“In Christopher Nolan movies, I never know whether he’s going to find an ending or not, but I never have any problem finding the exit…. Like bottom feeder Charlie Kaufman, Mr. Nolan’s reputation as an arrogant maverick draws a first-rate cast of players, none of whom have an inkling of what they’re doing or what this movie is about in the first place, and all of whom have been seen to better advantage elsewhere. Especially Leonardo DiCaprio, who remains one of the screen’s most gullible talents…. Inception is the kind of pretentious perplexity in which one or two reels could be mischievously transposed, or even projected backward, and nobody would know the difference.” WHAT IF… Friday finally comes and you find yourself agreeing with Rex Reed?

Has the dreaded chupacabra-the mysterious goat-sucker of legend-finally been found in Hood County? Yeah, sure, why not. COWER IN FEAR OF THE CHUPACABRA, people!

Today’s New York Post has a 20-page pullout tribute to the late George Steinbrenner, which includes a “look at some of The Boss’ memorable appearances on the front and back pages of” the paper. The final entry is, of course, the cover of today’s Post, which advertises the very tribute special in which one sees this image. It’s like some kind of infinite loop.

“He gestured towards a dinner roll and spoke about its ‘bread-ness’-the wan material object we call bread, juxtaposed with the vibrant reality of bread floating somewhere in the ether. ‘When you intellectualize your creation,’ he said, ‘you destroy your creation.’”
–Robert Davi, ladies and gentlemen.

I stopped watching this show early in season two, because 1. not enough vampires! and 2. I just didn’t see where it could go after the crushing season one finale, when plotting bipolar matriarch Sarah Palin lost her chance to run the “United States of America.” Plots just don’t work when they scale down, you know? Then season two got very Twin Peaks: Sarah quit her job, her daughter’s baby-daddy Levi tried to become a porn star through appearing in Fleshworld magazine, and I was like, there is nothing here of narrative importance or interest for me! Well, the show has gone uncanceled, because the network has nothing else, and at the top of season three, it was revealed that a pesky evil spy had moved in to the house next door to Sarah. This was a good start, but there wasn’t much to look at, because mostly Sarah spent all her time in her house, unemployed, chatting with friends on Facebook and Twitter. (I mean, history will prove most likely that this is going to be an amazing historical representation of America, but it’s still not much to look at in the here and now.) So now it’s last-ditch ratings gusto! This is like sweeps week, except this channel is way too subpar to register on Nielsen! Bristol and Levi, the parents of the baby that, in season one, everyone thought was secretly Sarah’s, have reunited! The subplot for the rest of season three is that they’re “scared” about what Sarah Palin is going to say when she finds out that they’re engaged! I wonder how she will find out! Maybe someone will post a copy of the cover of Us on Sarah’s Facebook wall!?

There is very possibly some backstory that we’re missing here-or not! We are talking about Gurnee, Illinois, after all-but we’ll simply provide you with the facts as stated: “Two Six Flags employees were ejected from the north suburban theme park Monday afternoon after allegedly attacking a female employee dressed as ‘Porky Pig.’ Taras Sikalchuk, 20, and Dmytro Petrychenko, 19, took a photo with “Porky Pig” about 2:20 p.m. Monday at Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, then punched the mascot in the head 10 to 15 times, Gurnee police said. Both men are employees of the park and were visiting on their day off, Gurnee police Sgt. Jon Ward said.”

The proud non-immigrant organization Concerned Citizens of the United States has been sending their list of suspected “illegal immigrants” in Utah-there are 1300 whole names on it!-to anyone who’ll listen. The feds wouldn’t, so then the “Citizens” distributed this menu of Mexican and Central American people to the cops and the newspapers… who are now expending their energy trying to find out who made the list. (What? While these immigrants, some of whom have green cards and U.S. citizen children, are taking our jobs?) Yes, unfortunately for the people of Concerned Citizens (by which I mean, the one person who did this), “they” are going to eventually go to jail for this, seeing as the lists have social security numbers, dates of applications for food stamps and other proprietary government information. You just can’t save America from the immigrants! I agree that we should have tried harder when those horrible Irish came over but it’s just too late now.

Dear nightshift manager at the Sheridan Garage,

Sorry for taking the key out of the engine of my car after you’d jumped the battery.

This was Sunday night, after a series of events that left me frazzled but also counting my lucky stars. My wife Emily and I were driving home from a weekend at her parents’ place upstate. Our five-year-old son was asleep in the backseat. Around ten o’clock, somewhere on the Taconic Parkway in Westchester, an orange light reading “ABS” appeared on the dashboard display. I had no idea what this meant. (A message from God to start working out?) But when I pointed it out to Emily, she guessed it stood for “Antilock Braking System.” I don’t know how she knew this-Emily grew up in New York City, and doesn’t drive-but she was right. Still, neither of us knew what we should do about it. The car seemed to be driving fine, so I figured I’d just look into it after we got home.

A little while later, after the Taconic had turned into the Sprain Brook, I noticed that all the other dashboard lights seemed to be dimming. At least, I thought this was the case. I wasn’t sure. I wondered if maybe it was just that they looked dimmer in comparison to the brighter orange “ABS” light that was new to the scene. I was still wondering about this as the Sprain turned into the Bronx River Parkway and when the little red picture of the battery lit up.

Also, we seemed to be losing our headlights. But again, it was hard to be sure, because of the brake lights in the car ahead of us.

“This is bad,” I said to Emily. But I couldn’t figure out why the battery would be dying while the car was driving. I thought that just happened when you left the car parked overnight with the lights on. I don’t know very much about how cars work. In fact, I know so little about how cars work, that I’d be sympathetic to the argument that, really, I should not ever drive one again.

“I guess we need a new battery?” I said. But we still didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how long it took for a battery to die after the warning light went on. “I hope we make it home.” I turned off the radio and the air-conditioning. There were lots of other cars around us, driving fast on the confusing sprawl of highways and bridges and exits and merges that circles the city. The shoulder looked thin and uninviting, especially with the kid in the backseat.

Turns out it doesn’t take very long for the battery to die after the warning light goes on. We got off the Parkway at the 177th Street exit and went under the Cross Bronx onto the Sheridan Expressway. And then the engine started slowing down. I pressed hard on the gas pedal and the car started herky-jerking. We were in the middle lane. Cars zoomed past on either side of us. I pushed the button for the hazard lights but they didn’t go on.

I said “fuck” and asked Emily to unroll her window to signal to the cars around us. Her window rolled down three inches and stopped. “It won’t go down,” she said.

The worst part of our night came when I turned my head around and saw that there was an eighteen-wheeler truck merging onto the road behind us. Merging into the right lane, where I was at the time trying to aim my lurching, sputtering, largely invisible and electronically-sealed death box. I held my breath and let it pass, and then cut off another car to turn into the right lane. Then, thank god, we found ourselves on an exit ramp. It was an upward incline, which was not great. But it was straight, which was great, because I now noticed that the steering wheel was resisting my turning it.

The best part of our night came when Emily saw a sign for the Sheridan Garage across the street from the top of the ramp. I pulled into the parking lot and felt the steering wheel freeze into a locked position just as we rolled through the open door and under the fluorescent lights. “Wow.” I stopped the car and turned to Emily. “That was really lucky!”

This is maybe where the worst part of your night began. You work at the Sheridan Garage. And after I got out of my car and knocked on the frosted-glass kiosk there, it was you who opened the door and stepped out to greet me.

You were nothing but nice. But we had trouble communicating because you don’t speak very much English and I don’t speak very much Spanish. At first, you thought I just wanted to park my car at the garage. But I was able to express the truth of the situation by pointing to the car and saying “battery” and making a knife out of fingers and drawing it across my throat. You perked up and said the word “jump” and called out, “JoJo!” and something in Spanish. I smiled and shrugged. Could it be that all the car needed was to have its battery jumped? Seemed unlikely. But what did I know? I wished I could have admitted to you my level of ignorance about cars from the outset.

JoJo, younger man in a blue polo shirt, appeared from the back of the garage pulling a dolly. On the dolly was a milk-crate that held a car battery with jumper cables attached. You asked me to open the hood and I did and you connected the cables and told me to start the car and I tried to but it wouldn’t start. You said something to JoJo and unconnected the cables and reconnected them in a few different places, one of which resulted in sparks and, apparently, a shock to your hand. But after some more discussion with JoJo and a couple more tries, the car finally started up. You smiled proudly and gave me a conclusive nod.

JoJo unconnected the cables and put them back in to the milk crate and carted the jumper battery away. But the car didn’t sound so good and I saw that the ABS light and the little red battery were once again lit up on the dashboard. I got out of the car and brought this to your attention. You got into the driver’s seat and inspected the dashboard and revved the engine, which sputtered. “No good,” you said.

“Yeah,” I said.

You said something in Spanish and I shrugged. You said something that sounded like “alternator” and got out of the car and pointed to a part of the engine that Internet research has since told me is called the alternator.

“Oh,” I said, nodding stupidly. “That’s it.”

We then spent a couple minutes coming to the understanding that there was a mechanic who worked at the garage who could fix the car and that I would come pick it up on Wednesday morning. You went back into the kiosk to call a taxi for us and Emily went to wake up the kid. I got back into the car and took the keys out of the ignition so I could open the trunk to get our bags. This was a mistake.

You stuck your head back out of the kiosk when you heard the engine stop running. “No!” you said, looking at me standing next to the car with the keys in my hand. “No off!”

“Oooh,” I said, realizing that you would probably need to move the car out of the entranceway to the garage.

You shook your head sadly and started walking to the back of the garage. “JoJo!”

Sorry about that. See you tomorrow?

Have you visited the saddest IMDb page in existence? It belongs to Anne Sellors, a woman just barely featured in the 1984 BBC television play Threads, which imagines the aftermath of nuclear armageddon in England. What role did Ms. Sellors play? “Woman who urinates herself.” She did not receive a credit and understandably never acted onscreen again.

Twenty-six years later, that lone performance is being recognized.

“Indeed, a truly memorable turn by the legendary Sellors,” writes one IMDb user. “Anne’s performance captured the real essence of the moment,” writes another. Rather than enduring the grim entirety of Threads, you can now skip directly to the terror-piss or enjoy it in .gif form. Here is obscurity celebrated, humiliation made holy. A few cutting-floor-ready frames scrutinized as museum exhibit.

The longer the web fractalizes, the more layers and detritus and dead ends it accrues, the more we trip over what amount to bizarre archaeological finds. Though it won’t matter later, we’d prefer to do the initial unearthing or be among the first on the scene when such a discovery occurs. We can then point others toward it, hoping to hear joyous disbelief.

Take that “Double Rainbow” video, which has now passed the 3.7-million-view mark this week: ecstasy over ecstasy. We are natural anthropologists, inviting colleagues to speculate on the circumstance of lives we have glimpsed askew.

Calling attention to a surreal life-fragment is not quite like force-loaning a DVD or gushing about a restaurant. In either case we shepherd opinion, flagging an object that shouldn’t get lost in the shuffle. Yet the Internet’s entropy overshadows the proliferation of art, insists that ever more sublime accidents go unnoticed in its hyperchurned muck. When we link to Anne Sellor’s IMDb page, we fight for its ascendance to the planes of conversation and preservation. It’s no big deal if your buddy isn’t into the mixtape you love (it will survive as private bliss), but Anne Sellors’ career must be acknowledged as shattering fact; she must be saved from-and by-her anti-legacy; people must confirm that real life is realer than they guessed. And they must draw wisdom from it all.

No doubt you’re familiar with Three Wolf Moon, a geek couture T-shirt design championed throughout the ether. You may also know that its popularity owes much to what Wikipedia delightfully terms “the ur-review,” a tongue-in-cheek bit of Amazon.com customer feedback written by one Brian Govern (alias “Bee-Dot-Govern”). Govern deadpanned that the shirt-and wolves generally-are ultimate, aphrodisiac expressions of alphahood, inspiring some 1,647 like-humored individuals to offer prose and Photoshops further expounding on the garment’s aura of supernatural virility.

Three Wolf Moon shot to the top of Amazon’s clothing bestsellers list more than a year ago; more remarkably, it still ranks #49.

If you’re not impressed by that data, ask yourself this: when was the last time a sarcastic response to lameness converted that lameness into unfiltered, profitable cool? Irony, fed into a complex chemical reaction, burned off quickly. The reverence is no longer shtick. Wearing the Three Wolf Moon shirt is probably the first identifiable act of post-hipsterism, eclipsing any argument about subverted intent or meta-fashion. The image simply owns its attached mythology like any other religious icon, collapsing the moment between folklore’s invention and its broader acceptance as a compelling belief system.

Many, um, niche items have since been blanketed with sarcastic reviews. Playmobil’s TSA security checkpoint set, a steering wheel-mounted laptop desk, a UFO detector and a gallon of Tuscan whole milk have drawn amusing comments for being creepy, suicidal, dumb and not something you want to buy from Amazon, respectively. My favorite, however, has to be a 648-page self-published book available for the sale (!) price of $135 and titled “BIRTH CONTROL IS SINFUL IN THE CHRISTIAN MARRIAGES and also ROBBING GOD OF PRIESTHOOD CHILDREN!!: MANY FALSE CHRIST MARRIAGES ARE LIVING ON BIRTH CONTROL AND: NOW LEADING THE AMERICAN CHURCH WEALTH!,” about which Amazon customer G. Foster yelled, “THIS IS A FANTASTIC BOOK BUT MY BOOKSHELF IS A BIT SPARSE AS AFTER READING IT I BURNED ALL MY OTHER BOOKS, INCLUDING THE BIBLES AS THEY WERE WRITTEN PARTIALLY IN LOWERCASE LETTERS, OR AS I LIKE TO CALL THEM, THE DEVIL’S RUNES.”

The difference is these items don’t sell. Nobody has crossed the line from ridicule to fondness here. Rarely is there an airtight marriage of product presentation and mock enthusiasm. But if Three Wolf Moon, laughably marketed as a “power” shirt, can be enshrined as one-can find an audience willing to ascribe actual power to it as part of an in-joke so broad that everyone’s in and the joke gets fuzzy-then doesn’t every morsel of our experience have a shot at immortality?

There’s a dreamy Steven Millhauser story called “Here at the Historical Society” that explores the radical desire to overlook the past and study the banalities of the present, as these can be vividly painted and upheld for future historians’ benefit. We have a hobby of explaining earlier generations, the story says, but a duty to explain our own. Nothing is too insignificant for this historical society-even gum wrappers have a place in the archives. Eventually, this new branch of academia proves too full, too vast, unsustainable, and one pines for the elisions of long-ago. Yet the project will not die; its steady subdivision cannot abate.

It is easier than ever to make the negligible infamous, to claim images or words as residue of and clues to modern consciousness. With an online campaign, Anne Sellors could even make a comeback. The age of the meme, for all its white noise, does permit a singular form of redemption.

Miles Klee is leaving some amazing reviews on Yelp right now.

by Mel Gibson

From time to time, we offer free editorial space to folks from all walks of life who have something to get off their chests. Today a popular entertainer who has been in the news lately asks for forgiveness.

I’m not going to come out and make excuses or try to offer any kind of explanation in hopes of minimizing the terrible things you’ve heard me say on the apparently endless series of audiotapes my ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva will be releasing until the end of time. I said all those terrible things. It doesn’t matter if it was in the heat of the moment, it’s not important if I was under the influence of alcohol, I won’t try to claim that I have anger issues that made me use language that might not be the normal way I’d choose to express myself. At the end of the day, I said all those things. I fucked up bad, and I’m sorry.

I know many of you are offended, particularly Blacks, Latinos, Jews, Gypsies, Cunts, Gays, ugly men, using whores, people who prefer not to smile while performing fellatio, mothers of my children, advocates against spousal abuse, gardeners, the Irish (not yet, I know, but wait, it’s gonna come out eventually), Jodie Foster and the poor bastards at Summit Entertainment who are somehow going to have to find a way to market The Beaver, actual beavers, Jews again (trust me, there’s more) and anyone who now has RadarOnline in their browser history and does not know how to delete it. Let me say it once more: I’m deeply sorry.

The next few weeks and months will, of necessity, be a period of deep reflection on my part. Assuming I am able to stay out of prison (and, you know, thank God for LA celebrity justice; I like my chances) I will need to engage in a long and difficult journey that includes counseling, both spiritual and mental, and the painful shedding of my own inflated ego as I attempt to seek forgiveness from the actual people I’ve wronged and then the public at large. I know I don’t deserve it, but I hope you allow me some modicum of privacy as I begin this healing process.

Again, I don’t want to present any mitigating factors in my defense. And I’m not asking for any sympathy on my behalf. I did what I did and I said what I said and now I’ve got to face the consequences. Still, I do want to point out one tiny thing: I have never ever made any disparaging remarks about cripples. You gimps are all right in my book, okay? And I think that’s gotta count for something.

Thanks for listening,
Mel

Mel Gibson feels like Tequila Sunrise never got the credit it deserved for being a really good movie.