After writing this week’s Cheap Seats column about the bizarre impact the movie “Remember the Titans” has had on the historical record of Alexandria, I came across a September 2000 story apparently from the L.A. Times posted on the personal website of Gregory Allen Howard. Howard is the screenwriter of “Titans,” and also the author of this L.A. Times piece, which goes over the process that led to the movie being made.

Howard’s script is uplifting and entertaining; his newspaper story is astonishingly wrong and phony. It’s full of errors so blatant that Howard, had he done even a fraction of the research he claims to have done before writing the “Titans” script, had to know they were errors as he was typing them into his L.A. Times piece. It’s as if he wrote the article to justify the historical inaccuracies in his movie.

Howard writes here that Alexandria consolidated “three segregated [high] schools…two black and one white” in 1971 and that George Washington and T.C. Williams High Schools were “all-black.” Wrong. All three of the city’s high schools were integrated , and majority white (Hammond overwhelmingly so) when the consolidation took place. And according to Alexandria school board’s statistics for the 1970-1971 school year, GW was 51.4 percent white/47.7 black; T.C. Williams 75.4 white/22.2 black.

The schools in the movie script, however, were all-black or -white.

Howard’s L.A. Times piece also asserts that racial unrest hit Alexandria in the summer of 1971 after a kid was murdered in an convenience store.

In real life, the shooting happened in the spring of 1970. The riots in Howard’s movie, however, happened in 1971.

Howard also wrote the script for “Glory Road,” a feature film allegedly about the 1966 NCAA basketball finals, which matched Kentucky and Texas Western. I’ve always been interested in that game, but never saw the movie. Now I’m scared to.

But it’s one thing to make things up for a script. Newspapering is allegedly a whole different ballgame. How did the L.A. Times let this crap run unchecked?

And what’s the statute of limitations on running corrections, anyway?

It’s probably a function of being exposed to Chariots of the Gods? at way too early an age, but I’ve always had a soft spot for conspiracy/occult/UFO crap. I’ve watched Loose Change at least twice, own a handful of Scientology texts, and have spent way too much time reading about Madame Blavatsky. One of my all-time favorite bookstores is Fields Book Store in San Francisco, which is stuffed with tomes on channeling, “I AM,” Eckankar, and every other stray bit of untraditional spiritual thinking you care to name. If you believe that Aleister Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard had aliens build the pyramids that will house the shadow government once the missiles launch on August 13 at midnight, Fields probably carries a couple of magazines on the subject.

I don’t believe in a bit of it, but I get suckered into this stuff the same way some folks fall for fantasy baseball, and for the past few months my crazy-talk needs have been well served by WUFO-TV (Ch. 49). Launched with little fanfare in November, the channel is, as founder Michael Gravino told DCRTV, a home for the “alternative knowledge genre featuring programming which comes to you direct from the authors, researchers, producers, and reporters.” In other words: low-quality video of UFO conferences featuring even lower-res images of alleged spacecraft.

And much more: Since the holidays I’ve processed a lot of information on crop circles, military testing facilities, revisited the rock-on-Mars-that-looks-like-a-dude’s-head theory a few more times, and heard an argument that a hieroglyph of a snake on the wall of a pyramid tunnel may, in fact, be an image of an early light bulb. (Centuries before Edison!) Tune in now: Coverage of NASA’s secret missions starts at 2:30 today.

I loved meeting and learning from cut man Chris Ray for a column I wrote for this week’s issue. Not only because he’s a swell guy and toils in a realm that fascinates me, but also because the conversations got me to seek out one of the most famous spilled-body-fluids clips in movie history: the “Cut me, Mick!” portion of the first and best chapter of the “Rocky” serial.

When it comes to jarring scenes from my ’70s adolescence, this one ranks right up there with the first shark attack in “Jaws” or the title character in “Carrie” taking a bucket of blood on prom night or poor Linda Blair throwing up on a poorer priest in “The Exorcist.”

It all seems so cartoony now…

Now, they’re not. I think if they were a little less dorky, and threw cooler parties, they might have a little more success.

Compare photos from last weekend’s dork fest throw-down, The Final Countdown: Ended of an Error (Heh, heh. Get it?) …

…to my old man’s mug shut.

Antonio Valdez was a student activist and a protester, and he dated some foxy ladies (including my mom). His parties in Portland in the late 60s and 70s were legendary, and perhaps notorious. I’m horrified, of course. But I have to admit he’s cooler than this guy.

If you’re like me, the holiday season can get pretty stressful. Sure, social gatherings are fun, but trying to make chit-chat with all those family members, business contacts, and new acquaintances can be a real chore. Not this year. A friend of mine picked up a fun little ice-breaker at a church rummage sale that might help us out. I give you “Ungame”:

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve exhausted myself trying to facilitate polite conversation between children, gray-haired women, and mustachioed dudes in vests. Thank goodness for Ungame. Shall we play? Go on, you start. Yes, you in the vest. Pick a card:

Thanks for sharing. That was fun, non-threatening, and non-competitive. And don’t we all know a little bit more about hitchhiking now?

Hey, little one, it’s your turn. Go on:

Hmm. Well, that’s a little bit heavy, isn’t it? Why don’t we just put that card back in the deck. Maybe we’ll tackle that one later, once you find out what “suicide” means. Go on, Grandma, it’s your turn. Tell us:

That’s certainly topical. It’s alright, pick again. With Ungame, there are oodles of topics to choose from. How about this one:

I suppose there’s no harm in rehashing the will again, just to be sure. Oh, don’t feel down, Grandma. It’s just a game. Pick again:

Thanks for playing, Grandma. What do you say we pull one last card and call it a day?

I think we all learned a lot about each other today.

In September, Brad Pitt visited the Washington Post’s newsroom apparently to research his upcoming role in the Washington investigative reporters drama “State of Play.” Then, around Thanksgiving, he dropped out of the film, which is also set to star Edward Norton, Helen Mirren, Rachel McAdams, Jason Bateman and Robin Wright Penn. Well, according to Variety, Russell Crowe has just stepped into Pitt’s old role. Here’s the film’s synopsis: “Crowe will play a politico-turned-journalist who spearheads his newspaper’s investigation into a killing that leads to a fast-rising pol (Norton). The journalist faces two conflicts: he once ran campaigns for the pol and was his confidante; the journalist develops a romance with the pol’s estranged wife (Wright Penn).”

Tyler Green’s excellent Modern Art Notes points to an interesting post at daddytypes.com, in which Greg Allen describes a recent visit to the National Gallery of Art with his three-year-old daughter. There, they collide with a docent attempting to explain Clyfford Still’s painting 1951-N to a group of middle-schoolers:

“Who wonders why this is here? Who wonders why it’s even art?” She waits and waits for sheepish hands to keep rising.

“Well, there are curators–do you know what that is? art experts who study and know what art is important enough to be in a museum–curators and art historians and other experts who say this is art, and even if it doesn’t look like it’s about anything and it doesn’t make any sense, you just have to bear with it sometimes.

Allen blows a gasket about all this, finding this attitude destructive to inquisitive minds. But though the docent’s shut-up-and-take-it condescension is clear, this attitude routinely gets dispensed to adults too, even by Smart People. Over the weekend, NPR’s All Things Considered featured a brief story on James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake in which poet Paul Muldoon argued, in essence, that you may as well give up trying to understand the damn thing and just try to appreciate it as a sort of music. Why it’s OK to just bear with it with Finnegan’s Wake but not with Still isn’t quite clear to me, but then I haven’t pondered either very closely.

Maybe this is just the tyranny of the middlebrow, but Muldoon and that docent were at least engaging with the art in question. Howard Stern, however, recently reacted to avant-jazz as if he’d just touched a hot stove. And then called in his buddies to make wisecracks about how fuckin’ stupid the fuckin’ stove is.

The Silverdocs festival just announced that next year’s festival will take place between June 16 and June 23—two days longer than this year’s event. That’s more dates, but not more documentaries. The press release explains:

SILVERDOCS: AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival announced today the expansion of the Festival by two days and the addition of venues to meet demand for SILVERDOCS offerings following last year’s higher demand for shows and increase in industry participation. The Festival will run from Monday, June 16 through Monday, June 23, increasing from a six-day to an eight-day event, with the last day ‘Best of the Fest’ screenings to provide passholders and local audiences an additional opportunity to catch the award winners and most popular films. SILVERDOCS will continue to program 100 documentaries, but the number of screenings per films in the program will increase.

On Sunday, Mark Opsasnick spoke at Cameron Perks Coffeehouse about his latest book, The Lizard King Was Here: The Life and Times of Jim Morrison in Alexandria, Virginia, concerning the dead Doorsman’s school days at George Washington High School. Three of Jimbo’s classmates showed up to testify: Randy Maney, Bill Thomas, and Stan Durkee.

Randy called Morrison a “great writer”; Stan called him a “great intellectual.” But among such revelations that Morrison “hated rock ‘n’ roll” as a teen—preferring poetry and Kerouak Kerouac, and opted for thriftwear as opposed to the “Gant shirt” crowd—Bill Thomas related an alarming tale of a Morrison encounter—in 1991.

While taking his son Brian to baseball camp in Arizona, father and son stopped at a cafe in Flagstaff that curiously featured a photo of Morrison in its ad. Mentioning his personal connection to the rock god apparently freaked the waitress out, for she immediately left and surreptitiously made a phone call. Moments later, a hairy, shaggy, bum-like personage slipped quietly into the cafe and sat in the booth behind the Thomas’ with his back to Bill. Son Brian insisted that it was Morrison. Bill resisted turning around, and when he did—the ghost was gone.

Though Bill Thomas offered the tale somewhat reluctantly and with a shrug, as if he didn’t really believe it, he says his son still insists the apparition was Morrison. The story does give hope to those who have kept the Doors on the charts 36 years after the “official” death. (To that end, Rhino has just released yet another best-of collection.)

If true, it could be bad news for the Soft Parade. But you can still get your Lizard King fix when “the world-famous Doors tribute show” plays the State Theater this Friday, Oct. 5.

CORRECTION: Due to an error by poster Dave Nuttycombe, this post originally mispelled the name of Jack Kerouac.

These are pictures of my sister on her way to her senior prom. (Go, Richard Montgomery Rockets!) Why she wore her hair that way I don’t know. (She’s not happy that I found the photo.) It was certainly not her usual style. I don’t think it was anybody’s style.

Until May of 1977, when Star Wars debuted at the Uptown Theater. My sister graduated in 1972. Obviously, the character of Princess Leia was inspired, in part, by Patti Nuttycombe.

For more evidence, let’s turn to page 146 of the paperback edition of Dale Pollack’s biography Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas, the Creator of Star Wars:

“George had been waiting since childhood to see a romantic-fantasy-adventure story set in a distant time and place….When he finished editing American Graffiti in February 1972, Lucas went right to work on his idea.”

So the script began the same year as the photo. Interesting, yes? I’m still investigating how Lucas or designer Ralph McQuarrie found their way to a high school in Rockville. Perhaps they were searching for Dagobah locations. Maybe Patti’s date, Dave Traynor, gave them a tip. Haven’t seen him around lately. But, really, the picture speaks for itself. Ipso facto, case closed.

So, George, reach into that big bag of money you sit on all day while you’re dreaming up new ways to ruin the franchise and toss some coins this way. Don’t make me get out the pictures of my slow cousin, Binks.

For those of you who’ve tired of reading the re-hashed rehashings of last night’s hookups on Late Night Shots, I offer an end-of-summer pick-me-up from New York City: Park Avenue Peerage. The blog is the unlikely product of James Kurisunkal, a college freshman from the Chicago burbs who began cataloging the photos and antics of the New York deb set before he’d even set foot in the city. Now, of course, he’s a media darling, with an internship at New York magazine and a kiss on the cheek from a real life deb.

The gossip reported on the website is impressive in its detail and insiderishness. But all the minutia makes my ears bleed. Do I really care that Dabney Mercer, an ascendent socialite, gets jokingly called a “shiksa” by her friends since she’s dating a Jew?As usual, the comments are the real gold.

And, I must say, these pampered ladies look better than the booze-glowing blondes on LNS.

On Monday Punk Planet magazine announced that its latest issue would be its last, citing “bad distribution deals, disappearing advertisers, and a decreasing audience of subscribers.” It wasn’t surprising news—when the owner of distributor Publishers Group West declared bankruptcy last December a lot of independent publishers took a huge hit—but it was still sad to hear.

In the mid-’90s the biggest punk zine out there was Maximumrocknroll—a finger-staining rag that was forever lecturing you about something or other when its prose wasn’t outright unreadable. Stepping into that arena, Punk Planet made the genre feel like something that wasn’t trapped in 1982—its spiritual point of reference was the Ian MacKaye who started Fugazi, not the Ian MacKaye who started Minor Threat—and it took a self-critical, follow-the-money attitude toward its own scene without being ridiculously doctrinaire about it.

That might be PP’s greatest legacy: it took punk so seriously that it was willing to apply real reportorial energy into it. In 1999, when I was working on a story about the Dead Kennedys suing each other, I quickly learned that PP had done some fine advance work on the story and had the (convoluted) facts of the case straight. In time, I got to know one of the zine’s editors in San Francisco; when he asked me to write a blurb for the first edition of its excellent collection of interviews, We Owe You Nothing, I was more than happy to pitch in. And I was thrilled when I was asked to contribute a story about a group of activists who changed the signs on San Francisco’s Bush Street to Puppet Street the night before Dubya’s first inauguration.

Still, I don’t recall so much as flipping through an issue of Punk Planet in the past five years. Maybe it started sucking, though I doubt that. Maybe the Web killed it: Thanks to blogs, you no longer have to go to a record store and find PP to read poorly written, wrongheaded reviews of CDs that five people care about. (The zine’s enthusiasm was infectious, though: Surely I wasn’t the only person who got suckered into buying a Snapcase album because of something PP wrote.) Maybe the generation that grew up with the zine got cynical and realized that doing stuff like changing street names in the dark of night is ultimately a toothless gesture. More likely, though, the means by which punk-loving, politically aware people interact with one another no longer involves a nicely designed, perfect-bound magazine. Whatever that replacement is, it has big shoes to fill.

We were rummaging through the Nuttycombe Archives™ and came upon a copy of Love Letters to the Monkees, the “new wild mad groovy” 1967 nonbook tie-in to the TV show. We found the slim paperback in some area secondhand store years ago and it’s inscribed, “Joyce from Chris, Christmas 1967.”

But our interest was piqued by the very first letter, which reads:

Darling Micky,

I’m not just another fan writing to you because you’re a Monkee. It’s you I love, Micky, that happy-go-lucky, carefree, funny person inside you. And I don’t care if you are crazy, pug-nosed, scrawny-necked, hairy, skinny, or funny looking. Nobody’s perfect, and I’ll love you always.

Your truest fan,
Toni B.
Silver Spring, Md.

So, Toni, if you’re still in the area, we wanna know:

1. Did Micky ever get back to you?
2. Are you still his truest fan?
3. Were you aware that your letter was published?
4. Were you aware that the Monkees were entirely fake, a cynical ploy by the entertainment industry to cash in on the success of the Beatles?

And to Joyce: Why would you get rid of such a classic work of literature?

OK, I admit it. The Posties and their incessant coverage of Tai Shan fascinated me. While a freelancer, I went to the zoo just about every day to check on the hysteria. I took my camera. The gift store has been consistently rich feeding grounds. I mean, do people really buy this wacky shit? A “When You’re a Jet” satin panda jacket??

Both the fever and sales of panda crap died down, of course, as Butterstick the Cute became Dirty Butt the Toddler, still entertaining at times. (Recently I caught him nearly falling out of a tree. This was hilarity itself.)

But now, ta-da, the Post is back, everybody, to drum up panda pride. Only the gift store could be more excited…

Last night Paul Simon received Library of Congress’ first annual Gershwin Prize for Popular Song at the Warner Theatre. (It’ll be broadcast on PBS on June 27.) I like Simon, but star-studded tributes like these have a way of sucking the lifeblood out of anybody’s music; I think I heard somebody sing about being “maddog fuckin’ crazy after all these years” halfway through, but that somebody was James Taylor.

A few notes from the peanut gallery:

• In his opening remarks, Bob Costas argued that Paul Simon’s genius spans multiple decades, a point that would’ve had more heft if the evening featured more than one post-Graceland tune. The one that Simon did break out is a sweet but lesser ditty, first written for an animated children’s film, that’s practically designed for cutesy YouTube slideshows.
• A series of video clips featuring various renditions of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” included a severe take by a Marine chorus, prompting giggles from the crowd. They shut up quick, though, once it became clear that the footage came from Ronald Reagan’s funeral. Still OK to laugh at Elvis, though!
• Shawn Colvin and Alison Krauss’ attempt at “The Boxer” got botched by a wave of feedback. They tried it again later in the evening; same problem. That sound you hear is a soundman gnashing his teeth and flipping through want ads.
• Philip Glass played “Sound of Silence” on piano. Ironically, it sounded like he was attempting to dismantle a locomotive.
• Art Garfunkel’s attempt to nail the end of “Bridge Over Troubled Water”—the fourth greatest song ever, according to, er, Art Garfunkel—was a beautifully heroic thing. Really.
• Note to Marc Anthony: Nice job with “Late in the Evening,” but air bass makes nobody look good.