Too Late To Say: Houston, We Have a Problem

It's amazing how often this scenario plays itself out: we watch a self-destructive celebrity like Amy Winehouse stumble around Camden Town for years in her scuffed ballet flats and then express surprise and a kind of collective grief when the toll finally claims her amazing talent and her life. It's happened again and again, with celebrities as diverse in their contributions and levels of talent as Michael Jackson and Anna Nicole Smith, and we keep expecting it to happen to tragedies-in-waiting like Lindsay Lohan but will somehow be taken aback when it actually transpires.


Whitney Houston has been skating on this thin ice for what, 15 years? Her career path took an unshakeable detour when she met the rapper Bobby Brown. She went from a clean-cut gospel-trained singer with a five-octave range to a raspy, drug-addled shadow of herself, a reality TV parody in a track suit shrieking obscenities at the ever-present camera. Just yesterday she was photographed emerging from a club looking confused and combative, with something that appeared to be blood running down her leg. 


Like many performers who die too young, she left one last performance as her final legacy: the role of the stage mother in the upcoming film version of Sparkle. Let's hope it does her memory justice as a natural actress and an immeasurable vocal talent. And in honor of her once-astonishing ability, let's try to remember her when she was fresh, lovely and maybe even a little unsure of herself -- but unmistakably impressive -- from videos that feature her alongside several dancers who soon succumbed to the AIDS pandemic. 

The Brown Elixer

Since I've completely given up on the San Francisco Chronicle, which has pared itself down like a late-season Biggest Loser contestant to an x-ray of its former self, on weekends I usually pick up the Sunday New York Times.

My favorite part is stopping by the Starbuck's in the upscale shopping center near my house. I make my way through the WiFi hoboes and screaming, over-entitled urban urchins to the counter, where I slap the thick bale of newsprint onto the counter. "Is that all?" the barrista will ask, after inquiring unconvincingly about my health and happiness level.

"Yes," I respond loudly. "I don't drink coffee." The response from the assembled caffein addicts is similar to when a living human stumbles into the zombie barn on The Walking Dead.

A study last week reported that the average American adult spends $1,096 a year on coffee, but I'm willing to believe that even in these troubled times it's much more than that. At just three visits to Starbuck's or Peet's a day at $4.00 a shot, that's $4,380.  Is it not strange and noteworthy that at 11 p.m. in any city or town you'll find people carting around 16-ounce cartons of coffee? People talk about how meth has ruined small town America but what about its watery brown cousin, the antsy hopped-up one that stains its users' teeth, fouls their breath and drains their already limited disposable income?

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen In Peace

When I set out for a brief walk on that unseasonably warm Thursday afternoon just before Christmas, I had no idea I was about to discover a disturbing new trend in yard decorations.

I strolled through a small park just down the street from my office building in San Bruno, a suburb of San Francisco, and found myself in a middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes. On nearly every lawn lay the crumpled forms of Santas, snowmen, teddy bears and elves. It took me a while to realize that these sad tableaux, which resembled some holiday version of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre that had mown down the season's favorite icons with machine gun fire, were simply inflatable decorations, their compressors shut off during the daylight hours.

The company I work for does a healthy business in what it calls inflatable decor items, selling giant blow-up haunted houses in October and giant Easter Bunnies in April. But it had never occurred to me before that for most of the day these pressurized plastic figures would have so opposite an effect, lying unfestively together on the grass like victims of the Manson family.

Springtime for Transvestites

Many years ago there was a highly improbable television sitcom called Bosom Buddies. The premise was that two best friends vie for the same job at an advertising agency and decide, because women are paid half as much, they'll try to pass as women and split the position and its salary. 

Like the much more entertaining Some Like It Hot, you never really bought the idea of the cross-dressing actors as women and had to suspend disbelief that the female co-stars didn't see the five o'clock shadows and Adam's apples under the pancake makeup. But the show had an appealing young cast and ran long enough to launch Tom Hanks' career, despite the fact that Peter Scolari was the better actor. While his former bosom buddy went on to a prestigious film career that included numerous Oscar wins, Scolari stumbled along in sitcom runs like Newhart and currently hawks an erectile dysfunction medication on radio spots. The poor guy was even cast as the dad in the short-lived television version of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.


As if to prove that network television executives are never too ashamed to resuscitate a tired idea that was lucky to succeed the first time around, ABC has green-lighted a sitcom called Work It. So low-brow and mouth-breathing an effort it makes Bosom Buddies seem like an Ingmar Bergman film, this reboot of the cross-dressing buddies in the workplace concept has angered transgender groups and makes me wonder if there isn't some bottom-line Springtime for Hitler principle at play here, where the producers make a fortune if they attempt a series that is certain to fail. The promo poster says it all, I guess, but can the gay porno version be far behind?

Elf Orgy

First, I can't be the only one who hears -- more than once! -- "Orgy Wonderland" being sung by the elves in this Samsung Galaxy commercial, instead of "4G." Is it just an aural trick, or a deliberate subconscious subversion? You decide.

Second, it might have seemed fresh back in 1939 to cast dwarves as Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz, but hasn't the practice of outfitting them as Santa's elves gone on a bit too long? Or are there union halls somewhere in the porny depths of the San Fernando Valley filled with smoking, poker-playing Little People waiting for their annual casting calls? The Will Farrell movie Elf was innovative enough to employ children as elves and that's just one of the things that contributed to its freshness ("These toilets are ginormous!"). Let's start casting dwarves as doctors, cops and sit-com stars, shall we?

Let Your Bundles Do the Walking

If I have to live in a world where every third person on the freeway is making love to his cell phone and Kardashians tweet, do I still have to also receive new phone books every year?

It's a long-standing annual ritual, the delivery of the white and yellow pages. And if you live in an apartment building, every December a stack of plastic bags containing those fat books is dumped at your doorstep -- a stack that pretty much remains there all month, because when's the last time you looked something up in a phone book? It couldn't be more anachronistic if every year a truck backed up to my lobby door and unloaded a pile of sun dials. 


Could we end the madness? And while we're at it, let's do something about those Kardashians.

Oh, Little Town of Hollywood

The suspension of disbelief is integral to many entertaining film classics. To fully enjoy them, you have to relinquish your logical mind and accept that a tornado can transport a farmhouse over the rainbow, a department store Santa could be the real Kris Kringle, or a myopic wizard could win a school championship riding a broom. 


But there are certain story lines that no unhinging of reason can account for, and one of them is Ice Age, a Mammoth Christmas Special. The Ice Age franchise of animated films, starring Ray Romano as a wooly mammoth grieving for his family and Denis Leary as his sabor-toothed sidekick, is an enjoyable series of films with a bold visual style depicting ancient landscapes and the flora and fauna found within them. The overriding premise, however, is that the action takes place in the last ice age, ten thousand years ago at the very least. Even the most ardent creationists agree that Christ, if he existed at all, was born 2,000 years ago -- meaning there could be no Christmas for our nomadic late-Pleistocene animal friends. None. Forget it. End of Christmas special.