Choose Hope

This was a response to some tit making a, “How's that hopey-changey thing working out for ya?” comment months ago on Facebook. 

I wrote fresh preamble to it, but it was turning into more of a pre-ramble so I'll save it for tomorrow.

Thanks to Heidi Mastrogiovanni for the inspiration.

FDR was, much like Obama, all hope and no substance. So empty was his promise that some of America's wealthiest men tried to organize a military coup to overthrow his New Deal presidency and install a government modeled on Mussolini's fascist state.

(This was before the excesses of fascism were known and many still admired him.) Wall Street's Robert Clark vowed that he would spend half his $60 million fortune to save the other half. Luckily the man they approached to head the coup, General Smedley Butler, played along only to expose the plot to Congress. Now Rupert Murdoch is succeeding where the 1933 plotters failed. 

To protect the interests of very wealthy people he has built a media powerhouse that not only muddies any real argument and labels anything resembling truth as "typical liberal bias" but has also managed to convince thousands of Americans (sorry, mostly white) that it would be in their interest to vote Republican and stop taxes from going to immigrants and other freeloaders. 

I'm just an actor and history buff and can't really work all of this out but when I need to defer on the Constitution, I choose those "elitists" like Robert Reich, Bill Moyers, and  president of the Harvard Law Review and U.S. President, Barack "Hussein" Obama. 

You can stick with Glenn Beck and Roger Ailes.

The Founding Fathers where all about hope and change.

I stand by them.

I stand with the man who told us not to fear fear.

I stand with the audacious one in office now.

You can stand by the conservatism of the Tories.

You can stand with the fascists of the 30's.

You can stand with the fear peddlers of Fox. 

You can also stand by  a daft bint who thinks Adam and Eve rode to school on a dinosaur and an inarticulate fundamentalist delinquent from Connecticut with a pathologically assumed  Texas accent who took H. Hoover off the hook by paddling the Nation and the world further up shit creek than Hoover could have imagined.

Just be advised your views aren't new, original, or even necessarily yours.

Goodbye Greg G.

I was going to call this post Ridi Pagliaccio, but didn't want to disappoint people looking for new ways to serve pasta.
My brother has been a comedy club owner for over 25 years.
I've been running into the same handful of comics who also act at auditions for years. The one thing I can say unreservedly is they are some of the unhappiest people in the world.

Odd isn't it? All that laughter. Night after night.

With Greg Giraldo's overdose and Arte Lange's suicide attempt, I thought about two comics I admired who weren't so lucky,
Rich Jeni and Tony Hancock.
I'd met and seen Rich many times at my brother's club.
He was a master at working the audience and riding the crest of the laughter like a champion surfer.
He always left me sore in the sides and crying with laughter.
But he couldn't escape the undertow.
I still listen to and laugh at Hancock Half Hour all the time and Tony shuffled off this mortal coil when he decided "not to be" 42 years ago.
I used to look at the glum faces of the comics I knew from audition waiting rooms and think that that misery came from waiting to be "Tim Allened" but realistically looking at years of going from the Chuckle Hut in Bumhole Iowa to the Whacky Shack in Whogivesashit Minnesota and sitting in a Holiday Inn after the show watching the $19 movie single handedly.
Now I think it something simpler and deeper. Like an fat opera singer who feels empty after all that outpouring and has to stuff food back in the same hole, the void left after all that laughter and happiness that a great comic gives needs to be filled.
I wouldn't begrudge them if they kept some for themselves.
Get well soon Greg.*

* It appears he was worse off than we thought.

Rest in peace.

The noble instinct of Pat Tillman

I was reading about the very sad case of Pat Tillman. We were blessed to have had such a strong idealistic patriot willing to run into harm's way when his country was attacked. Do we deserve such loyalty and bravery? I don't know.  
I do know that his government didn't.
War after war, fat, f4, draft dodging, bureaucrats pander to and exploit that noble instinct and send wave after wave of young people to their deaths. We were attacked, Tillman answered the alarm, and was promptly killed by the very same people who sounded that alarm. That's the sad part. 
War is rarely just. People die by accident or friendly fire. No glory. Just loss. 
But then his government really let him down. 
They tried to cover it up.
The training is so bad that the gulf war death rate from friendly fire is 52%...FIFTY TWO PERCENT.
Accident? No. More like Casino odds and Death holding the house advantage. Only 48% of the bullets are coming from in front of you so maybe turn around if you want a better chance of survival. Now it gets sadder. 
The government sent a democrat and republican to Tillman's memorial service. And they presumed to comfort his family with the promise of a heavenly home for Pat and assurances that we will all see him in the sweet by and by. 
Is this variation on 72 virgins supposed to absolve the government's culpability in this crime? 
"See he's not dead. He's playing Pinochle with grandpa."
To his great credit Pat's brother Richard thanked them for their well intentioned words and said, "Pat wasn't religious he's just fucking dead."   What balls. I hear him loud and clear.


So what comfort is there to be found if not in heaven?


By making sure this never happens again. His family needs the truth. His family should want for nothing and see all those responsible, all the way up to the highest level, man up like Pat and take the blame. 


Finally, Pat Tillman will live on in the hearts and minds of his family, friends, and a world left diminished by not only his premature death but also the loss of that noble instinct to do the right thing.
An instinct that his government so mindlessly and criminally abused.




See Richard Tillman on Bill Maher

Pulling your pants down! Such a terrible thing?

I'm getting busy trying to finish some of the unfinished stuff in my life.
I've come to this sudden burst of resolve because:

A. A terrible life long belief in a nebulous future over which I have little control.
B. A good talk with my brother who, at the age of 60 realized he might just be the grown up in the room. Like him I always looked for someone who would tell me what to do.
Fuck it! I'm working with people 20 years or more younger than me. I'll be the wise man.
C. A health regimen that has me feeling like the man I was 30 years ago when "there was no try, only do!" Piss & Vinegar full of, I am.
D. Like a lot of folks, I've been an armchair critic. It's far easier to be a sack of unfulfilled potential than to be embarrassed.

This leads me to the pants thing.

 “Anyone who subjects himself to publishing might as well walk down Madison Avenue with his pants down."  J.D Salinger

A family much concerned with embarrassment.
I was confused that even after his early success, he was embarrassed. Embarrassed!

So as I tackle the projects that were moldering in the remainder bin of neglect, I thought,

"I'm a blue collar slob with terrible education, poor grammar and spelling."
 And this brings me to the second half of this post's title.
"Such a bad thing?"
I had a friend Len Corman. He was an actor and also my dentist! The best dentist ever.
A very distinguished actor and gentleman.
When I first started acting I struggled with embarrassment.
I would toss and turn in bed for days after an audition. Thinking how awful I was. What could they think of me? Stuff like that.
I was telling Len how embarrassing it was for me and he gave me the best advice I've ever gotten,
"Such a terrible thing?"
He was right of course. Now I love to audition and when I have the job, I'm the grown up at work.

The same is true of the new creative projects I am now going to jump into.
I'm confident of the initial inspiration.
I now have the will.

I'm sure I'll get some tuts as I walk down the street with my earnest but half thought out ideas in torn and past their prime Fruit of the Looms. ~  "such a terrible thing?"

Welcome to Skrunt!

After It was suggested that Facebook may not be the best place to give free reign to my spleen, I decided to move to a blog. I can save FB for The 7am b.m. report.

This site will be the repository of my personal assholotry. My posts are quite short. I hope brevity is the soul of wit. If I can't make a point in one or two paragraphs, I'm flogging a dead horse.
Firstly let me explain the title. When my son was young his mother and I would read to him so much that his fist words were narrated like a children's book. He also had an innate gift of coining new words.
I had asked him a question and his rather forceful objection came out, “No!, he skrunted."
I use all the words at my disposal and am a godless heathen so move along if that ain't your cup o' punch.

There is a lot to say “No!” to after the last few years and it turns out that scrunting* is actually an old English hybrid of screaming and grunting. (And as with any word you can think of, it is a euphemism in the Urban Dictionary.)

* original spelling

If I've offended.

People use the phrase "I am offended by that!" and expect it gives them higher ground, moral authority, or some sort of license. No. What it means is that you are offended.
So fucking what. [This is a paraphrase of something Stephen Fry just said on the radio.]
I once offended an ex GF by putting on after shave. It turned into a big fight about my underlying passive-aggressive motives. (ex indeed!) The same is true of language. I think political correctness and censorship are the small minded neurotically trying to enforce and prop up their own world order. To that end, I will make every effort to only say what I mean and own it. That way we'll know where we stand with each other...cocksucker!

In a Just World.

I'd love to be a lefty version of Rush Limbaugh, but have too much respect for the sanctity of marriage to do it 4 times and too much respect for the dangers of over using prescription drugs to get addicted. But I sure wish I could parlay my penchant for being a full o' shit bloviating gasbag into cash too!

Canadian, the new N word.

That's right, Canadian.

A friend and I were discussing all the different substitute's we had heard for the N- word (which already makes me feel like I'm using baby talk when having an important sex talk."The man put's his pee pee in the woman's twinkle!"-Yes I actually heard a woman use twinkle for vagina.)

Anyway my friend said that Canadian was used when honking (Honkying?) on about..um..Canadians. (a lot of Fox "News" watchers where he used to work. Am I making a sweeping generalization about Right wingers? Yes. Yes I am.)

But, to my point. I have one you know!

I had an argument with a simpleton about the use of words. She insisted some words are never to be used by anyone. Ever!

Not her call. I say use any word any time. Just have your heart straight or take the consequences.

Richard Pryor made me laugh and think with it. "Dr." Laura got her miserable ass fired with it. Win-Win.

Jimmy the Greek showed his appalling ignorance without even using it.

Mel Brook's, "Can't you see that man is a ni..." and "I said the sheriff is a ni-(dong!)", plays with the word and the inappropriateness of it brilliantly. As we should have learned from the Shirley Sherrod fiasco, context is everything.

Fox you!

I'm tired of the "we can't spend our way out of debt!!" mantra accompanied by the dire warnings of something even worse to come. Take a look around cock knockers!

This is what bottom looks like!

Government spending has been monopoly money for a long time now.

The myth of the "fiscal conservative" ain't holding water anymore. You pissed away our record surplus and let Wall Street shoot the poot on red after it had been snorting coke out of a hooker's navel and was clearly shit faced on Southern Comfort.

Now you can't spare a quarter to help maintain social and educational programs?

Fuck you!

Old dogs watch fox.

In the gym today, unsolicited, an older gentleman gentleman thought it safe to start pontificating about the worst president ever, Barak Obama. I guess he's used to being indulged in deference to his age and because I am white, he thought it safe to gas on.Well I have been guilty of letting a sleeping dog tell his favorite neegra joke, but not today grandpa.. I left him very unsettled and I'm sure he's obsessing with his cronies about the guy who dared to strongly disagree with him, told him why he was wrong, and then called him a fucking idiot.

Something cleansing there.

Good work out.

Union yes!

I grew up in a neighborhood with families protected, in part or directly, by a workers union. I saw many men missing fingers, limbs, or an eye from their pre-union career. Business has a priority to it's stockholders and the bottom line. Workers get safety, security, and paid time off only because they are part of a fraternity of friends or because their employer wants to keep that fraternity out. Either way, the union is why. Things must have been pretty bad for men, who lived through the depression, to risk all to change it. I am most proud that my grandfather was one of the men who helped start the UAW. That middle class was most responsible for America's post war prosperity.Without it the only thing I can see is what I saw in south America, a huge void between a few wealthy and many poor.

Vissi d'arte

I had a great experience working with a commercial director.

Working as a day player I am expected to fulfill a small task with little direction or rehearsal. Big stars can show up not knowing lines and do a shit load of takes. I get one or two. And frankly that's all that should be needed.

Well how fun it was when I worked on a commercial and did the lines as intended once (maybe?) and spent the rest of the time on improv. When someone says you are a creative guy, have at it! It's a real treat. The only other times I've been lucky enough to do this has been in theater and Tom DicCillo let me go nuts on Law & Order (little of it was used) but still, the guy's terrific.

Most of the film and TV we consume has become like the food we consume. "Cheese" wrapped in plastic, market tested, cheaply made by non cheese makers.

It's on the shelf, I guess it's food.

Now as I deal with the consequences of years of cramming any old junk in me gob, I'm trying to think about EVERYTHING I consume.

Is it fresh, good for me, made by an artisan, and most importantly, soul sustaining.

Don't get me wrong, I'll probably eat and watch some processed junk today, but feel empty and bereft of spirit for doing so.

I also hope to get work that pays well but leaves me unsated.

But I feel inspired to try to be a collaborative story teller and make something with love that will stick to the ribs.

Lately, I've been dazzled by Auto tune the News. It's funny, original, great commentary, and as music better than any of the Olive Garden shit on American Idol. All done by people with a strong urge to create something wholly new.

It fed me and makes me want to cook.