My Family

Every week, my brother Tod hilariously skewers Parade Magazine and the fucktards (and Parade staffers) who pose questions to Walter Scott.  This week, though, Tod is at his best. Here’s my favorite part, which had me choking on my morning bagel:

As a child in the 1960s, I loved the novelty songs of Alvin and the Chipmunks. Are they still around?

It’s
hard to answer the question Jon Brown poses because it works on so many
different levels of consciousness. Are the songs still around? No, Jon,
the songs were stuffed into a time capsule and shot into space, which
is why you never hear them around Christmas anymore. And everyone knows
that once a song stops playing, well, it ceases to exist. Why, it’s
amazing the Star Spangled Banner has lasted so long, but I put that in
the hands of the Lord. You know what also no longer exists? Final
Countdown by Europe. Poof! It failed to exist. It’s no longer "around".
Same with Mickey by Toni Basil. The entire Blow Monkeys catalog.
Remember 99 Luftballons by Nena? Gone. No longer "around".

And then the larger question: Does Jon actually mean Alvin
and the Chipmunks? Does Jon Brown of Natick, Mass, really think Alvin
and the Chipmunks are no longer "around"? Well, that would indicate
that Alvin and the Chipmunks ever, you know, existed. You see, Jon,
they were a cartoon. Louis Leakey discovered in 1975 that cartoons
weren’t, in fact, part of the hominid line and all the history books
had to be rewritten. C. Owen Lovejoy, in his landmark paper on the
subject, noted that cartoons were actually "[D]rawn by people working
in Burbank, California and have no relation to any known lines of human
evolution. In addition, it appears the Brown family of Natick, Mass. is
part of a forgotten link in the parade of humanity known as fucktardicine americanas."

The Washington Post has reviewed my brother Tod’s short story collection SIMPLIFY. They like it. Sort of.

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By contrast, the guys in Tod Goldberg’s Simplify
(OV Books; paperback, $14.99) are too busy reeling from various blows
— terminally ill fathers, suicidal sisters, lost brothers — to
reinvent themselves. Many of these stories slide off in surreal
directions as they map their characters’ psychic turmoil. In "Comeback
Special," a man whose wife has left him for his best friend finds that
a photo of Elvis (from his 1968 comeback concert) cries blood and even
changes costumes. The ensuing media circus helps the story maintain its
amusing tone, but it’s not grounded enough in the man’s life to have
much effect on the reader.

Goldberg takes similar risks in other
stories, with mixed results. The narrator of "The Distance Between Us,"
who slowly reveals that his misunderstood brother was a serial killer,
is genuinely affecting in his grief, but the premise ends up feeling
far-fetched.

Goldberg’s best stories are told in retrospect, as
if the narrators need psychic distance to fashion their memories in the
most potent form. My favorite is "The Living End," a haunting account
of the summer of 1973, when the narrator’s older brother returns from
Vietnam with strange scrapes and bruises; the story becomes a mystery
that involves the abduction of a Native American girl across the
street. This story has a stable nuclear family at its center — not
stable enough, however, to stave off the enormous forces that conspire
to destroy its children.

My brother Tod tackles one of the dumbest questions ever posed to Letters to Parade, from Peter Jones of New York City:

"Brokeback Mountain’s Ang Lee is the favorite to win an Oscar for Best
Director. How did a Chinese person gain such an
understanding of homosexual American cowboys?"

Among Tod’s many observations:

1. Ang Lee also directed the Civil War film Ride With The Devil (based
on a great novel by Daniel Woodrell, incidentally), which is pretty
surprising because Ang Lee isn’t a Civil War vet and, in fact, lived
part of his life in Pinko China, and, I’m fairly certain, never once
listened to a 38 Special album and thought about how cool it would be
to grow up in the old South, where he would have been lynched. At any
rate, the pop singer Jewel co-starred in Ride with the Devil and her
longtime beau is cowboy Ty Murray. Perhaps one drunken night on the
range turned into a sexual bacchanal. Perhaps Ty rode Ang like a
bucking steer. Perhaps Ang woke one morning with a longing for the feel
of a rawhide saddle and the touch and feel of a man. Perhaps he read
the fucking short story.