A Perfectly Cromulent Blog

The Origin of the Specious

Posted by pete at February 24, 2005 11:44 AM

Some of you may recall the pathetic plea I made a few months ago for biographical information in the wake of severe head trauma (caused by repeated exposure to ABC's Wife Swap). There were many responses, which have cleared up a lot of questions about my past.

Using fragments of histories obtained a variety of diverse sources (the Dead Sea Scrolls, De Furtivis Literarun Notis, Combat Handguns, and Pia Zadora's Necronomicon) and submitted by helpful readers, I've managed to piece together a comprehensive and wholly accurate portrait of...myself.

And I had no idea I'd led such an interesting life. Without further windbaggery, here's everything you need to know about Pete, your host at A Perfectly Cromulent Blog.

First, for those of you bitching about a lack of pictures of yours truly, here you go:

And I think we can put those pesky alias rumors to rest, as detailed in Who's Who Among Unnecessary Pop Culture Bloggers:

"Pete Vonder Haar is the current nom de net of media entity Brian O'Blivion. In the early 1980s, Prof. O'Blivion gained fame as a television personality, but as the Internet gained prominence, he made the media jump to the online world, and in the process, changed his name.

"Prof. O'Blivion once noted that "The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye." As Pete Vonder Haar, he is at the moment uncertain as to whether the Internet is the mind itself, or merely the colon."

Funny, I thought it was "internets." I sure do miss that TV star lifestyle though...the chicks, the mountains of cocaine, the lost weekends with Todd Bridges.

And now, to business.

ORIGINS

The truth behind my ancestry is still apparently a bit hazy, it would seem. Imagine my delight when this bit from the Vanessa Williams issue of Penthouse was sent to me:

"Pete von der Haar (a/k/a the 15th Earl of Dordrecht) was born in 1969, the product of a tryst between a Pasadena, TX hotel cleaning lady and the bass player for Vanilla Fudge. Like Kaspar Hauser, young Pete was often kept in hotel broom closets and boiler rooms, without much significant human contact. A minor genius, however, Pete managed to reverse-engineer the rules of society learn using his Last Tango in Paris action figures.

Then there's this contradicting account, scrawled on a parchment removed from the skeletonized fingers of an explorer found on the Plain of Leng:

"Pete vonder Haar, noted film critic and prune Danish aficionado, was discovered at the mouths of the Ganges by a kindly Flemish couple at the age of six months. He had been floating in a small basket constructed of pitch-smeared bulrushes and subsisting on a diet of Cheez Whiz and beef jerky. His subsequent existence is shrouded in mystery, enigma, and confusion."

Mmmm....prune Danish. That sounds like it would go well with some refreshing beer. From the memoirs of Spuds McKenzie:

"Sometime in the late 1970s, a disgruntled vat scrubber at the Spoetzl Brewery in Shiner, Texas, purchased an untested hallucinogenic compound from an itinerant ElectroLux vacuum-cleaner salesman. In a drunken stupor, he committed a spiteful act of terrorism unparalleled in the annals of fermentation: he introduced the experimental narcotic into the Hot Wort tank. As he fled the scene, however, the hapless saboteur stumbled into Boggy Creek and was devoured by a school of ornery brook trout.

"Unwittingly, the Shiner Brewing Company distributed contaminated bottles of Shiner Bock across the state. A large portion of the tainted brew found its way to the supermarkets and package stores of College Station, where innocent, unsuspecting alcoholics purchased case after case. There, the potent elixir was consumed and the complex chemical compound wormed its way into the necrotic brain cells of thousands of credulous, beer-swilling Texans. And the persistent mass hallucination we know today as Peter Vonder Haar was born.

"Fueled by mysterious alchemy, mob psychology, a rare cosmic alignment, and narrative convenience, the Vonder Haar hallucination seeped into the collective subconscious and became infectious, passing from one diseased mind to another. Few were immune to the pernicious phantasm. Only a rare gene on the X chromosome allowed a fortunate handful of women to escape its influence -- to these happy few, Pete was invisible, and remains so to this day.

"I'm not your woman, I'm not your man, I am something that you'll never understand."

EARLY YEARS

Similarly, my adolescence appears to have been as confused as it was turbulent. Lets look back at that aforementioned issue of Penthouse:

"Pete himself prefers not to dwell on these dark times, and stage II of his remarkable life began when, at age 15, he was dumped in the dead of night on the 50-yard line of Kyle Field with a note reading "He's your problem now" stapled to his chest. Discovered by the Aggie Corps, he was adopted as an informal mascot (never able to supplant Reveille IV) and enrolled at the prestigious A & M Consolidated High School. However, Pete could not read, write, or speak in complete sentences, which meant that he fit in well with the other brain-dead Judas Priest fans yearning to attend the Monsters of Rock at Castle Donington."

I never could compete with that dog. Goddamn goody-two shoes. Or is it four shoes?

Further detail (and confusion) resulted from this passage, written in blood, which appeared on the wall of my basement one dreary morning:

"Pete 'The Hammer' von der Haar grew up in relative obscurity, never dreaming or knowing of the fame he would one day achieve. He got his nickname for his idolatry of Jan Hammer, the keyboardist of Miami Vice fame. Pete's obsession kept him off of the mean streets of Antwerp and rocketed him into near-stardom in eastern Europe. Alas, the early 80s had already whizzed by Pete in a blur, and there was no further need for big keyboard bridges and solos in pop music anymore. A-ha never returned his calls, Jan Hammer sent only an autographed 8x10 glossy in return to his requests for a studio session, and even Yamaha stopped comping him keyboards. Never one to back down, Pete hammered away at his keyboard still and attempted to convert his talents to the silver screen with big movie soundtracks, a la John Carpenter and Brad Fiedel, but the Hammer found his market over-saturated and impervious to his blows as well.

That stupid alligator never returned my calls either.

"ADULTHOOD"

Our first glimpses of my alleged maturation come from these words, translated from writings on a wall in darkest Bukovina:

"Nominated for Secretary of State by a delusional man, Vonder Haar found himself the subject of an official FBI investigation and was subsequently convicted of smuggling marmots, the only felony blemish on an otherwise misdemeanorish record. (The smuggling charge was enhanced by the judge's finding that the marmots were carried in the trousers in a prurient fashion.)"

As if there's any other way to carry marmots. Compare this to what those wiseass blood-scrivening poltergeists had to say:

"It was then that Pete entered his dark years, and he tried to run from everything, even his moniker. He disappeared into the east and rumor has it he trained intensely with the swordmaster Syrio Florel. Pete returned three years later, insisting on being called 'The Needle. His talents now were focused on swordplay and its rise in popularity' on the silver screen. He narrowly missed out on the part to play Conan the Barbarian, even though his swordplay was excellent - better than Mr. Schwarzenegger's - but in the end they were looking for someone a bit more 'Mr. Universe-ish' (Pete bitterly contends to this day that Conan's utterances of 'Crom!' were all based on his own ad-libs during the call-back). Pete then got his big break by playing the understudy for the stand-in for Chow Yun-Fat in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the rest, as they say, is elementary history, dear Watson.

More proof that my writing of movie reviews stems from my failures in the industry itself. Still, this would seem to be at odds with the last words of former President Ronald Reagan who, in a stunning moment of lucidity, uttered the folowing:

"Following the collapse of the soviet union, a dejected young Comrade Vonder Haar wandered across Europe searching for a new homeland. Stripped of his glorious position as head of the Personal Hygiene brigade of the Young Pioneers, Vonder Haar grew depressed and turned to drink."

That sounds about right. But before I could remove myself from his bedchamber and its attendant stench of death, he continued:

"His fate was transformed over night when, in the midst of a 3-day bender at Stockholm's Lydmar Hotel bar, another patron of the establishment tuned the TV in to a U.S. satellite network. The haze cleared from Vonder Haar's head in response to a strange, pleasing sound coming from the television:

"'Before I show you how to make a fortune in real estate, let me tell
you my story. Me and my family came to America broke. I couldn't speak English at the time… I still couldn't speak English now, but I found a way to make a fortune in real estate investment and I went on to teach thousands across America how to do the same. If you want to make a fortune in real estate, come to my FREE seminar.'

"A shot of adrenaline rushed through Vonder Haar. His fate was suddenly clear and that fate had a name: Tommy Vu".

"The hotel owner - eager to have Vonder Haar leave his establishment
before another major fire was started by a cigarette fallen from his
drunken lips - loaned him the money to buy a plane ticket to Houston. The rest is history. Today, Vonder Vu World Enterprises employs more spokesmodels than any other corporation in the entire world."

This would be only the first mention of toothsome feminity I came across in my research, but certainly not the last, as those Bukovinan cave writings would prove:

"Gifted with the ability to travel time and space by a magic pixie named "Autosomic Psychosis", Pete spends his vacations along the beaches of the Niobrara Sea in Kansas, 78 million years B.C., but has yet to report finding anything that resembles Raquel Welch. Who is, it must be said, frankly unto a dog compared to Pete's wife, but Ms. Welch's undeniable influence on young Pete's, let's say, appreciation of film overwhelms his otherwise flawless critical sense as well as his sense of marital danger."

The Wife, unfortunately, always has a convenient excuse to avoid wearing the fur-lined bikini I procured for her. Figures.

THE PRESENT

So, besides being time-traveling real estate magnate, what else is going on in my life?

"Known chiefly for wearing plus-fours and a natty tam-o'-shanter, he spends his working days at the intersection of the West Loop South and the South Loop West pounding out film critiques on an aging Commodore 64, the last of its breed."

I left my Amiga in the Mesozoic Era, it seems.

"The Vonder Haar hallucination evolved over time, becoming louder, more tangible, and slightly wider around the middle. It continues to find new ways to propagate itself -- first via the mass consensual delusion that is the Internet, and most recently through the creation of material offspring (best not to think too much about that).

"The future of the Vonder Haar hallucination is open to speculation, but the consequences for civilization as we know it are certain to be dire."

"You're looking at my gut, aren't ya? I'm working on it!"

And what was that about a family?

Pete currently lives in Houston's historic and scenic Fifth Ward with his wife, the former Mrs. Jeff Bagwell, and their adorable infant daughter, Chardonnay."

Now were talking. And I bet I can share some of that sweet, sweet Golden Palace profit, too.

What was that about a daughter?

Pete's daughter, whose name ("Winter Loveducky Vonder Haar") remains a closely guarded secret, plays the trombone professionally in the Tower of Power.

Casino endorsements? Professional musicians? I'll never have to work again.

Finally, this excerpt - written in John Bonham's terminal vomitus on a snare drumhead made from human flesh and handed to my agent David Kabakov during Super Bowl X - would appear to sum up my life quite aptly:

"Who knows where he came from, and who cares. We're just glad he came, with his shotgun and battered jeep and devil-dog, a blazing hurricane of kung-fu and zombie-fighting action. Thank the sweet little baby Jesus for Pete von der Haar -- lover, philosopher, acrobat and roguish jewel thief, privateer, and pioneer of endocrinology. His record is as long as his arm, and maybe something else is as well -- ladies, investigate.

"They say he's got a checkered past. He's a mystery, this one -- this lonely ghost with a pocket full of dreams and a belly full of bourbon and blues, the weight of a nation hanging on his shoulders, buoyed up only by a heart that's bigger than you or me. You can't walk a mile in his boots, pilgrim -- it's a hot, hot kitchen where he's going, and where he's been is as cold as liquid shade.

"But that's just Pete, breaking hearts and breaking heads, sometimes both at once but never twice in the same way, an elemental force if one of the elements were 'macho'. He's playing through the pain, he's taking one for the team, he's pushing the envelope and the envelope better not push back if it knows what's good for it.

"So forget where he came from. That's need to know, baby, and all you need to know is that somewhere, maybe across the world or around the block or standing right behind you, somewhere there's a man who strikes while the iron is hot, because he IS the iron, and the bad guys are being taken to the cleaners. Let go of the past; let go of the covert work in Burma, the rumors about him and Helen Mirren, those stories about the addiction to barium.

"God Bless Pete von der Haar, bad-ass warts and all."

Yeah, well, barium will do that to you.

portrait of me and The Wife courtesy of my friend Sara

Thanks to Norbizness, Greg, Steve, Andy, Sarah, Karin, Mason, and Brandon.