 This 4th of July marks the third anniversary of RightWingTrash. In other words, it’s another forgettable holiday. There really haven’t been many memorable 4th of Julys. I usually consider the day to be a drag on the level of Thanksgiving, where I don’t get my mail and the streets are full of people who should be at work. The only exception was July 4, 1990, which didn’t start out particularly promising.
I had just lined up some exciting new employment in the growing field of phone-sex scripts. This was in those pre-internet days when cheap thrills ran at a costly $2.95 per minute. They still can, but at least you get a live-cam feed nowadays. This company in Atlanta wasn’t breaking new ground for the time. They were even a few years late in setting up their adult chat lines, where you dialed a 976 area code to pay that premium price to reach live girls or pre-recorded tapes.
It was sexy stuff, but we’re not talking hardcore porn here. Things were kind of chaste. In those days before internet porn, it could be a big deal just to hear a lady reading a hot sex scene that wasn’t any more risqué than the best parts of a typical Harlequin novel. It was so sexy that even the live girls had scripted tales to read, since the assumption was that the conversation would eventually become one-sided.
I’d sent my new employers a few sample scripts from my home in Birmingham, Alabama. They were rightfully impressed by my ability to write in a woman’s voice. In fact, they asked me to provide their entire catalog of assorted fantasies—which was 30 scripts to be delivered by July 5th. That gave me an entire week to meet my deadline.
I arrived in Atlanta on the morning of July 4th, ready to start working on the scripts. My parents kept a condominium they rarely used that was off Peachtree Street near Lenox Mall. I’d already stopped by a deli to pick up a rough approximation of a 4th of July barbeque. I was settled in by 11 am, and things couldn’t look easier.
The big secret was that I had seven templates of sex scenes that I could drop into any script. Now I merely had to write a three-paragraph intro to set the scene, and then a couple of paragraphs to wrap up the tale. I kind of resented those final paragraphs. I had the feeling that few callers were going to stay on the line for my touching denouements.
I was out of ideas by noon. In my defense, these weren’t exactly the kind of sexual scenarios where an imagination can run wild. It didn’t make sense to write scripts that started out wilder than the actual sex scenes. I needed some fun-yet-banal settings from which wild romance could occur. I was in trouble.
So I turned on the television. Thankfully, my parents bothered to keep cable running in the condo. And there was my salvation in the form of an all-day marathon of Love, American Style.
I’m not sure which channel I was watching. At the time, there were two competing all-comedy cable channels. HA! and the Comedy Channel would merge to become Comedy Central at the start of the ’90s. HA! was fairly hip. The Comedy Channel was more likely to be airing episodes of one of ABC’s biggest hits of the early 1970s.
Love, American Style was an anthology show that (usually) filled an hour of ABC’s Friday night schedule. Each episode featured fun vignettes about romance amongst the changing sexual mores of the times. There were also amazing fashion statements displayed by the kind of aging stars who’d eventually return to ABC for The Love Boat and Fantasy Island.
The series was graced by celebrities including Paul Lynde, Karen Valentine, Rich Little, and many cast members from Laugh-In and Gilligan’s Island. There were also rising stars like Diane Keaton and Burt Reynolds. These would all become unwitting players in what was suddenly an inspired series of phone-sex scripts.
A trip to the bowling alley? There’s a good setting. A guy dealing with his first trip to a female barber? Sounds like a timeless topic. The desk clerk innocently giving a lady the wrong key at an overbooked motel? Must happen all the time. A romantic ending to a shoplifting expedition? Another fine idea, but let me finish up this story about having sex with the marriage counselor.
Those five seasons of Love, American Style had literally hundreds of great stories, including some good ideas courtesy of the short comic sketches that ran between them. I ended up with 40 scripts. Every one of them was a surefire sell. The only slow stretch was when the pilot for Happy Days showed up in an episode, along with a series of vignettes based on Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park.” I couldn’t do anything with those.
There was also a pleasant interruption when I heard some commotion outside in the evening. I didn’t know that the Sears at Lenox Mall hosted Atlanta’s big 4th of July fireworks show. I had a perfect view of the display from the balcony of the condo. The sky was lit up red, white, and blue—just like the fireworks seen at the start of every episode of Love, American Style. That must have been what gave some network executive the bright idea of running a holiday marathon.
And that was my best 4th of July ever. The day never really ended, either. A sex columnist in New York City recently told me that she’d run into a woman from Birmingham who was telling my story as her own—not realizing what an embarrassingly small town Manhattan can be. Also, those phone-sex scripts probably ran for several years. They were likely sold to another company, and could be very well be enjoying some internet incarnation today.
I still prefer to think of those scripts as they began life in 1990. I mostly like to think of some guy enjoying a sexy phone session, and then suddenly having a thought. “Wait a minute,” he says. “Wasn’t this a television show with Vincent Price and Ruth Buzzi in a haunted house?”
And it was, and that’s phone-sex American style.
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 I’m about to post a long piece that’ll be my last entry here until July 6th. If you need more holiday reading, check out McBeardo.com, where the Maven of Midnight Movies is compiling his Top 100 Cult Movie Nude Scenes of All Time. As of this writing, he’s just listed #60-51—which is a particularly stellar grouping. It includes Jenny Agutter (although I would’ve gone with her scene in Logan’s Run), Kelly Nichol’s touching display in The Toolbox Murders, and a nod to Body Double.
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 Like any sane person, I hate the neutered wryness of hipster humorist Dave Eggers. Still, there are worse movies to endure this summer than Away We Go—now in wide(r) release as Eggers’ first screenplay. Eggers isn’t the only reason right-minded people would skip the film, though. It’s directed by Sam Mendes, who’s given us I’m-scared-of-Americans classics such as American Beauty and Revolutionary Road. His modern war film Jarhead was a more interesting mess, since the director couldn’t hate his Marines enough to placate the critics who adore him.
Away We Go is a film where Mendes—and Eggers—seem happy with hating the core audience. Jerry (John Krasinski) and Gloria (Maya Rudolph) are thirtyish non-marrieds who are about to have a kid, and wander the country (and Canada) in search of a place to raise their child. It’s already telling that Jerry wants to get married. Gloria is simply too much of a free spirit. Their journey starts when Jerry’s equally free-spirited parents announce that they’re moving to Belgium, but they’ll try to get around to visiting their grandchild. (Jerry’s dad is played by Jeff Daniels, who was equally effective as an oblivious boomer in The Squid and the Whale.)
The couple’s quest begins with a predictable look at a suburban plastic-fantastic existence in Arizona. Things get interesting when the couple arrive in the liberal bastion of Madison, Wisconsin. Maggie Gyllenhaal does an amazing turn as a blownbrain Leftist mother who’s full of moronic theories about childrearing, while Josh Hamilton is perfectly patronizing as her overgrown trust-fund brat of a husband. Judging from her past public comments, Gyllenhaal probably has no idea she’s playing a moron. Jerry and Gloria are still properly offended before their visit is over, and this sequence alone makes for the most right-wing comedy of the year.
From there, Jerry and Gloria go to Montreal to meet some decent human beings. There aren’t any token rants against America, though. Then the script takes a touching detour as Jerry visits his suddenly-divorced brother, and ends with a sequence that suggests Jerry and Gloria might abandon their voguish mentality for a more traditional sense of homestead. That’s not any real spoiler. The true spoiler is that Away We Go doesn’t pander to kidults. Maybe it’s a trend. Even Helen Thomas seems to be growing up nowadays.
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 Sorry to be harping so much on music lately, but my deep thoughts on a few films have to wait until I catch up on some deadlines. Let’s also blame my distracted ways for not being sure what to make of today’s press release from the St. Louis band Story of the Year. It’s reasonable to be suspicious when any record company sends out a headline like “Story of the Year Pays Tribute to the Troops and Their Families with New Video.” It seems even more suspicious when the song is called “Terrified.” I tend to think that our troops should be paid tribute with songs like “Ballad of the Green Berets”—or maybe a ditty like “Hey, Ahmadinejad, We’ve Got A Message for You to Pass Along to Uday and Qusay Hussein, Who You’re Going to be Seeing Real Soon.”
Anyway, here’s what the moderately punk rockers of Story of the Year have to say about their work:
"The video for ‘Terrified’ is pretty much a direct interpretation of the lyrics," explains singer Dan Marsala. "A story of a husband who is off at war, scared of the fact that he might not ever make it home to his wife and family, and a pregnant wife who is left at home, not knowing if she will ever see her husband alive again. It is an extremely touching subject because there are hundreds of thousands of families in America going through this exact scenario as we speak. It has to be one of the most terrifying situations that any family could ever experience. I think the video is a great representation of the story told in the lyrics and it is our tribute to all the families who suffer through this situation every day."
"What excites me the most about this video," adds guitarist Ryan Phillips, "is that it takes an enormous issue our generation is facing, the war in Iraq, and instead of getting political we honed in on the human aspect of the situation.”
“Terrified” is a pretty lame song, but there isn’t anything really objectionable about the lyrics. The band tried to get real American soldiers to be in the video, too. It’s not likely that the press release went to many people who care about saluting our troops, so it’s at least worth writing about here in a bid to reach sympathetic ears. You might even like the tune, depending on your tolerance of easy-listening emo.
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 A lot of people wrote posts yesterday about this tragic story of a teenager forced to use an old-fashioned Walkman in polite society. As someone who still insists on using a portable tape player regularly, I was mainly reminded of how a Walkman seemed kind of uncool when the players were launched back in 1984. Uncool to me, that is, but my opinion was influenced by the then-new video for EBN-OZN’s “AEIOU Sometimes Y.” It’s a great pop song, but it was the first time I’d ever seen a Walkman being used, and the singer just didn’t seem like my kind of guy.
Sadly, EBN-OZN made an entire album after the dancefloor success of “AEIOU Sometimes Y”—with their second single being the baffling “Bag Lady.” Marvel at the video for that one, with poor Imogene Coca being dragged into a pathetic display of the new social consciousness that poseurs were striking in the Reagan Era. And say what you will about Michael Jackson, but at least he never embraced new-wave percolating as dance music.
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 Recent events only meant that I chose a fine time to get out of town. I’m also reminded that it was pretty smart to turn down that offer to send my resume to TMZ when the site was launching a few years ago. We’re long past the hipster salad days of the mid ’90s, and I would’ve been the pathetic old guy trying to get anyone to care about Sky Saxon while journalistic resources were focused on a self-proclaimed King of Pop who hadn’t truly mattered to pop culture in over a decade. Maybe I could’ve been of some use by pulling a still shot of Farrah Fawcett in bed with Raquel Welch in Myra Breckinridge.
There would’ve also been the shame of helping to distract the public from Washington’s recent idiotic dabblings with the environment and the economy. There’s been one good thing to come out of Michael Jackson’s death for me, but I’ll put off writing that up for a while. Otherwise, the big recent pop culture moment for me—and this was actually right before leaving on vacation—was “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Craigslist.”
The song might seem like a lame idea, since Yankovic has already goofed on eBay. Still, there’s something brilliant about the noted parodist deciding that our nation is in need of a deadly accurate goof on The Doors. The dueling banality of the subject matter is even accompanied by original Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, who’s merely continuing his career of cheapening his band’s heritage.
Anyway, here’s hoping that Yankovic has taken some phone calls asking him to comment about Jackson’s death, and he’s been able to plug his latest video that way. This is where I’d make a joke about having Weird Al’s box set and nothing from Michael Jackson’s solo career, but I was already planning to buy this—and Off the Wall is certainly an important album.
And while I’ve linked to a respectful Sky Saxon obituary, don’t forget that he was my favorite kind of burnt-out ’60s icon. Specifically, Saxon started out as a cynical punk with a menacing pose, and then barbequed his brain until he turned into the kind of hippie casualty that he set out to profit from. Saxon never mellowed, though. Follow the links from that obituary, and you’ll find people talking about how Saxon was a real icon of peace and love right up to the day he died. Why do grown people have to convince themselves of such crap?
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 Off on another vacation, and you won’t be hearing from me again until June 29th. But first, I’ll be sneering at all the prog-poseurs who are at home listening to Rush while I enjoy Sunday’s big Van der Graaf Generator show in New York City. You can be sure that I’ll be treating Peter Hammill’s vocals like an alternative sonic landscape to the instrumental backing. More importantly, I’ll be enjoying Strawbs as the opening act. It’s the acoustic Strawbs, which doesn’t include former member Richard Hudson—who, with former Strawb John Ford, wrote the scathing (and atypical) “Part of the Union.” Hudson has continued to be an outspoken conservative from his home in the UK. Ford seems to spend a lot of time in NYC, so maybe there’ll be a guest appearance.
While we’re linking music videos, here’s Scott Miller (the one formerly of the V-Roys) performing an acoustic version of “Cheap Ain’t Cheap” from his new album For Crying Out Loud. It’s a nice antidote to all the feel-good Cheap Chic that we’ll be pitched while President Obama’s policies continue to fail.
And here’s “Powder Blue Mercedes Queen” from Paul Revere & the Raiders. It’s a great song that’s often forgotten, but shows up as a bonus track on a recent Aussie reissue combining 1970’s Collage and 1971’s Indian Reservation. Thankfully, the tune’s less political than the latter’s title track. See you on the 29th...
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 As our President assures us that, hey, it doesn't really matter who wins an Iranian election anyway, some youthful voters are waking up to bigger issues. Consider the Iranians of the (pretty good) NYC rock band Hypernova, who've enjoyed plenty of hype from MTV and the New York Times. Now the band betrays their sponsors by actually being concerned about events back home. What follows is Hypernova's statement on the uproar in Iran, as released by singularly-named frontman Raam. It's a little long, but you're not likely to find other rock bands taking a stand on the subject. They're all waiting for permission from MTV and the New York Times:
First off, let me say that my heart goes out to the all the brave people who have stood up to the oppressors in this uprising. The people in Iran have been robbed. The lives that have been lost in this revolt these past couple of days will not be in vain. What is happening in Iran is an historic event not only for Iran, but the world. This "open" movement is the first of its kind in the history of mankind all thanks to technology. Because of the internet, the people of the world are being exposed to the reality of the streets. The oppressive government is continuously trying to clean up after itself, resorting to senseless violence, obstruction of property and all sorts of propaganda. The people have had enough. They will not tolerate the injustices anymore.
Thanks to social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, the the people now have a voice. Every single person I have talked to is willing to risk their lives in the name of Freedom and Justice. The rest of the world has to follow the example of these brave people and stand strongly behind them so they don't give up. There is no going back from here. And I'm afraid to say this but, even though the opposition is growing every day and has taken a complete nonviolent stance, there will be blood on the streets. The ruthless anti-riot police will resort to any kind of violence.
But as Jim Morrison once said: They got the guns but we got the numbers!!!!
We have to get the whole world united behind the Iranian people and let them know that they have our support. I also have contact to many journalists on the streets over there. If you know anyone who has witnessed anything please put them in touch with me so I can direct them to the proper people.
Our voices will be heard. We will not be silenced. The people shall prevail.
One love!
Viva La Resistance!!!!!!!
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 Fabulous news for those who were afraid the upcoming Red Dawn remake might be somehow patriotic. Word has it that the script is getting a rewrite from Tony Gilroy—screenwriter of the Jason Bourne films and Michael Clayton. This mostly means that we’re now likely to see our brave American freedom fighters getting waterboarded by the enemy occupiers, therefore teaching everyone an important lesson about moral relativism. Also, you can be sure that rich white American businessmen will somehow be behind the invasion of our country. We’ll also get a few references to how “freedom fighters” are also “terrorists.” Get it? Boy, I can’t wait to live under all the freedoms that are enjoyed by North Koreans and Palestinians and those lucky people in China and Iran.
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 I’ve been a little distracted while meeting deadlines before a vacation—but here’s my recent article about one of the more unlikely bands to be putting on great shows this summer. You’ll see that I was never a fan of the New York Dolls, but their recent reunions have been really impressive. That article is also the first time that I’ve written about the band in the past four years without recycling—as in this concert review—a story about my kid’s first concert being a Dolls show (if you don’t count that in utero show with the Sex Pistols at Atlantic City).
In related music news, it was sad to watch the final Virgin Megastore shut down in New York City. I mostly have fond memories of the time I swiped some pre-printed “75% Off” stickers from a shelf there, and assembled myself a shopping spree in the Import section. It was especially fun taking my merchandise to the cash register by all the Che merchandise.
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