Fate And Fault In A Ford Pinto: The Everyday Horror Of Cujo

By AJ Wood

On a recent warm summer night I was re-reading my favorite Stephen King novel, Cujo, by the open window. Just as King was describing how the foamy-mouthed mangy dog was munching into a man’s throat with quite serious OM NOM NOM gusto, my cat decided to come to the window and play a little joke on me.

“Meow?” he said in his meanest, growlingest voice (at least as I heard it).

“AHHHHHHH!” I replied, my body jolting, nearly tossing my e-book across the room.

Two important things I learned that evening: 1) the same stuff I use to clean up the cat’s pee works well at cleaning up my own accidents and 2) exactly what it is about Cujo that really scares the bejeezus out of me.
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Delivered Poetry: Jenny Lewis’s “Rabbit Fur Coat”

By AJ Wood

I’m not much into music. Top 40, R&B, jazz, indie rock, punk: It’s mostly just background sound to driving or typing. I can freely admit that. The trouble is that I’ve always found myself hanging out with, dating, and loving very musical people. Since moving to Portland, OR this has only gotten worse, what with indie music being the lifeblood of this town, like movies are in my home of Los Angeles. Invariably, there is that time in a relationship where I am subjected to a long string of “OMG you HAVE to hear this SONG, it’s so GREAT”s and thanks to YouTube, I’m subjected to just that. For hours.

I’m not saying I’m above such antics: I’ve kept many a fourth date pinned and wriggling to the couch doing dramatic readings of writings I enjoy, or forcing him to listen to spoken word, or—no doubt worst of all—demanding he read something while I watch him read it. I know it: I’m not better, just different.
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Tune In Tomorrow . . . PLEASE! Days Of Our Lives vs. EastEnders

By AJ Wood

Like so many who get involved in soap operas, my introduction to Days Of Our Lives circa 1994 was quite innocent and totally unintentional. Coming home from summer school, I would walk in just in time for my sister to be sitting down to lunch in front of the TV. Being tired, bored, and overheated from the bus ride home, I’d join her in the living room and idly watch Days, a.k.a. DOOL, with her. Then, after a few days, a week or two maybe, I made the mistake all unintentional soap opera watchers have made at some point: I asked, “Why’s she so mad at her?”
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Those Boots Aren’t Made For Walking: Wonder Woman Reimagined

By AJ Wood

Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman

I remember little of my childhood, especially anything before age eight or nine, but one memory I do have from age four or five was Wonder Woman. Stripped down to my red and blue briefs and a red T-shirt tucked into them, with a lasso of kite string at my side, I felt wise as Athena, fast as Hermes, and stronger than Hercules. I had to imagine the boots, bracelets, and tiara, but the costume was close enough.
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Seinfeld: You Got To Have Three

By AJ Wood

Comedy duos are always the front of our minds, as though funny only happens in pairs: Lucy and Desi, Burns and Allen, McCain and Palin. For me, as typified in that first sentence, three is the funniest of numbers: one and two set up the pattern and three knocks them down. Works every time.

What becomes even funnier is using the same structure on top of itself: having three different series of three gags which are each funny on their own, but funnier still when they come together to form something greater. Something like a comedy turducken: nothing is left to idle stuffing; it’s just meat on meat on meat. Or perhaps as a vegetarian, I should say a comedy Voltron, with powerful parts coming together to make something more. Or maybe I should stop giggling over the fact I just wrote “meat on meat on meat” and “powerful parts coming together” and move on to the next slide.

One of the best examples of seamless tripartite comedy writing comes from an unassuming source: the show about nothing, Seinfeld. Running from mid-1989 through the 1997 TV season, this sitcom created by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David offered something fresh and different from more typical sitcom formats. While “about nothing,” it was still quite unlike anything else on the air. One well-known episode from the early years setting this show apart was “The Chinese Restaurant” (Season 2, Episode 11): a continuous 22 minutes of Jerry, Elaine, and George waiting for a table in a restaurant. Pretty standard fare for a one-act stage comedy perhaps, but definitely not the realm of the typical sitcom.
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Terrorists, Tours, And Tourette’s: Season Three Of Curb Your Enthusiasm

By AJ Wood

Season Eight of Curb Your Enthusiasm will be starting soon, and I will of course be watching. No matter what it brings, it will be difficult for it to reach the brilliance of the third season, which aired in 2002.

Not that episodes from seasons before and after the third one have not been great in their own regard: Porno Gil’s dinner party, opening night of The Producers, and of course, a wrestler named Thor. But as a whole, the third season brings the best mix of those three things that make CYE such a comedic goldmine: impossibly bizarre situations, a wonderful supporting cast, and some great insights into the mind of Larry David.
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À La Recherche du Brooding Perdu

By AJ Wood

When I was 20, I was crazy to get out of Los Angeles, the Valley, and all I had grown up with. Being a French and English major at college, I honed in on an escape available to me: enrolling in a program for university students to teach English to French school children in France. Applications were made in stuttering French, time was spent wondering, and then, I got my escape: I went to France, to the smallest town I had ever been in (where cows outnumbered people) to teach French. But: I was 20, and an English Major, which means I was a navel-gazer and I brooded. And I certainly did that too: I brooded in pidgin French: Je brood, tu broodes, nous avons broodé souvent.
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