a brain tumor, and spurts giddily out of the office to the tune of Jimmie Lunceford or something, only to stop dead in his tracks when he realizes that someday, some way, the news will not be so good. This plunges him into a typical Woody Allen existential crisis—how can we live our lives, knowing that old age and/or death inevitably awaits us (what I describe to Belle as The Mango Truck at the End of Each of Our Streets)?

MICKEY
Do you realize what a thread we're all hanging by?

GAIL (offscreen)
Mickey, you're off the hook. You should be celebrating.

MICKEY (walking around to the front of his desk, gesturing)
Can you understand how meaningless everything is? Everything! I'm talking about nnnn--our lives, the show...the whole world, it's meaningless.

GAIL (gesturing)
Yeah...but you're not dying!

MICKEY
No, I'm not dying now, but, but (gesturing) you know, when I ran out of the hospital, I, I was so thrilled because they told me I was going to be all right. And I'm running down the street, and suddenly I stop, 'cause it hit me, all right, so, you know, I'm not going to go today. I'm okay. I'm not going to go tomorrow. (pointing) But eventually, I'm going to be in that position.

—

MICKEY (continuing)
...you know it, it just takes the pleasure out of everything. (gesturing, pointing) I mean, you're gonna die, I'm gonna die, the audience is gonna die, the network's gonna-- The sponsor. Everything!

GAIL (chewing)
I know, I know, and your hamster.

MICKEY (nodding emphatically)
Yes!

GAIL (chewing and pointing to Mickey)
Listen, kid, I think you snapped your cap.

(Please don't sue me, Woody. I saw you standing on the corner of 5th Ave. & 13th Street one day in 1997, and although I could've bothered you or falsely gushed about your clarinet playing, I chose to remain silent.) Belle of course has a different set of criteria for health-related worrying:

1. Is it bleeding?

2. Is it falling off?

3. If the answer to either 1 or 2 is "no", then shut up.

In the movie, Mickey finds serenity through falling in love with Dianne Weist; not being a sappy middle-aged guy, I'll have to content myself with Miles Davis's Porgy and Bess, Good ol' JJ's ramblings, and a really good corned beef sandwich.

Bloomsday No. 99
… is upon us.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

-- Introibo ad altare Dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:

-- Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!

…of course the first 18 Bloomsdays were unobserved since the Big Book hadn't been published. But in honor of that fateful day, we at W.U.L.A.D. are concentrating on things Joyce. (After some whiskey & ale, Shan-Bear & I spent some time in the gutter last night in honor of The Great Cataloguer's less polished moments.)

First of all, Jorn Barger runs the web's best omnibus of JJ info at IQ Infinity… there is a wealth of information here for all of the Canon, including extensive source info, pictures, history, sound samples, and the kind of scholarly discourse not likely to be found in the hallowed halls of academia.

My own semi-literate romp through Joyce's works (begun when this guy bought me my first copy of Portrait) is currently hovering over ReJoyce (corny title, the UK version has the more on-topic Here Comes Everybody) a loving and incisive overview of The Man's oeuvre by none other than Anthony Burgess (forever associated with violent guys in longjohns). Particularly interesting to me are his thoughts on the popular misconception of Joyce as primarily a trickster or hyper-intellectual whose main purpose was to confuse and dazzle the reader—Burgess rightly points out that underneath the technical and structural mastery of the books lie universal themes (fathers and sons, love and death, history and myth) that are served by technique but are not subservient to it. As a student of jazz, I've come to appreciate technical mastery only to the extent that it is in service to an idea, and lose interest when the mastery exists only for its own sake.

All of you should read Ulysses at some point in your lives. I had the good fortune to give it a whirl when I had a lot of down time at my old horrible job, and without getting overly verklempt, the connection I felt with the book's characters and their struggles (especially Stephen, Joyce's youthful parallel, coping with his mother's death, his seemingly stillborn artistic career, and tripping over his own ego at every turn). My favorite (simplistic) interpretation of the book's overall theme is the idea of Joyce's young and willful self (Stephen) meeting his older and wiser self (Bloom), and the lessons they might or might not learn from each other. Or as mentioned repeatedly in the book in various contexts, he is himself his own father.

And blah-ty blah blah. Where to begin? I recommend Gabler's corrected text (although any modern edition will suffice), and the following companion books are pretty near essential: The New Bloomsday Book, an excellent chapter-by-chapter synopsis by Harry Blamires; and Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford, the most comprehensive line-by-line reference guide; as well as a good dictionary. Maybe read a chapter cold, then read the Blamires summary, then read it again with the annotations. I wish I'd read the whole book cold first, but I doubt I would've been able to finish it. The bottom line is enjoying the book and following the story line(s), so anything that helps the reader do that is OK by me. OK, semi-academic bullshit artist hat coming off.

El Futuro is here to stay
Jose Reyes belted a 2-2 Jerrod Washburn pitch (you guys remember the Angels, right?) over the Edison's left field fence last night for a Grand Slam, the first Met to hit a salami for his first career homer in 36 years. Rey Sanchez can most likely begin scouting out hair salons for his retirement, as I believe the few stubborn Mets fans left would dismantle Shea Stadium cinderblock by ciderblock if interim GM Jim Duquette sent the Boy Wonder back to the farm. More, please.

On a fambly note, Papa G (who has lately had many more gigs than I have) had a triumphant turn as the baritone soloist in Mozart's Reqiuem Saturday night, with myself & Sista G in attendance, and made the old ladies cry.