"they turn into WILD ANIMALS!"

I became a different kind of zombie last night. The Classic TV Zombie. To my credit, it was only for a couple of hours, while I did my wash…but, still.

These are the things I stumbled across in the Big Bad World of Cable TV:

•Al Pacino on Inside the Actor’s Studio (sweet Jesus, do I love and miss that show). He was great, actually seems very intelligent and well-read, and not *that* pretentious. And, y’know, Al Pacino has a bloody *right* to be pretentious. A highlight (this one’s for JMo): Ol’ Man Lipton says that Kevin Spacey told him the actors “had a name” for the film “Glengarry Glen Ross” on the set. Lipton wants Pacino to say it, but Pacino is clueless and says “they left me out of everything. What did they call it?” Lipton: “Death of a Fucking Salesman.” I laughed out loud. And, I dug his answers to the ol Bernard Pivot questionnaire. My fave: “What turns you on?” Pacino, with a mild laugh: “Everything.”


•Flipping channels and found a really, really early (I think) “Growing Pains.” And I had never seen the show the whole way through in my life (I still haven’t, didn’t see more than five minutes of this one). The entire show, it seems, was about the Born Again Christian child actor who plays the son, trying to score Springsteen tickets. I shit you not. Best line of the whole damn five minutes comes from a friend of the son’s (I had to switch it after this, cuz nothing could top it): “Aw, man! Have you ever seen a girl after a Bruce Springsteen concert? They turn into *WILD ANIMALS*!!”

•Then this saddened and disturbed me so, I had to turn that contraption off, once and for all! It was a Dell commercial, I think…and the unmistakable music began…one of my favorite songs of the last year. It’s “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” by the 13th Floor Elevators and it originally came out in 1966. I fucking LOVE it. I own it from Nuggets (it was on the first one, in 1977). And it always makes me think of the flick, “High Fidelity” --it’s the first song you hear as you watch the vinyl spin and it’s muted, and muddled (exactly how a record sounds when the top is flipped up) and then those righteous screams kick in and it sounds dangerous and angry. It's one of those perfect fuck-you, break-up anthems, really what the first part of that movie is all about. Now, it’s on a fucking commercial and it just seems really, really wrong. It’s too punk, too screechy, too weird, too GREAT to be used to hawk computers…..right? Augh. I just can’t deal with using “dangerous” music for consumerism. Can’t deal, I tell you… I feel like a grumpy ol’ curmudgeon. Grrr.

Check out their sordid history here. Including this fact, I gotta share: “The band's name is a play on the superstitions that lead to many tall buildings not having a 13th floor, and the fact that the letter "M" (for marijuana) is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet. Tommy Hall's wife, Clementine is credited with helping to think up the name.”