Stalin Sitcom

This is an idea that I had with my friend Jeremy Millard that deserves to be heard.

Here is the pitch for the situational comedy show that is 2 Broke Girls, Anger Management, Black Adder meets Gulag Archipelago.  Before you say that's a terrible idea and esoteric, the theme song is "I'm a Steel Man" (Soul Man by Sam and Dave).  That should set the tone that this is not history just a mockery of television and the Soviet Union.



The premise its 1938.  Stalin's Mom moves into the Kremlin to live with her son and ruins his life.  Stalin is a single father trying to raise sons Yakov and Vasily and daughter Svetlana.  His two dead wives, Ekaterina and Nadezhda are feuding characters that visit Stalin on a periodic basis.  Stalin cant get anything done with his mother hovering and getting in his business about the five year plans, the gulags and why he never called her in Georgia.

Stalins Mom



Stalin's bros are Molotov, Voroshilov and Beria who wander around Kremlin aimlessly pretending to be busy and avoid Vasili Blokhin, the secret police executioner.  Blokhin keeps trying to lure people into the basement to shoot them.  Blokhin kills at least one guest every episode.  This is one of the running gags, like Trotsky being blamed for the rain or soggy pancakes, and keeping young children away from Beria.  Beria is like the pedophile George Costanza.

Beria

 



In the first episode we find Stalin and writer, Isaac Babel having a discussion at dinner.  Stalin tells Babel, "You have not written anything in twenty years!  Why am I paying you?  Ill bring Gorky back from the dead."  Stalin's Mom hits Stalin in the back of the head, "Ioseb you're being rude to your guest, its not like hes a Uzbek."  Queue the laugh track, rimshot and Kat Dennings effusive cleavage.  Had to make a reference to 2 Broke Girls because that is the kind of mathematical sitcom form that would work.

Kat Dennings



STALIN, would work for CBS.  NBC likes the handheld camera and monkey doctor thing.  FOX if Married with Children was still on.  ABC is too family oriented and may not get such a dark storyline.  Cartoon Network is too lazy and approves anything that came out of an improv skit.

STAY TUNED FOR CASTING IN LATER POSTS...Rowan Atkinson?  Charlie Sheen?

Bridge Hate 1: Champlain Bridge

While I hate many bridges and other inanimate objects, there are those people, you know who I mean, who love bridges and waste their lives trying to convert us to join their cult.  It is only a bridge.  It cannot love you back or hold your hair back over the toilet seat when you have had too many shots playing can I out drink Richard Burton?

The new Champlain Bridge opened in November 2011 replacing its rusted predecessor, which had been there since 1929.  It is a beautiful blue structure with fluid arches at its crest looming over the narrow passage between the ruins of Crown Point in New York and Chimney Point in Vermont.  Completed in two years by a German engineering firm, it cost was estimated at $76 million.

 

When the states demolished the old bridge with explosives in late 2009 hundreds of Vermonters living and working in Western Addison County lamented the long commutes and disruption to local businesses because they had to take a ferry across the two thousand feet passage.  The New Yorkers did not care and moved on like rational people.  The hundreds, needing more attention than a single actress or any of Judd Apatow's children twitter, convinced the local television stations in Burlington, Plattsburgh and Albany to do emotion driven stories about the hardships that the people of Chimney Point had to endure bridgeless.  Remember, its just a bridge.  The hundreds got their golden bridge and swindled millions from NYSDOT and the Vermont Agency for Transportation that should have been spent paving roads that more than fifty people use in a day.

 



"It's a critical link for west-central Vermont and New York State, and vital to Vermont's economic strength, as well as for the people who rely upon that bridge for work and recreation," said Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin.

In the press release, linked below, Governor Shumlin is not the only elected official cashing in on the bridge and making it the greatest human achievement of all time.  Remember, its just a bridge.
http://www.governor.ny.gov/press/110711OpeningofLakeChamplainBridge

As the politicians take credit and inflate the critical existential importance of this bridge to the few hundred voting people and their taxable revenue, they should remember like any wide receiver celebrating catching the ball that it is their fucking job to fix the bridge and do not deserve the adoration for following protocol. 



The two minutes hate for the Champlain Bridge is not because of the object itself but rather because the bridge lovers were so indignant about their bridge from nowhere to nowhere and how obviously important they are all hundred of them in the cosmic scheme. Remember, its just a bridge.

If you would like to join the cult of the Champlain Bridge please use the link below:
http://champlainbridgecommunity.org/index.html

Brownell Hall (Heartburn)

In the ghost darkness of the cinderblock room,
under the faded covers, waiting for sleep
uncomfortable dreaming of food. 
stomach wrenches hard
acids against its walls
burning flesh inside out. 
Ephemeral flashes of silver morning light
crash through wired window curtains
blow nascent heat into my chamber of vomit.

Talus Road (1 July 2005)

twilight yellowed after the storm
forest mountains hold low vapors
shades of devoured trees; chrysalis tents
in empty homes still silence

muted humid colors flood
branches bare maple, birch, poplar
harsh pink cast on stones
property lines unclear and open

trucks pound down gravel road
pond rests collapsed trees beneath surface skin
village green crowded and loud
eve comes with cold blue fog

this wasted day, this arriving night

16 August 2004

Lying in the deep center bow of the horrendous Castro bed sideways with the aging jack Russell terrier, Millie, in my armpit and the brown dachshund, Gus, in my crotch. My back is as numb as my small hands are trapped underneath the reddened flesh festering in body odor and the burning pinpricks of heat amassing on my skin.

Through the hand-blown sash windowpanes projected up on the studio roof I see the trickle of opaque light and shadow reflecting from the front and rear lights of dumptrucks, diesel rigs, loud subwoofered bass house tracks exploding out from a disheveled Japanese car that escaped death from a scrap metal yard.  Through the muslin veil of dust mite infested curtains the cars zoom by leaving a trail of dust and faint sounds in low decibels vibrating above the murmur of crickets, flies, and owls.  I hear their songs in and outside of the tattered and shred screen porch off to my distant left behind the pillows out past the kitchen/dining room to the mowed valley floor beneath Spruce, Burnt, the Gallop and Derby Hill on the mountain road.

Above me through the ceiling window, the glimmering stars and specs of folding Venus, red Mars and the gas giants surface currents flowing in tandem rhythms of riverine matter held together firmly by gravity and other forces of physics.  Thoughts flicker like drunken pixies in the forest groves about existence, our odd species and my futures that cannot escape our future.  Wandering back down from ethereal nonsense I hit the granite face hard in the echo chamber of my mind, into aimless desultory depression dreaming of future ex-wives.  Names that I will forget cascade down through the subconscious cataracts.

Contentment Island 6 July 2004

On a stone terraced hillside behind the abandoned hulk of a house that served as JA White's laboratory and his home wasting the clear day.  The winds pick up across the Sound and Scott's Cove.  The rising water laps up white caps.

There is goose shit everywhere.  The house waits to be destroyed and replaced by a greater asymmetrical behemoth that will be overvalued to eight digits because of its acreage at the end of the peninsula in the "special" tax district.  The boat launch has been broken by underground roots from the overgrown trees along the private beach and rock jetty.

There is a green wood hulled fifty footer sailboat anchored out in the cove.  The heavy breeze and tidal currents are pulling its anchor in towards the shore underneath the burning sun of a late summer day in Western Connecticut where we are beholden to Long Island and its face tattooed mother, New York City.

Contemptment Island would be a much better name.

Can you hate a bridge?

Yes.  I believe that you can hate bridges and all other inanimate objects including carbon rods, ears of corn, and fabric swatches.  The bridges that I hate are drawbridges, especially those over unimportant and small waterways that impede traffic for recreational or private purposes.  When drawbridges are raised they begin as quaint next annoying then boring back to annoying and the wait becomes infuriating as you watch the obese bridge operator smoking and texting his girlfriend while the uhf/vhf wails for his attention.  You think that anyone can do his job, press button make bridge go up and press button make bridge go down. Waits can turn into eternities as the backup cascades miles behind the bridge itself as a Hinckley daysailor 42 putters up or downriver.  This is magnified on interstates such as I-280 over the Passaic River in Newark and formerly over the Hutchinson River on I-95 in the Bronx.

The bridge that I hate is the Stanley H. Stroffolino Bridge also known as the Washington Street Bridge in South Norwalk, Connecticut.  The Norwalk River sees mostly recreational boat traffic and some commercial vessels such as barges and small tankers.  It is not a busy place.  The Stroffolino is a state operated maritime drawbridge that crosses the Norwalk River carrying the circuitous State Highway 136.  It opened on 2 February 1974 after being legislated to replace the old drawbridge in 1949 by the aforementioned State Senator Stanley Stroffolino from Norwalk, who served on the Roads and Bridges Committee.  The old bridge was damaged severely in the 1955 Floods.

The previous bridges were operated by the City and predate the creation of the state highway.   The Stroffolino Bridge is the second automobile drawbridge over the Norwalk; the first bridge was located closer to the railroad crossing and the row of Italianate roofed stores.  The first road bridge was finished in 1912 by the city.  Norwalk purchased plots of the Aisthorpe and Betts lands on the east side marsh and abutting the railroad bridge from the Bank following foreclosure in 1911. See Norwalk v. Kate Podmore (1913)

Hatred is not a logical expression it is emotional and rarely wins an argument.  Despite these set of facts, the Stroffolino drawbridge is unnecessary and should be replaced with a permanent structure or removed entirely.  For aesthetic reasons South Norwalk would probably fight a new bridge especially if the span is higher or incongruous with Washington Street and the urban renewal, but it would save the state on maintenance and rid it of another bridge operator.  Norwalk does not need a drawbridge.  No one needs another drawbridge.