I make no bones about it – I am completely predisposed to enjoy most documentaries. After all, the form is what originally made me want to be a film-maker, and to this day several documentaries remain in my top ten-to-twenty movies of all time. To me, a well-executed documentary challenges, entertains and informs viewers in ways that traditional cinema simply cannot – works of fiction, no matter how real-seeming, all require one to suspend their disbelief at some point. Not so with a good documentary, friends: it really is true that sometimes, you really can’t make this shit up. Anyway, it was with that in mind that, within the space of a week, I sat down and watched two different documentary films from 2008 – Bill Maher’s Religulous and Morgan Spurlock’s Where In The World Is Osama bin Laden. Surprisingly enough, both left me thoroughly underwhelmed.

I’ll admit that I’ve always felt a sense of uneasiness about comedian Bill Maher. I’ve caught his stand-up act from time to time over the years, and often tuned into his HBO show – Real Time With Bill Maher – and, while I often find myself agreeing with him, I always have to fight the urge to yell profanities at him through the television screen. It’s not about those things we disagree about: I’ve got a healthy dose of respect and admiration for lots of people (famous and otherwise) with whom I don’t see eye-to-eye on various issues. It’s not even that he has an odd kinship with right-wing attack-shrew (and total waste of a C cup) Ann Coulter, although I think I’d better understand a romantic relationship between a cobra and a mongoose. No, my issue with Maher is that he’s essentially an inverse copy of the blowhards on the right: he projects his own frailties onto those he doesn’t understand or agree with, then attempts to mock them, all the while making it all about him (while denying it’s about him). Maher’s always seemed to me to be a living, breathing example of why for me the ends never justify the means – if countering the vitriol and pandering of wack-a-doo conservatives requires being just as vitriolic and pandering, just in another direction, then count me out.

That said, I was actually curious to see Religulous, Maher’s globe-trotting documentary about the perils of religion. As someone who personally has no room in my life for religion, I was interested to see what our anti-hero found as he met up with kooks and Kabbalists from the Florida panhandle to the cradle of civilization. Would he see a common thread of xenophobia and self-isolation that ironically ties religious extremists together? Did he find some common ground that the faithful and the faithless can use as a foundation to build upon so our future doesn’t end up being a series of struggles for religious hegemony? Might he stumble upon people whose faith and actions are actually making a positive difference in the world? In a word, “no”.

And more to the point, Maher couldn’t give a shit. He set it out with the intention of making a film about how stupid religion is, and sure enough he did it. There was no transformation, either of himself or of his subject, along the way. In the days and months following the Iraq war, we all heard about the so-called Downing Street memo, in which the phrase “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” cropped up. Heck, Maher himself lampooned it on his show (and rightly so!) as evidence of a presidential administration drunk with power and willing to bend the truth to get what it wanted. Well that’s what we have here in Religulous, a film which starts out not with a hypothesis, but with a conclusion and then spends the next hour and a half illustrating its point. The fact that I largely agree with Maher’s conclusions is beside the point – it’s small solace knowing you’re right when it comes at the expense of seeing those who are wrong being goaded into putting on their passion plays. In the end, Bill Maher winds up telling us much more about his own discomfort and insecurities than the supposed ridiculousness of the religious folks he chases down for his film.

Unlike Maher and his movie, I came at Where In The World Is Osama bin Laden without an axe to grind against its director. I actually very much enjoyed Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock’s goofy and wide-eyed look at the perils of being a fast food nation. However, unlike his previous movie, Spurlock’s naivite in this film seems contrived and forced at best.

Where In The World… sees the director, upon recently discovering he’s going to become a father, channel his natural panic over the safety of his eventual progeny’s world into a one-man hunt for America’s most notorious enemy, OBL. Like Maher, Spurlock journeys around the world, ostensibly looking for the scourge of Tora Bora, but realizes that instead he should be looking for the common ground Americans have with the 1.5 billion Muslims around the world, people who we’ve been conditioned to believe want to see us deader than disco. In Spurlock’s case, it’s not that there’s no transformation involved: indeed, the transformation is the very crux of the movie. However, this elongated, cinematic eureka moment doesn’t feel genuine in the slightest.

As Spurlock “realizes” what the true purpose of his journey has been, it’s all one can do to not roll their eyes and say, “Well, duh, no shit, Sherlock!” Like Maher, Spurlock’s conclusion – albeit kinder-hearted and more uplifting – was pre-ordained before even setting out. In fact, the audience is left feeling like the director’s an asshole for leaving his wife to go through her pregnancy entirely alone, scared that her husband is going to get blown to smithereens by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan or a rocket attack in Israel. The film comes off as a very well-intentioned pantomime of Rodney King’s infamous “can’t we all just get along” line: it’s nice and all, but did it get us anywhere?

Both films, it should be noted, give us some really interesting moments. When the former head of the Vatican’s observatory sits down with Maher for a chat, we’re given a brief glimpse at someone who is able to gracefully keep his religious beliefs compartmentalized from his scientific knowledge. Maher also introduces us to two ex-Mormons who (now that they’re “ex’s”) have trouble even talking about Joseph Smith’s bizarre teachings (can you say “magic underwear“?) with a straight face. Spurlock, god love him, actually braves patrols in Afghanistan, meeting locals and soldiers to whom Osama Bin Laden seems about as consequential as the Tooth Fairy. He also speaks with a Wahhabist cleric in Saudi Arabia who simultaneously managed to make my skin crawl from fear and my belly ache from laughter.

Unfortunately, as humorous, poignant and intimate as some of these vignettes are, all they do is merely connect the dots of a line that was laid out for the audience before the opening credits even began rolling. In both cases, one doesn’t feel that they were brought along on a journey from point A to point B, but rather they were shown point B on a map and told, “trust me, it’s there – now eat your popcorn.”

All right, you say, big fucking deal – so you can follow a recipe. But take heart, friend: I managed to flip the script a bit and change it up. See, the original recipe as it were was very health-conscious, which is admirable to be sure but left me a little afraid of just how bad the thing might taste, given that it eschewed conventional ingredients such as flour, baking soda and eggs for store-bought cake mix and a liter of Diet Sprite. In any event, I elected to apply the recipe’s cool rainbowing effect to a traditional, from-scratch white cake.

• 1.5 sticks softened, unsalted butter
• 2t baking powder
• 2C flour (all-purpose)
• 1.5C sugar
• 6 egg whites
• 3t vanilla
• 3/4C 2% milk
• Pinch of salt

Combine the dry and wet ingredients separately. Then slowly add the wets to the drys, mixing the whole way. Divide the resulting batter into six evenly-sized portions, plunking some serious food coloring of your choice in each one. The brighter the better. Mix each color thoroughly. Grease and line two 8″ cake pans. Take three of the colors and put them into the first pan, one after the other, forming concentric circles. Repeat with the other three colors in the remaining pan. Bake both for 35 minutes at 350 degrees, or until they both pass a toothpick test. Once cooled a bit, pop both cakes out of their pans and let them cool entirely down to room temperature. Trim and frost as desired.

I should mention, I did follow the original recipe’s directions for the frosting and am pleased to say it actually turned out quite well – it oddly enough tastes a bit like buttercream, but without any of the nutritive holocaust that buttercream usually brings with it.

Anyhoo, since I’ve been out of the habit of being creative for a good couple of weeks now, I’m prepared to credit myself with a successful opus. Bon Appetit!

Favorite Band Names Of All Time

• The Gaza Strippers
• Anus The Menace
• 2 Live Jews
• Jesus Chrysler Supercar
• Debbie Harry’s Armpit Crew
• Eve’s Plum
• Vegetarian Meat
• Lesbian Dopeheads on Mopeds
• …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead
• Ronnie James Deodorant
• Bonus: Best fictitious band name? Everyone Gets Laid” from PCU

Favorite John Hughes-ian Movies From The ’80s

• Better Off Dead
• Weird Science
• Fast Times At Ridgemont High*
• Real Genius
• Say Anything
• The Breakfast Club
• Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
• Just One Of The Guys
• My Tutor
• Risky Business

Yes, I know it’s kind of a stretch lumping this in with those films since it’s technically a teen sex comedy, but just roll with it.

Words, Place Names Or Proper Names Which Make Me Giggle

• pasty
• sesquipedalian
• Lake Titicaca
• shuttlecock
• onomatopoeia
• coccyx
• Balzac
• defenestrate
• moist
• pantaloon

All right, I’ve done enough damage to the English language for one night. Adieu!

Damn them sonsabitches with their gill-nets set afloat
In the lap of your mama you land
Amassed resentment counting ounce and pound
Hope is a letter that’s never delivered by the postman of my fear
Tarzan I’m pleading stop your fucking screaming
Don’t tell me that you didn’t try and check out my bum
Suck, suck your teenage thumb
Or leave it senseless like a suck on a gun?
I said ‘oh’ in my hopeless youth, just so uncouth
I try to sing it funny like Beck but it’s bringing me down
I Brazilian wax poetic so hypothetically I don’t wanna beat around the bush
So why is it I’m happy when there’s tears down in your eye

Heh, well if nothing else, at least I entertain myself. G’night.

Fingertips

Every day your world expands,
your empires of independence
subsume old challenges
and make them old hat.

Every day your discoveries mount,
your rivers of interest
flood over their banks and crest
where imagination and reality become one.

Every day I hold your hands fast in mine
and wonder if you feel like
I am trying to hold you back,
when really all I want is for you
to drag me along for the ride.

That was either transcendental or completely unintelligible. Given the amount of cold medicine I’ve got coursing through my brain, I’m going to go with the latter. G’night.

honestly?
if it’s the journey
and not the destination
why even set out?

faith
’round every corner
lies not the promised land but
another corner

clarity
I’ve so often heard
stories of artists gone mad
now I understand

OK, that’s about as deep and introspective as I get on three hours’ sleep. I’m cashing in my chips for the night.

Be that as it may, I happened to read through Erica Jong’s newest book of poetry, Love Comes First, while slurping down a dreadfully necessary cup of coffee at the bookstore today. I’ve never been a huge Jong fan – even her fiction always seems gimmicky to me – but the woman’s an acclaimed writer so I figured it was worth a look. What I found were tons of good ideas that never bore any fruit. I once heard an American sportscaster explain why he never really took to soccer: he said, “It’s like watching a football game where every pass is just barely incomplete.” His point was, sure there’s a lot of running around, wild gesticulating and tension, but ninety minutes later you’re exactly where you were to begin with, namely nil-nil and preparing to kiss your sister. This sort of crystallizes how I felt about Jong’s poems: the concepts all seemed to be really inventive, but she was never able to draw them out into anything that made them stand up by themselves. Instead, despite the errant beautiful turn-of-phrase here or there, her poems seem to collapse onto themselves from their own weight (or perhaps the weight of her ego which, I was able to glean from her efforts, is ponderous indeed).

In any case, I came away from reading the book with a new-found sense of pride in my own mediocrity. After all, my poetry’s utter shite, not to put too fine a point on it, but my stuff’s no more treacly or self-indulgent than the all-hat-no-cattle stuff that Jong’s just published, and I don’t have the formal training, awards or confidence as a writer that she does to give me courage in the face of ineptitude. To that end, I’ve resolved to continue to write bad poems and terrible lyrics, and better yet, subject you to them. And….scene!

Fatherhood #38

There was a time,
when my children asked ‘why’,
that I would blanch and stammer,
steer them toward ‘how’ and ‘what’
and hope their curiosity
would rest its flickering gaze
on some other line of inquisition.

(After all it’s an enormous responsibility,
explaining the world to a child.
Fuck it up and its therapy and night-sweats forever.)

Nowadays, though, I’m unafraid,
and finally see that
it’s not mine
to explain the world to them,
but rather to give them a compass
and let them explore it themselves.

Now I realize that the answer
to all of their ‘why’ questions
is simply ‘why not?’

I can’t tell if it’s the wearying effect Jong’s writing had on me or the fact that I’m coming down off of about fourteen cups of coffee today, but I’m beat. G’night.

Experiment #2

Poetry is no place for a heart that’s a whore
Tangled too tight and too long to fight
It’s love that leaves and breaks the seal of always thinking you would be real
All these things we’ll one day swallow whole
Was there a voice, unkind, in the back of your mind?
It’s a helping hand that makes you feel wonderfully bland
I can never say “no” to anyone but you
And here I rest where disappointment and regret collide
Its okay, the struggle for things not to say
You were an island to discover
But where I’m headed, you just don’t know the way
I cannot find the heart I gave to you

Again, it almost works. There’s a strained quality to it – I can’t tell if that’s because the novelty of this form has worn off already or if it’s because the simple act of me having to critically decide which phrases from the songs move me most requires more creativity than I can muster. Oh well, it’s too late for me to quibble with it – it is done.

Oh, and because I know it’ll come up, here’s the track listing, in order of the lines above:

1. “B.M.F.A.” – Martha Wainwright
2. “He Lays In The Reigns” – Iron & Wine with Calexico
3. “Where Does The Good Go?” – Tegan & Sara
4. “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” – Radiohead
5. “Last Goodbye” – Jeff Buckley
6. “Country House” – Blur
7. “The Figurehead” – The Cure
8. “Title and Registration” – Death Cab For Cutie
9. “If You Wear That Velvet Dress” – U2
10. “A Warning Sign” – Coldplay
11. “Turn On Me” – The Shins
12. “Glass” – Ingrid MIchaelson

G’night.

five am
Slowly, quietly
tiny footsteps, wooden floors
wake up, tired old man

the usual
Same table each time
we wouldn’t know how to eat
anywhere else, huh?

Good night, poetry-lovers – too bad you didn’t get to read any poetry!

Experiment #1

I was friendly with this girl who insisted on touching my face
Nobody’s perfect, and that’s something that I’m sure she’ll know.
‘I might be old but I’m someone new,’ she said.
She’s so strange
This is the moment that you know that you told her that you loved her but you don’t.

God that was strange to see you again
Bright, just like the stars above me
On my picture shelf, statues mocking me.
I heard you cry aloud all the way across town.
There’s still a little bit of your taste in my mouth.
You sure you want to be with me? I’ve nothing to give.
Please remember me happily by the rosebush laughing.

This is how it works, it feels a little worse
How does it feel like to wake up in the sun?
I live at the top of a mountain.
Every day I wake up and it’s Sunday.
I want to crawl back inside my mother’s womb.
Give it to me, don’t give it away.

You want to know why I hate you? Well I’ll try and explain
You said I’d wake up, dead drunk, alone in the park.
And I’m not going back into rags or in the hole.
Why should he come back through the park?

Extra credit to those of you who can name all of the songs in question without Googling the lyrics.