The Sad Clown Wants You To Know His Pain

SO YESTER-DAY I found the Magic Hat Brewery's new variety 12 pack on sale at the local for 13 bucks, so I snapped it up, with the result that I still had Saras for lunch (Two Saras For Quasimodo: black forest ham with cheese and mustard between slices of French toast).

(Actually, lemme go there first: had the Quasimodo with Polaner's blackberry fruit spread, which I keep wanting to call a compote, except I keep thinking that I probably don't have a firm grip on what a compote actually is, and the Saranac Black & Tan and Black Forest. The fruit spread was interesting, but the real revelation was finding a splash of the Black & Tan in the bottom of the bottle at the very end, and mixing that with the last of the Black Forest, which, well, damn! Turned it into an entirely new beer.)

(Anyways.)

This is a ham and cheese omlette with diced shallot and sliced black olives topped with chili and drizzled with mustard. The Magic Hat beers were phenomenally interesting. The first, their 2010 annual brew, called Odd Notion, was a bright, hoppy, light-hearted brew that rbought to mind Fisher's Bitter D'alsace (if memory serves, and I haven't had one of those in a long, long time). The second was an IPA, which brought to mind another craft brewed IPA whose name I can't remember, but it was quite nice as well: bright, stiff, hoppy. And there was an element of top-of-the-palate sweet spiceyness to both beers that is sticking with me, both literally and figuratively. The memory is lingering in my brain, and the sweet spiceyness is hanging on the top of my palate like a frightened rock climber.

Clinging to a . . . Nah. I got nothin.

In other news, Bobcat Goldthwait is a mean, mean man.


I caught his stand-up routines several times in the 80's, when he was featured in one-man shows by HBO, as well as a couple of festival appearances and whatnot on Comedy Central later on. I watched the entirety of Shakes The Clown (and blogged about it, by the way), and while I got the point, and appreciated the sheer intestinal fortitude it must have taken to stick with the premise so rigidly all the way through, I couldn't escape the conclusion that Shakes The Clown is a viciously, enormously painful enterprise.

So I figured I have given Mr. Goldthwait more than a fair, um, shake. I confess that I only got through about five minutes of Sleeping Dogs Lie, which is a movie about-- SPOILER ALERT!-- a woman who gave her dog a blow job in college and then spends the rest of her life not talking about it. (What the @#$ do I know, like I said, I didn't get through it.) This, on the other hand, I slogged through almost in spite of myself.

Who am I kidding? In spite of myself. This is a movie that seeks to take everyone who thinks they are even remotely inadequate and grind their faces into a muddy landfill, in January, and then convince them that their own desperately painful existences are deeply funny, the kind of epic farce that recognizes that like itself is a joke, and death is merely The Great Pratfall. It's the epitome of the Mel Brooks concept: this is the joke where YOU fall down the manhole and die, and it's funny because you weren't that great a person in the first place, really. Oh, and also? Anyone who has any interest in or appreciation of poetry is a self-involved wanker who's only in it to get laid.

Which, that last part is largely true, but anyways.

The concept here is that the kid was a useless, vile wanker-- literally and figuratively, and after he dies wanking, his dad uses him as a strawman to gain literary fame. Which is a wholly crass assessment, and totally unfair. As Onion AV Club head writer Nabin wrote in his review, there is a kind of sweetness in this, a sense of affection for all the screwed up characters in this Marquis De Sade morality play. A sense that the writer/director is really, really sorry to point it out, but these stupid, useless people really suck. Oh, and life's a bitch. Sorry about that. Sucks to be you.

So I get the joke, but I'm not sure it's really worth the effort. And the longer it goes on the less believable it gets, the harder it is to swallow, and the less funny it gets. So do I recommend it? Sure. Watch this movie, ya craphound. The makers of this film want you to know they're glad you enjoyed it, ya bunch of meat-sacks.

PS: And, as it turns out, the punchline of the movie is a pratfall, almost literally. Do not watch this film unless you are fully prepared to watch Robin Williams high-dive in the nude.