Those stupid "Mitchum Man" ads, about all the dickly qualities that are supposed to go along with needing a strong deodorant, don't really offend me any more than all the other fratboy stuff that's taken over TV/movie/ad-land in the last 20 years (though it's all pretty creepy to me... I think there's kind of a fascist vibe to the way the generic "guy" on TV now is always a Men-Are-from-Mars dude with a short haircut who's dumb and babyish)... but one of them, posted above a urinal where I was peeing in the manly stand-up way I do, just got me totally confused.

Picture: a half-empty martini glass. Caption: "If she's looking better already... you're a Mitchum Man."

So which one of these is the message:

1. The M.M. can't find a pretty enough woman, so he just gets drunk and picks up the nearest monster?
2. The M.M. is gay, and tries to fix this with beer goggles?
3. He's such a lightweight that half a drink makes him all gaga?

Please help me out folks, my masculinity may be at stake.

ps. It's a pretty good product if you're sweaty like me.

(Also: more signs you may have missed.)

George W. being a big jerk is not news, but this gallery of physical assholitude is still pretty impressive. He just did the "hey baby, your shoulders look tense" bit (which one German report called a "love-attack") to Chancellor Angela Merkel, with less than good results.

Maybe he's trying to borrow some Clinton magic, or maybe the thought of the Middle East blowing up just makes him horny.

One thing I do now and then is write stuff about Wallace Shawn for my website, A Wallace Shawn Reference. Yes, he's the little guy in The Princess Bride but he's also a goddamn brilliant writer. Because no one else bothered to do a big fan site, people keep using me as a link whenever they mention him, so I'm weirdly the #3 result on Google even though I don't even have any goofy photos.

Anyway, I just added a review of a book about him, and some nice links like a radio interview about the new CD release of his most disturbing play.

I saw Art School Confidential a while ago and it wasn't perfect, but I loved it. The movie doesn't invite love - it starts snarky and ends horrific, and I wasn't surprised that some of the audience stomped out at the end saying things like "What was that even about?" But I'm really perplexed by some of the reviews that said, (1) all the characters are irredeemable schmucks; (2) the murder plot was irrelevant; (3) it's all about how art is bullshit. I will now overanalyze these.

(1) Yeah, most of the characters are weak and wrong in some way, but not unreal or unforgiveable. Jerome is a talented immature guy who's desperate for some kind of acceptance. Audrey is just drawn to people who seem vulnerable and out of place. Sandy is a totally realistic prisoner of academia - I had this teacher - and as maddening and sleazy as he is, he sometimes does what a good teacher does. I don't even think the bad students are total idiots, they're just insecure kids who are desperate to be unique and have only managed to define themselves as "creative". (One of them, Shiloh the photographer, isn't an idiot at all. I wonder what became of her.) Most of the characters are sketched in pretty quickly, but that doesn't equal shallow; I think Clowes and Zwigoff are good at quick sketching. (I'm thinking of a scene near the end of Ghost World where Seymour comes crying back to his therapist; her expression when she leaves the room tells us what the last 10 years have been like for those two.)

(2) Violence isn't an incidental part of the movie; it starts with Jerome getting beaten up at age 10, and art for him is a weapon. When things start going against him, he picks up Jimmy's bitterness as a pose at first, but it seems pretty clear that they've got some things in common and that Jimmy's damage is very bad, a sign of where Jerome might go - they're both Romantics and that often includes a lot of fucked-up death-focus. Jerome is a guy increasingly desperate to prove himself, it feels like life or death to him, so in the end it is life or death - and the two crimes he profits by in the end do go together, considering how strongly these characters believe that individual expression is the source of all value in life. And the murder plot brings in two nice foils to the ethereal art kids: the crass film student who thinks his thug talk makes him worldly, and the philistine cops.

(3) The movie is only anti-art in the same way the Bible is anti-God. Art causes grief and bullshit, but has undeniable power and has to be pursued. The institutions that rise up around it are corrupted by basic human flaws, and the movie keeps coming back to one of these: the fear of expressing an inappropriate response, liking the wrong thing or looking stupid. The cops think there's something uniquely freaky and laughable about the art school, but from all the other evidence it's just the kind of place you'll naturally get whenever people are trying to be special and please others and learn how to do magic.

(Yeah, I ended up thinking about Harry Potter somehow. Those books include some good teachers, who help the kids figure out the strengths and limits of themselves and adults and traditions. The Strathmore kids don't get much of that. I think the kind of cryptic, noncommittal commentary Sandy gives his class can be a good thing: it keeps the students from rote-learning criteria they don't really get yet, and discourages the "this thing I like to do is the only important thing" notion that creative kids are prone to; what a class like that is good for is just to get people talking and surprise them. And he gives Jerome some good advice about style... and he really doesn't want that girl to cry. But he's not honest: the evaluations say one thing and the grades say another, he offers you favor in a way that keeps plausible deniability, and he warns you not to focus on career ambition when that's all he ever does. Since he's smart and charismatic this is a very bad setup.)

My annoyingly talented pal Jesse Reklaw's somewhat legendary (and possibly legally actionable) one-shot zine Applicant, culled from the trash bin of a University Not to Be Named, has finally been published as a mini-paperback! Now I can stop lending it to people and wondering if I'll ever see it again. If you've ever worried about what some institutional gatekeeper thought of you - and/or if you'd like a reminder that society has actually progressed a little in some ways in the last 30 years - you should read this.

Bay Area people: it's nice weather, and the state of the world continues to be not so good... so it's the perfect time to go see some outdoor theater about bad decisions and cosmic disaster!

I've been watching this thing take shape since my folks first started working with Shotgun, and it's a hell of a thing - dark, poetic, and goofy, not unlike what you might get if Neil Gaiman collaborated with the Marx Brothers. The cast is solid and the music is lovely. The stage is a WPA-era amphitheater that sounds amazing (though I was told to tell you to bring a cushion for the stone seats, and something warm for if the fog rolls in). Mead is available.

The story, knitted together from the Norse myths I dug so much as a kid, is basically: the gods freak out about an ambiguous prophecy, gather bad intelligence about their mysterious rivals, screw over various third parties in increasingly unscrupulous and violent ways, and gather some awfully shady allies; the source of joy gets shot with a sprig of mistletoe and the monsters of mass destruction come home to roost. Meanwhile, some 11th-century Scandinavian actors get more involved in their low-budget religious production than they meant to...

Anyway, go see it. It opens this weekend and I'll probably be there on August 5.

I unwisely took a job as Vampire's Henchman. I've never met the big boss, just my manager. Now I'm showing up at headquarters (a cheap motel room) a half-hour late, and in the parking lot I get ambushed by the big boss - an ancient and very dangerous-looking little guy who doesn't believe I'm an employee. "I just started last week... my manager is, uh..." I can't remember the fucker's name!

Desperately I start mentioning little incidents to prove I've been there, but they're all really embarrassing: "On my first day, I spilled holy water on him by mistake," etc. He lets me live at the cost of looking like an idiot. I go on in, having second thoughts about the job, and they don't wear name tags and I still can't remember my manager's name.