I don’t say this to make fun of the lady. She just has an amazingly large head. It’s a fact of nature and I was surprised.

I saw her last weekend when I went to a comedic reenactment of The Hills at Cobb’s Comedy Club, part of SF Sketchfest. I have never been to a comedy club before. I liked it, despite the slight cheesiness of the atmosphere. This comedy club makes you share tables with other people and order two drinks. They were very insistent on the two drinks point! There were lots of men with shoulder-length swirly hair and women in plunging, badly sewn tops.

The show was an ensemble cast that included Garofalo; Tom Kenny, the voice of Sponge Bob; Rod Riggle, who was on The Daily Show; and Rachel Harris, who is in those commercials about 100-calorie snack food. The joke was to read the script of The Hills verbatim and let its banality speak for itself. It’s a simple concept but works well. While the comedians were mostly doing valley girl imitations, if you’ve seen The Hills, you could definitely pick up on the individual characters. Harris did the best job as Heidi. Garofalo had the toughest job because Lauren Conrad has the personality of a stick, which may be why Garofalo resorted to twirling her hair a lot. Overall the show was funny and worth seeing. Now I want to see Celebrity Autobiography.

But getting back to Garofalo’s head: She is a tiny woman. She’s maybe 5’1”. Her head is big for her size, but she also has terrific bone structure and is quite lovely. Watching her on stage, I started wondering if having a bigger head would help you in Hollywood. After all, there’s more real estate for the camera to pan in on. Nathanael West described celebrity heads as all the features crowding in on the front of the face, but that was in the 1930s. Now features have to be huge and exaggerated, like a cartoon character. Having a big head would help, I think. I wonder if anyone has ever done a scientific study on the size of celebrity heads. There’s a possible thesis idea for you PhD candidates out there.

I consider this a public service. For year, I have wanted to find “Solomon” by Cole Porter somewhere on the Internet. I had this song on a much-loved Cole Porter album when I was a kid and I remembered “Solomon” distinctly, mostly because of the catchy way the singer (who turns out to be Gertrude Lawrence) sashays through the word “Sooooooooo-lo-mon.”

As a kid, I remember standing in my bedroom trying to sing along with this song, but not knowing what any of the things in the song were. I understood the basic plot, however. Solomon has a thousand wives like in the Bible, but they cheat on him with gigolos, so he brutally murders them. In retrospect, this seems very odd. Thus as an adult, I wanted to hear this song again.

However, because Cole Porter went on to write many superior songs later in his career, “Solomon” seems almost forgotten, at least on the Internet. The closest thing I could find was the other song by Gertrude Lawrence that was on the record, The Physician, about a woman lamenting how a doctor loves all her body parts but not her. (Wink wink.)

I found out that “Solomon” was from a forgotten musical called Nymph Errant, which ran once in 1933. I tried to find a free Mp3 of the song, then a YouTube video of it, and then the CD version of the record I had as a child, which seems to be out of print. Finally, I found a CD with the song and I purchased the Mp3 for $.89.

At an adult listen, I was slightly turned off by how much Gertrude Lawrence’s voice strains at the end. She gets somewhat shrill. I also found that I *still* didn’t know what some of the vocabulary words are. I didn’t know what a Hispano was–it’s a car–or what a dais is–I think it’s a throne?–so I looked up the lyrics. I was impressed. First of all, I love when people mix old and new together. Using what would have been cutting edge things like a microphone or a term like “jazzing” with an ancient concept of Solomon and his wives seems fresh and strange even today, 76 years later. I also liked the rhyming. Today, we have “My Humps” with Fergie rhyming “my humps” with “my lumps” over and over like a drugged-out eighth grader. Cole Porter slant-rhymes “Hispano” and “piano” with “kimono” all within two lines of the song. Wow I wish we were as smart today as we were back then.

Of course, we were also more racist back then, and there’s this whole issue in the song with the eunuch Rastas Brown who Solomon tells him to call “massa,” evoking an image of a castrated African American slave. (It doesn’t sound like “massa” in the song. It sounds like “mother.” However, all the lyrics of the song that I have read, including The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter edited by Robert Kimball, lists “massa.”) And then there’s the fact that the punishment for adultery is murdering your wives brutally, because hey, you’re king, right? Still, I can totally see why I loved this song as a kid. Gigolos? Jigsaw puzzles? Mass murder of a thousand people? Awesome.

Anyway, take a listen to “Solomon” if you are curious. And sing along:

Solomon
by Cole Porter

Solomon had a thousand wives
And being mighty good he wanted all of them
To lead contented lives.
So he bought each Mama a platinum piano
A gold-lined kimono and a diamond-studded Hispano.
Solomon had a thousand wives

In spite of all he gave them, the wives of Solomon
Found their papa slow.
And for her jazzing
Every wife of Solomon
Took on a gigolo. [Ed. note: I love this word]
And while they pampered those high-brow heroes
By bunching them and lunching them and supping them at Ciro’s,
Solomon had no place to go

Soon Solomon began to miss those baby dolls of his
And got his favorite eunuch, Rastas Brown.
And when he heard the lowdown on those molls of his
He said, “Go out and hunt the whole darn town
Until you’ve found your massa a thousand knives.
I’m tired of doing the treating for a thousand cheating wives.
Solomon is going to cut the whole crop down.”

So Solomon summoned his thousand wives
Then Solomon pulled out a thousand knives
And he slashed their gizzards and gashed their muzzles
‘Til all that was left of them was a lot of jigsaw puzzles.
Then slowly mounting his royal dais,
He took out his microphone and said,
“All I got to say, is
Solomon no longer has a thousand wives.”

I got around to using the sausage attachment for my KitchenAid Mixer this weekend and made my own sausage. It was astoundingly easy. All you do is cut up the meat, add herbs, and run it through the attachment. I didn’t bother with casing since nine times out of ten I cut it off. I ended up with a mild Italian sausage that tasted awesome on this pizza:

I have forthcoming articles in The Writer, Entrepreneur, Pacific Sun, and others. I keep forgetting to mention them on here.

Writing-wise I am in great spirits. I’m on draft 23 of my novel. That number is misleading, however, because Word keeps fighting with my Linux operating system, forcing me to continually save new drafts of my novel to keep it from disappearing. In reality I’m probably on draft 10 or so.

I am reading four books right now. I don’t know how that happened. I’m reading The Suicide Club by Robert Louis Stevenson, A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, and Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence. I’ll probably finish The Suicide Club first because it is the shortest, then A Poetry Handbook because it is the most interesting, then David Copperfield because it is making me feel guilty. (I did get a long way into that one–I’m on chapter 35. It would be a shame not to soldier on through.)

Other than that, I’m polishing some short fiction to send out and pitching new article ideas. I spend a tremendous amount of time on this computer, as those who follow my Facebook account can attest. I really should figure out some viable form of exercise …

I didn’t get to go snowmobiling because the weather didn’t cooperate, but that didn’t stop us from visiting Troy and Krista in Sacramento this weekend. We walked around downtown, ate good food, and visited the Crocker Art Museum.

The Crocker is in an old mansion. Half the pleasure of being in it is walking around the building itself. I took many pictures of tile and woodwork like this one:

They had an exhibit of art from original Warner Bros cartoons. It was interesting to see the evolution of characters like Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny. I never really thought about how many man hours went into one of those cartoons before. It made me respect animation in a new way. My favorite part was the backgrounds of the cartoons, which were tiny, brightly colored paintings. Unfortunately, the security guard wouldn’t let me take pictures of the Warner Bros’ exhibit. Who knows why. However, the contemporary art section had a bunch of Peep-like bunnies in a canoe. Here is a picture of that:

The other thing I liked at the Crocker was this old cigarette machine that had been converted so that you could buy cigarette-carton-sized art with $5 tokens. You buy the tokens in the museum store, put them in the machine, and pull the knob:

Krista and Kyle got their art just fine. Krista got an olive key chain and Kyle got a little painting. But when we tried to buy my art, the knob got stuck and we had to get a museum guy to help us while all these snotty art people looked on. It turned out that the slot my art had been in was empty, but you couldn’t tell because they had put a multi-colored weight in the slot that looked just like the art. The guy got mad at me and told me to pick something, so I pointed to another slot. He gave me a block of wood with brown and green splotches on it. It looked like 1970s kitsch you would find in a thrift store.

I tried to not show how disappointed I was by the lame art and mean people, but Troy and Krista could tell so they gave me their other token. (!) This time, the knob worked and I got a cool painting of safety pins. They are good friends. [ETA: Troy and Krista, not the safety pins.]

Krista and Troy

Kyle in front of a giant piece of aluminum

Me in a house of mirrors

I can’t believe I lived near Sacramento all that time and never went to the Crocker Art Museum. Now I want to go back to Sacramento and see the California History Museum, which I also ignored while I lived there. Another time, I guess.

“Praise Song for the Day” by Elizabeth Alexander. She’s the fourth poet to deliver a poem during an inaugural ceremony. I can only imagine the pressure this woman was under to write this poem.

The Age in Australia asks some interesting questions about Hunter S. Thompson:

What is it about Thompson that continues to fascinate? Is it his journalism? Is it that his writing bore so little resemblance to conventional journalism? Or, is it his “strange and savage life” as E. Jean Carroll described it in the subtitle of her 1993 Thompson biography?

If it is primarily his work, then what is his legacy, three and four decades after his best-known books, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell’s Angels, were published?

If it is primarily his life, are we simply perpetuating the modern celebrity freak show?

I think it’s both. It started out with Thompson writing something innovative and changing journalism. While participatory journalism was around before Thompson–you have only to glance at the career of Nellie Bly to see that–he made it cool and modern (also macho). He was a good writer, too. There’s no way Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was written on a drug bender–it’s too well-crafted a book for that.

But as time went on, and as the drugs and alcohol took over, who Thompson was became more important to his public reputation than his actual work. He became a myth, a hero, someone to copy and revere:

Many fans, at the time and since, have succumbed to a kind of literary adolescent boy’s wet dream; namely, that you can be a brilliant writer despite ingesting gargantuan amounts of alcohol and drugs.

You, too, can rampage around the country, all expenses paid by hotshot national magazines, and ignore the assignment for whatever takes your fancy.

You can blow off deadlines and editors and fact-checkers because, like your literary hero William Faulkner, you are aiming to portray a higher truth.

It’s a powerful fantasy that goes a good way to explaining Thompson’s continuing fascination for aspiring writers, especially young ones.

I’m not saying people don’t read and love Thompson. They do. But like Hemingway, eventually the myth Thompson perpetuated–the same myth that helped create his name–took over and overshadowed his work. This is an odd thing, when you think about it. Hemingway could always retreat into his imagination, but for a journalist, who has to be an anonymous observer even when he is bashing around Las Vegas high on mescaline, this doesn’t work. It’s a bit like the singer/songwriter who has nothing to say once she gets famous and so only writes about feuds with famous people and arguments with the record company. It’s just not the stuff of real life anymore.

It must be very disillusioning to work so hard to become famous only to find that it brings troubles that are perhaps harder to solve. And yet, who wouldn’t want to have a career like Thompson’s? What can I say, fame is a weird thing.

On Saturday, Marcia and I took advantage of the amazing weather and went for a hike by Lake Sonoma near Geyserville.

The trail we hiked was called Boar Scat Trail. There were several warnings about wild boars on the sign for the park, so we were hoping to see one. Mostly we saw flowering bushes–nature seems to think it is springtime–and pityings of doves. Finally though, we did get to see a wild boar. Unfortunately, it was dead. We ran into some hunters who had just killed one and were carrying it on a stick between them ala Lord of the Flies. I took a picture:

Afterwards, we found place on top of a hillside and had a picnic. The views from up there were neato.

Lake Sonoma

Some other hikers

I really liked this hike. It’s challenging enough to break a sweat but you are rewarded for your work with lots of gorgeous views. I recommend it.

Before

After

New everything: new sink, floor, walls, toilet, light fixture. It was a lot of work! Luckily, my parents helped. I’m pretty happy with the results. I learned that I don’t like tiling.