and now, A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode one — Arrival

Creator/star Patrick McGoohan listens to our 2021 podcast about his TV show on a Zune in this 1967 photo.

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Four years and seven score ago, Pal-For-Life Glen Weldon suggested to me we do a podcast deconstructing The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan’s short-lived, long-tailed allegorical spy-fi TV series that flummoxed and infuriated viewers with its final episode decades before The Sopranos or LOST or Mad Men would do the same. We are neither of us men of haste. We dragged our heels about doing it for so long that its initial news hook — the 50th anniversary of the series, which ran for 17 episodes in England in 1967-8 and in the U.S. the following summer — came and went, only to be replaced by a far more dire one. We’ve all been more or less confined to our homes for a year and counting.

Like the show’s mysterious title character, Number Six, we are all vexed by circumstance and desperate to escape. Unlike Number Six, we are friendly and personable to people of any and all genders. But you’ll be the judge of that, we hope. You’ve heard Glen & me share the studio on a number of episodes of Pop Culture Happy Hour over the years — I’m still not thrilled that he called me “sconce-jawed” that one time on the Man of Steel episode — but this the is first All-New, All-Different, All-Glen, All-Chris podcast, and its senses-shattering first episode is available right now.

Ladies, gentlemen, and nonbinary individuals, I give you… A Degree Absolute!

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "In & Of Itself"

From Isabel Greenberg’s The Encyclopedia of Early Earth (Bond Street Books, 2013)

I was delighted to join my pal Linda Holmes to discuss the just-released-on-Hulu filmed version of illusionist/storyteller/railer-against-the-labeling-of-people Derek DelGaudio’s stage show In & Of Itself, which he performed several hundred times over engagements in Los Angeles and New York circa 2016-2018. You can listen to the episode below. I also recommend Claire McNear’s 2018 profile of DelGaudio in The Ringer.

Naturally, Linda mentioned my onetime employment by the great illusionist Ricky Jay. I wrote about my time in RJ’s employ shortly after he passed away in November 2018.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Showgirls" at Twenty-Five

Gina Gershon and Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls. Gershon’s career survived. (MGM)

I was surprised when I heard from erstwhile Pop Culture Happy Hour producer Jess Reedy that the show had opted to cover Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven’s notorious 1995 riff on A Star Is Born set in the world of Las Vegas dancers. The movie got a lot of attention at the time, because Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas were both coming off of Basic Instinct — controversial, but also a huge hit — and because Verhoeven had promised their new $40-million plus movie would carry an NC-17 rating due to its realistic treatment of the sex trade.

But realism isn’t Verhoeven’s Versace (pronounced Vehrr-SAYce) bag. Showgirls tanked, all but ending the career of former Saved by the Bell star Elizabeth Berkley, whose bizarre performance is one of the features that got the movie pilloried by critics 25 years ago, and is also one of the elements that has driven the movie’s latter-day reclamation as a Rocky Horror Picture Show-style campfest. (That reclamation is the subject of a good documentary called You Don’t Nomi, which in part inspired PCHH’s Showgirls episode. I recommend the doc.)

I was very happy to join in the Showgirls discourse with the brilliant panel of Linda Holmes, Aisha Harris, and Barrie Hardymon a couple of months back. That episode has now posted, just when we need it most. One thing I wish I’d found a place to point out is how Showgirls’ failure (though the movie by most accounts become profitable on home video) sent Verhoeven back to the R-rated sci-fi satire genre for 1997’s Starship Troopers — another movie that underperformed and got lousy reviews at the time (though not from me!) but has, over time, been rightfully recognized as a sort of masterpiece.

FURTHER READING: Seven long years ago I made 1987’s RoboCop — the movie that made Dutch auteur Verhoeven into a bankable Hollywood filmmaker for about a decade — the subject of the first and ,sadly, only installment in a proposed series of posts for what was then called NPR’s Monkey See blog on the subject of remakes. The column didn’t happen, but I certainly didn’t abandon the approach, as my review of 2016’s instantly forgotten Ben-Hur remake shall demonstrate. Maybe I’ll get to revive it if the long-threatened remake of Starship Troopers sever happens.

Talking Yuletunes on All Things Considered

I didn’t put quite as much muscle behind promoting my yulemix this year as I have in years past, but I was very glad to get an invitation to talk to All Things Considered’s Ailsa Chang about some of the selections featured on my 2020 compilation, Four Seasons Total Greetings. The show suggested I choose three new-for-2020 recordings and one of the surprising deep cuts I uncovered in the prior year, which is how I got to talk about The Shades’ recorded-in-1966-but-eerily-topical “Prancer’s Got Some Red Spots” and also sneak a little bit of Canadian country singer Hank Snow’s “Christmas Wants” in at the outro.

We recorded this conversation in mid-December, and there was enough dire news in the days after that that I assumed this piece would be axed. It was my old boyhood pal Chip Goines who notified me, via Twitter, that the piece was airing on Christmas Eve, just as I was loading up to drive to my parents’ house in Virginia (after two weeks in quarantine) for the holiday. The bar for Christmas miracles has rarely been lower, but I’ll take it. God bless us, everyone!

Hark! "FOUR SEASONS TOTAL GREETINGS," my XVth fabulous #yulemix, hath arrived to delight your senses. One of them, anyway!

It’s the most puzzling tiiiiiiiiiiiiime of the year.

One knee operation, one global pandemic, three No Time to Die release dates, and one harrowing but un-fradulent presidential election later, your favorite foul-weather friend has returned to soundtrack (verb) your regrettably antisocial holidaze with another lovingly curated set of yulejams, yulehyms, and yulbrenners. Golly! HARK your herald angels and DECK whatever halls you’ve got, because this multidenominaltional multitrack is the funkiest yulestew in the multiverse. It’s got more hooks than Jan Hooks and more riffs than Ron Rifkin. Masked singers only, please.

Side B TK, OK?

ctklimek · FOUR SEASONS TOTAL GREETINGS—Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XV [Side A]

Just in time to save Christmas, it's the long-awaited second side of my 2020 yulemix! It's the perfectly imperfect soundtrack to your somber, shelter-in-place holiday.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Three Towering Sean Connery Performances

Connery kicks off what will become a Bond-flick tradition — the pre-title sequence — in Goldfinger, 1964.

Sean Connery, not the first screen James Bond but the first one that stuck, died at the age of 90 on Friday. His time in da moviesh spanned some 45 years, but to take stock of it in manageable fashion Pop Culture Happy Hour producer Jessica Reedy asked me to choose three of his performances to discuss. I did that with my pal Glen Weldon today. I tried to pick a trio that reflected the distinct phases of Connery’s career. Which means you’ll have to wait a little longer to hear Glen and I give 1974’s Zardoz the careful dissection it deserves.

Flowers (Postcards) For Harrison

This paen to handwritten correspondence is didactic and repetitive but whaddaya want from me, it's raining. At least it has a certified banger at the end. As of this morning the Cook Political Report had the South Carolina Senate race between three-term incumbent Lindsey Graham and challenger Jaime Harrison in the Toss-Up column.

Please make sure everyone you know votes... unless, you know.

Literature on Screen: "You" with Caroline Kepnes and Penn Badgley

I had roughly six weeks’ notice to prepare for the 90-minute discussion I moderated for the PEN/Faulkner Foundation on Sept. 23 between Caroline Kepnes, author of the bestselling thrillers You and Hidden Bodies, and Penn Badgley, who plays the homicidal narrator of those books on the Netflix series they spawned. Given that I had to read two 500ish-page novels and watch 20 hours of Netflix, that was a reasonable amount of time! But I was pleased with how the discussion turned out, and particularly that I managed to make my office/bedroom look enough like a recording booth to fool Mr. Badgley.

The PEN/Faulker people have now posted a video of the even, which you can watch here if you like.

IN EIGHT HOURS! It’s my first time conducting a live interview with the author of bestselling novels about a predator & the actor who plays that predator on TV so I left my keys in my door all night & did not discover this until a neighbor knocked at 8 AM to alert me. Good omen! https://t.co/iOn4iAvppB

— Chris Klimek (@ctklimek) September 23, 2020