It's so stupid. I can't wait!

My best friend and I cooked up this really stupid idea. And the more I think about it, the more stoked about it I get.

Okay, so we're really big JAWS geeks. I'm talking really, really big. Like maybe seen it more times than that guy down the street in his mom's basement has seen STAR WARS. That kinda big.

We used to watch it all the time, in a wonderful 16mm Panavision print my Dad had. But now we're adults, and everybody's got DVD players and widescreen TVs and we live a long way from each other and all that kinda grown-up crap.

But we got us this idea. Pick a night. We each get out the DVD and fire it up, at as close to the exact same second as possible. We get on the phone (him in NYC and me in NC) and then we watch it "together." Of course, we could always wait till the next time he's down here or something, but that wouldn't be as stupid, would it? And that's the point of the whole thing.

Maybe we've stumbled upon the Next Big Thing: The Conference Call Film Festival. (Guess we should watch DIAL M FOR MURDER next, huh?)

The Cure For A Terrible Day.

When you're having a totally terrible awful "Where's-the-galvanized-tub-full-of-Koolade?" kinda day, nothing works quite like a favorite movie.


For me, today is just such a day. And I'm sitting at my desk thinking it'd be great to sit down on the couch with maybe an adult beverage and watch RIO BRAVO.

Being that I can't do it right now, a cool picture from it of John Wayne helps a bit.

Or maybe this is an ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN kinda day.

"That's a spirit breaker."

Mr. Krabs said that on SpongeBob.

And I know exactly what he means.

Just got some comments back from a client on a radio spot I wrote. Pretty cool spot, I might add.

Well, it WAS a pretty cool spot. The client completely rewrote the script instead of just giving me comments on what I'd written. Looking it over, I see maybe three or four words that I wrote. It's a really huge, really frustrating, really stupid, really a damn mess.

And it now has a disclaimer at least 20 seconds long, which means the whole thing is at least 15 seconds too long. On the bright side, that gives me a helluva excuse to remove a decent chunk of the crap they wrote.

So, as I get to work on this thing, trying to pull it back from the brink of Suckdom, I'm a little concerned. What if my turd polisher can't handle it?

Another day saved by Warren Zevon (who should still be here).

Today, I was suffering through yet another client meeting. And some Warren Zevon lyrics found there way into my head. (Not hard, I wasn't really using it at the time.)

"You're supposed to sit on your ass and nod at stupid things
Man, that's hard to do
But if you don't they'll screw you
And if you do they'll screw you, too"

That's from "Bill Lee" offa BAD LUCK STREAK IN DANCING SCHOOL. Don't own it? You should.

Aren't familiar with Zevon's music? Then, dammit, you're a sap -- and I feel sorry for ya.

How'd I end up with a kid like this?

Yesterday my daughter Presley, who's six, went and got all her hair cut off to make a wig for a cancer patient. And I could not possibly be more proud.

The whole thing was inspired by my mom losing her hair during her chemotherapy days and getting a wig (she prefered hats). And I'm sure my mom's proud of her, too.

She's a good kid.

Still no hot rod.

But my best friend's cousin Monty's got one. Go Monty!

"He got the high sign so he jumped the bus..."

Tuesday night, I saw Stan Ridgway play a show in "celebration" of CALL OF THE WEST, a fine album he made back in '82 — when he was front man for Wall Of Voodoo.

My best friend James rode the AmTrak down from NYC for the show — he and I saw Wall Of Voodoo together back in '83. (I wrote a blog thing about that show a week or so ago.) If Stan was gonna pay homage to his truly great album, we thought we'd pay homage to our truly great evening from back in June of '83.

To be honest, we were both a little scared. Would this taint our fond memories of the old show? Would it live up to the materpiece that is CALL OF THE WEST? (In one of those arguments people tend to have at parties when adult beverages are present, I once loudly proclaimed CALL OF THE WEST the absolute Best Album Of The Eighties. And in the clarity of the next morning, I realized I was probably right.) Would Stan be another one of those Rock N Roll guys who'd got all old and dumpy and crummy?

We shouldn't have worried about that crap. Stan and his crack band played with some of the arrangements a bit, especially on a deconstructed "Factory," while others got a more reverant treatment. In between the CALL OF THE WEST tunes and a few other Wall Of Voodoo things were songs from Stan's solo work — and a really creepy cover of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit." A good show.

With CALL OF THE WEST, Wall Of Voodoo got it right. It sounds as crazy, creepy and fresh today as it did then. I bet I've heard that album hundreds of times — and I marvel at it every time. It's certainly something worthy of a celebration. (Now that I think of it, their DARK CONTINENT is a masterpiece, too.)

NOTE: In a blog somewhere, someone recently wrote about Wall Of Voodoo and CALL OF THE WEST. Stan chimed in, saying "Sadly, two WOV members are gone to Heaven. Sometimes the price is high for things like this." That would be Marc Moreland and Joe Nanini. RIP, fellas.