Darrell Hammond and the Perils of the Impressionist

It was Whoopi Goldberg who first called him “the shape-shifter,” and Darrell Hammond was “extremely flattered” when he heard that one. “It might sound a little woo-woo mystical,” he writes in his new memoir God, If You’re Not Up There, I’m F*cked: Tales of Stand-up, ‘Saturday Night Live’ and Other Mind-Altering Mayhem, “but truth be told, it might actually be the best description of what I do. According to mythology, though, a real shape-shifter has trouble returning to his original form after a while, whereas I, unfortunately, had no such issue.”

It’s hard to know just what returning to his original form means, exactly, when it comes to Darrell Hammond, although it’s apparent that what he means here is returning to the addict, depressive, bipolar, multiple-personality schizophrenic. Those are all diagnoses Hammond has received and shares in these pages, but it’s the last of them, more than any other, that makes coherent definition impossible, even if all of them, to some extent, describe someone who’s a shape-shifter even when not on the clock. 

Read the rest of "The Shape-Shifter" at The Rumpus. 

Not All Cotton Swabs Are Created Equal

I used to think it doesn't matter what kind of Q-tip you use--by which I mean: I used to think it doesn't matter what kind of cotton swab you use. The two are not the same. It's not a mistake I'll make again. This change came about just last week, when I went out to get some Q-tips, having run out. What I decided to get instead was the generic, and the absolute cheapest generic they had, at that. What could it matter? I thought. It's cotton on a stick. The answer came to me when I got back home with the cotton swabs that were not Q-tips, and, overly accustomed to that protective and absorbent softness I'd always taken for granted, ended up stabbing my eardrum. It wasn't a puncture, but it was a stab, and I had to adjust my technique from a vigorous swabbing to a ginger, gentle probing. There are some things with which you can cut costs like corners, but then there are things with which you never should.

Just a Coupla Coen Brothers Regulars, Out Bowling

If you're watching a scene set in a bowling alley that features two of the Coen Brothers' go-to repertory players, chances are you're watching The Big Lebowski (1998). Either that or you're watching Roseanne. I learned this not too long ago, when I tracked down "Lovers Lane" (1988), one of two bowling-themed episodes in the show's run. (The other, somewhat less imaginatively, is titled "The Bowling Show" [1992].) You'll quickly guess who one of the Coen regulars is--that would be John Goodman, the co-star of Lebowski and an actor nearly as closely identified with Roseanne as Roseanne herself. But the other is trickier, because it's easy to forget that George Clooney was ever a regular on Roseanne at all. 

Jackie and Booker agree to terms, while Dan marches on in the background. 

He played Booker, Roseanne and Jackie's supervisor at work, and here he is on a night out bowling with them and Dan (Goodman). If you want the spoiler, I'll give it to you. Booker and Jackie make a wager: if Jackie wins, Booker cleans her bathroom; if Booker wins, Jackie doesn't get to sleep at her own place that night. Booker wins, but then renegs on the deal from the wrong end, declaring, gallantly, "Not on a bet." Meaning to-be-continued. But Jackie doesn't want to-be-continued. She wants the terms of her loss honored, and when she yells at him, "Welcher!," you know that she's a double loser on this night. 

Notes on the Grayness of Boba Fett's Suit

Serving neither the Empire nor the Alliance, Boba Fett emerged from the culture known as Mandelorian--which places him, on the chromatic good-guy/bad-guy scale, somewhere between a Jedi and a Sith. He's much closer to the Sith, of course; as a bounty hunter, he works more often on behalf of evil than any other cause. But really the only cause he serves is his own--a code of his own devising that only Boba abides. 

Boba Fett's morality, in other words, is as gray as the suit he wears. That's one reason for his surprising popularity among fans, which is really surprising only if you think of it in terms of the paucity of his role--as measured in both screen time and number of lines. But that's a superficial way to measure importance. His appearances in the Original Trilogy (the only Star Wars entity that really matters) are brief, but they're not inconsequential. He captures Han Solo, after all, or gives the Empire the means to capture Han Solo, by tracking him down to Bespin and Cloud City. He did it for the bounty promised by Jabba the Hutt (to whom Solo owes money), which is why he makes sure to tell Darth Vader, in bold and strident terms, that Solo had better make it to Jabba's Palace in that carbon-freeze alive. 

To get away with talking to Vader like that, you'd better be damned good at what you do. You have to be an asset, both skilled and competent, which is something Boba Fett manages without even accessing the Force, either its Light or its Dark Side. He's all the more impressive for that. Probably the least appealing thing about the Star Wars Galaxy is its absence of moral ambiguity, and although Boba Fett is not a major enough character to single-handedly eradicate that, he can at least help mute all those primary colors with a graceful touch of gray.

And speaking of mute--since when is an absence of lines something to make a character any less appealing. Boba Fett's literal, audible muteness does more than just emphasize his essence as a man of action--it also forces the viewer to fill in his silences with all the imagination's possibilities. Why does he wear those braided Wookiee scalps over his shoulder? How did he become such a skilled marksman? Where did he get that jetpack on his back? What does that symbol on his right breast mean? These questions can all be answered on Wookieepedia, or by reading the warehouseful of auxiliary texts to come out of the Galaxy, or by watching those dreadful prequels. 

The questions have answers, and the answers are often interesting. But most interesting of all is the way Boba Fett is allowed to exist within the Original Trilogy as pure mystery. He meets his end when Solo sets off his jetpack over the Sarlacc pit, sending Boba Fett hurtling down into its merciless maw. If you ead the books, they'll tell you that he made it out of there alive, but I like to think of Boba Fett dying for that superior technology and bravery with which he supplemented his pure skill. You live by a thing, you die by a thing--that's pretty much the way things go out here in the real galaxy. 

Was Chevy Chase a Model for Steely Dan's 'Dirty Work'?

Chevy Chase used to play drums with Steely Dan. This was before Becker and Fagen called themselves Steely Dan--they were just a couple kids hanging out at Bard College, fronting a band called the Leather Canary, and Chase was in there with them. This is all pretty common knowledge, and no one could credibly dispute it even if they wanted to. Much less indisputable is my own claim--inspired by a passage in Rene Fruchter's biography I'm Chevy Chase...And You're Not (2007)--that events in Chase's life around this time may have inspired the Dan song "Dirty Work" (released on their first album, Can't Buy a Thrill [1972], but written and demoed significantly earlier). 

Fruchter tells the story of young Chevy meeting an older and better-financially-situated woman who was also married, and with whom Chase eventually carried on an affair. Chase soon began to feel guilty about things, and, on a much more selfish level, began to feel like a de facto gigolo. This feeling did not abate when the woman offered him money upon termination of their affair. "Well, isn't there something you want?" she asked, and Chase said, why, yes, there's a $600 drum kit he'd had his eye on. "That's egg money for me." she said, giving Chevy what would become a favorite phrase of his for life. 

Fruchter tells about all this, and then she drops in the information that makes the connection, intentionally or not,  to "Dirty Work": 

A short time later, he became a drummer with a rock 'n' roll group and his career started moving. For a while, he played with musicians Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, who later formed the group Steely Dan. But Chevy didn't think he was good enough and left the band, advising them to find a better drummer. 

They found a better drummer--they found a bunch of them. That much we know. What we don't know is whether they had to go any further to find the raw narrative material for this signature song. 

When George Carlin Played the Big Room in His Twilight

The first and only time I ever went to Vegas was the summer of '02. I was about to discharge from the Navy and wanted to make sure I got in that token trip before moving away from the West Coast. I stayed at the MGM Grand. There were banners everywhere touting Carrot Top's ongoing engagements at the hotel, and then, next to that, the coming-soon: George Carlin. As if to say,"You came this close, asshole. Sorry." It might as well be the Lost Wages motto.

Missing out on a chance to serendipitously see your all-time favorite stand-up is discouraging enough, but if I'd known then what I know now, having read James Sullivan's new Carlin biography 7 Dirty Words, I would have been even more dispirited still. You see, it turns out that in those months at the MGM Grand, Carlin would put on the kind of theater you simply can't pay for, because you never see it coming. He was a couple years away from checking into rehab, for booze and painkillers, and he was disgusted as ever with the whole crass, ersatz culture of Las Vegas. When he did his misanthropic shtick during this run of engagements, it wasn't always shtick. Sullivan reports:

Shortly after Winston Smith finished his work on the Complaints and Grievances album art, he was invited to see Carlin perform at his new venue in Vegas, the MGM Grand, where several patrons mistook the white-bearded collage artist for the headlining comedian as he made his way through the casino. Midway through the show, Carlin grew frustrated with a woman who was talking loudly to her companion, ignoring the performer. “Lady, would you shut the fuck up?” Carlin finally blurted, followed by “other, much ruder things,” according to Smith. “People realized he wasn’t kidding. Suddenly the laughter kind of died down.”

"It was," Sullivan continues, "by no means Carlin's only incident at the MGM Grand," where apparently "Carlin perfected the art of driving faint-hearted ticket holders toward the exits."

The constant complaint was that the show was too dark. “Riffs included suicide and beheadings,” wrote one local reviewer. At the end of the run, Carlin took the opportunity to renew his contempt for the city and the mindless escapism it stood for: “People who go to Las Vegas, you’ve got to question their fuckin’ intellect to start with,” he said. “Traveling hundreds and thousands of miles to essentially give your money to a large corporation is kind of fuckin’ moronic.” A woman in the audience reportedly yelled, “Stop degrading us!” 

Facetiously, Carlin thanked her, indicating he hadn’t actually heard what she said. “I hope it was positive. If not, well, blow me,” he said.

I never saw him perform live--I never even fucking saw him. I must have thought that, just because he's immortal, he was gonna stick around here forever.

The Miseducations of Lauryn Hill, D'Angelo, and Remy Shand

If anyone's talking about a soul singer this week, they're most likely talking about Whitney Houston--unless they're talking about Bobby Brown, of course, and we all know that can't be for the right reasons. But I'd like to talk about a different soul singer, and believe me, it's not at all impertinent to the tragedy of Whitney Houston. I use the the term soul singer instead of R&B singer. I hope you'll go along with it. R&B has such negative connotations for me--a bunch of plastic and prettified product pushed in the '80s and '90s, it evokes nothing so much as mewling vocal gymnastics and sterile verses on the vexations of love. Or what they call love. I have my doubts.

Anyway, who I'd like to talk about is Lauryn Hill. I don't know all the details of what happened to her after she took home the award that Whitney Houston has taken home more times than any other female vocalist. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998) came along at a time when soul-singing was a wasteland much more deserving of that other name, R&B, which is what people usually gave it anyway. I was one of The Miseducation's purchasers that year, and one of its avid listeners. It was a dominant soundtrack to my first year in the Navy, just as D'Angelo's Brown Sugar (1995) had been a dominant soundtrack to my first, aborted attempt at college just a couple years earlier. These albums were throwbacks in all the best senses--they had the soul and sophisticated instrumentation of the '70s, the right lyrical concerns, songwriting that probed for personal and idiosyncratic meaning, most often finding it. They were all of that, at a time when all of that was likely to stand out. 

Just a few years later came a third album in this vein, Remy Shand's The Way I Feel (2002), and even though it was by a white Canadian, of all the damned species, it was, if anything, better than the previous two I mention. But it doesn't matter which was best, because they were all great, and, really, once you get to a certain plateau, there's no such thing as better anyway. But it was probably my favorite, and it arrived in 2002, making Hill's album equidistant from both D'Angelo's and Shand's--the latter of which arrived just prior to the end of my hitch in the Navy, and my return to college. 

So you can see how I've come to collect these three LPs into a kind of trilogy--because of where they fell in my own miseducation (which is the only kind of education worth acquiring; for further evidence of this, just see The Education of Henry Adams, whose title is echoed by Hill's). But even if those hadn't been formative and important years for me, I'd make the albums into a trilogy anyway, for the sheer excellence they exude. If the ghost of Marvin Gaye lives anywhere, it lives here. But there's another thing that unites them, and that is that their creators have all been absent, or at least silent, in the years since. And we're not talking about a few years, either. D'Angelo has made one album in the last 17 years, in 2000, which his fans would probably prefer he not made at all; Lauryn Hill has released no album of new material; and neither has Remy Shand. 

You can swim for yourself through the rumors of what happened to Hill and D'Angelo and Shand in these years. You will read about love-sickness and drugs and artistic blockages of varying provenance. D'Angelo and Hill, for their own parts, have new albums scheduled to drop this year, while Shand has became a figure of such inexplicable reclusiveness that there's actually a Twitter page called "Where is Remy Shand?" (It's short on answers.) Their disappearances are baffling and beguiling reminders that death isn't the only tragic disappearance, even if it is the most definitively final. But right up until the day it occurs, the questing spirit acquires the wisdom that songs are made of.