It’s Monday. I slept poorly last night, partly because I ate a snack about an hour before going to bed and had utterly bizarre chocolate-fueled dreams involving Tom Skerritt and a merry-go-round as a result, but mostly because the cats gradually expanded to take up the entire bed and left me with one square foot of mattress to sleep on and a flimsy pillowcase to keep myself warm. I hauled my shivering carcass out of bed at around nine o’clock to find that Little Joe, who is going through a let’s-test-gravity phase, had batted everything off of all three bookshelves, my coffee table, and my desk, including my lighter, which I cannot find. I got dressed; while getting dressed, I noticed that my pants had gotten tighter, because I pretty much spent the weekend on my ass, eating. Then I got down on my knees and picked five pairs of earrings and a barrette out of the kitty litter (gravity testing again). Then I set about fixing myself breakfast. I left the kitchen for, literally, four seconds to boot up the computer, and when I returned, I found Little Joe on the counter, licking the butter. I put him down on the floor and scolded him and finished making my toast, and I came out into the main room and found Little Joe on my desk, licking the space bar of my keyboard. I put him down on the floor and scolded him again. “Don’t you have a nap to take?” “Meeee.” So he went to take a nap, if by “take a nap” you mean “launch every single one of Mommy’s snowglobes onto the floor, then respond to subsequent reprimands by sitting on the Caller ID box and squalling, ‘MEEEEE!'” I chased him off and ate my toast. It got suspiciously quiet, but I decided to enjoy the silence instead of investigating whatever trouble Little Joe had gotten into, and as it turns out, said trouble soon made itself known in the form of a strange creature with the body of a cat and the head of a Puma sneaker, which bumbled into the side of my desk. “Mrrrrrf?” “Oh, Jesus.” I pried the shoe off of the cat’s head. “Go take a bath, because you smell like feet now.” “Meeee.” He went to take a bath, if by “take a bath” you mean “stalk over to the Hobe, currently curled up in a peaceful, well-behaved circle on the bed, and pounce on him.” After five minutes of offended snarling which I did my level best to ignore, I shot out of my chair and yelled, “STOP IT!” Little Joe sulked into the bathroom, where he’s presently chasing his tail in the bathtub and kicking up a big racket in the process (whoomp whoomp whoomp KABOMP whoomp whoomp whoomp KABOMP). I already need a nap, and it’s not even lunchtime.

All this by way of saying that there’s no way I can produce a coherent entry today. I anticipate having to get up every ten minutes for the rest of the day to come between Little Joe and the siren song of America’s favorite cat treat, Secret antiperspirant. Furthermore, chasing the feline equivalent of a two-year-old, one with pointy teeth who has ingested a handful of amphetamines, around my apartment has exhausted me to the point of psychosis. And so I bring you part three of The Canon According To Tomato Nation: Pop-Culture Jetsam.

I love pop culture. Analyses of pop culture, behind-the-scenes peeks at pop culture, biographies of pop-culture’s royalty — you name it, I’ve read it. Fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a lowbrow night.

Horizontal Hold: The Making And Breaking Of A Network Television Pilot. Daniel Paisner. I picked Horizontal Hold up for a couple of bucks at the Strand, mostly because I’d just joined an informal writing team charged with shaping up a script for pilot shooting, and I wanted a bit of insight into the process. Well, I didn’t get it. Paisner’s writing is intrusively pedestrian; he uses the same phrases and sentence constructions over and over, and over, AND OVER. And while Paisner clearly expects the reader to sympathize with the pilot’s creators (Bruce Paltrow and part of the St. Elsewhere team), I had trouble, mostly because Paltrow should have understood the compromises involved after years in network television, so when the suits start haranguing him and asking for changes that dumb down the material, I sort of shrugged; what did he expect? Not a lot of surprises here, but the big names keep things mildly interesting (as does the fact that the sitcom as originally written sounds like an early draft of The West Wing).

Girls On Film: The Highly Opinionated, Completely Subjective Guide To The Movies. Clare Bundy, Lise Carrigg, Sibyl Goldman, Andrea Pyros. I like the layout of the book a lot; it’s broken down into categories like dramas, indie films, tearjerkers, and coming-of-age films, and almost every page has a little sidebar by all four of the Girls on subjects like “Phew! It’s Not As Scary As When I Was A Kid” and “I Loved, Everyone Else Loathed.” Books – and, for that matter, Web sites and other media – that purport to shine elements of our culture through a female lens tend to make me nervous, because they usually wind up trying way to hard to make everything about the ovaries and typical ur-girlness, and it comes off really strained. But Girls On Film is quite good. The Girls write well, and they write as film reviewers first and women second (most of the time – but, given the form, I can forgive the occasional lapse into glibness). I use it as a resource, too, for the lists of suggested rentals.

I Hated, Hated, HATED This Movie. Roger Ebert. Ebert is one of two film reviewers I agree with nine times out of ten (Anthony Lane of The New Yorker is the other), and few reviewers give me the thrill that Ebert does when he rolls up his sleeves and tears a film to shreds. Because of the TV show, we tend to forget that Ebert got the syndicated gig in the first place based on his writing, and it’s good writing, unadorned, direct, and knowledgeable. Best of all, you can feel Ebert enjoying himself; as a writer myself, I know well the thrill of deploying lines like the one Ebert uses to close his review of The Beyond: “The movie is being revived around the country for midnight cult shows. Midnight is not late enough.”

Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary. Roger Ebert et. al. A compendium of the most flagrant film clichÈs, the Little Movie Glossary covers everything from The Talking Villain (the villain spends several Basil Exposition-y minutes explaining his motivations, thus allowing the hero enough time to escape, best the villain in a knife fight, or whatever) to The Fruit Cart (during any chase scene set in crowded streets, a fruit cart will get overturned). I would list more, but I gave mine to the Biscuit and never got around to buying a new copy. Anyway, it’s a wonderful little book and a great resource, and later editions include suggestions from readers.

Heartburn. Nora Ephron. I read this because 1) apparently it’s based on Ephron’s marriage to Carl Bernstein and 2) I really hated the movie, but heard that the book is much better. It is much better. The narrative tone reminds me of Joy Behar – it’s overdone, and you don’t want to laugh, but it’s actually pretty funny and you can’t help it. It’s a good book to read while traveling or sitting around a doctor’s office, because it moves quickly and you don’t have to concentrate very hard.

The Devil’s Candy: The Bonfire Of The Vanities Goes To Hollywood. Julie Salamon. Touted as the inside scoop on what went so terribly awry with the film version of Tom Wolfe’s book, The Devil’s Candy is a disappointment, not least because it’s relatively difficult to find, and after weeks of scrounging around on eBay, I had higher expectations for the tome than it warranted. Salamon does a good job of describing the myriad headaches involved in shooting a feature film, from nailing down locations to pacifying studio VPs to managing the interns’ delusions of grandeur but that’s part of the problem with the narrative, because, like most of the other people who picked up the book, I already understood those headaches. That’s why I wanted to read it in the first place. I wanted the dirt behind the headaches. Alas, there isn’t much dirt forthcoming. Bruce Willis and Melanie Griffith allegedly made giant pains in the ass of themselves, but Salamon glosses over them, lingering instead on the trials and tribulations of a second assistant director’s pet shot of the Concorde landing at JFK. I didn’t have any particular axe to grind with the source material – I disliked both the book version and the film version of Bonfire equally – but Salamon apparently didn’t feel that she could slam any of the major players with impunity, and the book, which isn’t very well-written to begin with, suffers for it.

Comedy Central: The Essential Guide To Comedy. Christopher Claro and Julie Klam. Not a bad idea for a book, in theory, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired, primarily because it tries too hard. Parts of it also have a condescending tone that borders on the unpleasant, and the lists of comedy “greats” – books, stand-up records, and movies, among others – that it presents as definitive don’t really do it for me. Where’s Bill Hicks? Why so much M*A*S*H? It’s a good bathroom book, but that’s about it except for the short pieces on a variety of stand-up comedians, which, while intended as a spotlight for the talent, wind up proving the old axiom that comedians have no sense of humor.

You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again. Julia Phillips. Okay, okay, so she smoked a little crack. But she wrote a fierce book. It’s full of dirt on early Spielberg, the writing crackles, and Phillips isn’t afraid to name names. Here’s a sample: “Aaron Spelling was obsequious to the point of becoming one giant can of Crisco.” Hee!

My So-Called Life. Catherine Clark. I don’t ordinarily touch novelizations with a ten-foot pole, but I made an exception in this case. Big mistake. The dialogue is all rendered faithfully, then ruined by Clark’s pale imitation of it in the descriptive passages. If you’ve seen the show, you’ll hate the book.

Rock This! Chris Rock. It’s no substitute for seeing Rock perform the material or even listening to one of his albums, but it’ll do in a pinch. And you don’t have to wait for it to come on HBO – for $5.99, you can read it whenever you want.

Sein Language. Jerry Seinfeld. I cannot stand to watch the Seinfeld reruns anymore. Ever since the Ballantine blast of publicity that attended the show’s series finale more than two years ago, I can’t stand the sight of any of them, especially not Kramer, who always bugged me anyway. “Master of your domain”? Not funny anymore. “George is gettin’ upset”? I don’t care. It’s played, and it needs a rest for a while – like, for about ten years. But I still like to leaf through Sein Language every once in a while. It’s – wait for it – comedy about nothing, but it’s brilliant, and you don’t realize how many other comedians have ripped him off until you go back and read the book.

Growing Up Brady: I Was A Teenage Greg. Barry Williams, with Chris Kreski. Williams got himself a talented ghostwriter, a rarity in books of this ilk. Growing Up Brady includes an exhaustive episode guide, insider dirt on Robert Reed’s constant battles with Sherwood Schwartz (which, frankly, come off as kind of pathetic – if he’s so proud of his Shakespearean training, why doesn’t he stick to Shakespeare instead of whoring himself out with The Brady Variety Hour?), Williams’s ill-starred “affair” with Maureen McCormick, and the scoop on all the Brady reunions and the crappy one-hour drama The Bradys. I never get tired of the “Greg and Carol go out on a date” story.

Gen-X TV: The Brady Bunch To Melrose Place. Rob Owen. The book reads like an extended – and clumsy – reminiscence on one Gen-X guy’s TV experience in some parts; a sociological study of generational viewing habits in others; and an op-ed-style rip-off of a small-town papers “Eye On TV” column in others. In other words, it bites. It tries to do too much, and does none of it well. The scattered highlights include: a sidebar on quickly-forgotten drama The Heights, starring Jamie “Pumpkin Boy” Walters; the author’s unintentionally hilarious admission that Homefront is his favorite show; and a truly Smurfy picture of Will Smith on page 78 that had me in tears of laughter. But these don’t make up for an overly didactic tone, excessive TV-trivia showboating, and a welter of generalizations about “the MTV generation” that don’t hold up.

Stay tuned next week for more pop-cultural selections from the TN library in “The Canon According To Tomato Nation, Part Four.”

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