Congratulate me on having endured my 70th hour off the grid. It looks like I'll break the 80-hour record before this little adventure is done, and about forty mintes after that I intend to set a new velocity record for number of facial slaps administered to communications engineers in a 90-second span. By the time I'm twenty seconds into the record attempt, the slaps will be landing so fast that the ear will only be able to register it as a thready buzzing sound. The specific tone will probably be a G-flat two octaves above middle "C," though I did the math on this in my head so don't bet the farm on it. What I do know is that I'm going to be slapping a lot of people very hard and very much.

Let's recap:

1) The data line in my house is down. Just plumb stopped workin' over the weekend. Danged if I know why. It could be a problem with the wall jack. It could be a problem with the splitter at the wall jack. Or the cables plugged into the splitter, or any of the four devices that the cables eventually lead to. Or, hey, maybe the fact that copper technology was designed to support one pink Princess phone and an answering machine, tops, and I've got enough gear tied into it that I occasionally get misdirected calls from the Air Force, demanding to know why the hell I haven't turned my key as commanded. In any event, poking the wall jack with a stick didn't fix the problem. The jack is behind a steel Army-surplus drafting table that isn't budging without a UN resolution, so that's as much as I could do.

2) I have no voice line, because it belongs to my Airport base station for the duration of this crisis. The people I work with have long-since been trained to email me instead of phoning if at all possible. Thus, my voice line is traditionally more or less solely in the hands of PR people and true-blue patriots who are concerned that my choice of long-distance carrier is indirectly underwriting terrorism. The big deal is my ability to continue to get email, so swapping telephone calls for email is a no-brainer.

3) I have no email.

Let us pause here and reflect upon that statement.

I. Have. No. Email.

"Jerwillickers," you're thinking. "I remember the time when my mail client suddenly stopped working. Boy, I sympathize."

No, you don't. In case you haven't been keeping up, I HAVE NO EMAIL. As in, my ISP had a big fight with their backbone connection and as of Sunday night, the answer to the question "Is there any unread email on the server?" is "What server?"

It doesn't matter what language or dialect you use while asking, or if you accompany the request with a bottle of Dry Sack and the phone number of an extremely available sister. I often have marveled at the average user's ability to get anything done on a reliable basis. Just by pivoting my head I can spot six different devices in my office capable of establishing a connection to the Internet and receiving mail. On each of those, there are probably at least two or three methods of getting that mail. If one connection to the Internet is acting all petulant and decides that it desperately needs some Alone Time, that's OK. I'll go to the second ISP, and if all else fails, I've got AOL.

Six devices times three methods of getting mail times three ISPs: that comes out to fifty-four chances at getting my email. Oftentimes, I need to blast through the first six or seven before I succeed. What if it's just this one iMac, with just the free email client that comes with it, and just the one ISP? It's like your car breaking down in the middle of "Deliverance" country and you only have enough juice in your cellphone for one call. Either it works or you resign yourself to being Fate's chew-toy.

Believe me. I burned through all of my options. Switching apps, computers, and operating systems wasn't going to help any because — and I can't even type this without my teeth clenching — my ISP's mailserver isn't receiving anything.

"When I found myself tearing open foil-packed sterile swabs to suck out the alcohol, I knew that I had a serious dependency issue." If a VH1 "Behind The Music" special doesn't feature that line, it ain't worth watching. Well, ladies and gentlemen, my Moment of Suckage came when I found myself firing up Lilith 2, my PowerBook 190. When Lilith 2 was my main axe, everybody's main Internet application was a terminal window, not a web browser, and you connected by issuing individual commands directly to the modem hardware, not by locating a wireless access point that maintains a PPP connection.

That's an old trick for getting into unreachable systems. It's surprisingly effective if the system's so old that its original system administrators kicked it with wingtipped shoes, instead of the New Balance cross-trainers favored by today's engineers. There are lots of ways into a computer. When new networking technologies come along, they're often screwed into the rack on top of whatever was already there. So when an admin flicks a switch to render the service invisible to TCP, they might be unaware of a certain box buried in there. Its lights are still blinking and it'll throw the doors wide-open to Satan himself, so long as he uses a 1200-baud modem.

Folks who attended old universities (and who believed that $18,000 in annual tuition entitled them to do a hell of a lot) are already familiar with this concept. The [Founder of BigEvilBastardCo] H. "Gobbo" Ticklinger Engineering Center is the home of multi-gazillion-dollar research projects, so it's the most secure building on campus. No windows on the first three floors. You need a magcard to get in through the front door, then a guard has to peep your ID, then you encounter an elevator that has to be operated via a key, et cetera. The only people wandering its halls are (1) holders of multidisciplinary doctorates with very much their own opinion regarding how many megatons of energy can be liberated from one Tylenol-sized object, (2) corporate titans (and by extension, any shapeshifting alien superwarriors who broke containment on the seventeenth floor and extracted a nearby Corporate Titan's DNA via the most inefficient and disgusting manner possible)...and (3) freshmen who walked straight in through an 80-year-old steam tunnel that connects from the unlocked Humanities building next door.

But I digress. I booted up Lilith 2, plugged my voice line into its modem jack, launched ZTerm, tapped in a long init string followed by a dialing command...and I still couldn't get my email. But at least I was now Not Getting My Email in a very unique way.

No. I'm still unsatisfied with that phrase. Am I really conveying the power of those five words?

Look, here's what I'm going to do:

I can't get my email c it damn god- bloody h k ing mother sonofa ! f s u bit o ty

Print it out. Cut each expressive molecule out and slide them together until you see something that really brings it home for you.

Sample:

SONOFAB****!!!!! I CAN'T GET MY C*******ING MOTHER****ING G*D-DAMN EMAIL! F*********!!!!!!!! SONOFA F***ING B****!!!!!

Try it! It's easy and fun. And quite reflexive, if you can't get your...well, I risk belaboring the point.

No email, no phone calls. No faxes either, which isn't that big a deal considering that my machine came with three rolls of paper when I bought it at the MIT Flea Market six years ago, and I'm only halfway through the second.

The cable guy arrives on Monday to install broadband. EvilBastardLizardScum Cable started offering it back in March, but I've been travelling so much that there seemed to be no point in having it installed. Like the perfect comeback or a handgun, broadband is that it's no good to you unless it's right at hand. Plus, they were charging usurous rates for the bloody service and I was hoping I could do better with DSL or a fractional T1.

Well, LizardScumBastardWeasel Phone Company still won't run DSL to my neighborhood. Serves me right: apparently (and this was explained to me very carefully before I moved here) there's a ring of fractalized subspace around the entire block. Apparently it's the Internet Age all the way from the backbone to the central office out through overhead and buried wires into and out of switching stations and all the way up to a point a few feet beyond the fire hydrant near the corner. That's where the fractalized subspace thingy is: for reasons that a bunch of grad students are trying to work out, for a distance roughly equivalent to the wavelength of red light, it's 1571. Then it's the Internet Age again all the way up to my house.

See, no matter what the broadband technology, I keep getting hosed by that 650 nanometer foray into the 16th century. The biggest technology there is a new form of keel that increases the cargo capacity of merchant ships by more than 40% with no additional draft...so I mean, good luck getting IP packets across it. I'm told that it also screws up cellphone reception, but you're cool if you take a half-step away from the hydrant.

Fractional T1 is out, DSL is out, and to my surprise EvilBastardLizardScum (they have a really cool logo) drastically lowered their rates since the last time I'd checked. It'll just cost me twelve bucks a month more than the (nonfunctional) data line. It should be about two dollars more...but if I bristled at being rogered by the cable company, I'm sort of OK with just being slapped around a little. Getting the data line fixed means having a guy come to the house in one of LizardScumBastardWeasel's service trucks — their logo is sort of an unidentifiable red smear; the result of one corporate merger too many, no doubt — and to have him tell me "It's a problem with your equipment, not ours" will run me the cost of three months' worth of service.

I'll be honest, though. Computer hardware is like a Hydra: remove one machine and four more instantly sprout to take their place. After ten years of this, the end result is that my office floor is carpeted with cords and cables. Few of them actually lead anywhere and the only thing they actually do is prevent me from vacuuming.

So if you're asking me "why are you finally replacing your data line with broadband, instead of simply making do until a better pipe becomes available?" the truthful answer has nothing to do with speed or patience or cost. It's possible that my data line is dead because of a bad $.19 connector which I could replace myself in about three minutes, tops, once I locate it.

But the hydra will not give up that secret easily.

Given the choice between spending days working through that dense mat of techno-dredlocks and simply leaving it as an exercise for future archaeologists, well, hell...I have twelve dollars. I have much, much more than twelve dollars and God willing, I shall make many more Twelve Dollars in the future.

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Yesterday I finally bought Endless Nights, Neil Gaiman's (and P. Craig Russell's and Milo Manara's and Bil Sienkiewicz' and Miguelanxo Prado's and Barron Storey's and Glenn Fabry's and Frank Quitely's and Dave McKean's) anthology of the first all-new "Sandman" stories since...since...well, since the last one. Which was a very, very long time ago. I want to say "...in ten years," because I remember that there was a nice, fluffy round number attached to this release, but I'm looking at those three words right now and an orange "No, That's Not Right" light is flashing in the left side of my peripheral vision.

("The George Lazenby Accuracy Amigo," $16.95 from any Target Store. The implant procedure is relatively painless and can be performed on an outpatient basis.)

Re-reading Gaiman's introduction reveals that the book's publication marks the 15th anniversary of the "Sandman" stories, which were first published back in 1988. That's pretty impressive but there's a bigger indication of how long ago that was. There was a time when Gaiman would write a major miniseries for the BBC or a best-selling novel and be identified as "Creator of the best-selling 'Sandman' comics." The cover of Endless Nights helpfully informs me that Gaiman is the New York Times Best-Selling Author of American Gods and Coraline, and suggests that if I liked that stuff, perhaps I should give this comic book of his a whirl, too.

I intended to just say that and then move along to another topic

("Yes, yes, yes," Ego sighs, impatiently fiddling with the brim of his straw boater. "When are you going to talk about us again? This is Andy Ihnatko's Colossal Waste Of Bandwith, after all. Shouldn't we be brutally envious of Gaiman instead of plugging his book and his weblog?"

Ego bought the boater under the (wholly incorrect) impression that it made him look intriguingly dashing, but the only real impact of that doofy hat is that it makes it all the easier for me disregard nearly everything he says. End of aside.)

...but it's just occurred to me that Neil Gaiman is the Martin Scorsese of comics and this isn't the sort of observation that one should keep close to the vest.

Scorsese is brilliant. That's so obvious that you can't say it without becoming terribly self-conscious, like when you come to New York for the first time and think "Gosh, them buildings is tall!," or when you meet someone's new third wife and find yourself asking the woman if it hurt a lot when the surgeon did that to her face.

You can dissect Scorsese's storytelling and filmmaking all the way down to the subatomic level, but for me, Scorsese's signature is the ease with which he uses techniques that would look shabby and cheap in anyone else's hands.

"Casino" is a case in point. A blackjack player in Robert DeNiro's casino is cheating, with the help of a confederate at a nearby table. DeNiro picks up a phone, calmly utters a single, cryptic command, and a half-dozen security guys quietly slip into position around the table for what will soon be Colorful and Extremely Effective Response.

The scene takes place on a crowded casino floor. Part of the point is to communicate that this is all happening subtly and secretly, so that none of the casino's patrons (least of all the cheater) has any idea what's going on. But how do you make sure that the audience is keeping up?

Well, if you're Scorsese, you simply have a bunch of high-intensity overhead spotlights hit the floor. As the cheater continues to adjust his chips, guards wander in from every vector until there's one standing in every circle of light. The wide shot is so busy that you don't even notice what's happening until Overwhelming Numbers have been firmly established.

Scorsese can pull off that sort of thing. It's hard to think of any other filmmaker who could make something so blatant seem so subtle. I can easily imagine another filmmaker thinking he can make it work. I can also imagine grips and associate directors giggling and shaking their heads a lot while the scene is shot.

Scorsese can get away with having a dead character narrate the film. He can undercrank the camera (which is what how film weenies describe "The 'Benny Hill' Effect"). He can underscore the action with lounge-ey music. Scorsese is the living, working embodiment of the fact that there's no such thing as a tired old device or cliche: there's just an ever-narrowing field of people who know how to use these tools effectively. You might look at the scene from "Bringing Out The Dead" in which the actors are moving funny and the snow is falling upward from the ground and you think "Wow, if I ever make a movie I'm definitely gonna film stuff backwards; look how well it worked for Martin Scorsese!"

You'd fail miserably. Using a technique like that isn't simple like landing on the moon, where it's tough going the first time and then everyone else can just do what the first guy did. It's not about copying what you've seen or going after certain effects. It's all about having a profound understanding of the science of filmmaking, of that combination of manipulation and hypnotism that causes an audience to buy more or less whatever you show them.

The analogy to Gaiman isn't perfect, of course. Gaiman's "Sandman" stories don't have any one signature technique or style. But when I read Endless Nights (or any of his other books, really) I get that same impression: it'd be so easy to try to directly emulate him and you'd be so certain to fail miserably.

How do you create a character with such matter-of-fact charm as Death? Or a story of Desire which puts across a complicated shift of character so offhandedly? His tale of Delirium is (by definition) written from the point of view of the utterly mad...yet a careful reader will make sense of it.

(Note: after he puts "Casino" on pause for a while, and moves from the chair to the sofa and puts his feet up and tries very hard not to be distracted by that diesel truck he hears chuffing up the street which might be the FedEx guy. The point is that it's all clear, provided that you're properly hydrated and are willing to meet the story halfway.)

I see a rippingly-good Scorsese movie (ie, all of them) and I imagine the 100 truly awful movies that people will make trying to ape its elements. I read a rippingly good Gaiman tale (ditto) and imagine the 1000 truly awful stories that will be written with the same motivation.

I mean, I've been there. I wrote my first piece of long fiction in junior high, after reading The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy. And folks, the only reason why I still have those seven single-spaced pages is that I've yet to find a hole deep enough to bury them in. It was the most whorish aping of Douglas Adams imaginable. In my own defense I'll say that it was a loving whore, one who tells you her real name and refuses to sneak out with your watch and your wedding ring after you fall asleep, but still, brrrrrr. It came from the idea that wow, I love what DNA did; I should try to do those same things.

Gaiman writes the sort of horror that sticks to your bones. His characters speak Truth. Big truths, the sort of things that'll unconsciously work their way onto the playing field years later when you're arguing with a girlfriend. When there's a party scene, someone in the back of the crowd will toss off a line of throwaway dialogue that would be the rich, nougaty center of a whole novel in someone else's hands.

Those successes are worthy of emulation, no question. But you can't sit down and think "Hey, I'm gonna write one of those, whaddyacall, 'character studies that subtly yet deeply resonate with the fundamental experience that binds all peoples together into a coherent society'. That dodge worked gangbusters for Neil Gaiman, you know? It's probably worth looking into."

That sort of thinking comes from the same place as the impulse to toss in a 27-minute Steadicam shot like the one in "Goodfellas." Good stories aren't the result of figuring out why a good story worked, but from figuring out how good storytelling works. Gaiman has read the inside of the lid of the box that Storytelling came in and he understands all the rules. If Storytelling were "Monopoly," he'd be the only one at the table who knows that rolling three doubles in a row means that you Go Directly To Jail.

Like Scorsese, everything Gaiman does fills you with confidence that his creative choices flow from the simple and honest desire to tell a good story — no matter where that desire takes him, no matter what he has to do to the story or put his characters through to make it happen.

To sum up, Endless Nights is A Rather Good Read.

It's uncanny, though. As I mentioned, I was going to just toss out this data point and move on. The book came out a couple of weeks ago and ordinarily, I would have bought it as soon as it arrived at my friendly area comics retailer.

But I've been terribly, hideously, nigh-excrementally busy all month and I've bought too many books that now sit on the shelf and grow increasingly impatient to be read. Yesterday I recognized that I had done an exceptionally good job in acknowledging that manslaughter was morally-ambiguous at best and a definite legal no-no. I grudgingly resigned myself to the fact that heading over to the offices of my ISP armed with a pillowcase full of old PowerBook batteries was probably not in my long-term best interests.

In a nutshell, by not murdering anyone this week, I had been a Very Good Boy and Deserved A Toy. So I bought the new "Sandman" book and took an hour or two off to read it.

The uncanny aspect comes in when I explain that this was my fourth or fifth attempt at posting about how busy I am. It turns out that it's a lot easier to explain how matter, energy and time are simply three expressions of the same basic phenomenon than to explain how busy you are.

A sampling of previous abandoned attempts:

Hey, I'm sorry for the lack of updates this month. Lots of things to talk about but no tim

I'm too busy to post, so here's a picture of a dog I saw in Coolidge Corner yesterday: (and then iPhoto refused to export the picture and I couldn't waste any time fixing it)

Kipling put it best: "The hour of the bear, in the tree of the wolf, oh damn, that'll probably be my editor calling, hang on, I'll pick this back up right after I answer this...

See, the only way to maintain credibility in a situation like this is to not post anything at all. Whereas when you enter a university lecture hall with a presentation on the Unified Theory Of Everything, you've got an excellent chance of making it all the way to the end aithout interruption. The first eight minutes is the toughest. Then everyone's fast asleep and the audience is all yours, until you press the button on the podium which activates the seat buzzers.

This here interlude comes to you courtesy of my ongoing communications crisis. I still have no phone line but email has been upgraded from Nonexistant to Spotty. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, some things are getting through, some things aren't. So the 11 hours a day I normally spend dealing with email have now been replaced with 9 hours of worrying about all of the emails I'm missing. Which leaves a couple of hours for Elective Acivities, such as showering, writing things for the weblog, and thinking of new ways in which I specifically should not murder the people responsible for my current crisis.

Today, I finally had time to explain how busy I am...and what do I write? Oh, well. Sometimes, what you hope to write adamantly refuses to be Wrot after all.

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Two news items from this weekend are worthy of comment:

First, of course, was the gorilla who broke out of the zoo downtown. I can't tell you how much this Breaking News Item delighted me (until it became known that a two-year-old girl got hurt, of course). There's a good reason why our parents didn't want us watching cartoons and Three Stooges shorts: they knew that a childhood spent watching stuff like that only leads to a lifetime of disappointment. I remember the first time I had a minor disagreement with someone and he knocked my hat off my head. Well, being a big Laurel & Hardy fan, I knew that he was going to wait patiently while I picked up a pitcher full of gravy and slowly poured it down his pants. And then I'd stand by while he carefully cut a hole out of my shirt and daintily deposited on my head. Back and forth like gentlemen, and eventually things would get worked out.

But nothing doing. Before I could even look around to see if there was any gravy handy, he just hauled off and hit me without waiting for his turn.

The disappointments come almost every day in this media-rich World of Tomorrow. "We interrupt 'Dr. Phil' for breaking news," Chet (or Natalie or Trip or whoever it is) intones. And I sit right up and take notice. Has a costumed madman hijacked the Bullwinkle balloon straight from the middle of the Macy's Parade? Is Evel Knievel's stunt-jetcycle missing, last seen losing altitude over the Bermuda Triangle, vehicle and driver presumed lost forever? Perhaps the sole nephew of eccentric late billionaire must wed by 5 PM or lose his inheritance, and desperately announces that he'll marry any woman who meets him on the front steps of Trinity Church at 4:45?

No, of course not. "As anyone within twelve feet of a window already knows, it's raining," Chet says. "Just thought you'd like to know that it's probably going to keep up for another couple of hours. Plus, there's something about a city councilman being caught naked on a pontoon boat with either a veterinarian or a veteran, or possibly both. Well, whichever, I guess it'll hold until the 5:30 newscast. Toodles!"

Yesterday I finally — finally — got what I was hoping for:

"Breaking news out of Roxbury: a 300-pound gorilla has escaped from the city zoo and is at currently at large. Citizens are urged to keep a close eye out for 'Little Joe'..."

And I did. Oh, boy, I certainly did. Every time I heard a car starting somewhere in the neighborhood, I ran to the door, half-expecting to see a gorilla driving off in the general direction of the African Lowlands, wearing a little derby hat and clenching a big cigar in his bared teeth. I put the odds at a realistic seventy-thirty against, but if it was an escaped gorilla stealing a car, I was very sure that when he made the turn to get to the highway, he'd ignore the stick on the steering column and signal the turn by sticking his left arm straight out the window.

I mean, it was just wonderful. Somewhere, someone was surely saying "Wait...if that was Uncle Leonardo on the phone just now, then who was the big, hairy guy that Ted picked up from the airport?!?" By now, downtown alleys were filled with men in groups of twos and threes sneaking around with big butterfly nets, most of them unaware that the Boston Police's charity costume gala was being held that same evening, and that this year's theme was "Goin' Bananas For Homeland Security."

Unfortunately, Little Joe made the rookie mistake of waiting at the bus stop just outside the zoo. Apparently he didn't know that the MBTA had switched to a Sunday schedule and it was after 6 PM besides, so in the hour and a half before the next appearance of the #29, tranquilization and recapture was inevitable. Stupid frickin' monkey. At least he had the courtesy not to try and carjack someone. See? He was here in New England for just a short part of his troubled and disadvantaged life; it's good to know that some of our folksy, wool-blazers-with-nubby-leather-patches-on-the-elbows charm and our old-world manners have rubbed off on the lad.

And let's give a shout out to the New England Media. A gorilla escaped from the zoo and was wandering at large: yet it just didn't occur to anybody to send a helicopter up to cover it. "Tacky," was the concensus among newsproducers. "Besides, what if a fight breaks out between a bunch of Harvard and BU students, and they decide to settle things with an impromptu regatta? Let's not be impulsive about our resources."

I don't know how you people in California manage to deal with it. If I were a resident and I found out that (a) a close relative was going to be on Jerry Springer and (b) the word "pimpin'" was to figure prominently in the show title, I wouldn't resort to anything as clumsy as a lawsuit to block the show from being broadcast. I'd just jump in my Volare, pick up some drive-through, and then I'd run a yellow light about ten minutes before airtime. Within moments, every TV station would pre-empt their normal programming in favor of live aerial coverage of me calmly proceeding down major arteries, nodding my head in time to the iPod and blissfully munching on the first in an hourlong series of cheeseburgers.

In other news, Donald O'Connor passed away. It was yet another blow in the born-under-a-bad-moon life of Stanley "'Whitey' from 'Leave It To Beaver'" Fafara.

Lots of urban legend buffs breathed a sigh of relief when they got the news about O'Connor. Nobody's happy when a member of Hollywood's old guard passes on, of course. But with the deaths of Robert Palmer and George Plimpton, it was looking like they'd have to complete the "celebrities always die in threes" trifecta with this "Whitey" fellow.

And that just didn't sit well. "Is this really the best we can do?" everyone wondered. Unfortunately, the deaths of folks like Milton Berle and Bob Hope and Kate Hepburn have hit the Trifecta hobby hard. There was once a day when you could afford to be picky, you see. When Fate dealt you Brian Keith and then Bob Mitchum, you might have had a moment of weakness and considered working your way backwards and penciling in that day player from "Pillow Talk" who'd choked to death a month earlier. But you shook it off. You had a little faith, and sure enough before the weekend was out, your patience was rewarded in the form of Mr. Jimmy Stewart.

There were always a few A-list octa- and nonagenarians hanging in there for the express purpose of Keeping Hopes Alive. These days, who can afford to take the risk? The recent string of celebrity deaths has been an aberration. It seems like you can't turn on the morning news without encountering a clip from an old movie or TV show that's so breathtakingly out-of-context that you know that hundreds of autographs dubiously attributed to one of the actors therein are popping up on eBay at this very moment.

Personally, I saw that clip from "Three's Company" and for the first time in my life, the phrase "Anybody but Don Knotts" escaped my lips. Usually I'm up for as much Don Knotts as you or my TiVo are willing to serve up, you see. What a shock to learn that John Ritter had died, but perhaps this will scare George W. into putting Mr. Knotts on the Kennedy Center Honors list before it's too late.

Nearly every Donold O'Connor obituary I've read (with the exception of Ebert's) seems to follow the same basic (and fairly offensive) arc: He did a whole bunch of stuff not particularly worth mentioning, then he created one of the most brilliant and memorable scenes in the history of cinema...and then a bunch of stuff came afterwards, but hey! Let's not just zip past that bit where he ran up a freakin' wall, I mean, holy cow that was awesome, man!

I suppose that when you've got "Singin' In The Rain" on your resume it's hard to believe that "I Love Melvin" is going to make it into your obit. I liked his work but Donald O'Connor is also singled out for me because he's the reason why I think I'd have been a great minion of Satan.

I always found him an interesting case study on the subject of Fame. I imagine setting up my little office in Hollywood during the Thirties, and doing the paperwork on Deals With The Devil on a commission basis. I wouldn't be doing all the cold-calls, mind you; people would come and see me when the boys and girls in the sales office had already lined them up for a "Fame At Any Cost" package.

"I can make you a leading man, a huge, fabulous celebrity," I'd say, "something along the lines of what Jesus would have been if He'd had a publicity team out there to make sure He always got the right spin in the trades. And you'd hang on to this megatitanic level of celebrity until the end of your long, prosperous life. Just an endless string of successful movies."

The client is nodding hungrily.

"But none of them will really be any good, you see. Folks at the studio will one day ask themselves which is more valuable: the sole remaining prints and negatives of your life's work, or the storage space that could be freed up by selling your life's work to a recycling company. This question will be rhetorical in nature. Eventually your name will be completely forgotten. in terms of Making A Lasting Impact Upon Society, well, I suppose your films could be recycled into enough guitar and ukulele picks to keep the entire Pacific Rim well-stocked with such items for about ninety to a hundred years. Which is better than no legacy at all, I suppose."

The client is now fiddling with the complimentary thermometer I gave him when he came in.

"Of course, I can put you into a Second Banana package, if you want," I'd continue, pulling another folder out of the desk. "Make a decent living, have a pretty OK career, considering — not good enough that you wouldn't have the occasional bout with alcoholism, but hey, it's not like that doesn't happen to steelworkers, too — but you'll never really become a superstar."

If the client were living in the Nineties and not the Thirties, he would now be wondering if California's Lemon Law applies to bills of sale-and-title on eternal souls and if so, if it isn't time to get out the cellphone and call that consumer-reporter on Channel 6, the cute one with the hair. As is, he really has no choice but to keep listening.

"The point is, though, that one of these second-banana roles will be in the greatest musical of all time. More than that, you, personally will solo in one of the greatest scenes in the greatest musical of all time. Let me put it this way: 'To be, or not to be...'"

The client looks puzzled. I wait another ten seconds and then make an expectant gesture to help things along.

"'That is the question?'" he says, unsure of himself.

"Bingo. As tightly-woven into the cultural consciousness as that, only as a film scene. Even people who have never seen the movie will have seen your big solo. And they'll know who did it, no worries there. Even on the day of Final Judgement, the angels who bring down the end of all Creation will be humming your song while reaving the souls of the unworthy. It'll be that catchy and memorable, no question."

This has made an obvious impact on the fellow so I know it's time to button the pitch. "Why don't I go have Stella fetch us some coffees while you think all this over?" I say, and after stepping out of the office and counting to 130, I return to find that the contract has been hurriedly and eagerly signed and I've just made myself another seventy bucks.

It's an interesting question, isn't it? Which is more attractive: to create work that make an impact while you're around to enjoy it, or to create something that doesn't benefit you in any real way but will stand as a legacy long after you've quit this vale of tears?

It's as though O'Connor was presented with exactly such an opportunity and he made the right choice. I could mention hundreds of performers who chose poorly, but naturally, I can't think of any of their names. Check out this cool guitar pick I found on the subway last week, though.

Then you have guys like Whitey, who apparently never had the opportunity to even make such a choice. He had a marginal success with "Leave It To Beaver," but he never equalled it and sank into lifelone addiction and depression. And year after year his one memorable success steps further and further into the shadows. It was never a terribly good show to begin with, and as more and more choices are made available to viewers, "Leave It To Beaver" becomes harder and harder to find, even on a cable dial with triple-digits and a fourth on the way.

In the 24 hours between starting and finishing this piece, legendary (and notorious) director Elia Kazan has died. So maybe Whitey will make it into a Trifecta regardless. It just goes to show you that even in death, there's Hope.

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Catch up on the many heroic banalities that I posted last month.

This page and its contents are © 2003 Andy Ihnatko.