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You know, I’m not a young man. I don’t keep up with things like I used to. New trends and tastes and fashions have the same effect on me that fresh batteries have on a tired, worn-out Rolling Fella^TM blowjob simulator: you get some brief, sporadic whirring and tongue-lolling followed by silence. The fact that I live in Japan certainly doesn’t help me stay abreast of shifts in Western ideas and mores.

What I’m angling for here is to immunize myself from the inevitable complaints from various demographics that this collection of my old blog posts is crass or offensive or just fuddy-duddy-ish. I’m aiming for that same sort of rueful, head-shaking amnesty that my siblings and I used to grant our frail, declining grandmother whenever she would go off on “the Negroes.” My dear, dear young reader…won’t you be my magnanimous grandchild? There’ll be sugar-cookies!

Like Grandma, I never set out deliberately to provoke or offend any group.¹ It’s just that I often succumb to this nasty compulsion to tell readers exactly what is on my mind at any given moment, and you see, the thing is, more often than not it’s tits. So you get a lot of references to tits in my blog and I know that some people find it off-putting or tedious but, well, there you have it.

You may well be thinking, “Don’t give me that. What do you suppose Piers Morgan is thinking about when he’s sitting across from some hot babe like Condoleezza Rice? And yet he still manages to squeeze out a few coherent questions about Libya instead of just blabbering incontinently about tits for an hour.” Yes, point taken. Got to hand it to those Brits. Me, I’m not that continent.

In addition to the whole tits obsession, you Western readers will have to show some forbearance with regard to my dated cultural references. I stopped living in the Great Satan back in 1979, you see, so I just may be even more locked into the Seventies, cultural-reference-wise, than ESPN’s Chris Berman—himself a sort of Seventies-based cultural in-joke.

Brace yourself as well for shameless book plugs (since, after all, book promotion was the raison d’etre of the website from which these posts sprang).

All that aside, these essays are, in my opinion, pretty good…at least compared to the ones that I chose not to include. Re-reading them after two or three years, I often found myself saying, “Ha-ha. Now, that is rather amusing!” or “I used to say the darnedest things!” I also said, more than once, “Whoa, that’s harsh. I sort of feel sorry for Augusten Burroughs.” And then I would remember how Augusten Burroughs almost single-handedly gutted the art of memoir-writing for my generation of memoirists, and get mad all over again.

But don’t let that stop you from feeling sorry for him, if you like. Somebody’s got to do it.

A few other caveats:

1. I set out to present these posts exactly as they appeared on my site, but, like a lapdog locked indoors with nothing to eat but her deceased master, soon found my core principles untenable. First, I allowed myself to correct typos. Then, I decided it was okay to excise the boring parts (defined here as stretches of text longer than a page with no mention of tits). Then I said, “Oh, pish-tosh” and started ripping whole paragraphs to shreds with the zeal of six overcaffeinated Sarah Palin ghostwriters working on deadline.

2. I’ve expunged most of the links to external sites that appeared in the original posts, or else moved them to footnotes.

3. Speaking of footnotes… In an ebook format, as you know, footnotes take the form of internal links to endnotes. On handheld e-readers, navigating to these endnotes and then back to the text can be an aerobic workout for your thumbs, but I hope you will humor your rapidly failing grandparent by taking the trouble to check out my footnotes. After all, no beau will ever come courting till you do something about those chubby thumbs of yours, dear.

As always I can be reached at:

joshmuggins@hotmail.com

Also by me (though not free):

Wussie: In Praise of Spineless Men

How To Pick Up Japanese Chicks And Doom Your Immortal Soul

Summer of Marv

October 10, 2011

(Happy birthday, Ed Wood!)

1 Except people named Augusten Burroughs.

When I’m Sixty-Four—Or Thereabouts

Well, I’ll be fifty-four years old this fall, and the summer will mark the thirtieth anniversary of my arrival in Japan. To my amazement I find all organs save my brain (an optional luxury for an English teacher anyway) still in fine working order, and that my deep, abiding interest in younger Japanese women has not subsided one iota these past three decades. I still enjoy talking with them, imagining them naked, complimenting them, listening to their problems, listening to their problems some more, continuing to listen to their problems—take it from an expert: if your plans for the day include getting a young Japanese woman to open up about what’s bugging her, pack a big lunch—and imagining them stealing my lunch naked, and so on and so forth. No need to beat the proverbial dead horse here assuming you’ve read any of my other work.

But as Billy Bob Thornton, Bill Gates, Billy Idol and I lurch through this wide turn that leads from middle age to the homestretch of plain and simple old age, I begin to wonder if my maintaining this lifelong interest is, you know…seemly. And if not, then what sort of more proper Old Manhood ought I to start aiming at? Should I break out the jigsaw puzzles of European cathedrals? Practice standing at the edge of construction sites to watch workmen pour concrete?

As I dwelled on this subject over the recent Golden Week holidays, I realized that my long-held image of Old Manhood has always been insidiously informed by two creative masterworks that I encountered in my early twenties: the French soft-core film Emmanuelle and the Junichiro Tanizaki novel Diary of a Mad Old Man. I will now explain the influence of each.¹

Emmanuelle

I’m referring here to the original 1974 Sylvia Kristel vehicle, directed by the much too modestly named Just Jaeckin and screened for one night only in back-to-back midnight matinees at an off-campus theater in Mankato, Minnesota in winter 1978.² I went, of course, with Gary.

In those days I suffered from what turned out to be a rather inflated estimation of my local celebrityhood as a newspaper columnist, and thus was trying to submerge myself into my puffy coat to avoid the Key City paparazzi while we waited outdoors in a long line to pay to see smut. Meanwhile, Gary cheerfully tried to chat up acquaintances as they emerged from the earlier showing, but most of them were in too much of a hurry to get home and start masturbating to bother with us. (Some of those acquaintances were female. Emmanuelle, being French, carried that sort of cachet, that je ne sais quoi, that pâté de foie gras, that ineffable European eau de élégance that somehow transforms midnight smut into High Art.)

Here is my succinct appraisal of Emmanuelle based on my viewing of it at twenty-two and reinforced by my second viewing last week. And to all the mothers out there reading this usually family-friendly blog aloud to the young-uns on their laps, let me apologize in advance and assure you that you will never see this phrase in my writing again, but the thing is, well… Emmanuelle is a pluperfect fuckfest.

I found that I recalled the set pieces of the story, and even their sequence, rather well without the need for a second viewing after all. There’s Emmanuelle riding atop her husband soon after her arrival in Thailand; there’s the two Thai servants, aroused by that sight, who run off into the bushes to re-enact it; there’s the gratuitous naked-swimming montage; there’s the underage-looking neighbor girl who drops by to suck on a lollipop and masturbate in the rattan swing facing Emmanuelle’s; there’s the flashback to Emmanuelle’s mile-high double-header with the two can-opener-nosed French mofos on the plane to Thailand; there’s the lesbian who gropes Emmanuelle on the racquetball court; there’s more skinny dipping and groping with the second-string lesbian; there’s the Thai stripper who smokes cigarettes with her hoo-hah; there’s the husband rather violently consoling the jilted lesbian atop the coffee table—all rendered explicitly and yet without that off-putting gynecological perspective that, as has been lamented here before, mars so much contemporary pornography; and with the added bonus of everyone’s speaking French, a language in which just about anything a person can utter—“The trolley cars don’t go there on weekends,” say—comes out sounding like a silkily purred “Let us duck into the boiler room and lick each other like giant airmail stamps.”

I could go on and on here about all the insights to be gleaned from a close reading of Emmanuelle. Did you know, for example, that French ladies wear bras to the gym, then remove them and play racquetball braless? (No, I don’t know why.) But that would be to diverge from today’s main thesis.

You see, all of the above is what happens in the first half of the film, before the hero, dude by the name of Mario, emerges. When Mario first appeared in the movie during the Key City screening, my initial reaction was My God, I hope we don’t have to see this old shriv naked. Well, we didn’t, nothing even close, not a peep of him south of the neck wattles in fact—and I loved him the more for that.

Mario is, much like the Winston Wolfe character in Pulp Fiction, a grizzled elder who shows up late in the film to set things right. Emmanuelle’s husband, you see, is concerned about his repressed, puritanical wife, who in the past week has had relations with a paltry three men and two women and one Sasquatch, and so he enlists Mario to take her out and show her what’s what. He’s like the Dos Equis chap that the police talk to just because he’s so interesting³.

He takes her out to dinner and a show, throwing in gratis his own impromptu running lecture on his theory of “eroticism,” in the midst of which he whimsically brakes his horse-drawn carriage to allow a drunken vagrant the privilege of removing her underwear, which he (Mario) wears in his breast pocket as a handkerchief for the rest of the film. Then for some reason we find them walking through the jungle, at night, while he continues to ramble on and on about the glories of lust and the evils of monogamy without so much as loosening his tie. He takes her to an opium den where he watches a native have sex with her. Then, for variety, he takes her to a kick-boxing establishment where he watches a native have sex with her, all the while wearing exactly the expression of a man trying to start a lawnmower by telekinesis.

As soon as the credits began rolling in Mankato, I turned to Gary and proclaimed, “I’m going to be that guy!” Not that I wanted to become him right then and there at the tender age of twenty-two. Ideally I would first become the kickboxer, then the opium addict, then the Gallic-beaked mofos on the plane, then the husband, and then just for the hell of it one of the lesbians before settling into the old man’s skin—rather in the fashion of a career Shakespearean actor cycling through the roles of Romeo, Hamlet, and Macbeth on his way to doing Lear. Anyway, I could see it all clearly: strolling through the steamy jungle in my dark business suit late at night with a scantily clad young white lady scrunching her Caucasoid bosoms against my shoulder while I kept on pouring syrupy ladles of pompous, liquefied bullshit about l’érotisme into her ear and then watching her take it doggy style. That would be the life.

I masturbated with uncommon tranquility that night, suddenly unburdened of the twin fears of leading a purposeless life and then ending up old and useless. For mightn’t I, like Mario, find my purpose in life in old age?

For the record, Emmanuelle still holds up as stimulating adult entertainment, but I was a bit alarmed and put out to note that Mario doesn’t seem nearly as crispy as he used to. He rather looks like a slicked-up version of a couple of farmers in my most recent high school reunion photo…but let’s not spoil things by going there. Let's instead move on to...

Diary of a Mad Old Man

I’ll be briefer here because the following is about all I remember about this novel, abetted by online sources.

Utsugi, the titular mad old man, is a seventy-seven-year-old retired businessman of some means: once tough and ruthless, now rough and toothless—as the old joke goes. His main interests, as expressed in his diary, are his myriad health problems and kabuki, the traditional form of Japanese theater that is only slightly more gripping than reading about old people’s health problems. He shares his home with his son and neglected daughter-in-law Satsuko, a beautiful former nightclub dancer. Though impotent, Utsugi develops a fixation on Satsuko and finds in her a reason to stay alive.

What slight potential for l’érotisme this situation affords is torpedoed by Utsugi’s proclivities, for he is not interested so much in the lady-parts that most of us are drawn to, but rather to ladies’ feet. As Satsuko realizes the power she holds over the old man, she teases and torments and extorts gifts from him in exchange for access to her…feet. But once he achieves his goals, which mostly involve instep-kissing and toe-sucking, he suffers a stroke and abruptly loses his tastes for both toejam and life.

It all sounds quite pathetic, I know, and that was my primary impression of Utsugi upon first reading the book. These days, while I remain as indifferent as ever to the finer points of toejam, I’m less inclined to cast stones.

Anyway, the message I took away from the book at age twenty-four was double-edged. On the one hand, a powerful attraction to young Japanese women was not only a natural and healthy thing, but the very definition of being alive—at least in Tanizaki’s worldview, and he was a great man, you know: one of the few Japanese novelists allowed to die of natural causes. On the other hand, the inverse also holds true: the extinguishment of that desire for young Japanese women signifies Game Over, and it’s time to pack up your quarters and give up the ghost.

Thus, if I were to grow old in Japan (as in fact I seem to be doing), I need not fear or try to repress any ongoing appreciation for the nation’s younger women. On the contrary, I should nurture such a craving for my own self-preservation.

Okay, rather a self-serving interpretation, I’ll admit. But part of me still hopes to find myself strolling through an Asian jungle in a dinner jacket one of these nights.

May 12, 2009

1 Please note that I have long since lost my original copy of Diary of a Mad Old Man and am not inclined to purchase and read a new copy solely for the sake of fortifying a blog post, so my account of the novel will be based on memory and a few summaries found online—synapses and synopses, if you will. Readers will no doubt point out any errors that I make. I did find time, however—as should surprise no one—to give Emmanuelle a thorough re-watching.

2 Specifically the theater off Stadium Road, still rather new in 1978, located through no fault of its own within a stone's throw of that vile, suppurating sore on Satan’s nutsack, that lazy-tongued slathering insult to all that is decent in the world, that glistening nougatty hyena-turd in the fishtank of Righteousness: the Albatross. That theater, fellow middle-aged former Mankato-ites.

3 Just joshing about the Sasquatch.

Consider the Handjob

As Barack Obama was saying to me the other day at the annual meeting of the Guys with Two Memoirs Club, one learns a great deal about oneself in the course of writing two memoirs, and much of it not very nice. In my case, I’ve unearthed a theretofore unsuspected trove of selfishness, an almost constant thread of insensitivity, haunting questions about my racial identity (Oops—that one’s Barack’s; I’m always getting us mixed up), and an abiding affection for handjobs (which probably covers both of us).

It occurred to me recently that both of my books include handjob scenes. In the first, I sing the praises of a Japanese girlfriend who acquired the knack of providing “a rip-snorting handjob southpaw while eating rice crackers and watching the six o’clock news” and note in passing a vigorous “drive-by handjob” administered by a charming neighbor in my boardinghouse.

The upcoming Summer of Marv describes at some length an encounter during my late teens with a set of particularly oily digits at a massage parlor. A paean to the handjob, composed with appropriately Seventies-bound cultural references, ensues:

That the handjob, that quintessence of carnal minimalism, had been so widely relegated to foreplay was, I felt strongly, an injustice on a par with forcing Rick Derringer to open for Edgar Winter.

Of course, this astonishing condescension toward handjobs couldn’t last: There are now websites devoted to the darned deed¹. And it’s not hard to see why. The handjob is, arguably, the only cooperative sex act in which everybody comes out a winner.

Consider the transaction from the Orgasmatician’s² viewpoint. The handjob is safe. It’s painless. Chastity vows? No problem. In most cases, cleanup is, quite literally, on him. While nudity is always recommended—if for no other reason than to save on dry cleaning (see Lewinsky, M.)—it is often optional. Poor hygiene on the part of either party is much less of an issue than it is in other cases. And if the hand in use starts to go numb, well, chances are you have a viable, well-rested spare. It’s like having a backup quarterback on your team who’s virtually as reliable as your starter. Plus, the sense of accomplishment that one gets from working successfully with one’s hands—well, it’s hard to put a price on some things.

For the recipient, too, most of the above advantages apply. In addition, there’s this: Any portion of one’s Orgasmatician that one would care to peruse can be brought into ogling and fondling range without interrupting the process. You can even try to carry on a conversation if so inclined, though it may become a trifle one-sided. And finally, for the untrusting: no teeth!

The act is wonderfully versatile. I have two examples from here in Japan—neither of which, sorry to say, involves me—that testify to just how utilitarian the handjob is.

The first comes from a fairly unimpeachable source, an overview on education in Japan published twenty years ago by a prominent American sociologist. Alas, I’ve lost my copy of it, and the bit I’d like to quote from it—really just an offhand remark in the midst of an otherwise dreary chapter—isn’t mentioned in any online references to the book. But for what it’s worth, here’s what I remember.

Japanese children take entrance exams to get into prestigious junior highs, high schools, and universities. The pressure to pass is especially intense on boys, and it traditionally falls upon mothers to oversee their sons’ preparation for the exams at each stage.

Thus, said mothers and teenage sons spend hours at the sons’ desks poring over practice exams side by side, and in the course of these study sessions the tutor occasionally glimpses physical evidence that the pupil’s thoughts are not firmly locked in on the Pythagorean theorem; and in such situations it is not uncommon (so says this source) for the mother to apply a brisk manual palliative in order to eliminate the distraction.

The male reader can imagine for himself how effective this stratagem would be in his own case, eliminating-the-distraction-wise. Or maybe not.

The second tale comes from a likewise no-longer-accessible source (a Japanese weekly magazine as translated and summarized by a now defunct English website), and seems even more credible than the first to a long-term Japan resident like myself. Or at least, much more pleasant to buy into.

As Japan’s population continues to age faster than any in the world, its nursing homes become ever more overpopulated. Harried female attendants have discovered that one quick method for placating unruly male inmates is…well, you’re way ahead of me. It’s the ultimate panacea, if you think about it: raspy, insistent queries about medication, TV volume, flatulent roommates, and the outcome of World War II quickly melt away. Peace reigns.

Thus may handjobs follow a man virtually from cradle to grave.

Let me conclude (since it’s my website) with a personal reminiscence.

This occurred in the last of my three senior years at college. I found myself—to my own amazement as much as to that of my friends—in possession of a blonde and buxom trophy girlfriend. Another reference to a Seventies artist will bring home just how enticing this young woman was. Her favorite singer was Barry Manilow, and it didn’t matter. And let me be even more frank. She was beautiful; she was young, she was innocent. She was the greatest piece of ass I ever had, and I had 'em all over the world!

(Sorry, sorry. I just can’t allow a chance for a Godfather riff to waft by. It’s a sickness.)

Throughout our first overnighter, for reasons never explained, I was not allowed to proceed past second base while she eagerly galloped to third. My gallant offers to rectify the base imbalance were rebuffed, so I let her run the show. The result was everything a handjob should be—the at once comfortably familiar and thrillingly different sensation of those four fingers and opposable thumb locking into place as if they had a mind of their own, followed by the slow and steady pumping…

We dozed for a while, until I woke her with an involuntary poke in the hip. Being twenty-three at the time, I no doubt would have been more or less as frisky had my bedfellow been Abraham Lincoln. Fortunately, it was still Debbie, and she delivered a repeat performance.

In the next few weeks, Debbie and I moved on to the so-called “better” stuff before our relationship inevitably imploded just shy of the two-month mark. (She cited my impending graduation and departure for Japan; I still think it had more to do with a certain non-neurotic chap with a pilot’s license. And of course, the Manilow Cloud was always hovering over us, uncommented on but impossible to ignore.) But despite all that followed, the night of the Handjob Doubleheader is the one I hold dear in my memory.

As to where it fits in the pantheon of my erotic evenings, that’s harder to say. It’s sort of an apples-and-oranges comparison, handjobs vs. the so-called "better stuff." But I tell you: if I had to pick one night to relive for nothing but pure, guilt-free self-indulgence… Well, that one.

October 19, 2008

1 The cloyingly named Wank My Wood awaits you.

2 I’ve decided that we need a clinical term to denote the partner charged with providing the pleasure in any sexual act, a generic one that is neutral with regard to gender or to paid-vs.-voluntary status. This is a work in progress, and I’m open to suggestions, but I’m going with Orgasmatician for now.

The Sexbot as Stocking Stuffer

As a full year of fairly vigorous, sweaty-fingered blogging winds down, I can’t help feeling amazed and a bit appalled at the vicissitudes of my monthly visitor count. It has become abundantly clear that when I provide my usual canny analyses of such topical matters as Michael Jackson’s passing or Malcolm Gladwell’s books or the enduring appeal of Lost and Dexter, or try to provide practical advice to writers wishing to navigate the grimy underworld of self-publishing that I know all too well, the world at large yawns. Many of you sadly shake your heads and move away. “Nothing to see here, folks,” you mutter to your cyberfriends, if you bother to mutter anything at all.

But should I shine my light on nineteen-year-old Japanese blowjob specialists, or revel in the joys of retro-eroticism in the original Emmanuelle, or provide a detailed comparative breakdown of the quality of exposed bosoms in the HBO series Rome and Deadwood, or extol the underrated delights of a well-executed handjob, well, that’s quite another matter, isn’t it? Don’t try to deny that you come here for the filth and not for the elegant and insightful writing. My hosting service lets me see the searches that lead you here, and not one of you arrived by way of “elegant and insightful writing.” You animals.

Okay, so let’s talk artificially induced orgasms. Not because I want to, mind you, but just to keep you happy. An old friend sent me this link the other day to an article titled “Sexbots Will Give us Longevity Orgasm.” The news here, of course, is not that “sexbots” are being developed, nor that frequent orgasms are good for everyone’s health. The news here is that my friend evidently was astonished to learn one or both of these things—so astonished, in fact, that he felt compelled to ask me for my comments.¹

Good heavens, the idea of lifelike sex-providing robots was already old when the original film version of The Stepford Wives came out in 1975. Since then, just off the top of my head, there’s been Darryl Hannah as the “pleasure model” replicant in Blade Runner, the John Hughes classic Weird Science, hordes of fetching female Terminators, the Fembot foes of Austin Powers, ruthless killing and breeding machine Sarah Palin and no doubt countless porn knockoffs of all of the above.

The bad news is, the only full-sized sexbots likely to be made widely available in the ejaculatory lifetime of middle-aged mouth-breathers like me will be (a) prohibitively expensive—such that we’ll probably only have access to them on a short-term rental basis, and only after hundreds of other horny desperados have drained themselves all over, around, and through them; (b) not much more lifelike than a department store manikin—a bit off-putting if you’re expecting Summer Glau or early-Eighties Darryl Hannah—and (c) likely prone to annoying glitches, such as occasionally tearing a user’s penis off like a corn tassel or char-broiling him whole. Rest assured, Matt Drudge is already composing the horrific banner headlines in his warped little mind.

The good news is, you don’t need a full-sized, lifelike sexbot. For one thing, they are awfully hard for a married man to hide in a sock drawer. What is available now, and can be hidden in a sock drawer—take it from one who knows—is a nifty little number marketed here in Japan as the “Rolling Fella Bomber.”

I don’t want to give too much away about the Rolling Fella Bomber because I intend to describe it and the wonders it performs in depth in my upcoming book Wussie: In Praise of Spineless Men. This is what we in the trade call “a tease,” don’t you know.

In the meantime, well, there it is in the picture at the top of this post: a pink, polyurethane eyeless, forehead-less, battery-powered, speed-controlled thing-a-ma-bob capable of bringing you to greater heights of ecstasy than you’ve ever known. Wait—I can’t make good on that. I don’t know what heights of ecstasy you’ve ever known. For all I know, you’re Tiger Woods. God knows you’ve got the time for web-browsing now.

But for me? Based on the ecstasy that I’ve ever known? You betcha.

I found my first Rolling Fella Bomber (I’ve worked through a few of them by now) in an adult goods store in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo. It was packaged in a pretty pink box, the copy of which promised “Explosive spermifying!” and “Intense fella-play!” before adding perhaps the easiest question ever addressed to male consumers in the history of ad copy: “Do you like being fellated?” There was a picture of an annoyed Japanese woman with her mouth wrapped around some obscured cylindrical object along with a cartoon balloon that has her saying (or more likely just thinking), “Please excuse me for making you feel too good,” a sentiment that her expression coats with sarcasm.

The “Intense fella-play!” message is reiterated on the back of the box, along with a website for fans who have further questions, and in fine print:

“Please recycle after use.”

I have much more to tell about my Rolling Fella Bombers, but it’s going into the book. Oh, what a tease I am!

In the meantime, best wishes for the new year, readers.

December 22, 2009

1 Speaking as a one-time copy editor, I must say that it is also newsworthy that an appalling grammar or punctuation error was made in the article’s title and nobody caught it. But that’s just me.

Getting Some Wood Again

There are moments when I suspect that I may be the worst writer in history. In contrast, there are other moments when I’m sure of it. Recently such moments have not been in short supply around here; I’ve even begun to wonder if I might just be the memoir-writing equivalent of the schlock horror director Ed Wood, bound for the sole writerly fate even more dreaded than obscurity: a laughingstock for the yet unborn.

To better understand what I might be in for, I rented the 1994 film Ed Wood. Well, okay, I pirate-downloaded it. Tim Burton can have me prosecuted if he likes, but he should know that I really did pay to rent this movie—on, I’m estimating, six different occasions—in the years soon after its video release, those being pre-online-piracy days.

They were pre-Josh Muggins days as well: I was a lowly magazine freelancer then, publishing under my real name. So this would be the first time for me to see one of my all-time favorite films from the perspective of an active memoirist. A critic once described Wood as a creature who clung for decades to the dark underbelly of Hollywood, and I now wrangle with the prospect of one day being described in similar terms vis-à-vis the literary world. I was anxious to see how strongly I’d relate to the man who raised the bar for creative ineptitude.

I did not attempt a “running diary” (as I gather such stunts are called in the blogosphere) of my viewing of Ed Wood, as doing so would have interfered with my quest to get drunk, but I did jot down the lines that had a significant impact on me so that I might expand on them after sobering up. So here goes…

“I’m just scared that it’s not gonna get any better than this.” (Ed, lying awake after a scathing review of his play.)

The non-improving it in question, presumably, is the world’s reaction to his work and not the work itself, with which Ed himself is entirely satisfied. Here’s where my powerful identification with Ed kicks in like moldy mushrooms at an all-day Hot Tuna concert circa 1975. I like to blather on and on in this blog about how I write for myself and not for critical acclaim, but truth be told, I care what other people think and say about my work and I can’t stop caring. And yes, you bet I’m scared that it’s not gonna get any better than this.

“The story opens on these mysterious explosions. Nobody knows what’s causing them, but it’s upsetting all the buffalo.” (Ed riffing unironically on how he might cobble together an entire movie from discarded stock footage of military maneuvers and wildlife.)

It’s a funny throw-away bit, but it makes one wonder how many liberties Burton et al took with the real Ed Wood. Not that this movie lays any claim to being a genuine biopic, but still. Could he really have been such a naïf, such a wide-eyed man-child? More on this to come…

Ed: You’re much scarier in real life than you are in the movies.

Bela Lugosi: Thank you.

(Ed and Bela meet cute one day while Bela is out coffin-shopping.)

I brought to bear my usual passion for research (about twenty minutes poking around on Wikipedia) in an attempt to pin down the validity of the movie’s portrayal of the friendship between Ed and Bela Lugosi, by then a has-been junkie. Notwithstanding the protests of Bela’s son, who resents the movie’s implication that Bela’s family altogether abandoned him in his dotage, the general consensus seems to be that the fondness between Ed and Bela was genuine in both directions and that there was no exploitation. That’s good to know.

“I think she’s a honey. Look at those jugs!” (Bela enthusing over TV movie hostess Vampira.)

Thus begins the slow seepage of my empathy away from Ed and toward Bela—something I don’t remember happening when I used to watch this movie at regular intervals back in the Nineties. After all, Ed’s a bug-eyed idealist who rebounds quickly from setbacks. That’s not me anymore. Moreover, his transvestitism notwithstanding, he has lengthy relationships with girlfriends portrayed by Sarah Jessica Parker and Patricia Arquette in their respective primes. And we’re supposed to scoff at this man?

Bela, on the other hand, is a lonely, creepy old guy who has nothing better to do most nights than get wasted in his cramped little room and obsess over whatever boobs chance to bound onto the screen in front of him. Well, then. If the shoe fits…

What about this so-called Barbara character that’s obviously me! I mean, this is our life! It’s so embarrassing! (Ed’s live-in girlfriend reacting to the screenplay for Glen or Glenda while discovering that Ed is a transvestite.)

Ouch! I probably breezed through this scene on autopilot in years past—other than to note Ed’s first appearance in a blonde wig and women’s clothing. Watching it afresh in Josh Muggins mode, it cuts far too close to the bone.

Good grief. Is this really the way people react when they find out that they’ve been drafted into an autobiographical work? Even when they’ve been painstakingly fake-named, and when there’s little chance of anyone finding out (or caring) who they are? This isn’t the first time I’ve wrestled with this question, of course, but I thought I had pinned it in two out of three falls and sent it to the showers.

Now I have to revisit the whole issue again, thanks to this damn movie. Just because I honestly can’t understand why someone could be embarrassed to be described as, say, a rather ditzy college girl who used to date the likes of me, it does not stand to reason that a former ditzy college girl who used to date the likes of me would be similarly unmoved. People have different thresholds of shock and pain, as Dolores’s reaction—excessive as it seems to me—demonstrates. Damn it.

Paul: You were great as Karloff’s sidekick.

Bela: Karrrrrr-loff?? Side-keek? FUCK YOU! Karloff does not deserve to smell my shit! That Limey cocksucker can rot in Hell for all I care!

Bela’s anti-Karloff rant gets included simply because it’s one of the more oft-quoted segments of the film. It needs no explication, but I had forgotten how long it goes on, with Bela kvetching about how simple the role of Frankenstein’s monster was, replete with grunting imitation. Has any actor ever had more fun on the way to an academy award than Martin Landau did?

Ed: Tor… Mr. Johnson… Did you ever fancy the notion of becoming an actor?

Tor: Not good-looking enough.

It’s easy to see why Tim Burton had to make this movie. The freakish cast of characters is right in his wheelhouse, and they’re all real people. The late Ed Wood may have merited a ghostly writing credit on Burton’s Big Fish, which in some ways is a romantic do-over of his life.

This casting interview takes place in a locker room after a brutal pro wrestling match, with Tor Johnson lying on his stomach to receive a massage and with me thinking Please, God, let that hair on his back be prosthetic. Tor is played by George “The Animal” Steele, a hefty pro wrestler who was lured into acting by an oddball director in order to play a hefty pro wrestler who was lured into acting by an oddball director. Moreover, in the heyday of his wrestling career, Steele was often mistaken by fans for Tor Johnson—or at least for the iconic Halloween mask that Tor inspired. See what you can learn in twenty minutes of online research? I love Google.

Ed: I’m no good… I made the worst movie of all time… All I want to do is tell stories! The things that I find interesting.

I hear that! I hear that!

Bela (as Dr. Eric Vornoff): Home? I haff no home. Hunted! Despised! Living like an animal! The chungle is my home! But I shall show de vorld that I can be its master! I shall perfect my own race of people! A race of atomic supermen that vill conquer de vorld! Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.

Through some weird organic symbiosis, Bela’s and Ed’s meager talents of acting and writing fuse here (abetted to no small degree by Howard Shore’s swelling score) to create something akin to genuinely moving art. It’s perhaps the most unexpected moment in a movie chockfull of weirdness. It’s not quite Once more unto the breach, dear friends! but presumably this is the closest Ed ever came to writing a bona fide purple passage.

Dolores: You’re wasting your lives making shit! Nobody cares! These movies are terrible!

Sarah Jessica Parker can get really annoying at times.

Bela: There is no such thing as bad press, Eddie. Man from New York even told me he’s putting me on the front page! First celebrity ever to check into rehab!

I keep trying to tell myself that there’s no such thing as bad press, but it’s not sinking in…

They should have stopped the line there, by the way. The “check into rehab” bit is a glaring anachronism. In the late Fifties, it would have been called drying out, getting clean, or any number of things, but not “checking into rehab.” The writers fell in love with a gag-line that was too cute for its own good and then couldn’t bear to kill it. I know the feeling; I won’t cast the first stone. I’m just saying.

Bela: AHHHHH! AHHHHH! AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Ed: And cut! That was perfect!

Here is another scene that has become too famous to be left out: the loosely-based-on-fact incident in which Ed and crew break into a warehouse to steal a giant mechanical squid but neglect to steal its motor, forcing Bela to lie down in cold, scummy pond water and manually make the rubbery tentacles flail around him while screaming in terror.

It’s a running gag throughout the movie that Ed enthuses “That was perfect!” after a take in which things have gone obviously, horribly wrong. The gag carries a sort of reverse jujitsu here in that, given the circumstances, this take probably couldn’t have come off any better than it did.

Bela: Now that was a premiere!

I’ve not been able to determine whether the event to which Bela refers actually took place, but here’s how it’s portrayed in the movie: Ed and the cast have arrived late to the premiere of Bride of the Monster to find a theater full of howling, jujube-hurling fans. Ed’s attempt to soothe the savage beasts with a spooky amplified introduction falls flat, Vampira (Lisa Marie) has her breasts massaged by a horny ten-year-old, and finally the whole crew has to flee for their lives. Safely ensconced in a taxi with the rabid throng receding behind them, Bela delivers the above encomium.

Ed: Did you see that kid grab Vampira’s boobies?

Bela: I envied him.

I wonder how many takes they had to do on that premiere-gone-wrong scene. (Bear in mind that Lisa Marie was the director’s girlfriend.) Did the same lucky kid get to squeeze them over and over again? Or did they rotate the part among the boys to make it fair? I, for one, need to know these things, but sometimes even Wikipedia lets you down.

Kathy: You’re lucky. Eddie’s the only person in town who doesn’t pass judgment on people.

Ed: That’s right. If I did, I wouldn’t have any friends.

(Ed’s bride-to-be admonishing the freshly unemployed Vampira to lay off the condescension.)

Amen. If you’ve read my first memoir, you can understand why I’m a great believer in second chances. In third, tenth, fiftieth and seven hundredth chances, too. If I get ‘em, everybody should have ‘em. If I were into fantasy baseball, I’d still be drafting Steve Howe¹ every year.

Ed: That’s it! I can’t take it!

(Ed at the end of his tether, besieged by his Baptist financial backers and their petty demands.)

This sounds a lot like me back in my thirties, trying to parlay a very low-profile freelance magazine-writing gig into a book deal. I didn’t have financial backers to deal with, though; my bête noire was literary agents, who would take months to respond to a query or a submission only to cough up a form letter. The evolution of the print-on-demand industry lets writers of my ilk run a nifty end run around these guard dogs of the traditional publishing world, so I’ve ceased dealing with them, much to the benefit of my cardiovascular system.

Ed, alas, what with film being his medium, did not have the option of self-financing. Which was dreadful for him personally, but wonderful for the movie, for this outburst leads to him taxiing to the nearest bar, still in drag, where he runs into…

Ed: Do you know, I’ve even had producers re-cut my movies.

Orson Welles: I hate it when that happens.

Ed: And they’re always trying to cast their buddies! It doesn’t even matter if they’re right for the part!

Orson: Tell me about it.

The encounter is pure wishful thinking on two levels. For one, Ed himself wished for it as long as he and Orson Welles shared above-ground space, for he really did revere Welles—saw him as a kindred spirit, what with both of them being rare writing-directing-acting triple threats. But neither party ever made any claim to such a tête-à-tête.

Likewise, the filmmakers couldn’t resist the indulgence of creating this scene, and for once I don’t object to the blatant mangling of facts. In this case, it’s enough that they might have met. And had they met, wouldn’t it have gone something like this? Wouldn’t the greatest and awfulest filmmakers of all time have quickly found common ground in the frustrations of getting a movie made?

I’ve long held the (admittedly rather snooty) notion that the world is basically divided into producers and consumers of culture, and that the producers’ club is clearly the exclusive one. You don’t need talent to get in but you do need perseverance and a completed product, and that’s where 99.9 percent of the applicants fall down. You need to, as they say, git ‘er done. And say what you will about Ed Wood, he got ‘er done over and over again in circumstances even more daunting than those Welles faced. Ergo, he makes it into the Producers-of-Culture club, where we all embrace him as one of our own.

Ed: Ahh, Mr. Welles, is it all worth it?

Orson: When it works it is.

Vincent D’Onofrio practically takes over the whole movie in his few minutes here as Orson Welles. He never gets enough credit. He got his big break as the madman Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket, you know, and a few years after Ed Wood he would turn in one of the great physical-comedy performances of our times as the redneck whose body is co-opted by a giant insectoid alien in Men In Black. Orson Welles and a giant insectoid alien in the same decade. That, my friends, is range.

“Ed, visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else’s dreams?”

(Me, pounding the desk) Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!

Isn’t that it? Isn’t that the whole ball of wax, right there?

“Vision” seems too grandiose a word for what the likes of Ed and me do, but after all, a vision doesn’t have to be a grand or noble thing so long as it shimmers in the mind of its creator. My visions aren’t on the scale of, say, a reunified Korean peninsula or even a decent English film version of Don Quixote. In fact, they amount to nothing more than collections of anecdotes that I feel compelled to tell about my funny or heartbreaking relationships with Japanese women, or stuff that happened to my friends and me in college. Et cetera. Indeed, my visions are the etceteras of life. Mundane stuff, to be sure, but damn it, these are my visions! And they! (Bam!) Are! (Bam!) Worth! (Bam!) Fighting For! (Bam!)

“See? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!” (An alien in Plan 9 from Outer Space, shortly before being inexplicably vaporized, to humans who have just done something stupid.)

Personally, I don’t really relate to a Superior Being venting his frustration to the inferior minds around him. Heck, even when I’m teaching English composition to freshmen here in Japan I make no assumptions of intellectual superiority. I take it on faith that there are always several people in the room who trump me in terms of raw intellect, though they can’t manifest it in English. I suspect, however, that this speech neatly nutshells the internal sentiments of almost any of the Japanese females that I describe in my first memoir during the period of their lives that included me.

“Greetings, my friends. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends: future events such as these will affect you…in the future.”

I recently wrote at length about HBO’s Deadwood without a word about the estimable Jeffrey Jones, who seemed wasted in the series. As the jabbering ninny Criswell, though, he’s having almost as much fun as he had playing the idiot emperor in Amadeus. At any moment you expect his tongue to actually burst through the skin of his cheek.

“This is the one. This is the one I’ll be remembered for.” (Ed’s ironic revelation while watching the premiere of Plan 9 from Outer Space.)

Ed’s got the jump on me here. I haven’t yet made the work that I hope or expect to be remembered for.

And by the way, this was not an idle statement on his part (if indeed he made it in real life). Ed was nothing if not prolific. While the movie implies that his output was sporadic up until Plan 9, in fact he had directed eight feature films and a TV episode (according to IMDB) by that time.

The take-home point for me: I’ve got to get cracking on my output. As I type these words, I’m exactly, to the day, one year shy of Ed Wood’s age at the time of his death: 54 years, 2 months. I am duly humbled by this revelation.

Ed: Hey! Let’s get married. Right now! Let’s go to Vegas.

Kathy: But Eddie, it’s raining and the car top is stuck.

Ed: It’s only a five-hour drive, and it’ll probably stop by the time we get to the desert. Heck, it’ll probably stop by the time we get around the corner! Let’s go!

(Ed and Kathy slipping out of the Plan 9 premiere to drive off triumphantly—well, by Ed’s standards at least—in an open convertible in a driving rain.)

Throughout the movie, there’s this constant tension between Ed’s real bio and this sunnier, fictional theme park of a life toward which the movie wants to lead its viewers by the nose, and that divergence is strained most forcefully at the end. The movie’s implication is that Ed and his bride ride off to live happily (if wetly) ever after: Come, my dear, grow old with me: the shittiest movies are yet to come. The movie version of Ed is nothing if not resilient and armed with an endless reserve of optimism to overcome all critics.

The murkier reality is that Plan 9 really was the apex of his career. Afterward, writing and directing opportunities became fewer and farther between, and that dark underbelly became slipperier and harder to cling to. Kathy did stick by him to his dying day and beyond (she never remarried), but she could not spare Ed from the devil’s two-pronged pitchfork: drink and depression. In his later years he resorted to the porn industry for work and finally succumbed to a heart attack while watching a football game on TV. Kathy, in the next room, ignored his cries for help because Ed had often feigned heart attacks, Redd Foxx-like, as a joke.

Not a pretty story, I know, and I’m sorry if I’m the one breaking it to you. But I tell you what: Go to IMDB and check out the respective careers of Ed and Orson Welles in the years following that putative heart-to-heart that they mighta, coulda had one day in an LA bar. Welles’s directing and writing career up till his death in 1985 (on October 10, by the way—Ed’s birthday) is much sparser and scarcely weightier than Ed’s resume for that same period. Yes, Ed was writing feature-length scripts for $100 a pop while subsisting on convenience store vodka and churning out the likes of The Love Feast and The Cocktail Hostesses and Five Loose Women. But meanwhile, Orson was coasting along on commercials for supermarket wine and awing the easily awed Merv Griffin with his magic tricks. Which path would you choose to follow?

I come away from this viewing of Ed Wood, and from my study of the auteur’s real life, both shamed and rejuvenated. He didn’t cower in a secure day job or go four years without releasing any new product. He was out there pitching day after day after day until it killed him.

I suppose there are a lot worse things that could happen to a writer than to end up dubbed “the Ed Wood of memoirists” after all. And I’m going to get cracking on the One I’ll Be Remembered For. Just as soon as I polish off this here vodka.

December 22, 2008

1 Major League pitcher of the 1980s and 90s who was famously reinstated after multiple suspensions and one “lifetime ban” for substance abuse. In 2006 God slapped him with a deathtime ban, from which he has yet to return.

And Nothing But the Truth…Sorta

It’s hard out here for a memoirist. I get emails from readers that start off promisingly enough--“Great stuff” or “I liked your book”—before crashing onto the rocky shoals of “…if it’s true.”

One can hardly blame readers for their reluctance to invest in anyone’s personal stories anymore. The discount bins are full of the stirring autobiographies of non-Indian-gangstah Indian gangstahs, forty-year-old “teenage” prostitutes, and philandering philatelists. Okay, that last one was just fun to type.

Then we have that triumvirate of truthiness, James Frey, David Sedaris, and Augusten Burroughs. Before I give these three a piece of my mind that they’re certain never to notice, let me assure you that I’ve brought my usual standards of meticulousness to bear in composing this post, as the following table illustrates:

Fabricating Memoirist: Stuff written by him that I’ve actually read

James Frey: About three pages of A Million Little Pieces, which I can’t honestly say I “read,” but rather just skimmed with exponentially increasing haste, in a Borders.

David Sedaris: Me Talk Pretty One Day, the whole book!

Augusten Burroughs: His pen name.

And now for that piece of my mind.

Fabricating Memoirist 1: James Frey

To my thinking, Frey is the least culpable of the three in terms of messing things up for us lesser-known memoirists. To be sure, he's done the least harm. Well, he did cause that one train wreck that killed a girl. But in fact, he didn’t, which is how he ended up getting listed here.

I was in DC for a few nights on day-job business early in 2006 when the two stories getting obsessively covered were the frying of Frey by The Smoking Gun and the latest in a series of female schoolteachers who got caught preying upon their naive, innocent male students. Though the former story was the more relevant to me, being as it concerned the travails of a Brother Memoirist, I couldn’t help getting more caught up in the latter, since the teacher in question was uncommonly hot. (The always dependable Bill Maher thought so, too. “Just look at her!” he gushed. "Wait—show that mug shot again!")

I called Gary, my all-around point man in the US. Among the many other tasks that he generously takes upon himself, such as designing covers for my books and mailing out copies to reviewers, Gary reads non-Josh-Muggins books so that I won’t have to. “It’s all written in this weird, gonzo style,” Gary said of Frey’s bestseller. Then he added, “It’s just weird. And gonzo.” Then he added, “That teacher is really hot!”

The following day I was at Borders skimming as much of A Million Little Pieces as I could bear to skim (again, about three pages). My internal monologue:

…This is really hard to follow… To be fair, I ought to try a different chapter… Hmm, this one is even denser… It’s gonzo and, well, weird… Oprah really read this whole book? She’s tougher than I thought… How many more pages should I try before giving this up as a bad job?... I wonder if anyone has found and posted naked pictures of that teacher yet…

In the end, I had to forgive Frey because:

(a) He claims that he wrote the book as fiction and was pressured into reclassifying it as a memoir by Doubleday, and I find that claim credible. Anyway, it’s a lot easier for me to hate a major publishing house than a besieged Brother Memoirist who got yelled at by Oprah.

(b) Although his book was bought by millions of people, I suspect it was actually read by only a couple dozen. Thus, the whole betrayal-of-trust ballyhoo is way overblown.

Fabricating Memoirist 2: David Sedaris

After my first book came out, I began hearing/reading comparisons of my style with Sedaris’s. Those making the comparison clearly intended it as a compliment. That’s when I bought Me Talk Pretty One Day and started reading it poolside in Waikiki in the fall of 2007.

It started off well enough. The first chapter centered on his sessions with a speech therapist in fifth grade, and was amusing. This guy is good, I said to myself, and much more comprehensible than Frey. The next story jumped ahead a few years and dealt with the guitar lessons his father forced him to take from a midget. This is where ambivalence started to creep over me.

On the one hand, I admired the way he organized the book as a series of essays utterly independent of one another. (I’m not being ironic here.) I’d been operating under the assumption that a memoir had to be, if not one’s entire life story, at least a set of episodes from one’s life bound together by a unifying theme: the trauma of growing up a Klingon hermaphrodite, say--or, in my case, my bumbling interactions with Japanese females.

However, much of the story of the midget guitar teacher just didn’t ring true. The character was too broad and buffoonish, etc. It was clear that he was no longer reporting his memories here but just making stuff up. Now, throwing the theme out of memoir writing is one thing, but if you throw the memories out of the memoir, what have you got? Just -oir I guess. Whatever that is.

I shook off the midget guitar teacher story, hoping it to be an aberration, but my see-saw battle with credibility would rage on. The next chapter was a benign, fluffy piece on his father’s eccentricities; no problems there. But the following item, “Twelve Moments in the Life of an Artist,” was an uphill climb from start to finish. Most of this piece detailed Sedaris’s days in college, when he had eccentric friends and took lots of speed.

At the time, I myself had just finished drafting a memoir about my own college days and the eccentric friends and god-awful lot of speed that highlighted the era, so I was on familiar turf here. Since Sedaris hung out with avant-garde artists rather than southwestern Minnesota farm boys, I was prepared to concede that his friends would make for more colorful storytelling fodder than mine did. But...but some of these stories… When I finally got to the sentence, “His living room contained nothing but an enormous nest made of human hair,” I sadly closed the book and began scanning the pool area for someone of legal age to mentally undress.

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