Twunch

It Gets Worse

2012-01-26T12:51:00.001-05:00

Having been sincerely moved by Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" campaign, I wanted to do something to help a group of people that I feel very close to.

Young people interested in the performing arts.

Specifically, collegiate actors, directors, and writers.

See, right now they are having the time of their lives. They are being cast with unworthy compatriots, in unworthy remounts of unwatchable projects. Sex and drugs, alcohol and praise come freely to them.

Or seemingly freely. Because all the while that they are performing in Our Town or Cloud 9 or The Tempest, they are racking of student loans and squandering their chance for a real education in French or Computer Science or Accounting.

And as a result, they are liberated from college with six figures of debt and no clue and head to New York where they learn the awful truth.

My plan is called "It Gets Worse" where we find nearly destitute New York artists and performers to make you tube videos of themselves about how desolate, lonely, and hopeless they are in the hopes of dissuading even a fraction of the talentless and overmatched from heading to a city where they have statistically no chance of success.

It gets worse. Think ahead. The life you saved could be your own.

What do you think?

I Don't Like The Way You Like The Crap You Like

2012-01-22T15:20:00.000-05:00

One thing that social networking has done is that it has provided me with a moderately comprehensive view of the likes and enjoyments, guilty pleasures, and robust artistic allegiances of a circle of friends and associates.

I think this is probably bad.

In a world where religion is a taboo topic, instead of judging people by a professed belief system I find myself judging them by a pronounced or implied aesthetic system. How can I seriously speak to someone who views "Inception" as a major work of cinematic art? How do I talk to people who believe "How I Met Your Mother" to be the funniest show recently produced on television? A friend, director, and potential collaborator recently called "Warrior" the best movie he'd seen 'in forever'. There's nothing wrong with 'Warrior' -apart from its length, over-reliance on cliche, and a painfully stupid split-screen musical montage at the 90 minute mark. But it's nowhere near Hardy or Edgerton's best work ('Bronson' and 'Animal Kingdom' respectively).

I recognize that in the milieu of 'social media news' (and I think Facebook's use of "news feed" maybe one of the most preposterous appropriation of the word news possible) to have your message, thought, or needless personal contribution noticed it is important to imbue it with gravitas, levitas, or overstatement- but at what point am I supposed to take you seriously?

The question of the value of influences, the value of preferences, the value of aesthetic in any creative process dogs me. It is my suspicion that a creative process in which all of the collaborators share the same aesthetic values runs the risk of being stale. On the other side, if somebody's heroes are unworthy does it make sense to aspire with them?

What is the point of announcing these preferences anyway? I am quick to tell people that "The Wire" is my favorite show. My hope in telling people this might be several things: 1) I want people to know I didn't miss out on what was the most well-thought out piece of popular art work I can remember. 2) I want people I like not to miss out on this event. 3) I want people who feel similarly towards this show to recommend other shows that they have liked. Here you can see I am trying to brand myself with the show, equate its excellence with my own excellence, and hopefully be guided by like minded types to further excellence.

Here are a group of things that I think are good right now, things that I would offer as positive without hesitation.

Peep Show.
Community: Seasons 2, 3, and 1 in that order.
Tiny Fuppets.

"Charlie Rose" by Samuel Beckett

If I think of other things I like, I'll add them.

Also, I need to provide huge credit to Josh de la Noco whose daily blogging has really made me want to return to this bastard form of communication.

A thought about Midnight In Paris

2012-01-16T12:53:00.000-05:00

I've been watching the screeners that SAG sends its members ahead of the SAG awards. It's one of my favorite times of the year because I am compelled to watch movies as a function of my Union Membership and therefore any hatred spilled on these creative efforts is all done in solidarity and fraternity and the best interests of my trade. And over the course of two sittings I made it through Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris."

I knew a little bit about the movie going in. I knew Owen Wilson was Woody's latest choice to be his proxy, I knew it took place in Paris, and I heard- as you hear with nearly ever Woody Allen movie released since 1992:

"Oh, you'll love it- it's his finest work since [insert good movie made by Woody Allen prior to 1992]."

What can I tell you about "Midnight in Paris"? On facebook, where I've placed most of my reviews/trenchant observations I described it as standard a la carte Woody Allen- by the numbers and there to be over-praised.

But this morning, I thought of something and realized it was too long and maybe too nebulous for a standard three sentence smackdown. So here it is:

I recently went to the MoMA and saw a retrospective on deKooning. Full disclosure: I'd heard of deKooning before my visit but knew almost nothing of his work, oeuvre, or mythos- and spending thirty minutes in and around two hundred of his paintings makes quite an impression. Art retrospectives provide a narrative of an artist's life that simply destroys film retrospective- you can place immediate impressions of work side by side. You can form visceral snap judgments and not be bogged down by sentimentality. Art retrospectives are vicious events. This is my favorite thing about art. Good? Bad? You are always the emperor and your thumb immediately goes up or down on the career of a person who has spent a lifetime creating work. 'Snice.

But at the end of the deKooning retrospective his art takes on an entirely different tack. In fact, to my (untrained and over-opinionated) eye, it scarcely resembled the work by the painter I'd been watching earlier in the exhibit. And yet, every now and then I'd see a line or a splash of pink that called to mind the earlier work and I would practically shout:

"There he is! He's still here, his talent announces itself even as death stands, looming over him."

And so it is with Woody Allen. He's not really making movies any more. He books expensive vacations and creates lengthy itemizations for tax deductions by shooting two takes of Owen Wilson mouthing the lines that Woody Allen wrote in his hotel room waiting for his wife to get dressed the night before. There are no rehearsals. The characterizations in Midnight in Paris border on sketch comedy (and in case anybody is confused a 'characterization bordering on sketch comedy' is NEVER a compliment).

But people still go to his movies. And praise "Match Point" and "Mighty Aphrodite" and "Scoop" and "Whatever Works" to the rafters (most of the time.) Not because these are good movies but because:

"There he is! He's still here, his talent announces itself even as death stands, looming over him."

It's the sunk cost fallacy. Culturally, many people have placed a great deal of faith in Woody. And the idea that his later work should not be relevant or even good threatens to diminish all the time spent with Hannah and Annie and Manhattan. But, my friends, it doesn't. Good art is good because it is good. Not because of who did it.

If Shakespeare can survive Timon of Athens without it being held up as the peak of literature, Woody Allen can survive with Midnight in Paris being described as what it is: a cute skit with nice sets.

Wessoning Heights

2011-11-03T12:43:00.000-04:00

Here is the piece I wrote last night for Our Bar.

A man sits at the bar. He pulls out a bottle of WESSON CANOLA OIL. He pours himself a shot and downs it. Makes a face.

WESSON

If the boy gets the operation, they say there’s an 80% chance the tumor doesn’t grow back. But the thing about the tumor [pours another shot of oil] it grows so slowly- it’s technically benign. So according to insurance company it’s elective surgery.

He slams the next shot. Gags.

Elective! Never mind that when my boy turns 8 he’ll lose his sense of smell. Blind in the one eye by twelve! Blind in both by sixteen! Fuck you, says Cigna! Elective.

A MYSTERIOUS WOMAN has been watching him.

I need $80 grand just to get the docs to cut on him. $35 grand to the doc. $15 grand to the anesthesiologist. Shit, the room by itself costs $30 grand.

MYSTERY

So take out a second mortgage.

WESSON

Banks. [shakes his head.] Somebody stole my identity. Credit’s destroyed. Only one way I see that money. Life insurance.

MYSTERY

Canola oil.

WESSON

Pure trans fat. [holds up bottle.] I’ve been drinking two of these a day for the last two weeks. I can tell I’m close because it feels like somebody gave the right side of my heart a purple nurple.

MYSTERY

You think the insurance companies won’t screw you too?

WESSON

Massive heart attack’s an act of God. The trick is making sure it’s big enough. I’ve had a couple little ones today. But they aren’t it. Got to keep going. Got to make sure nobody’s around to call 9-1-1. If I have to pay for an ambulance and an ICU, I’m fucked. [He pours himself another shot.] Oh that’s nasty.

MYSTERY

Aren’t you afraid to die?

WESSON

Lady, in the past ten years I had a wife leave me because some psycho slut wouldn’t stop leaving message on my answering machine. I had a little vacuum store in Elmhurst. That place burned down. I’ve had four IRS audits. Some motherfucker has put sugar in my gas tank six times.

MYSTERY

I’m sorry about that.

WESSON

Thanks but what can you do?

MYSTERY

I probably should have stopped putting sugar in your gas tank after the third time.

WESSON

Oh shit. That voice. You’re the voice that kept leaving messages.

MYSTERY

Yeah. I set your shop on fire. I tipped the IRS. I’m the one who stole your credit cards.

WESSON

I don’t know you.

MYSTERY

Your dad. Your dad knew my Dad. They went to college together. Your dad did something to my dad.

WESSON

Did what? What did he do?!

MYSTERY

Said something to him. My dad promised that he’d get him back. Only a lot worse. So he brought me up to settle the score.

WESSON

Wait a second.

MYSTERY

Fifteen years, I’ve been ruining your life. And then I found out. About your boy. And that’s why I’m here. To let you know it’s over. I’m done. No more bad stuff.

WESSON

You didn’t give him the tumor?

MYSTERY

Nope. Just the sugar in the gas tank. And the credit card. And the messages. And the arson. But as of right now. We’re square. Your Dad and my Dad are even.

WESSON

My dad’s dead.

MYSTERY

So’s mine. See you around.

WESSON

Wait. What did my Dad say? The insult? What was it?

MYSTERY

He never told me. I never asked (she shrugs. ) Family. Good luck with your boy.

Playwright's Note for MANGELLA

2011-10-01T18:51:00.000-04:00

Joe Jung, the director of MANGELLA, offered me a chance to put something in the program about the play and I turned him down. Thanks to his insightful staging and the dedication of the actors, designers, and crew I think it's all up on stage. Also, I only ever end up reading playwright's notes when I'm bored with what's happening on the stage.
But the more I thought about it, the more important it became to me to take a few minutes and explain how the play came into being and to express my gratitude to the people who have helped me take something from hieroglyphs in the margins of a notebook to a full New York production.

Mangella Drawing: October 2002

"Mangella" started out as a drawing in a grad school notebook during a particularly boring literary criticism class taught by an unnamed Florida State professor (Gil Lazier). I had grown up in St. Louis, Missouri and been fascinated by bluesmen like Elmore James and Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson. And during this class, I drew an old white man in a bathrobe with a guitar and a harmonic snorkel. I regret to say that the harmonica snorkel did not make it into the play.
During my time in grad school, I got to spend some time with my uncle who was schizophrenic and terminally ill. Since he was my father's brother, I spent a lot of time talking to him about his childhood. He was rarely lucid, but there would be occasional flashes where he'd say something about my father or my grandparents that I'd never heard before. My visits with him were brief and he died much too soon but his impact upon my life and this play are immeasurable.

Further proof I cannot draw, November 2005

After grad school, I'd write other plays and when I became dissatisfied or disillusion or (for God's sake) bored with what I was working on, I would return to "Mangella". I wrote (and sensibly abandoned) a play titled "Roman A Clef" in 2005 which featured a talking/codependent television set. I had cable at the time and found that I had real trouble turning it off. Later, as I got deeper into Mangella, I decided to cannibalize and reconstitute this character as Gabriella, Ned Frangiapanni's boxy, out-of-date desktop computer. I found that as I attached feelings and motives to my own laptop, it clearly had very specific needs. Your computer needs you to be paying attention to it at all times. Tabbed browsing, updates, news feeds, pornography- all of these things are just your computer screaming at you to pay attention! Because your computer knows, s/he/it's only got three or four years to live and be useful and the second s/he/it stops, you're going to chuck it into the garbage (when you really should have recycled it.)

From London, 2004.

In 2007, I wrote and performed 'angel/buddy' at the New York International Fringe Festival. I took away two things:
1) I would never again act in a play I wrote
2) I would try to write at least one really compelling role for a woman.
That's how Lilly came about. I'm not going to say any more about Lilly because a play ought to have a couple surprises except to mention how brave and patient the actor (the talented Hannah Wilson) has been since the moment she got her hands on the script.

Similarly, Anthony Manna has to be credited with pushing ahead with this play. After reading it at my house, he announced "I think this may be something" and asked to be attached to it. I have to thank my wife, an actor of such imagination and humanity that she inspired me to write a role for a woman as a 2003 Hewlett Packard Desktop Computer. Jessi Blue, the producer of 'Our Bar' where I work every month as a writer and actor, was a huge help in the development of the Gabriella's character as well as the catalyst for Project: Theater producing the show. Thank you to Ali Perlwitz who, only a couple of months out of undergrad, has infused her character with an energy and specificity of a seasoned professional. Thank you to Bob Austin McDonald for his fearless work in the face of truly daunting and complex title character. Thank you to Adam Carpenter and Alicia Bullen who gave the play its first reading in Sarasota. Adam even ended up stage managing. I can't say enough about Ben Schwartz and the extraordinary art work he contributed. Thank you to Miles Grier, Tijuana Ricks, my parents, my brothers, Matt Schneider, Matt Hamilton, the contributors to Project: Theater and the fantastic artists at 'Our Bar.' Without these people, I doubt this show would have happened.

2005.

Lastly and most importantly, I must credit Joe Jung, the show's director. If you don't know, Joe Jung I expect you will before long because he's going to be famous. Not simply because he's a talented director with a keen sense of beauty and moment who plays extraordinary guitar and is a Broadway-caliber performer. Joe will be famous because he works harder and with greater generosity of spirit than any human being I have ever seen. There was never an Off-Off Broadway show that didn't see some rainy days, but I never saw concern even crease Joe's face. As a writer, I have never been in a more fruitful or more personally enjoyable rehearsal process and I credit that to Joe's talents as a director and a collaborator.

So there you have it. As I said at the top, it's all on the stage. Lastly, and I say this with all sincerity: anything you like in this play is probably very much the contribution of one of the people listed above. And anything you really hate is all my fault.
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy "MANGELLA."

Michael Ian Black's "MY CUSTOM VAN" returns to NYC for One Night Only

2011-08-11T10:32:00.002-04:00

WHAT IS THE WHAT?
Michael Ian Black's
My Custom Van
performed by PROJECT: THEATER
Click Here for Tickets

WHERE IS THE WHAT?
The Living Room

154 Ludlow

New York, NY

WHOSAMAJINGO?

Project: Theater is remounting a show they did with great success last summer, "My Custom Van" by Michael Ian Black. Based on the seminal work "My Custom Van: And 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays That Will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face", the play is an theatrical adaptation of Michael Ian Black's innermost thoughts on Taco Parties, Robots, Squirrels, and Jug Bands.

My friends at Project: Theater (including Artistic Director, Joe Jung) had this idea to adapt Michael Ian Black's book so they called his agent and got his permission. The author himself even stopped by the show. The rest is legend. The reviews were awesome,

"It's unbridled enthusiasm for the simple things, like taco parties. It's dorky and racy at the same time, making you cringe through the giggles. Above all, it's freaking hysterical."
-Julie Feltman, Theatre is Easy

And they are back for one night only in support of a project that I wrote that Project: Theater is producing and Joe Jung is directing called "Mangella".
I'll talk more about my play in a little bit.
But for right now, if you're intrigued please come for this one night only showing on August 28th. Tickets are only $20 and that money will go towards supporting a project of yours truly.

Thanks so much!

And if you'd be kind enough, feel free to repost, reblog, retweet, rewhatever you like so as to get out the word.

Nunc est bibendum...

2011-05-03T11:52:00.000-04:00

"Let us ease the Roman people of their continual care, who think it long to await the death of an old man.”

The last words of Hannibal, 182 BCE

In high school, my outstanding Latin teacher, known to all as Magistra, would teach each class Ode XXXVII by Horace.

It begins with the famous line "Nunc est bibendum", literally 'Now it is time for drinking.'

The ode comes from around 30 BC, when Cleopatra was defeated and then ultimately killed herself. For a little context, this right at the end of the Republic and the beginning of the empire: Augustus Caesar has already defeated Mark Antony (the non-pop singing one) at the Battle of Actium and Mark Antony has killed himself. And now with Cleopatra's suicide, Rome can finally be at peace. And so Horace takes up the ode starting with a famous triumphant beginning:

Now is the time for drinking, now let the earth be beaten with unfettered feet;
Now,my friends, is the time to bedeck the altars of gods with Salarian banquets!

This stanza doesn't really stand out- though it is the most frequently quoted part of the poem. Roman triumphalism was a hallmark of both the Republic and the Empire: successful generals would literally parade through the streets of Rome at great expense after a military triumph and Cleopatra's suicide was an attempt to avoid being led through the capitol in a cage to the mockery of tens of thousands.

The next part of the poem immediately calls to mind the grave threat that Cleopatra posed.

Before this it was irreligious to pour out Caecuban wine from ancestral cellars,
while this Queen prepared the insane destruction for our Capitol and even the deaths even for our leaders with the contaminated, with the infected flock of her loathsome males, raging and drunk enough in every way to set her hopes on sweet fortune.

The translation is clumsy- but the here you see that Cleopatra herself is demonized as insane and drunk on fortune, plotting the destruction of the capitol and even Caesar himself. She represents an existential threat upon the state of Rome. So Horace changes the tone of the poem from gaiety to something more somber. Cleopatra here is depicted as the single enemy of Rome leading an infected flock of men; she is the last thing to be defeated before we can all drink deep of that sweet, sweet Caecuban wine.

But then, in another tonal shift- after a stanza about Augustus' pursuit of her, he finally and strangely turns to her nobility:

[But] she seeking to perish more nobly did not in womanly way blanch at the sword,
Nor did she flee to hidden shores in a swift ship;
Daring even to stare at collapsing kingdom with calm face,
and brave to handle savage serpents, in order to drink black venom with her body,
more fierce in deliberated death:
refusing with distain to be led with cruel Liburnians,
ordinary woman in high triumph, no lowly woman she.

Here at the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire you can already see the seeds of liberal ambivalence being planted. Horace starts in a champagne fuelled frenzy but as the booze cruise continues, you see the remorse, the regret, and ultimately the identification with Cleopatra's iconoclastic suicide over the rabble she would have to face in a triumphant parade.

So... what?

I watched the range of reactions on Sunday night and again yesterday to the news regarding the death of Osama bin Laden it appeared that many of the posts that I read followed a similar thread. There were those of the Bibendum aspect who simply cheered that a man who sought to terrorize the US and other countries had been killed. They reacted simply and honestly- their fears had been cancelled by military action. Break out that Caecuban wine and some Cuban cigars.

Another group of people fixated on the losses that Bin Laden had inflicted and the gravity of the threat. They found the celebration distasteful in the face of the thousands of lost lives in the US and the tens of thousands of lost lives (US and non-US) overseas.

And then a third group focused on Bin Laden's condition –not idealized as Cleopatra's is in the final stanzas of this ode- but as a human being in the first place. This desire to recognize the humanity of a hateful and evil man is so at odds historically with our culture that Penn Jilette appears to have had to coin a quote and attribute it to Martin Luther King, Jr. as a means of creating a viral sentiment.

Many Americans are like Horace- ill at ease with the notion of Empire. Many liberal Americans (if I may call them (and myself) so) are ill at ease with notion of being in control of that Empire. The notion that Barack Obama may have called in four helicopters to eliminate/murder an enemy of the state sets them ill at ease. And chastising the Bibendum-ites allows for some assuaging of their complicity in that state sponsored murder.

(For some more really great stuff on Rome, I highly recommend Mike Duncan's excellent History of Rome podcast and the 8 hour six part Fall of the Republic series that Dan Carlin's been doing at Hardcore History (a podcast markedly superior to its awful title.) Both of these podcasts have enriched my life nearly to the point of donating to them.)

A few thoughts on the Oscars (in the cold daylight of a Tuesday)

2011-03-01T16:51:00.002-05:00

Two words: Never Try.

First off: I watched the whole thing. And it wasn't pretty.

Even from the Inception themed opening, which more or less just pointed up the preposterous premise of Inception while simultaneously undercutting the credibility of the two hosts (Anne Hathaway and James Franco), there was an audible gap of laughter. It was the opener, it was expensive, and it wasn't very funny.
The Hosts:
Anne Hathaway and James Franco had me scratching my head when they were picked. Both of these actors are talented and appealing, good looking and hip (or in Anne's case hip-ish), but neither is comic. And neither of them have ever carried the comedy part of a comedy that I'm aware of. They are both darlings of the critics, on the verge of the A-list, and... That's about it really. I can't think of any reason that they were given this job except that the people in charge of Hollywood at the moment are dealing with drooping attendance, declining relevance, shifting racial and socio-economic demographics (which they responded to by fielding the whitest Oscars in years, and then having Jennifer Hudson introduce Gwyneth Paltrow to sing- the evening's unrivaled moment for ugly irony.)

Franco and Hathaway later posed with a muppet
imitation of Oprah Winfrey

And basically Franco and Hathaway's performance broke down to this: Franco saw from the opening gambit that their entire evening was going to go over like a wet fart. Hathaway said that Billy Crystal gave them one piece of advice backstage: just be yourselves. So Franco reverted to his pre-movie star persona from Freaks and Geeks. He went full stoner, too cool for school. For the rest of the evening, you could hardly notice that Franco was on the stage.
Meanwhile, Hathaway in the midst of what was shaping up to be a disaster went 180 degrees the other way. She went full Ella Enchanted. She constantly talked up being "the luckiest girl in the world," while forcing a smile that already dwarfs the size of her face into a pained Ren and Stimpy mask. And as the evening wore on (and didn't it just?) you could watch as Hathaway took the stage that Franco had ceded and basically looked as though she was campaigning for class president.

It was a real testament to the two personalities of the hosts. Franco disappeared and Hathaway mugged. Franco skipped his own afterparty while Hathaway did Oprah the next day.

It will be interesting to see who ends up receiving the larger Oscar host bounce (should there be any bounce.)

The Awards
Despite my getting the second fewest Award winners right (out of 19 people), even as I looked at my heavily incorrect ballot, there were very few surprises. Firth, Bale, and Portman seemed mortal locks, and only Melissa Leo surprised because I thought Hollywood do the Coen bros another favor and give Hailee Steinfeld an (unwarranted) Oscar (because she was a supporting actress who was in every scene?)

The technical awards exist only to make the less qualified fare better in Oscar pools.

THE SPEECHES
Christian Bale forgot his wife's name, called her a mast, and then spat out the website for Dicky Eklund's website (which later crashed). He's a classy cat. And I don't know what he's shooting for with that look (Gay Viking Vampire Lawyers of the Future, perhaps?) but I don't think I'll be dropping $13 for it.
Melissa Leo dropped an F bomb. Bono was unimpressed.
Natalie Portman was pregnant and should have had record hormone levels for an Academy Award acceptance speech, but shamefully held it together providing people like me very little of interest to comment about.

THE PRESENTERS

Okay. Kirk Douglas (seen here kissing John Travolta) is an extraordinary actor and a Hollywood legend. But why is it that on a night where the young and the hip were supposed to be brought to the fore and we had to endure somebody autotuning clips of movies (nominated and in the case of Twilight, not nominated) somebody thought it would be a good idea to bring him out to drive the ceremony to a stand still. He came out twenty minutes into the performance and remained on stage for around ten minutes. I felt badly for him. I felt badly for the nominees who were terribly upstaged. But mostly I felt bad for myself because that's what I do most of the time.

The Music
If you were told you had the chance to see Randy Newman, Celine Dion, Mandy Moore, Gwyneth Paltrow, and and A.R. Rahman, you'd Tivo that, right? No, of course not. But that's what we were treated to at Oscar night. Because what could be more hip than Randy Newman and Celine Dion?

The Future
This is getting pretty awful. Grim really. I skipped a Miami Heat/New York Knicks game to watch these Oscars and after Best Supporting Actress I was really thinking about switching directions and liveblogging that game.
First, get a comedian. Get a team of comedians. Get people who are paid to be funny to be funny. You can't ask people who've never landed a plane before to land a 747 with half a billion people watching (THAT'S A METAPHOR!) I had long discussions with Matt the Liveblogger on this and apart from being unable to figure out why Bill Cosby never hosted the Oscars we came up with a list of names but few knockouts.

Second, cut 45 minutes out of the evening. I don't care how. Present some of the technical awards during the red carpet. 210 minutes of Academy Awards after 6 hours of red carpet countdown.

Go back to five best picture nominees. Immediately. Winter's Bone can't be one of the ten best films of the year. It's just not possible that the cinema has been so completely debased that that dreary boring film is in the running for BEST PICTURE.

Involve people of color! Hey! It's 2011! Maybe it's time to make movies about gigantic sets of the population that are completely underserved? Maybe it's time for an African American studio exec! Hollywood's lag in this department seems positively conspiratorial.

Behold the Future!

Lastly, how the hell many ~~millions~~ BILLIONS of dollars does Harry Potter have to make before they give it the obligatory Oscar nod? There's only one more chance to do this. I haven't seen the next Harry Potter film, I don't know if it's any damn good, but it better get at least six nominations including a best supporting actor nomination for Rupert Grint who has carried way too much water for Daniel Radcliffe without acknowledgement.
Seriously, Return of the King was nominated and WON 11 Academy Awards, and the LOTR franchise garnered a total of 30 nominations and 17 Oscars.
Harry Potter movies have won ZERO. And have you tried to watch a LOTR movie lately?
They are unwatchable. Long, tedious, and pointless.

Just like the Oscars.

MAILBAG

First this from Johnny in Iowa:

If you watch 127 hours in reverse, it's a beautiful story about a disabled man who goes on a quest to find the perfect prosthetic in the most curious of places.

He's right of course. And this movie would still be better than The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

But if you reverse other movies you also come up with extraordinary plots that Hollywood never considered. For instance, The King's Speech:

The story of how the King of England caught a speech impediment from an Australian while the Germans fled from Poland.

Or the Black Swan:

A young woman comes back to life, renounces drugs and lesbianism in order to give Winona Ryder the role of the Black Swan.

I could only come up with two. I leave it to you to best my efforts.

OOOH. Matt's got one. Winter's Bone.

A chainsaw wielding, Ozarkian arm-butcher slowly pulls away from her meth pushing cohorts to care for her sick mother and siblings...

LIVE BLOG WRAPUP.

2011-02-28T00:26:00.000-05:00

All right- that was fun.

We had a four way tie for first. My wife, Mr Casey, Sir Makington the Fifth, and Vermeer you are each entitled to 75 cents via paypal from me for sixteen correct answers. I had 8 correct. Matt had fourteen. Kenny and Shelley each with 11.

We had a total, so far of 263 comments.

And here's Casey from Chicago to play us out with a pair of videos.

BEST ACTOR

And GOODNIGHT!

11pm LIVE BLOG COMMENTSMENT

2011-02-27T22:58:00.001-05:00

ENDGAME in the COMMENTS

10pm LIVE BLOG COMMENTERRORISM

2011-02-27T21:59:00.001-05:00

Join us in the comments...

And now a word from our man in Chicago!

9:15 LIVE BLOG COMMENTING.

2011-02-27T21:12:00.003-05:00

We'll be fighting it out in the comments section this round. Matt goes by Ootek.

THIS JUST IN FROM OUR MAN IN CHICAGO!!!

8:30 PM LIVEBLOG FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!

2011-02-27T19:59:00.060-05:00

Everybody hated their pictures.

Here are your bloggers for the evening.
You can participate by leaving a comment, drunk dialing a voicemail, or making fun of us on twitter or something.
Also we are extremely happy to have Casey From Chicago joining us with LIVE ON TAPE reaction to awards via youtube.

With no further ado, Shelley will be in Blue, Matt in Green, Kenny in Orange, and I'll be in black.

8:30 - Greetings from Shelley in Los Angeles where this stuff actually takes place! This horrible, horrible stuff. I'm so excited and just know that Amadeus is going to win everything!

8:31 I've just drank one liter of cherry coke zero and this movie music is not helping me. Okay!! Let's see some self-aggrandizing!!

8:31 $10 says Letterman shows up somewhere in here.

8:36 This is just pointing out how long and horrible the concept for Inception was. I like this. I like someone pointing out right away what a murky gas bag of a movie that claptrap was. Woah!! Back to the Future reference! Please GOD LET DOC BROWN YELL 'THE LIBYANS'!!

8:37 - Clearly nothing good happened beyond 1989

8:39- Woah, what did Anne Hathaway get naked in this year?? I mean we got to see her goodies in Brokeback Mountain (in a really sort of sad way) but I feel like her natural talents could be better displayed in a sort of Monster's Ball setting.

8:42 I know the Oscars are always slow out of the gate but could we come up with do we need a Gone With The Wind Diorama???

8:42 Tom Hanks and Gone with the Wind. Yeah, this makes sense.

8:42 - I have heard multiple people say Ken's wife looks like Anne Hathaway. Luckily Dee's personality isn't like a small bag of sawdust

8:46 - Another blow to Potterphiles everywhere.

8:45- Not taking the wife bait. Back tot he topic at hand!! DID ANYBODY SEE ALICE IN WONDERLAND???? It was awful. It was beyond awful. Tim Burton has gone down a special rabbit hole of horribleness. He is moving to a place of turkey-necked Lucas-ian-ness.

8:48 Wally Pfister from Inception had a coke moment there. Did you catch it? I'm calling that a Charlie Sheen hat tip.

8:46 Wally Pfister would make a fine porn name.

8:49 Matt, I think Wally Pfister is a pretty specific genre of Porn. I'm not judging you.

8:51 KIRK DOUGLAS! Operated by the Henson Studio! (seriously can you imagine putting make up on this guy?) Do you think it's possible that he might get a little pity nookie out of Anne Hathaway?

8:53 I know they always do it like this, but I think this is a huge mistake announcing this award here this time. It's the only competitive award. That said. I'd give my eye teeth to see Jacki Weaver win here. I'd believe in a lot of things.

8:56. He entered a long long time ago. "I will never forget this moment." Actually, it's seven minutes now.

8:55: I look forward to a moment like when Angelina Jolie told everyone she was in love with her brother. More disturbing the better

8:56. He entered a long long time ago. "I will never forget this moment." Actually, it's seven minutes now.

8:57 - I am not laughing

8:58- Melissa Leo is completely tolerable. She got fired from Homicide once upon a time for reasons that I don't really understand. And even though "The Fighter" was totally Oscar-bait from the word go it was one of my favorites (top two?) of this whole thing. She's like seven years older than Marky Mark.

9:01- Pssst. Anne Hathaway. Never Improvise. Just don't. Period.

9:02- Yes, by the way, on the blog's oscar ballot I forgot to include this category. That should indicate how much I care about it. It was too much trouble to copy and paste.

9:02 I mourn for The Gruffalo. That was awesome.

9:07 Toy Story 3 won? What? Preposterous. Honestly, I would flip out if this movie could win best picture. Why not? Is there any movie that was heads and shoulders better? When was the last time a cartoon won best picture?

9:09 This from Kimberblake: For the record, Dee Dee has MUCH better arms than Anne Hathaway. She should stop wailing those things around.

Red Carpet

2011-02-27T19:07:00.037-05:00

we're keeping balloting open for forty more minutes.

Allright, I'm here by myself to start.
It's 7:07 ET and I just watched a reporter nearly make out with Hailee Steinfeld.

And now Jesse Eisenberg (whose bangs cover the lobotomy scar) drones.

He doesn't own a television. He's super.

We're not really getting going until 8pm over here, but I'm here for you.
There are 500 members of the press at the Oscar.

Here's Cuba Gooding Jr.'s acceptance speech! The night that launched him to international superstar! He loves everybody!

By the way, I'm really impressed with Miracle Whip trying to make people take a strong position about it. Great campaign. I would love to be a writer whose job it was to write mean things about miracle whip. I mean, seriously- I would fill reams of paper with metaphors about how awful miracle whip is.

The Oscars is like Thanksgiving for Haters. Hate Thanksgiving. Speaking of hate- Amy Adams dress looks like Wonder Woman in formal wear.

Currently Mila Kunis is the only dress I've liked.

Tonight kids will be singing somewhere over the rainbow. Which is like a scheduled bathroom break.
Awesome.

Guest blogger Kenny just asked if it would be inappropriate to call the Oscars "The Gay Super Bowl". If so- does that make Tim Gunn the Gay Terry Bradshaw?

Cate Blanchett has yet to recover from Robin Hood. I hope an agent was killed over her involvement int that movie.

Whoever that dude was who just said that Hailee (Joel) Steinfeld will win because of ads taken out just revealed so much of what is laughably horrible about the Oscars. Grah!

Scarlett Johanson is rocking the Something About Mary hair tonight. Good to see.

Valentino looks like he might be related to John Boehner.

Okay we're ten minutes away from starting for real. Put on your game face.

Gwyneth Paltrow going to sing some Country Song tonight? That's another nice bathroom break right there. Also, it's nice to see Reese Witherspoon looking like Vanna White.

Holy shit, Jennifer Hudson, what happened! She looks like she has a pair of tape worms fighting it out.

not impressed with natalie portman's teeth. Is whitening bad for the baby??

8:00 Hello all. I am coming to you from an Oscar party in the Washington, DC suburbs. Glamorous! An oddly large number of people here are Gilbert & Sullivan aficionados. Tonight I will attempt the dangerous task of live blogging while remaining mildly social. This should be… interesting. First question: Does anyone remember who hosted last year? I don’t. Anne Hathway and James Franco have to at least be nominally more memorable, right?

8:02 James Franco always looks stoned. Impressive.

8:08 Sandra Bullock is slowly becoming Joan Crawford. Tell no one.

8:10 Outside of terrorist attack, I throw out the question what is the most shocking thing that could take place at this academy awards? I'm going to go with James Franco coming out of the closet during the opening ceremony.

8:14 Gwyneth suggests Jay-Z mash up. Angels and ministers of grace, defend us.

8:17 Evidently Jennifer hudson is 20ft tall. who knew?

8:18 Most shocking thing? Christopher Nolan admits that that Inception made no sense and Winter's Bone wins best picture. God that picture was miserable.

8:23 Roberto Benigni's Oscar acceptance speech is the favorite of all time. And yet, he was allowed exactly one more attempt at movie making before being drummed out of hollywood forever. Granted that movie was pinnochio which you can see at the video store in pristine and unrented condition because no one saw that movie. Or if you did, tell me about it- because I can't picture how that movie could have so summarily executed that man's American career.

8:27 I am delighted to see Tom Hanks looking more or less healthy. Let's light this candle!!!

8:25: The backstage and sit down interviews are really giving me a window into the mind of a movie star. they are all saying they remember nothing about winning

8:28 Jake Gyllenhal has apparently remade 12 Monkeys on a train.

PREGAME

2011-02-27T14:30:00.001-05:00

So I'll start putting some stuff up here around 5pm.

In the meantime, my questions are these:

What are the mortal locks? (Other than Christian Bale?)

How is Hailee Steinfeld a supporting actress nomination and Jeff Bridges a lead? People saw this movie, right?

Where the hell is Animal Kingdom?

Still time to choose your own picks. I know you'd hate to miss that chance at that sweet, sweet cheddar. ($3, via paypal to the winner-or in the case of a tie, it will be divided.)

In the meantime here's the worst oscar video I've ever seen. Unquestionably. Hat tip to Shelley for this.
(oh yeah it's blurry and nine minutes long.)

OSCAR LIVEBLOG...What's at Stake?

2011-02-24T18:18:00.000-05:00

Sunday is the Oscars.

And we've placed a three dollar purse for the person to guesses the most correct Oscar winners (to be paid via Paypal.)

And we've booked a gay man in Chicago to give us hard-hitting instant reaction to the awards via youtube.

Really, the only thing left for you to do is to fill out a bracket.

That and read about how this year is the whitest Oscars in recent memory.

And to stare in wide wonder at the list of Best Picture nominees that don't even seem to be things you'd want to watch for free on TNT on a Sunday afternoon when it was raining (I'm looking at you "Winter's Bone" and "The Kids Are All Right".)

And to wonder how it is that the hosts this year are younger than I am. Makes me long for Jack Palance.

Meanwhile, which is the worst Best Picture? Forest Gump? Ordinary People? Driving Miss Daisy? Because there's an outside shot Winter's Bone could be the best worst ever. And that, my friends, is worth believing in Hollywood all over again. Honestly, I could see Braveheart high in the running for worst best...

Liveblogging the Oscars! Live! Blog! Ing!

2011-02-21T17:20:00.003-05:00

A few updates here at Twunch.

First, we've added a voicemail box. So now you can drunk dial this blog. Please take advantage of this opportunity.

Second, I've gotten some volunteer to help me liveblog the Oscars. Shelley in LA, Kenny in St. Louis, and Matt in DC will be joining me via satellite in New York to try and unravel the mysteries of Oscar night. Live. Naturally, we welcome your input during the broadcast. Or the aforementioned drunken phone calls.

But! If you want to take on the field and see if you can smoke four experts with absolutely no qualifications whatsoever, here's your chance!!

I will paypal the winner three of my very own dollars.*

*I anticipate winning. And paying myself those three dollars. Which I will put into escrow for a later purchase of tacos.

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A Series of Sentences No One Has Ever Said

2011-02-20T17:24:00.000-05:00

You speak so well and so frequently on so many topics.
Is there a way I could get more and better access to your many opinions?
Do you blog?

The Concerned Italian-American's Guide to RubyGate

2011-02-09T17:24:00.000-05:00

If you go to Google News in Italy, you see an awful lot about RubyGate. Which is weird because the suffix -Gate doesn't seem to make sense when every other word in the news article is in Italian. Weirder still because nobody in the story is actually named Ruby.

Don't hate on his Christ-like nature.

SILVIO BERLUSCONI
The story starts and ends with the man who has been Prime Minister of Italy for most of adult life as well as being worth $9 billion, running three national television stations in Italy, as well as owning AC Milan, the most successful Italian football club.
Berlusconi's colorful legal past has been well-documented and the Legal Troubles and Controversies sections on his wikipedia page run nearly 9,000 words (and make for excellent reading).

Flash back to December 2009, Berlusconi was at a rally outside Milan. While he was shaking hands with his constituents, a 42-year old man walked up to him and threw a replica of Milan's cathedral at the Prime Minister's face, breaking his nose and knocking out two of his teeth (gory video here.)

The attacker apologized and Berlusconi (who at the time was under the cloud of a different prostitution scandal that would result in his wife filing for divorce) experienced a brief wave of national sympathy. He also met Nicole Minetti, a 25-year old TV-showgirl-turned-dental hygienist who would help nurse Berlusconi back to health. For her ministrations, she would receive an appointment as a general councillor in Lombardy.

She's also being questioned this week. About Ruby.

Everybody, meet Ruby.

On May 27th of last year, a girl was arrested without identification in Milan and charged with stealing three thousand euros. She was a seventeen-year-old nightclub dancer who went by the name Ruby Rubicuori (Ruby the Heartstealer) and since she had no identification, she was taken into custody and placed in a shelter for juvenile offenders. Within a few hours, Berlusconi calls from Paris and demands her release explaining that she is "Hosni Mubarak's grandaughter" and that she had to be released immediately in order to avoid an international incident. And so she was released, to newly-minted public official, Nicole Minetti.

I believe Rodney Dangerfield may have used this defense.

The actual text of P.M. Berlusconi's infamous comment, "'As always, I work without interruption and if occasionally I happen to look a beautiful girl in the face, it's better to like beautiful girls than to be gay."
Suffices to say, it did not charm a large portion of the citizenry. To make matters worse, the scope of what was becoming known as Rubygate was widening and beginning to include specific anecdotes from Ruby (whose real name is Karima El Mahroug and is a Morrocan runaway) regarding trading sex with the Prime Minister for money and jewelry.

Even a man with Berlusconi's colorful past, this has all proved a little much for the Italian citizens. Nicole Minetti is being implicated as Berlusconi's chief procurer of young (or very young) women for what are now being called "bunga bunga" parties in which prosecutors are alleging that Berlusconi

"paid for sex with a “significant” number of prostitutes, including a then 17-year-old nightclub dancer who goes by the name of “Ruby the Heart Stealer”, at parties in his luxurious villa."

Berlusconi says he's never paid for sex because he's "never understood where the satisfaction is when you're missing the pleasure of the conquest."
What's more, Ruby herself has repeatedly denied that Berlusconi ever 'laid a hand on her' (despite testimony from friends' of hers to the contrary and the extraordinary gifts which she acknowledges having received from the Prime Minster including a diamond necklace, six thousand euros, and an Audi.

So this is pretty much where Rubygate stands at the moment. The prosecution believes they have enough evidence that they can forgo preliminary hearings and push for a trial with weeks.

Meanwhile, Berlusconi's approval rating has shrunk from 40% to 35% which is still 13 points higher than George W. Bush's when he left office in 2009.

Egypt: When a picture is not worth all that many words…

2011-02-07T13:47:00.002-05:00

(In which I continue to ponder Egypt's future...) 

Yay, Facebook!!

So today the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood began brokering their own peace deal with Mubarak. And the early reports are that that peace deal does not include the immediate step down of the Egyptian President.

I feel that once again we have seen the limitations of Facebook and Twitter-based slacktivism, namely the reprinting of photo and video ‘evidence’ of huge change in a country and the wholesale abandoning of the realpolitik that actually goes into revolutions. 


He looks like a Shawarma-Flavored Harry Reid

Early on, the Muslim Brotherhood’s silence had been noted in this uprising. Despite being a large (though illegal) political force in the country, they were not at the fore of the popular revolt in Tahrir Square. That position went to El-Baradei who is beginning to score a lot of google hits under the term “useful idiot.” El Baradei’s Western (read: non-threatening) appearance and idiomatic (read: non-threatening) English made him an ideal front man for the early revolution.

And all over the world, it was easy to see calls for Mubarak to step down. Calls for a popular overthrow of the government in Egypt. And the Muslim Brotherhood stayed out of the way for nearly two weeks. Why?

Because the Muslim Brotherhood is a professional political/terrorist organization (think Sinn Fein/IRA) and knew that if you just wait long enough, eventually all the amateurs in the square have to go home. Because they have to go to work. Because they need money to feed their families. And pay their Internet bills so that they can stay on Twitter and Facebook.

Street Protest in Pakistan against Salman
Rushdie being knighted in 2007.

There used to be the notion of the Muslim “street”. Newspapers and journalists used to talk about it all the time. Every time there would be an outbreak in Gaza or Beirut, a camera crew would be dispatched to get the response of the Muslim Street and American flags would be burned and the same twenty five guys would shout death to the Great Satan and it all made for terrific television but it failed to represent the entire story. And the journalists, whose job is to divert eyes to media, don’t mind- the pictures would be moving and interesting and fit nicely with American narrative regarding the Middle East.

Egypt's Torturer-in-Chief and Next President!
Omar Suleiman

But what about this time? I asked ten days ago whether Egypt would go the full Tunisia or whether it would just be another Iran and as of right now it looks like an Iran-situation. Americans have supported Egypt’s uprising and pushed their politicians to strongly pressure Mubarak to leave (though not strongly enough for The Street.) Mubarak has named a successor who is just as spooky as he is. Mubarak has announced that he will not run for another term as President (a pretty small victory considering his advanced age). And now the professional politicians have waltzed in to fill the void.

From here it appears that Mubarak will:

Advance the Muslim Brotherhood from illegal political party to legal status and place himself and his successor as lawfully resisting a homegrown terrorist organization. Mubarak and creep-o, Omar Suleiman have now successfully created a boogeyman to frighten Israel and America with and will thereby be able to retain their substantial financial aid (lest the Muslim Brotherhood triumph.)

Simultaneously, I think the Muslim Brotherhood will 

Move closer to Hezbollah status in Egypt, accepting the position as the only political alternative to Mubarak, the Us, and Israel.

So what did we gain for this Twitter-based revolution? Nothing as far as I can see except a lesson that International Politics are not simply about pictures. And that the twenty-four hour news cycle of showing big exciting pictures does not apply to the professional. And either way, Egypt looks like it is going to turn for the worse.

Happy to hear other opinions in the comments, my friends.

Superbowl Live blog Part II

2011-02-06T20:28:00.010-05:00

Allright we are back
8:26. The Black Eyed Peas are beyond awful. They are a stain upon the very vibration of sound. They are truly a black eye upon all peas. They are an abomination and bring shame to the very name of vegetables.

Charles Woodson is out. Sam Shields is out. Driver, ankle injury. That's uh, a lot of people in their secondary.

Green Bay starts the second half with the ball and an eleven point lead. I'm still hung over from the Black Eyed Piece of Shiminy. Wow. That was horrible. Slash, Usher, I wanted more celebrity appearances.
You know what would have done it for me? Meatloaf. If they'd have brought in Meatloaf, all would have been forgiven.
Another penalty. Two penalties on the first three plays. NFL- where boring happens.

One of the things that blogging about something like the Superbowl makes abundantly clear is how difficult it is to come up with thing to talk about when everyone is watching something. There is no need to describe what was just seen. We all just saw it. And yet, there's Joe Buck paid to talk at length.

Late hit. Cue the self destruction music. It may have been the terribleness of the Black Eyed Peas which has infected the cheeseheads.

Lots of cowboys in these commercials. Is this a True Grit bounce? E-Trade baby... I'm going to give it a C-. Ozzy Osbourne and Justin Beiber. I've seen him twice today, he may be the single most forgettable person generated by the media in a long time.

Could American Idol have existed without George W. Bush? Each new commercial reminds me that when I watched that show, George W. Bush was president and we were searchin' for WMD. American Evidence! Maybe nothing. Each sentence in this blog is a chance for a lame dissertation thesis. I dropping dimes here, grad students....

Mendenhall just got injured. By the camera op. That's some good squishy right there.

Roethlisberger is so much larger than so many of the players. A cornerback has almost no chance of stopping him. Let alone a 20 year old coed. Sorry, don't mean to keep focusing on that. But dear god what a dirt bag.

8:41: Still no alcohol. But I have switched to carrot sticks. The time stamp here really will help me to do the personal anthropology that will certainly be de rigeur in the future. What was I doin at 8:41 on February Sixth, 2011. Oh eating carrot stic- TOUCHDOWN MENDENHALL...

This is the funky horror of the Steelers. They win games slowly and uglily (new adverb, grad students!)

I saw the first Pirates of the Carribean- and HOLD THE PHONE- "Cram it in the boot?" For real? That is pretty on the nose there, Mini cooper.

Test baby... not sure about that one Home Away dot com.

Nice to see Staff Sergeant Sal Giunta get a little love for his Medal of Honor. Great story. Cool guy.

So, the question now is do the Packers fold? The largest halftime deficit overcome in Superbowl history is 11. And the Steelers were down 21-3. And they've made up two of those touchdowns in the first five and half minute.

Lots of drops for the Pack Attack. Aaron Rodgers has got to - oh, he just got sacked. Now he has more things to complain about. And the Steelers fans are getting quite a bit more vocal.

Oh no, a Jeff Bridges narrated car commercial! I hate him as a pitchman. Hyundai... why have you done this.

Tibet commercial with Timothy Hutton. Nice Groupon change up. Well done. And I bet somewhere Richard Gere just dropped a gerbil, if you know what I'm saying, over the irreverence.

Coke commercial. Would have been better if they'd kissed. I know. I always say that.

"The momentum has totally shifted" notes Joe Buck in light of the 14pt swing in the second half. Very difficult to say something not patently obvious. "The Field remains Green. And appears likely to remain so for much of the rest of the game."

8:52. People are starting to facebook the game. Commercial.
Adrian Brody. Singing smooth jazz. Stella Artois. I blame planet earth for this. Carmax... weirdness. First Carmina Burana sighting? 8:54. Commercial for? Goddamnit. Simon Cowell. I'm sorry I watched.

Condoleeza Rice is sitting near John Madden. I wonder how many of their conversations are about food. As opposed to say... Israel?

I love it when people say a receiver is 'impossible to overthrow due to their speed.' This is invariably said when somebody has just been overthrown.

The Steelers are currently beating the crap out of the Packers. It's 5:49 to go in the third quarter. Without a major change of plans, the Steelers will win this game. (Sorry for the captain obvious assessment but Joe Buck had gone quiet for a second)

8:58. 3 and 13. Packers have gotten penetration a couple plays in a row. Which is good because they have no secondary. And there's the first sack of the game, literally cued by Joe Buck's pronouncement four seconds earlier that "the Packers do not yet have a sack in this game."

52 yard field goal- and he's stunk all day. And he stinks here. They should have gotten the horse from the Budweiser commercial five years ago.

Commercial: "I gotta question for you"- Oh, no a car commercial that asks you to feel bad for Detroit. "It's the hottest fires that make the hardest steel." Skanky. And the 8 mile tease at the end. Chrysler. Poverty pimp. Car maker. Goddamn. They took the whole sixty seconds to have the Eminem gospel choir ending. "Imported from Detroit." Cue SNL parody writers.

9:02. Green Bay with the ball. Aaron Rodgers was seen earlier blowing snot on his receivers hands hoping for sticky booger success. He succeeds. Geordie Nelson picks up twenty yards on a pass that was nearly passed into his rib cage. And then a terrible run right that could have been sniffed out from MiR.

Donald Driver isn't coming back either. It's going to be pitch and catch between Nelson and Rodgers if anything good is going to happen. Steelers call a timeout. That's probably not good.

The ultimate Glee event is after the Superbowl? That can't possibly be bad. They might as well announce "Assisted Suicide Fanatics- Stay tuned for after the Superbowl for the one push you need to get you off the planet! A very special episode of Glee!"

I know people like Glee. I've never watched Glee. I'll never watch Glee. I'm not required to give a television show a chance. Nope. Television does not get the benefit of the doubt.

9:06. Green Bay chooses not to kick the 56 yarder. Green Bay is playing not to lose. Steelers with the ball, 2:23 in the 3rd, on the 13. Mendenhall looks particularly strong.

When people asked me if I cared who won I said obviously I hope that Roethlisberger got hurt, preferably very badly, and that I hoped there it would be a close game. So, really I have nothing to complain about except that Ben's head and shoulders are still connected.

Just a reminder about Roethlisberger- a couple years ago when he was in a motorcycle wreck and it was suggested that he might do well to wear a helmet from now on seeing as his skull was fractured and his teeth were all over the pavement- he said he couldn't do that. Couldn't wear a helmet. He's a jackwagon of the highest order.

Green Bay gets the ball back and immediately picks up a completely moronic penalty. If you're counting moronic penalties and dropped passes, Green Bay is really giving a clinic in how to play some terrible football. I'm a Rams fan. I know from terrible football.

9:10. Steelers and Green Bay have traded places, with GB on their own 13. Play action and another laser speed pass from Rodgers that is three yards behind his receiver. He's rattled. His guys aren't making plays and now he's reached into "trying too hard land." Somebody needs to get him a drink. Or get me a drink. Second down was equally horrible. Green Bay is lucky they are still allowed to play football after this quarter. And Swain just made the sixty seventh drop of the afternoon.

"I probably agree with that call" says Aikman. Well, Troy, you've shed some light on that event.

A lot of people are really excited about Instant Replay, but is there anything that slows down the flow of a game more than Instant Replay? And now they bring in Mike Pereira, the instant replay expert.

Everyone in the broadcast booth is in agreement. The call will stand. And now the producer's nightmare of coming up with compelling video during what is basically a man-made rain delay three hours into the broadcast. Once upon a time they used to put up a clock to tell you how long the replay was. Here he comes:

Incomplete. Coach Tomlin pumps his fist. I wonder if Green Bay's defense appreciated the break seeing as they are about to be on the field for the thirty second time this quarter.

Great punt. And another dumb penalty. Let's rekick!

9:19. Green Bay has all this talent and a case of the Yips that you accept to see from an NCAA team playing in January. Terrible kick. Awful. Pittsburgh gets the ball at Green Bay's 40.

It did seem that that punt had an outside chance of hitting the scoreboard. No such luck.

The Steelers right now appear to be REALITY. The Green Bay Packers are trying to stop REALITY. And the Steelers are here to remind you that REALITY can only be delayed.

Fourth Quarter. 21-17.

Commercial. TV montage for some reason. Alf sighting. NFL thanks its fans. By showing TV shows. Toyota commercial and some commercials I've already seen. We're into the ass of superbowl commercials now. The price must go down for the fourth quarter. Because the number of competitive fourth quarters of super bowls is relativelY
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUMBLE!!!

MADDEN RULE. So you keep using the same guy on the same play eventually you will get a turnover. Huge play by Matthews. And crazy of Desmond Bishop not to just fall on that ball.

REALITY may just have been reversed. Rodgers still yippy as hell. He looks like Sanchez but without a seventeen year old girl who really understands him in a way no grown woman could. Not nice.

Two passes for a total of three yards. Green Bay's play calling has gone from suspect to downright weird. Bombs and screens. And drops. Lots and lots of drops. 3 and 7. And a bad pass is bailed out by James Jones.

9:27. Rodgers still looks bad. He's gone from needing a drink to needing a valium. His next step is needing an epidural. He has such a sad face. Sunken eyes. He looks li- Nelson drops another. His third or fourth. Just horrible. Blitz. And Nelson redeems himself with a huge catch and run. Out at the one.
It seems that most of the big plays for Green Bay have come on blitzes by Pittsburgh.

9:30. Might be time to run the ball? That was an awful play just then. TOUCHDOWN TOUCHDOWN
BEN STAY OUT OF THE BATHROOM STALL YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BRING WOMEN THERE TOUCHDOWN.

Jennings so open in the corner that Troy Polymaluoaljoulooo looked bad. Astonishing turn of events. The turnover by Mendenhall and the resulting points. Aaron Rodgers looks like he just took a dump that he's been waiting to take for a long time. I guess that's his version of happy.

Cars.com's commercials are getting worse. Dogs serving beer. And more Glee. The Black Eyed Peas of network television (oh no he di'n't.)

Rango with Johnny Depp. I think if I were eight, that might be a reason to keep leaving. But as it stands, I can only hope to avoid watching Glee as long as I live and make that a reason to keep going.

9:34. We're into lots of commercial time. Jeff Bridges- could we have some kind of pledge drive to keep you out of Hyundai commercials? Pepsi Max commercial featuring terrible acting. Even funny commercials need decent actors.

Fatigue is becoming a factor. The Steelers have been pursued by the avenging turnover angel of karma. Ten minutes ago they were reality, and now they are paralyzed and beneath the sword of Damocles (take that, Cosell). [Mamas don't name your babies Maurkice. Just a terrible looking name.]

9:37. Again Roethlisberger with all day in the pocket. It is as though someone told the D Line of the Packers that this was the Pro Bowl and not the Super Bowl. And on cue, a good lick put on Roethlisberger.

Packers on their heels again. Play action and it's flag day, and a hold is called. 1 and 20.
The entire game has been more about watching bad execution than good football. Dropped passes, dumb plays, picks, fumbles, flags, injuries out the yingyang- and I'm now waiting to hear Joe Buck say, "The Steelers really need to put some points on the board."

Note to GB, Heinz Ward continues to be good. TOUCHDOWN, Wallace. 9:42. Beautiful throw by Roethlisburglar.
Steelers going for two. 28-23. Successful on the option to Randal-El. 28-25. 7:34 to go. And a three point game.

Go Daddy, Herpes of Superbowl commercials. Good bug commercial here. Beetle commercial. Excellent. A late add but really good. VW. Won't get a lot of run because most of the people are too drunk at this point to remember these commercials but I'm putting it in the running.

I'm feeling it too, fellas.

GB takes the kick out to the 25. Another Commercial Break. 9:46. Nice House commercial.

9:48. Rodgers sacked to start the possession, loss of four. This was a successful blitz. Packers have run the ball 9 times. Everybody is dealing with fatigue now, including Jack and Troy. And here the Packers have another flag. 3 and 10? Don't mind if we do. The Steelers are back in full REALITY mode. And the JENNINGS catch on 3 and 10. Rodgers is just an unbelievable talent. And if it weren't for Troy Polymanolooboo that play might have gone for six.
Packers run for fourteen. And suddenly there are five minutes left in this game. And the Packers can run the ball again. Rodgers is giving instruction at the line of scrimmage, nearly all of which are "Don't jump offsides!! Don't jump offsides anymore!!"
Another completion. GB first and goal. A very Will Farrell looking Berger on the sideline.
9:54. 3 fifteen on the clock. Empty backfield. Weird (failed) screen pass gets them to 3 and four. Jordie Nelson another drop. Fourth down. Field Goal.
Commercial.
Camaro. Tim Allen as voice over. See Tim Allen should be doing car voice overs. He's the right guy for the job. Iphone/Verizon commercial. The guy with the glasses gets fatter every year. Because he's able to eat nothing but panda meat with all the money he makes.

9:58. Earlier in the game, the commentators commentated that the biggest fear was that Roetlisberger would have a chance to win the game with two minutes left using his arm. And a moronic foul by Johnson takes us in the two minute warning.

Boy we've reached the ugly part of the commercials. These are not really Superbowl commercials. They are cut rate superbowl commercials. We are into the suck.

Steelers on the 13, 1:59. 15 yard completion. GB pass rush still laughable. 2 and 5 on the 34, Ben throws it out of bounds, 3 and 5, 1:02 to go. Looks quite gloomy for Pittsburgh. Terrible throw by Ben.

10:04. 4th and 5. This is for all of the marbles. Fifty six seconds left. Many terrible towels may dry many terrible tears. GAME OVER.

There's talk that there was contact. But in point of fact, the pass was kind of crap. And there was not much contact. And that's it. Ben has lost the game. Also the Steelers have lost the game.

Not a bad game, not a bad way to kill four hours.
5475 words on this nonsense.

And... I'm going with the Pepsi Max Dieting commercial for best commercial.

Superbowl Live blog.

2011-02-06T18:13:00.024-05:00

6:12
Okay, a little live blogging- [A LIE this goes on forever for no discernible reason]

(and here's where I miss Twitter a little bit).

First- the Focus Rally America pre Kick Off show including a reading of the Declaration of Independence? Why not. Why the hell not.

And then Sam Elliot introduces the Steelers? No one's going to explain that? Or why it looks like he's held together with wire hangers. Cool.

Ben Roethlisberger is just an awful, awful human being. Irrespective of outcome, I'm hoping someone has to pick up his helmet with his head in it.

Sam Elliot now introduces the Packers! Why??? And he looks disheveled and sad. Met the man once. Asked him for acting advice. "You'd better want to do this. Because I haven't worked in 18 months." Now I see he's cashing NFL checks... Groovy.

6:13
In point of fact, if I don't live blog this I have to put it up on facebook. or keep it to myself. So that's no good.
Nice to see Adam Sandler movie "Just Go With It" nicking Bo Derek's shot from "10".
Just 12 bucks gets you 24 slices of pizza. Ladies love 50 cent pizza slices. The good ones anyway.
Beverage of choice tonight? Decaf coffee. We'll see how long that lasts.

6:18 "Just Go With It" with Sandler and Aniston seems like it just had to happen. They have failed to a point where they were each unavoidable for each other. They have hit rock bottom. Collided there in fact. In case you were worried it was going to be good- here's the wiki.

Just Go with It, originally titled Pretend Wife, is a romantic comedy filmstarring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston. Other stars include Nicole Kidman, fashion model Brooklyn Decker, and musician Dave Matthews.Allan Loeb and Timothy Dowling wrote the script and Dennis Dugan, who has collaborated with Sandler on most of his films such as Happy Gilmore,Big Daddy, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, You Don't Mess with the Zohan and Grown Ups served as director.^[2]

6:20. I saw Lea Michelle in Spring Awakening. She was the weakest link. Just saying. And America the Beautiful needs to be sung a lot less often. And this horrible 1960-ish arrangement would make John Barry's ashes swirl dervish-like in their urn. Such a crap song, And Lea Michele is the warm up for what I'm certain will be a dignified and low-key Cristina Aguilera National anthem. Amerik-haaaaaa!

and now to honor america...cristina aguilera...

I accidentally caught five minutes of White Chicks tonight with the Wayans Brothers. I think Aguilera looked a little like them.

6:26. Living Social commercial features opportunity for transvestism. Not sure what they are selling. Or why they are selling it that way. AT&T rerunning commercials for the Super Bowl. Pay attention share holders.
Jane Lynch is beginning to look like a turkey.

6:27: Ooh The Focus Rally America Pre Kick Show is mentioned again. There's an awful lot of tacit statements that the SuperBowl and America are some how joined. Super Bowl, Ford, Michael Douglas, and NFL. What is Michael Douglas selling? Dear God... 9/11, Martin Luther King, Bono, and JFK are all lining up to see this game...
"This is so much bigger than just a football game. These two teams have given us a chance for one night not only to dream but to believe. This is a celebration of their journey. Of our journey."
Wow, that's a lot of radioactive bullshit for Mr. Douglas to have in his mouth at one time...

6:30 Tough tie/shirt combination, Marshall

GREEN BAY HAS WON THE TOSS. It's a lock for the Packers.

"The Focus Rally America Pre Kick Show!" Joe Buck makes it sound like poetry. Focusrally.com! Like a reality television commercial. (By the way, how did we ever believe that there was such a thing as reality television. TV watchers are some craven optimists.)

6:33 Charles Woodson just murmured a nine word interview. No idea what any of those words were.

Mike Tomlin is only 38. How old are you, Ken? 35? And yet Mike Tomlin has already won a superbowl and been to two---

Kick off! Steelers return it to the 37 yard line! It's over! The Steelers WIN!!

6:35: The Steelers Fans and the Packers Fans are both so obnoxious that it calls to mind the slogan for crap movie: Alien Versus Predator.
Whoever wins... We Lose. Steelers to Punt. There has never been a punt returned in Super Bowl History. But that punt was seriously muffed up. I love the guys who point. And by the way, there is supposed to be a ton of nut twisting in those piles to force people to relinquish the football.

Green Bay survives a little scare. Call it a two week pregnancy scare. Let' see what Mr. Rogers has prepared for us.

By the way, I don't know how I'm going to schedule bathroom breaks. I might have to try and catheter myself. I'll also liveblog that.

Aaron Rodgers has a d in it. Rod-gers.

Jordie Nelson. No hands. That would have been six-ish. (6:43)

Thus far, not so exciting. First commercial.

Hack Job. Bud Light Commercial (featuring two African America Leads).
Dorito Animal Cruelty and a Kristin Wiig (lookalike) sighting. And a very strange Audi commercial featuring Kenny G.

A lot of weird in the first group of commercials. Let's see if the Bud Light diversity thing holds.

(6:47) Bathroom break during Steelers Penalty.

Just heard Buck say somebody "banged a beauty."

Doritos commercial featuring weird male/male thing. Chevy Cruze goes for "Old People can't hear."
Pepsi Max with funny commercial followed by a stern reminder that Black Eyed Peas will be performing. So sad. And horrifying.
I don't think the Pepsi Max commercial will be easily topped.
6:51.
The commercials are outpacing game pretty much here. Each commercial is well-thought out and well shot. Relatively few offensive plays can say the same. One good pass. One good run.

6:54 Just occurred to me that my dear friend Shelley has this blog emailed to her everytime I update it.
I'd like to apologize to Shelley right now. I hope that these updates are going to her smartphone as well and driving her nearly crazy at whatever LA Superbowl party she's at.

"Will I. Am and the Black Eyed Peas has promised something spectacular" warns Joe Buck. Whew. A commercial.

Budlight, Swashbuckling and product placement. 'Here we go' is a little lame as a slogan. 'The sure sign of a good time.'

I feel like car commercials that are vaguely interesting should be given extra points as that is a particularly difficult product to market. I mean, if you're not interested in buying a car there is really no way to 'tempt' you.

The Chicago Code and Fast Five. Two things I will never see unless I am stuck overnight in a hospital and my arms cannot work the remote control.

John Madden and George W. And Alex Rodriguez being fed popcorn by Cameron Diaz. Nice to see he's eating.

I think when you say "one of the best. all time." it is unnecessary to add "in the history of the game." Unless you are a former athlete in which case you're just gulping air and spitting words and hoping to keep your drool in your mouth.

(7:00) TOUCHDOWN. GREEN BAY! SHE SAID NO BEN! SHE SAID NO!!!
Geordi LaForge! Sorry. Jordi Nelson.
From Shelley in LA.

shelley has left a new comment on your post "Superbowl Live blog.":
truth be told, i only get the first blog, not anything after..that might be too much

I missed the Pepsi Max commercial I feel bad about that. Because it appeared to have more cans being thrown at people. The Doritos commercial was difficult to understand. I think that Doritos are much more likely to stop people from living than to reanimate them. I mean, can we fact check that?

7:05: Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig in Cowboys & Aliens (versus Predator). Unless that movie is really terrible it will make so much money. I mean just oodles and oodles.
Poseidon and Aliens are sparring over the ownership of a new Kia Optima. Ultimately beaten out by Aztecs (Mayans). All over a $19k car. Neither deities nor aliens nor indigenous types have any concept of money apparently.

TOUCHDOWN GREEN BAY!!! NO MEANS NO, BEN!!! NO NO NO!!

Do you think it's possible that Roger Goodell has called the fix in on this game? Because that was one of the worst passes we've seen in a Superbowl not thrown by Rex Grossman.

14-0 Greenbay.

Eminem commercial. For an Iced Tea Brisk commercial. We haven't seen these commercials since the old Rocky parodies ("Nothin's over just give me somethin' to drink!")

I love the unsportsmanlike conduct penalty for excessive celebration. I mean how about excessive penalization? Such a stupid, stupid rule.

7:10. Ben gets the ball back. He looks sad. Also stupid.
"Remember the Steelers were down by fourteen points in the first half in the divisional game to the baltimore ravens." They just watched the Packers put up 14 points in 24 seconds.

I find the notion of Pittsburgh sadness tremendously interesting. I am imposing a skunk rule right now. If the Packers go up 35 points I'm canceling this Liveblog. Interesting sidenote: I now have a rooting interest in this game.

7:14 Roethlisberger slow to get up! He could have "Cutler knee". NFL players with tweet accounts and hate in your hearts- tweet it up!! Nope. Ben just scampered (if you can scamper when you're 275 lbs) for 18 yards.

Commerce. Mustache sighting. Funny. South Indian. Bridgestone. Weird Ben Franklin sighting. Tim Allen is doing the Chevy Volt? Godaddy is a black mark on Superbowls since they've arrived. Ashleigh Madison would be a more welcome addition.
Lame Ford commercial and Go. Ford, Alicia Keyes and Jay-Z and Derek Jeter just go to show that there's no limit to how far marketing tie ins can go in terms of cost.

Back. 7:18. Woodson is 300 years old and he's still an awesome corner back. There should be some watch for players who are 35 years old and older. Because I can't imagine doing what these guys do at my age (note: or any age that I've ever been). 3 and 12. First down. I don't know how anybody ever watched football before the yellow lines. These are heady times.

7:21. Food needs are becoming an issue. Ordering delivery is nothing short of a terrible plan. I mean how long are you reasonably expecting to wait to get food delivered during half time? I suppose there is some appeal in testing that out.

Steelers Field Goal. 14-3. Chances of skunk 9.2%. According to the thing i just made up.

7:23. Budweiser takes a Tiny Dancer turn. Strange. Faith Hill in a Teleflora commercial. The word Rack is said in a Superbowl commercial. Take that Ashleigh Madison. Transformers continues to exist. John Travolta is drinking by himself at the SuperBowl.

7:26. BMW, Spartanburg South Carolina, "Does it make sense?" First Ipad commercial. A throwback to the apple commercial from 1984. Apple providing individualism to white people- OH SNAP it was Motorolla. And now I'm a sucker.
David Bowie and pollution. BMW commercial. Diesel has ch-ch-changed. I can't imagine trying to watch this game with alcohol. I would have passed out twenty minutes ago.

In an effort to protect myself from the Black Eyed Peas, I will be abandoning my post during half time. I just can't stand the thought of having to hear that awful group.
I never understand why people don't go for it more often on fourth and short. It's a soul crushing move when it works. And it works an awful lot.
Stop showing knee injuries. Warn me.

Cartoon commercial. Oh and it's a coke commercial. With Lord of the Rings overtones. I'm calling this an epic fail. Worst commercial of the day so far. Oh and Thor rears his head. No more superhero movies. And now the Star Wars commercial that everyone has watched over and over again on youtube. Kids reaction to the car sells it.

7:33 The first mention of Roethlisberger's sexual assault charges. As he gets the ball back. Nice timing, Fox. 1st and 20. Quick cut to shot of Troy Aikman and Joe Buck. Troy with no jacket. Looks like he's eating right. Nice to see.

They are now mentioning that Bart Starr is in the house tonight. That might indicate a teensy bit of boredom on behalf of the producers of this here Superbowl.

A little sports-related commentary: there has been zero pressure put on Roethlisberger (non-legal pressure I mean) during the course of this game. He can stand there all day. I can remember one blitz- and it resulted in an interception.

There are so many bad beards, bad hair cuts, and bad crops of facial hair in this game- it's astonishing. The field is beset by would-be wookies.

Snickers Commercial with Roseanne Barr. Obvious. Chimps commercial. Nothing doing yet. Steven Spielberg rocking a movie I've never heard of.
(7:41) Black Eyed Peas, you are the monster at the end of this quarter. And if you are a person who likes the Black Eyed Peas I'm going to encourage you to reevaluate your life choices.

And now we're waiting to get the official attendance count. PICKED OFF, BEN.

Please, please, please, let me see the back up QB warming up on the sideline...

That was a fairly sweet interception. Man, Rodgers throws hard. And a nice run by Starks and we are in Field Goal range. But a field goal doesn't get me closer to (eeeeehagagaga Black Eyed Peas are getting to sound to me like the Jaws theme... they lurk. closer and closer)

I know a fair number of- TOUCHDOWN!!! NO BEN! NO NO NO!
Wow. 21-3. That's what you call a pretty, uh, pretty good first half. I was just going to say, I know a fair number of Pittsburgh fans- odious people really- as I said these are two fairly insufferable fan bases- and it brings me some small modicum of pleasure to imagine their suffering. Because I am a small small person.
7:47. On the plus side, they're probably getting sloppy drunk and spilling their beer for which they have a "Terrible Towel" with which to mop up the booze.
I discussed this before. Hating Interest>Rooting interest. One more turnover could do it.

By the way, I'm monitoring facebook. There have been very few posts about this Superbowl which I think can be chalked up tot he fact that people are watching this game and not posting about it. But to be fair I feel like the whomping involved has kept a lot of people quiet.
Randel-El just made a big play. So maybe now people will start to update their releived frustrations...

Oh, snap, a commercial for Chevy Cruze which reads your facebook posts to you. Zuckerbeeeeeeeeeeeeerg!

This Summer, Captain America.... another movie I will save some cash on.

Nice carmax commercial. Funny. Easy. Memorable. Low cost. High bang for buck.

I was wrong. No relief expressed by Steelers fans.

2 minutes to go. Two timeouts for Pittsburgh. And The Packers are all getting hurt. Woodson this time. Green bay takes a timeout to look at him. But Fox does not go to commercial. Fascinating. That was a one million dollar decision.

How long will half time be? 35 minutes? It's all a source of fascination. Ben Roethlisburger just got planted. Heinz Ward makes the catch but Roethlisberger is shaking cobwebs off. Can he just be called "The Burger"? "Wimpy"? Anything that's not 22 letters long?

7:55 Been doing this for 100 minutes. I'm not fatigued. But I am hungry. This is the longest I've tried to do this. I'll link my past attempts. They are equally stupid.

Ward, Ward, Ward. Touchdown. It seems like somebody probably should have covered him. It's hard not to like Heinz Ward. It's too bad that he wasn't adopted by a Ketchup company as a child and then he could have been Heinz' ward, Heinz Ward. It's a lot to hope for.

The entire defensive secondary of the Packers are in the locker room, hurt. I need a little help here guys. The skunk rule is my only hope. :39 seconds left. And the Black Eyed Peas lurking just around the corner.

That's halftime. I'm headed to the grocery. Enjoy your terrible towels, Roethlisbuddies.

Wikileaks, Tunisia, and Egypt. Friday's WTF.

2011-01-28T17:12:00.004-05:00

Update: This. Wow.

And now a context attempt.

How do Wikileaks, Tunisia, and Egypt fit together? It's Friday, I have a ridiculous job, nothing to do, and a desk I must occupy so I'm getting down to the bottom of this.

This is all my understanding. I'm just a temp who works at a hotel. If I've got something wrong, straighten me out in the comments.

Egypt has been run by Hosni Mubarak for the last 29 years and 106 days (and it is really nice of Wikipedia to put that stat up on his page) since the assassination of Anwar Sadat by Khalid Islambouli.
In that time Egypt has been run under emergency law, where the state is able to jail people without a reason, freedom of the press is suppressed, elections are rigged, and all manner of unhappiness takes place in the government. Egypt has also been an ally of the United States, receiving $20 billion dollars in debt forgiveness for being an ally during the First Gulf War.

Obviously, the trouble with running a crooked regime is always in the transitions of power. It's easy to be a merciless strong man, succession is the trouble. Mubarak has neither a vice president UPDATE [he just did at 3pm Saturday 1/29, 24 hours after this was published) nor an announced successor. Rumor has it he's grooming his son, Gamal. Gamal is naturally qualified to be president of a kleptocracy because he worked for Bank of America. Gamal left Egypt two days ago to hide out in London.

Worse yet, there is a strong resistance in Egypt that has existed for many years, the extra legal political party "The Muslim Brotherhood" which in 2005, despite being illegal and having to run as independents rather than as members of TMB, took 20% of the seats in Parliament.
So even before this week's events, Mubarak has been hearing footsteps.

TUNISIA
On December 17th, 2010, a pushcart vendor named Mohammed Bouazizi was slapped in the face and spat upon by a female government official named Hamdi. She overturned his cart and confiscated his electronic scales. Mr. Bouazizi, who had long perceived himself the victim of goverment repression, was deeply upset by being treated disrespectfully by a female. He went to the government to seek redress of grievances and was turned away empty handed. Instead, he went out to the front of a government building with a gas can and set himself on fire.
Rarely in history are entire national revolutions so completely catalyzed by something so personal.
Tunisia, while widely believed to be corrupt, has been stable and an ally of the US (again because of their President Ben Ali's willingness to play ball with the War on Terror).
Within two days there were peaceful protests. Then two more suicides drew more of the national debate. Cue the Youtube. And the Twitter.
And before you knew it, Ben Ali was deposed and whisked away to that shining beacon of middle eastern freedom, Saudi Arabia (after being turned down by France. Ouch. Note to France: Baby Doc is okay but no Ben Ali? You've changed, man.)
Ben Ali left an enduring legacy of corruption but it is notable that his wife has been accused of looting the treasury of 1.5 tonnes of gold on her way out of the country.

Ben Ali's leaving Tunisia was greeted with several people setting themselves on fire. In Egypt. And Mauritania.

WIKILEAKS
So how does Julian Assange's upstart Wikileaks play into this, if at all.

Well, like this: For years, Tunisia's citizens had believed that their government while corrupt was completely supported by the United States. Because of Ben Ali's willingness to pursue Islamists in his country (like other US puppets in Central American dictatorships have chased around Communists at the U.S.'s bidding) it was presumed that Ben Ali's crimes against his country were ignored or even sanctioned by the U.S.
When the Wikileaks went out in November, all of a sudden the citizens of Tunisia had the rumors regarding their government's corruption confirmed by a host of confidential cables from the U.S. State Department. And the people of Tunisia could rely upon their verity because Congressmen and women in the United States were suggesting that Assange should be assassinated.
Further, these cables showed how rather than providing blanket support for Ben Ali, behind closed doors, the US condemned his hideous form of government. Rather than turning a blind eye to it, they were wondering when he would be made accountable.

Move over to Egypt. Dozens more leaks about the brutality of the government. A government that banned Facebook (you know how Farmville could bring down your government). There are leaks that indicate the army wouldn't support Mubarak's son Gamal.

Today, when Egypt canceled the Internet- simply pulling the plug nationwide (a move echoed by Syria who's trying to keep that freedom fever from catching)- the chaotic/evil/good/anarchist web continuum Anonymous has begun faxing thousand of pages of wikileaks to Egyptian Fax numbers.

This all stems from a man that Joe Biden recently called a Terrorist.

I haven't seen on my facebook stream the kind of support for the uprising in Egypt that I recall seeing for the uprising in Iran. Is this because Mahmoud Amadenejad was just more fun to hate? Or does it lack the single face of a martyr like Neda?

Or is there an unwillingness on the United States' part to get behind a movement that will remove a useful son-of-a-bitch from power in Egypt and replace him with an made to order Muslim plurality in "The Muslim Brotherhood"?

The War on Terror and the March toward Democracy are completely at odds here. The U.S. has already lost one sketch ally in Ben-Ali. When will they give up on their other sketchy partner in Mubarak?

Second update: White House threatens to revoke $1.5 billion in aid from Egypt. Are these really the guys we should be giving 1,500 million dollars to?

A bunch of recent discoveries, including two mom-based ones.

2011-01-27T18:33:00.004-05:00

FIRST,

So my mother is awesome. Has been for a while now. She sent me a pair of books for Christmas and I just finished the first one and wanted to tip it here. WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN? by Budd Schulberg debuted in 1941 and about a copy boy who sails in a short period of time to the head of a major Hollywood studio. Selling points:

Sleazy as hell. My mother claims that the book was a childhood favorite. I asked her about what about all of the empty, transactional sex that happens in the book? She says she didn't remember it. LIES.
Despite being completely filmic, and about filmmakers, and frequently having scenes described in film terminology- it's never been made into a Hollywood movie. Ben Stiller has it in his hands right now. Pray it waits a little longer...
Hollywood in the late 30s and early 40s is exactly as you'd picture it except with more communists and everybody talking like they're in a Phillip Marlowe novel. This book eats up Subway rides. Lasted four days.

SECOND,

For my mother's birthday I tried to be clever and give her some new music. I've been listening to a lot of Regina Spektor- it sounded to me like the kind of stuff she liked. She says she likes it well enough but says it reminds her of Laura Nyro. And naturally, I'm like who is Laura Nyro so I look and I'm totally blown away. I mean I'd heard of Stoned Soul Picnic but only The Fifth Dimension's version.

I am happy to report that through my mother's gracious intercession I ran into this tune featuring Patti LaBelle and written by Marvin Gaye*.

*Thanks, MPG. Good catch.

This song is awesome. Lots of her songs are awesome. I have to agree with my mom that she mops the floor with Regina Spektor. Who is also awesome.

THIRD

2010 featured some deletions from my life. I trumpet the additions but I think I have failed to sing loudly enough about the death of Verizon Wireless from my life. Each year I was spending 1800 dollars to keep Deanna and I in cell phones. 1800 dollars. And you know who we called most often? Each other. We had only 700 minutes between us and we couldn't use all of them.

So here's the solution we worked out: I bought a pair of Virgin Mobile Blackberrys (For 170 a piece) and got on VM's 35 bucks a month all you can eat data plan. I got myself a google voice number and started using my computer for home phone calls (either that or skype). Suddenly the cost for owning a functional cell phone drops down to 78 (with tax) for the two phones per month ($924 per year- a savings of $876 bucks).

Is the connection worse? I haven't noticed. The hook is I only get 300 minutes- but if I want to add 10 dollars to the plan I can jump it to 1,200 minutes. The discrepancy in price between Verizon and Virgin makes almost no sense to me.

Unless you absolutely need an iphone. And having that privilege is worth an extra thousand dollars a year.

FOURTH

I quit twitter. I'm a twitter quitter. I was on for quite a while there and I tried to step back and I tried to make it work but I cannot confine myself to 140 characters. I tried Tumblr. I think it's a cool website which does cool stuff.
More to the point, I couldn't help but look at the numbers involved and feel competitive. How many followers. How many retweets. Nobody knows how many people come to this blog. Except me. That said I do miss you Jimski. And my hope is that I can keep over writing here.

LAST

Quick plug for a couple of friends' blogs.
Ain't Studying You - MPG, a friend and regular commentator, is a man with whom I've engaged in a single eleven year conversation. He's just that much fun to talk to. Read what he writes. And follow him, because it's the kind of educated and insightful discussion that blogs can host. You'll be glad you did.
Thoughts of An Irrational Mind is my friend Angela's blog. And she's a mother of three and is currently in the middle of moving back from Germany. Her candor is harrowing.

"The Fighter" versus The Dogfighter

2011-01-20T10:24:00.000-05:00

I suppose a disclaimer is in order. I don't support what Michael Vick did. As a person who grew up around dogs, has deep emotional ties to dogs, and would love to own a dog, his actions are incomprehensible to me.
After he served his 23 months in prison, and paid a million dollars to the future care of the dogs that were confiscated from him, he has participated with the Humane Society on campaigns to end dogfighting. His apologies for his behavior have gone out on endless sports shows, Sixty Minutes, etc.
While it is certainly possible to doubt his contrition, the man was in jail for two years, lost millions of dollars in salary and endorsements, ended up in bankruptcy court, and of course was lately slated for execution by world-class douchenozzle Tucker Carlson.
It is very easy to find pundits who have written lengthy columns on how Michael Vick can never be forgiven for his actions, how he got off so very lightly, how the NFL should have made an example of him. Recently, President Obama credited the ownership of the Philadelphia Eagles for giving a convict a second chance and was widely excoriated in the press.
Michael Vick did some horrible stuff. No question. And I think giving up two years of your life in federal prison, as well as millions of dollars in endorsements, as well as going bankrupt, as well as becoming an international symbol for animal cruelty is a steep price to pay.

But I wanted to compare him to somebody else.

This attractive and well groomed fellow here is Mark Wahlberg.

I'd like to quote the wikipedia here.

When he was 16, Wahlberg approached a middle-aged Vietnamese man on the street and, using a large wooden stick, knocked him unconscious (while calling him "Vietnam fucking shit"), he also attacked another Vietnamese man, leaving him permanently blind in one eye, and attacked a security guard (again using racist language).^[8]^[9] For these crimes, Wahlberg was charged with attempted murder, pleaded guilty to assault, and was sentenced to two years in jail at Boston'sDeer Island House of Correction, of which he served 45 days.^[8]^[10]

In his defense: he said he was drunk both times he attacked Vietnamese people.

When he was 21, Mark Wahlberg then went on to have his bodyguards hold down Robert Crehan and then kick him in the face until he'd broken his jaw. Crehan dropped the charges when Wahlberg had paid him enough.

These events took place many years ago, but they have not served to stigmatize Wahlberg in any way. The fact that he left a man blind in one eye during a racially motivated attack is not even mentioned when he puts out a film.

It is difficult for me to compare crimes. But I'll endeavor.

There is a culture of dogfighting in the South. Michael Vick didn't invent it. One could argue it is comparable to that tourist favorite, bullfighting that exists in Spain. Not every culture relates to dogs the same way. In some countries, millions of people eat them. Nobody is suggesting that we roll up on South Korea and liberate their food-dogs. But without a doubt, Michael Vick violated the laws of our country. He's paid a fairly steep price, personally and professionally.

Mark Wahlberg when asked by ABC News if he ever apologized to the man he admitted he had not. But assured people that he was not bothered by it

"I don't have a problem going to sleep at night. I feel good when I wake up in the morning."

So let's play the race card here.

How do you suppose it would have gone for Mark Wahlberg had he been black and committed some hate crimes while drunk at sixteen? Do you suspect he would have been granted the same number of chances? Do you suppose the police would have dropped the charges when Wahlberg kicked the man's face repeatedly when he was 21?

There aren't a lot of dog-fighting stories in the media for me to do an apples to apples comparion. When Governer Mike Huckabee's son tortured a dog to death (by hanging it, slitting its throat, and then stoning it) as a Boy Scout Leader, he lost his job with the Boy Scouts. He did not serve any jail time. He was seventeen at the time and turned eighteen- there was no prosecution for the crime of animal cruelty nor was his father prosecuted for failing to control his son.

Here's the last thing: Michael Vick's talents are beyond dispute. He is simply one of the greatest football players in the country and has demonstrated it before and after his time in prison. Where he fits precisely in the pantheon of American athletes can be debated, but it cannot be debated that his skills place him there.

There are very few objective metrics by which an actor can be measured. Box office is probably the closest thing that exists to a non-subjective standard and even then, an actor's influence upon the box office success of their pictures is greatly swayed by dozens of other factors (distribution, critical success, release timing).

There is no way to look at Mark Wahlberg and say- this man needs to be in our movie based on objective factors. Mark Wahlberg couldn't be a successful actor unless everyone who ever cast him looked at him, and his past, and said "This is okay. We are okay with his blinding a Vietnamese dude." It is acceptable for him to move on with his life and be in buddy comedies with Will Farrell.

When, if ever, do you think this will be the case for Michael Vick?

Liveblogging "The Social Network"

2011-01-19T21:32:00.000-05:00

I've decided to try and comment on my feelings on the film "The Social Network" in real time using the comments section of my blog. As a SAG member, this movie is required viewing for an informed vote in the upcoming SAG awards. Feel free to follow along as I try to update my constantly changing feelings regarding the film.

Spoiler alert: Duh, I will be mentioning spoilers.

Feel free to add your two bits.

-twnch

Blogging on people's blogs.

2011-01-18T13:37:00.000-05:00

The other day I read a response on someone's facebook page which concluded "sorry to blog on your facebook page." And I laughed because I recognized that I catch myself doing exactly that on a regular basis.

And I do not understand why it does not happen more often.

There appears to be an issue of decorum in responding to someone in a social medium- a golden mean of how long you can respond before you are considered ...gauche? The bias against prolixity in favor of terseness or worse yet self-conscious 'lol'ing seems to me a sad state of affairs. There used to be a reason to keep your response brief- you'd run out of allocated paper, or you were paying by the word, or the editor of the letters section would clip you to preserve precious column inches.

But now, when there's no real limit to how much a person can say imposed upon them, the overriding position is to say nothing at all. Or if you are going to say something, to keep your comments as brief as possible.

I suppose this gets a little bit at the devaluation of friendship that stems from online relationship. For me, friendships are those people with whom I freely share ideas. I do not censor myself in the hopes that something that pops out of my mouth, sparked by the glimmering minds of my friends, will be of interest and value to me. Immediately, I think of those friends with whom I share conversations that have run for years, where specific iterations of the conversation are referenced later and become part of a larger shorthand of the relationship.

The thing that attracted me to blogging originally was the possibility of starting a continuing conversation in print. Too often in a verbal chat details slip into the fuzziness of mutual memory and positions can shift without being perceived. In a blog, there is the ability to reference all of the prior data- to quote directly in the hopes of gaining more from a discussion.

At any rate, I wanted to make sure that you (whoever you are) are invited to say in this space whatever the hell you'd like to about anything I say. Or about anything else. Those of you whom I know that visit are people who's opinions would do well to be written down, as you all are some bright people capable of providing me insight even (and perhaps especially) in places where we disagree.

Lastly, if I've blown up the comments of your blog by writing for longer than is currently the fashion, please accept my apologies if it skeeved you out. Someday I'll get better about sharpening my thoughts into a single sentence. But in the meantime, just skim my stuff. :)

Stewart > Olbermann

2011-01-11T21:14:00.000-05:00

What I stated a couple of days ago about Jon Stewart being the voice of sanity and reason is demonstrated here. Thoughtful, intelligent, circumspect, more affecting than Olbermann, Stewart takes time to put the event into context by decommissioning his own event.

Please watch, if you haven't already.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Arizona Shootings Reaction

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog</a>

The Daily Show on Fac

A graphic regarding my base and ignoble feelings about the King's Speech.

2011-01-10T14:00:00.000-05:00

It's not that it's a bad story, it's just kind of pumped up into a bigger deal than it was. I mean, the English archers at Agincourt did most of the work anyway. And the French were really handicapped by the rain...

A reaction to Keith Olbermann's Comment on Saturday's Shooting

2011-01-09T11:00:00.002-05:00

A quick response re: Olbermann.

A lot of people are posting Keith Olbermann's Special Commentary on the shooting. And it's idiotic. Olbermann speaks for nearly 10 minutes less than twelve hours after the event with very few details released about the shooter, his motivations, his confederates, his anything.

It seems like Olbermann's goal here is to get out in front of the story- to shape the narrative surrounding the event into a usable political instrument.

Even more than Olbermann's message, I'm irritated by the need for instant hindsight. Phony context. Since there is an absolute dearth of information at the moment, why the rush for immediate context? Shouldn't the story be "we don't know so we won't speculate." Isn't that responsible journalism?

His points are largely irrelevant. There are any number of political ads that are in terrible taste, including Palin's, but the idea that we can make politics in America a safer place by cleaning up our metaphors strikes me as nothing short of ludicrous. This country has a long track record with representative violence, violent media, violent video games, violent sports, etc. The notion that people should change their modes of communication to protect the weak-minded who might be overly swayed is simply put a shitty notion. Frank Zappa said this in Congress when testifying against putting warning labels on music, it was true then and it's true now, "They're just words."

Consider for a moment that this wasn't simply a political assassination attempt. 6 people were killed including a nine year old girl. So right away that tells you that this wasn't a Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth situation. This was a mass murder. Olbermann's narrow focus on the political causes for such an event only serve to freshly politicize the event.

Some of you cagier politicos are thinking: BUT if Keith doesn't get there first and put his spin on the story then Fox News will get their spin on the story and then the story will be remembered vis-a-vis the narrative of the Fox News narrative and this is what always happens and BOOHOO. Don't care. This is a national tragedy and when national tragedies get politicized into populist nonsense, 9-11 gets turned into a war in Iraq. This is exactly the time that the media needs to be calm, sensitive, and dignified. And this is exactly the time that my liberal friends, who are supposed to be educated and intelligent and discerning, should demand nothing less.

I know. BUT Olbermann's our guy. I know he's been applying for the position with his stern, straight-to-the-camera no-nonsense nonsense. But he's not our guy. Sadly, Jon Stewart ends up being our guy because of clowns like Olbermann.

Lastly, The Atlantic had a very intelligent piece on political assassinations yesterday. Read it. It provides a little actual context.

Why I Hid You On Facebook

2011-01-06T17:47:00.003-05:00

Dead-horse tickling

2011-01-05T17:34:00.000-05:00

Just a few things.

I've just started a job that is not at all unlike the first job I had in New York- which is too say: comically slow, hilarious hours, not enough money, and always wearing a suit. But the upshot is this: I have no reason not to be putting down a few thoughts into the ether(net).

MOVIES

~~it is not my intention to be crass.~~

"SPunk'd"

Does anybody else think that this new movie about casual sex between friends and starring Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman ought to be called 'Spunk'd'? Ivan Reitman directed this? And why does Ashton Kutcher continue to get second chances as an actor? Can't there be a ceremonial film featuring him and Jennifer Aniston that prevents them from contaminating other movies?


We are fat.

And while Ivan Reitman is busying himself with Ashton Kutcher, Ron Howard rolls over to this nonsense.

I was watching a video of Vince Vaughn from Swingers last night. The man has gained sixty pounds easily since 1996. And yet Hollywood continues to try to sell him as a leading man. But this time they've decided to place him next to Kevin James and hope that he'll look better by comparison. It disappoints me. it makes me sad and angry.

Look at what Vince used to be like (incidentally, the other guy who doesn't look emo- is Iron Man director Jonathan Favreau who also appears to have cloned himself repeatedly and then eaten his clone repeatedly.)

Lastly, I'm performing tonight. I've been performing about once a month lately doing sort of funny, monologue-y things. But if you find yourself in Murray Hill tonight looking for a bar and a lot of low-brow but highly theatrical short sketches featuring f-bombs a-plenty, drop me a line.

Lastly, I have Katy Perry's teenage dream in my head. I got it in there at the gym two days ago and ever since it's like my brain has a computer virus. I wake up, and it's there, every time I try to start up a new browser window, that song loads instead. I'm this close to getting a screwdriver and going after my hippocampus through my ear.

I'll write more soon.
Probably.

Testes! Testes! One, two...three?

2010-12-16T16:55:00.000-05:00

LAY OFF, I'VE BEEN WORKING.

Inconsequential thoughts regarding sports teams that i hate

2010-09-27T00:40:00.000-04:00

I no longer spend much time cheering for my favorite teams.
They are not particularly good.
So if I invest three hours to watch a game and they lose, I feel like I've wasted those hours.
However, I still enjoy the soap-opera story lines that sports has to offer.

I think I've found a way to enjoy sports without the crippling pain of cheering for losing teams.
No, I'm not switching to cheering for winning teams. That seems wrong to me.
Instead I've taken to hating teams. To actively cheering for the demise of individual players and entire teams.

I'm not joking.

I root against probably 8 baseball teams, 10 professional football teams, half a dozen college football teams, and countless individual players.

And I really enjoy it. Much more than rooting for one or two sentimental favorites.

Here's how it works. I root against Notre Dame. All the time. I hate them. I hate their fans. I hate their general attitude of privilege and entitlement. And, lucky for me, they've been terrible for nearly ten years. And each and every time they lose, I gain a small amount of satisfaction. If they win, am I crushed? Not at all. I don't really care that deeply. So for emotional investment, hating Notre Dame has provided me with excellent return.

Some investments of hatred take longer to pan out. I hate Brett Favre. (I've never met the man, so obviously hate is an imprecise choice of words but I really want something bad to happen to him.) There's no logical reason to hate the man- he's an excellent professional athlete. But something about the way he's put together drives me nuts. And I've hated him for at least ten years. And he's been good pretty much that entire time. So here we have an example of an emotional investment of hate that has really underperformed.

I hate the Yankees in principle but apart from Alex Rodriguez it's difficult to hate the individuals.

I hate the Cubs. But only when they contend. When they play really poorly, as they have this year, it feels to cruel to hate them. Their nickname is so hapless- you picture a group of feckless baby bears, terrified on a baseball diamond. But they are a blue chip team to hate. 100 years without a World Series.

I hate the Celtics, Patriots, Boston College, Boston Marathon, and really anything to do with Boston athletics. I don't have any strong reason for these feelings. I didn't like Boston as a college student, but that is now 284 years ago.

A lot of the teams I hate simply because I know someone who likes them very much. And the thought that that person should be experiencing emotional pain in a given moment because of his team's failure to win tickles me. This is sadistic. I should be bigger than this. I am not.

But I find it is very important to maintain a wide variety of hated teams and players because then by the law of averages, you will find something to enjoy nearly every week in sports. If I were a statistician, I could calculate the odds of all of my hated teams and players coming out ahead, but I imagine they are close to staggering.

So if you're new to sports and are considering choosing a favorite team, allow me to suggest going the other way and picking about a third of the teams in a given league to hate. And then joy in their losses. It's far more enjoyable and a lot less work.

My Four Month Mensiversary (because anno still means year)

2010-09-15T00:59:00.005-04:00

I'd been waiting to write about this one for a while.

Because I knew that when I wrote about it, I'd get to think about it.

I got married in May.

About a year ago I proposed and she said yes.

And since the day she said she'd marry me, my life has reset. So many of the internal scoreboards, counters, ciphers, and odometers clicked over to zeroes. And I realized that for the rest of my life, I would have a teammate. Sure, a lover and a friend and someone to split entrees with at restaurants. But for me, the thing that has resonated is that I finally have someone who is on my side against the ludicrous cruelty that exists in the world. I'm not alone. I have a partner. No matter how much trouble I get into, no matter how stupid a thing I have done, she will be the first person I call. For the rest of my life. I cannot imagine what a relief that presents to my parents.

What's more, I tend to view my past as a fulminating, volcanic landscape with dinosaur bones and smoldering car wrecks. I look at my life and I've always been awed by the Shame of having pissed away good opportunities (too many to list) and the Fear of, well, everything. When I'm feeling down, it seems that my adult life has been a frantic darting between Fear and Shame.

Getting married seems to me a giant Fuck You to Fear and Shame.

Deanna proposed first. This is a detail that will be likely edited out in future retellings. I think she proposed twice. Once after having made me penne pasta in vodka sauce. And another time later. The "Pasta" proposal made me angry. "Give me a chance!" I said. I had been engaged once before. The experience raised in me a level of trepidation for the process of getting married. In fact I began to tell her, "I want to be married. I don't want to get married." To which, months later, she responded with the second proposal.

"Let's elope."
What?
"We'll go to Vegas. And get married. Piece of cake."

I tried to explain that as she was her mother's only daughter, her mother had a right to plan her wedding and I didn't want to be the guy who took that away. So elopement was out. But the ball was rolling.

The following sentence looks terrible. I made demands of Deanna if she wanted to marry me. If I was to have a partner for life, she would have to join me in my lifelong avocations! For instance, I said she'd have to learn to play the guitar. She did. She plays well. It astonishes me. I said she'd have to learn to run long distances with me. She did. She runs more than I do. I said she'd have to read War and Peace so we could talk about it. And she did. For me. Women get a ring as proof of partnership but I wanted something that couldn't get lost. I wanted to have passions that we shared together. I didn't want to have to go away from her to find my heart's bliss in anything.

550 words of prologue, and now the good stuff.

We got married on the North Carolina/South Carolina border. Right next to her parents house outside of Greenville. We got married at a YMCA chapel called Pretty Place that her father had taken us to when I'd visited two years ago. Her father spoke at length on that trip about the importance of 'commitment' describing it as a 'magic carpet that can take you everywhere.' At that time, on her porch, the words weighed heavily in the air- fraught with subtext- but now they seem like pure prophecy.

The thing that sucks about memory is it is unreliable. The more times you remember something the more unreliable the memory becomes. Details start to splinter and fray. So I write about this tonight for the same reason I always write- in the hopes of taking a quick etching of these memories before they turn into memories of my wedding photo album.

So rather than give you a travelogue of the events of my wedding, I'd just like to share with you a couple of my mind's snapshots.

At the rehearsal dinner, the night before, there was terrific food and drink and beer and company. People I hadn't seen together in more than a decade were eating ribs next to each other. And people gave toasts to Deanna and me and my older brother and my younger brother put on a skit about me when I was four. I think they chose to do the skit about me when I was four because any skit about me when I was an adult would have risked appalling members of the bride's family.

And then my sister-in-law stood up to give a toast. My sister-in-law is among the best things that ever happened to my family. She kind of knows this. She carries herself with an ease and grace that make me want to be like her, even though she is a mother of three and I am not. And she mentioned that when my mother raised my brothers and me, my mom was the only woman in the family opposite four boys and a husband. When Becky, my sister-in-law, married my brother that doubled the number of women but it was still five to two. Then my sister-in-law had three daughters. Which makes my wife the tiebreaker. There are now more women in my family than men.

Of course we howled because Becky is a math teacher and put together a math toast. But then she played dirty. 12 years ago, I was my brother's best man at his wedding. Having never been to a reception, I knew I had to make a toast but I figured I'd write the beginning and the end and I'd fake it in the middle. She said she'd written down the final words I'd said at my toast and she'd meant to frame them but instead she kept them in a drawer in her kitchen. And looked at them from time to time when things were rough. And then she said them to me:

"May your marriage be long, and never seem so. May you find happiness in your God and each other. And may you continue in your parents' proud tradition of having exceptional children."
And I lost it. Because that toast that I made had come true for them. I could look at their family and see that I had received my wish. And my body started heaving with sobs. And moments later, I sobbed my way through a thank you toast which some people found moving and which unfortunately is on the wedding video…
There were any number of odd things that happened on the way to the wedding. My father losing his tuxedo. Me forgetting the rings. The large amounts of hail. After I discovered I'd forgotten the wedding rings my little brother and best man absorbed my abuse with a grace that would make saints jealous. But we arrived. And having discovered that neither my father nor my older brother wear wedding rings, I had to ask my father-in-law for his. He gave it to me, and Deanna's engagement ring was substituted for her wedding ring and the hail stopped and the rain stopped and suddenly…

The canyon beyond the mountains was gray and white and green with wisps of smoke that clung to the trees. It was beautiful beyond the words I have in me to describe it and rendered obvious why it was we should be getting married here. These were the mountains where my love grew up.

And during the ceremony we held hands, and we shook, and we trembled, and we looked into each other's eyes. And the man we hired to talk talked. And two of our friends read things we chose for them to read. And then a third friend, who was filling in for a friend who couldn't make it because of the storm, read an e.e.cummings poem.

This friend of mine is one of those secret ninja friends who gets me utterly despite the infrequency of our contact- for whatever reason, this friend of mine has direct access to remote parts of my spinal column and stomach.

And I heard him say:

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
And the tears flowed between us. And I will, I hope, forever remember my wife biting her lip and squeezing my hand as I heard those words. The words she chose. That my friend said.
One more, then off to bed.

After the wedding there was more food. A beautiful dinner in a beautiful location beautifully decorated. The amount of 'loved' I felt at this point was simply not to be believed. My friend Matt had agreed to DJ for us. He DJs a bit in Brooklyn. I explained to him the songs I was thinking about and he agreed that yes, they should be considered. I also explained that there would be a strict ban on hip-hop as Deanna's mother was not a fan. He nodded solemnly.

"I understand."
Thanks, man.
"But I will be playing some hip-hop at you and Dee's wedding."
But her mother hates it-
"I understand. Don't worry about it. There will be hip-hop."

The wedding wasn't large. 66 people or so. And the space we were in was pretty big so when Deanna and I got up to dance together for the first time ("This Will Be Our Year" by the Zombies, thank you very much) I felt a little awkward and self-conscious. And then I danced with my mother ("Loves Me Like A Rock", Paul Simon) and felt about as awkward as your supposed to feel dancing with your mother. And I had that sinking scary feeling that I was going to spend the rest of my wedding self-conscious about the party part of the wedding. Was it a good party? Were people having enough fun?

And then another minor miracle took place. My three nieces, ages 8, 6, and 3 took to the dance floor with us and for the first half hour when people were reluctant to dance because it was early, the five of us danced. Perhaps you didn't know this, but it is impossible to feel self conscious while dancing with a beaming 8 year old girl or a laughing six year old girl or a three year old girl who can't dance just yet but is completely comfortable running circles around you for an entire song. Just at that moment when I was going to be in my head, these three beautiful girls came and saved me from my silly-ass self.

And then everyone came out and danced, the young people and the old people and Matt effortlessly laced in Nelly's Hott in Herr between Motown classics and I watched my mother-in-law groove to the sound of a guy who grew up not far from where I did in St. Louis.

But the evening truly belonged to Deanna. I don't think in the nearly six years we've been together we've ever been out dancing. This was the first time. And I don't think in the nearly four hours of our wedding reception that we left the floor for more than twenty minutes. You know how at your wedding reception you're supposed to go table to table and talk to everybody and thank them for coming? We didn't do that. We just danced the whole night. And if anybody wanted to say hi, they came out and danced with us.

And my wife was radiant. She led conga lines, she did the splits in her wedding dress during "Come on Eileen," she was as vivacious and beautiful as I could've dreamed.

And there was this moment. There was a song, and I forget the song, and she and I were dancing and I got a glimpse of her, looking the way she did just then. And you see someone a million times when you're together for a long while, but very rarely do you actually notice what they look like. But for that one single moment, I saw how beautiful my wife was. Not her innate goodness, or her wild sense of humor, of her unbelievable talent, but just what a fine looking human being she is. And I realized that if this were somebody else's wedding, if she and I weren't getting married, if I was just meeting her that night for the first time, how unbelievably psyched I would be to get her phone number.

A while back I figured what it was to be in love. To be in love, truly in love, you have to be convinced that you are stealing the person you are with from the universe- that you are getting a better deal, a larger share, a more choice portion than you ever could've deserved. But in that moment on the dance floor, realizing who I had for this night, for this lifetime, in spite of my ten thousand flaws, and the smoldering wreckage of my Fear and Shame, I may have actually been jealous of myself.

By the way, my wife wrote a lovely description of our wedding as well. It includes some great pictures. You can find it here.

The Audition

2010-09-08T22:29:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, I had my second ever Broadway audition.

SPOILER ALERT: I don't think I got it.

Acting has never been something I did easily. I was never a person who took to the stage with the natural grace of a born yadda yadda yadda. No. Those of you who have known me for a long time know that I am by the grace of God and deoxyribonucleic acid a spaz. It's a sad fact. All memories I have of myself as a child and even an adolescent are fraught with images of a desperate need for attention coupled with an extraordinary lack of the fundamentals of hand-eye coordination.
All children are like that, you think to yourself. Nah.
A brief list of Injuries From Childhood:

Age 6. Stitches in skull from aggressively headbutting a bully's backpack. The backpack contained a metal lunchbox.
Age 7. Fractured humerus while attempting to bounce a gerbil on a pillow on a bunkbed.
Age 9. Stitches in eyebrow from smashing face against radiator after balance-beaming on bathtub wearing slippery socks.
Age 10. Stitches in hand- from slamming knuckles into side mirror of car while riding bicycle. NB: The side mirror did come off.
Age 11: Stitches in knee while attempting to jump over an 18 inch brick wall.

But these are the innocent wounds of childhood! you say, attempting to be piteous. So I break out the big gun:

Age 16: Broken arm while celebrating a touchdown. Not scoring one. Celebrating one. I broke my arm in jubilation. This was not during some actual game with cheerleaders and uniforms. Just some guys in a park. Also: I did not score the touchdown. Even at 16, as I held my arm to my belly, I realized I had tunneled into new and fresh layers of ignominy.

So... I'm trying to say I'm not a natural.

However, I do have a great need for self-expression.

And I talk too much.

So people think that it is feasible that I might be an actor.

Also! I cannot sing. I do sing. In shows. For people who pay money. But history tells me again and again I should not.

Witness!

At age 13, during my Roman Catholic Confirmation, we were all to sing a special song (I still remember the melody) BUT I was instructed by the Monsignor not to actually sing with the rest of my class but rather to mouth the words to the song so that my voice would not distract from the atonal droning of the other Confirmees. This happened. My voice was displeasing to REPRESENTATIVES OF GOD.
At age 17, I did my first musical. If I ever end up in AA, and I get to step 9 where I have to make amends I will have to hunt down every person who saw that production and give them back the six dollars they paid to see the show. And let them kick me in the stomach.

But somehow, someway in this entire crazy universe, I have now been to two Broadway auditions.

The first one was for Lieutenant of Inishmore. I don't even know how they found me. I had just moved to New York City and there must be some sort of mandatory reporting of redheaded Irish looking guys in the casting directors offices. Because I got a call from somebody important that I needed to come audition.

And so I played it cool. So cool that I told as few people as I could. Not my parents. Not my girlfriend (now wife). Nobody.

I barely prepared. I didn't want to seem stiff. I didn't reread the play. I didn't want to mess with my original, fresh interpretation.

And I walked in, and I gave one of the most ...boring readings I have ever given. My Irish dialect was non-existent. I knew I sucked. The director looked at me mercifully and allowed me to leave.

And as I walked out, I thanked Jeebus that I hadn't told anybody. Because I didn't have to give anybody the news that I sucked. It was as if it had never happened.

And I kept the audition a secret for years. Because to get a shot at something amazing and piss it away like that is a dirty, dirty thing.

So, a friend of mine named Joe lately got himself into this Broadway show that's about to open named Bl--dy Bl--dy Andrew J-ckson. (I don't want to show up on anybody's google updater, discretion is very important in these assignations.) He's a guy who has been handling his career brilliantly- he's directing, he's acting, he's producing, basically he's doing all the stuff I ought to be doing but lack the testicles to do. And he's doing it well! And when he got into the show I gave him the highest compliment I could give another actor. Particularly one that I know.

I hated him a little bit.

Most actors will deny feelings of hatred. They may cop to jealousy, but they're lying. It's an instantaneous sort of hatred. Like a flash fire. It comes and it goes right away, the superego comes in with a fire extinguishes and puts out the ego and chides the id for arson. And you move on with your life.

The best compliment my wife ever gave me when she saw me in a show was 'I was jealous of you.' It's part of the gig.

So this guy who is exemplary in basically every way I can think of, handling his career with rectitude ends up pitching me to the casting director for a possible role in this Broadway Musical.

I came home from the gym, flushed with endorphins and sweat and got an email from the casting director saying Joe had recommended me and asking if I might be interested in auditioning. And that's when I had to remember the hating and realize that I was kind of a gonad.

I called Joe- he was gracious as hell, fielded my torrent of panicked questions. I'd never seen the show even though I had opportunities in between getting married, honeymooning and doing a show in Florida. Not a lot of opportunities but I didn't go when I could've and now...FUCK!

But he gave me some guidelines on what to prepare and the style to prepare them and then...

I called in a favor with a friend of mine who knows things. Like really knows things about theatre. Guy who's been nominated for a Pulitzer in playwriting. And I begged him to help me.

And he agreed!

And then I called a friend of mine who I knew was going to be out of town to help me pick a song and suddenly he was IN TOWN! And he'd be happy to help me.

And I told everybody I could that I was going to have this audition. And instead of hiding it, I was going to give it my absolute best shot, and petition the folks who cared about me to send positive energy my way so that I might just get it!

And my playwright friend gave me THREE FUCKING HOURS of his time. Just to help me. And you know how when you have time with a really great teacher, they don't just help you think about things but they actually impart to you a little bit of understanding of yourself? That's what this guy did. I left his apartment relaxed- he made me feel like I wasn't going in there with my hand out; I was offering this production what I could do.

And the night before the audition I lost my voice.

Not completely. I could still talk. Just not loud. And I couldn't sing. At all. And there was to be singing at this audition.

And I thought about cancelling. I did. I didn't want to embarrass myself. I told my wife. And she told me just to wait till the next morning.

And I did.

And with a combination of homeopathic medications, gentleness, and good old fashioned humidity when the time for the audition came around my voice was more or less whole.

And I went in. And I sang. And they laughed at my stuff. Which was good because it was supposed to be funny. And I read and they laughed some more.

And the director, who's name is Alex, is a ridiculously charismatic, good-looking nice guy. He made me feel like I'd done a good job.

And I left.

And suddenly this adventure that had been the coolest, most fun, and exciting thing that had happened since my miraculous wedding was over.

And for the past 36 hours I've checked my phone every fifteen minutes. To make sure it's on. To make sure it works. To make sure it's still receiving calls. That no calls have accidentally gone to voicemail. That there have been no dropped calls.

And today, for spite, my phone never rang once all day.

It's unusual for me to get completely shut out by the phone gods.

Until my friend Matt called.

"Did you get the show?"

I don't think so.

"Are we still on for Fishbone tomorrow in New Jersey?"

(Fishbone is a band. They are awesome. Matt and I have seen them four or five times together.)

Yeah, man.

"Great, I'll pick you up at Canal Street and Broadway at noon. We'll have some fun in New Jersey."

And like that, my life picks up where it left off.

And I'm hilariously sad that I'm not going to be on Broadway this week.

And I am pretty happy to be this sad.

Stop crying. Have some carbs.

2010-09-01T02:07:00.000-04:00

My wife has left me.
She leaves me all the time.
This time for six weeks. She returns in October.
I was just away for much of June and all of July.
We were married in May. By the time she returns we will have spent most of our married lives apart. And the nature of our careers is such that time apart is a sign of success.
Nuts to that.
So in my wife's absence, and as I spend my time searching for more of that fabulous gainful employment, I have been busying myself in a number of ways. Making music for no one to hear. Working on a play that no one is allowed to read. Learning Italian. And giving up carbs.
Giving up carbs, you say. What's that about?
I'm approaching my 35th birthday. It's coming up so soon that I no longer bother telling people I'm 34. I'm 35 already. And I realize that it means that I'm on the downside of all of my physical prowesses. Which is difficult as I never really had an athletic peak. So I have this vain hope, this imagining that maybe just maybe I could get down to 160 lbs by my birthday. It's not a far trip. Not a short one either. The kind of goal that seems accomplishable. And I am a man without a wife and without a job so accomplishable goals sound great right now.
Here's the fun stuff about carb free living. It's completely impossible to do sanely. Carrots are loaded with carbs. Carrots. Everything has carbs. And if you successfully remove yourself from carbohydrates you are rewarded with halitosis. The first big sign that you're on the road to insane and self destructive weight loss is that your breath stinks.
And then your pee smells impossibly like cat pee.
And then something really weird happens. You go into ketosis. Your brain, which used to enjoy munching on fats, decides if there are no fats to eat that it will just munch up some ketones. This is cool, your brain is fine with this, but for me I have noticed some serious shifts.
Like sleeping. Which once was an activity I enjoyed.
Now, I lay in bed and continually repeat the bridge to CeeLo's song F**K YOU. "

Yeah i'm sorry, I can't afford a ferrari,

But that don't mean I can't get you there.

I guess he's an xbox and i'm more atari,

But the way you play your game ain't fair.

The song is absolutely catchy. But the words mean nothing to me. I don't feel the way the song suggests towards anybody. But for four hours I sang it to myself from two to six in the morning the other night.
And it keeps happening. It's 2 AM right now and I'm seriously considering baking something. I got time. Sleep was something I used to do apparently.
The other thing is- carbohydrates are comforting. When your alone and life is making you lonely you can always go- eat some bread. And I did. I would dive into bready, starchy, potato-y goodness with nary a scruple. And now I can't. Tonight I made a cheese burger and tried to use lettuce instead of bread. I looked at it on the plate and it looked like something from Gilligan's Island.
And then around 11:45, I kind of snapped. I started weeping. I miss my wife. And from their the self-pity started taking the wide turns that self-pity does and I became inconsolable and my wife was an absolute champ in talking me down.
But she did suggest that maybe
just maybe
I ought to eat some bread.

Firing this thing back up.

2010-08-30T19:32:00.000-04:00

Five years ago I started this blog. Oddly enough, I started it on Friendster (which is now wholly-owned by Al Qaeda. Friendster. Not my Blog. My blog was at one point partially funded by the Saudi Government but the money trail stops there.)

It's five years and a month ago now that I began my blog. These were the first two sentences I wrote.

The other day I woke up at nine p.m. and had red wine for breakfast.

Time has no meaning to those of us who work the overnight shift.

I would never write an opening sentence like that now. Even if it were true. Especially if it were true.

The thing whole thing has changed, I tell you.

Most of the blogs that I have followed through the years have fallen off or disappeared. A stalwart few continue in earnest. One of my friends now blogs professionally (this idea in 2005 would have been tantamount to scratching your butt professionally. But for some reason, the navel-gazing that took place five years ago whereby a person might spend 800 words in the pursuit of an observed experience or the clarification of an opinion now seem as quaint as a fountain pen. It's all micro-blogging and status updates. Shades of meaning are so 2006.

So blogging became jejune. And you know how I feel about jejunosity.

But other stuff happened too! For starters, people started reading what I was writing. Strangers (which was awesome!) and then people I knew (which was strange...) I would write something here and my parents would ask me about it. It makes sense- they're adults, they have questions and opinions, and I enjoy writing about them so seems fair that they should ask questions about things I would write. But these friends and loved ones reading what I would write put me deeply in my head about what to write about. It wasn't the writing that bothered me. It was the choosing.

And all your recycling went for nought!

And then the privacy concerns started to come up. Identity theft. And people being able to google anything. I worked like a galley slave to keep my name out of my blog for that a future employer might read it. But now I realize I'm never going to have another real job because the earth is going to be destroyed by sunspots. I felt concerned that my writing would embarrass people connected/related to me. For quality or content. My mother once told me I was the most frightened person she knew. Or at least I think she told me that. Fortunately for me conversations with parents are not googlable. So I'll print my name here. I'm not scared any more. It's K-n F-rr-gn-.

Then came the analytics. Around 2007, you could start to see how many people were coming to your blog. And I would watch that. And care about it. A day where 50 people came to my blog was a lot better than a day where 13 came by. Why? Because 50 is a larger number than 13. What benefit did that larger number grant me? I'm like you. I'm looking for any conceivable measure of progress. Any potentially positive metric that might point me in the right direction. I may have my head up my butt, but I always have my finger in the wind.

So I stepped away from the blog.

And a couple of people have nicely asked me to come back. Which was awesome of them. Even if they were only doing it to be nice- the very act of telling someone who likes to write that you'd like them to write should be in the Bible as corporal work of mercy. If you ever get a chance to casually encourage someone, take it. I issue that axiom with a caveat: if the person you are encouraging in turn points to you as a muse or a mentor- run away as fast as you fucking can.

But now I'm back. For a while anyway. And I'm going to try to go back to writing in a way that I enjoy. Because I really do enjoy writing. And if it's funny, great. If it's touching, super. And if it's not, if it's just my monkey hands, pounding out nonsense at a keyboard until the sun blows up, I'm cool with that too.

My name is Ken and I'm blogging again. And if you googled me to find out if I got fat after grade school I think the best answer to that question is "Compared to whom?"

The bug man comes tomorrow

2010-08-29T23:45:00.001-04:00

I used to have bed bugs. I probably don’t now but I truly have no way of knowing. Bedbugs are similar to herpes. Except the plural of bedbug is bedbugs and the plural of herpes is herpes. And theoretically, you got herpes from doing something fun while you got bedbugs because you picked up a nightstand off the sidewalk.

Anyway, the bug man is coming tomorrow. And I asked the super if it was bedbug related and he informed me emphatically and in his best, least broken english that it was not bedbug related. Just bugs. Which is cool because about four days ago I saw a roach on my toilet and it articulated its limbs in such a seeming flourish before I flushed it down the toilet that I have not been able to get it out of my head. It may have been the reflection from the tile but that roach looked yellow. Jaundiced roaches hurt my heart.

The bug man comes tomorrow and I cleaned my apartment because I won’t be home. He might steal my stuff, the bug man. But he won’t think I’m a filthy person. He won’t think the bugs are my fault.

I have thought about skipping work so I can make my excuses directly to the bug man.

By the way- our bug man’s home base is Brighton Beach. He drives a long way to kill our bugs. There’s something shady about that.

Hating On...The Oscars (Two Minute Hate)

2010-03-07T01:02:00.001-05:00

I got busy so my hate is late.

To make matters worse, I'm forced to coalesce my hate into a lazy list.

BlogHateGods, you have my sympathy. I will sacrifice a .GIF to mitigate your rage...wait, no to stem your bloghategodly rage i will include my capsuled hatred in translations so that the world at large can know and understand my feelings.

I hate Avatar.Nekenčiu avataras.

I hate Avatar because it is defended by people in the strangest ways.

1) It's just a movie! (therefore, I suppose, exonerated from making any damn sense.)

2) It has great special effects! (the Captain EO defense)

3) It has a powerful message of ...something. (does it? it does?)

4) Entire world created digitally (so we can have more accurate videogame play)

5) Two and a half hours???? SERIOUSLY?

And to make matters worse, they're charging fifteen bucks and up to see it which means that people who go have to make up there minds beforehand that they like it or risk painful buyer's remorse. It must be good! I spent all this money! And the movie cost all this money to make!

There are people painting themselves blue and running around videotaping it. The amount of Nav'i fan pornography is horrific.

The worst part to me is that I think the movie was stupid on purpose. Cameron is locked in a battle with Lucas and others to make the most sterling special effects film. A strong plot might obscure some of the CGI. Cameron knows how to write a plot (right?) and yet this one is deliberately threadbare.

Cameron should get some kind of award for creating a movie where Sigourney Weaver looks like a dip.

I hate Up In The Air. Nu-mi place sus în aer.

There were some interesting stories in the movie. Stories of people who lost their jobs. I lost my job last year. I found those people sympathetic.

The movie is really just kind of festooned with those people's stories.

So that we can fixate on the question: Is George Clooney lonely?

I don't really think that's that interesting a question for a movie.

Also- Jason Reitman's NPR-Whitebread sensibilities are killing me. These are movies designed around future interviews with Terry Gross on Fresh Air.

I didn't hate District 9. Ја не мрзим Дистрикта 9.

But the third act is not particularly memorable.

And we have to call a moratorium on fake documentaries now.

Because it's not really writing.

I didn't hate Precious. Tôi không ghét Precious

but I thought it ended too soon.

Seriously, if you saw it- SPOILER A-never mind.

I don't think the ending made a lick of sense. Which begs the question did the movie make a lick of sense...

I didn't see The Blind Side. Unë nuk shoh Side Blind

But when Sandra Bullock is a favorite to win best actress

I think we're talking about a national crisis in cinema.

I liked UP. Għoġobni UP.

Best first ten minutes of a movie I've seen in a long time.

Weak third act. Weakish.

But this movie made up for the cutesypoo trash heap that was Wall-E.

I liked Inglorious Basterds 난 이름도없는 바스터스 좋아

I'm not sure it's a movie.

But I will watch it again.

I didn't see An Education. Ní raibh mé a fheiceáil An Oideachais.

I've had it in my house for two months.

Free SAG screener.

I've rented a half dozen other movies instead.

Peter Saarsgaarrrrd doing an english accent makes my throat swell shut. I saw him in the Seagull.

A Serious Man did not get seen. ร้ายแรง Man ไม่ ได้ เห็น.

I seriously had trouble caring.

I thought i would rent it.

But now when I go to try and rent it

It starts an argument with my lover.

My lover is not serious about a serious man.

All this leaves my choice of The Hurt Locker for best picture. كل هذا يترك لي من خيار وهيرت لوكر للحصول على أفضل صورة.

It was pretty good. Better than average.

Interesting, atmospheric, politically opaque.

Worthy of insightful critique.

I don't need to hate on it here.

End of Hate.

(BONUS HATE:

Saw Mike Judge's comedy Extract.

Movie is enjoyable in spots.

Mila Kunis must now be downgraded from actor to ornament.

And shame on Judge for writing such a boring, storyless character.)

Danny or Denny or Donny: First of the ThumBlogs

2010-03-01T11:06:00.000-05:00

ThumBlogs are a new addition to Twunch will I will discontinue very soon. I promise. With my upgraded cellular telephone I will now blog while commuting about things of interest to no one. So basically the usual stuff but now less interesting.

There is a guy in my neighborhood. He is on the thin side, tall, big full mustache. He walks an embarrassingly sissified dog which he compels to wear a plaid raincoat and carries over small puddles. He is in his late forties or early fifties as best I can tell.
We have a delightfully neighborly relationship. He has told me his name so many times that I feel it would be indecent to ask for clarification as to whether it is Danny or Donny or Denny. But I am quite sure it is one of those three.
D/e/o/anny and I see each other in passing on my street about once a month on average whereupon we choose from a relatively short rubric of conversations all of which make me feel like either struggling to be polite or out-and-out uncomfortable.
To wit:

The time he danced with/for Madonna in the 1980s.
How good I look since I started working out.
The time he spent in my home state of Missouri doing basic training at Fort Leonard Wood.
How sad it is that I sold my car three years ago and how glad he would have been to have moved it for me on alternate side parking days had I simply left him a key.
How fortunate I am to live in a building on my block without rodents.
How friend of the family Edie Falco will soon give him a part on Nurse Jackie.
How close I am to making it in my chosen profession because I look better since I started working out.

He's a nice man. He's full of great neighborhood gossip. He has the shambling appearance and gait of a Florida retiree. Our conversations are full of pauses and gaps.

I don't know the guy's name. And if I ask him again, I know I'll just forget it again in the intervening month before I see him again.

End of ThumBlog #1.

Hating On... NPR

2010-02-26T21:23:00.001-05:00

Hating On… National Public Radio.

Disclaimer: I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri and began listening to NPR pretty steadily from the age of 11 when I was given a forced inoculation in carpool. For the two decades I spent in St. Louis, NPR was a genteel source of information and culture. I am pretty closed to dyed in the blood of the 'All Things Considered' lamb. But when it comes to Hating On… these sacred cattle must be burgerized.

Pedantic Opening: When I learned Greek in high school (and I never really learned Greek however I did attend enough classes to say the alphabet once upon a time), i observed there was a manner of balance to all of the sentences. A large number of thoughts in Greek began on the one hand and concluded with on the other hand. Even then there was something really appealing to an idea presented with inherent balance. And you can follow this rationale thousands of years forward into Hegelian Dialectic with its theories of Thesis plus Antithesis Equaling Synthesis.

When you extend from the very tiny analogy posted above, National Public Radio becomes the necessary tonic to Right Wing Talk Radio. I don't know that NPR sought leftiness or just had leftiness pressed upon it but it is regularly cited along with MSNBC, CNN, New York Times, etc as a left wing organization by those on the right. This never bothered me. I even listen for left wing bias and occasionally when I do hear it rather than feeling rankled, I feel reassured. Because despite my desire for NPR to have a liberal bias, data shows it does not.

And yet in my idealized world, National Public Radio is a group of intellectual progressives going toe to toe against sensationalized corporate news and looking out for the little guy. It might not be perfect but at least I know that there's one news organization that isn't for sale!

And then Archer Daniels Midland…

Do you remember when NPR was brought to you by Archer Daniels Midland? ADM? Supermarket to the world? If you don't remember these words you were not listening to NPR in the 1990s and 2000's Perhaps you have no idea who ADM is. Archer Daniels Midland is a multi-national agribusiness corporation with huge holdings in HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP (the worm is the spice/the spice is the worm) and ETHANOL. There is a movie called "The Informant!" which describes how this company engaged in lysine price fixing to illegally profit in global agribusiness. It received a fair amount of bad publicity for this (the price fixing/not the movie) and was slapped with the largest anti-trust fine ($70 million) in US history at that time (1996).

It's pretty bad when a corporation faces massive fines and jail time and Matt Damon movies for its bad behavior. But ADM gets a bad rap from the Galt mooks over at the Cato Institute who have labeled ADM the biggest corporate welfare recipient in the US (in 1995):

"ADM has cost the American economy billions of dollars since 1980 and has indirectly cost Americans tens of billions of dollars in higher prices and higher taxes over that same period. At least 43 percent of ADM's annual profits are from products heavily subsidized or protected by the American government. Moreover, every $1 of profits earned by ADM's corn sweetener operation costs consumers $10, and every $1 of profits earned by its ethanol operation costs taxpayers $30."

I didn't notice when they began underwriting National Public Radio. This makes sense, they started before the Lysine fixing thing even went to trial. And I didn't notice how ADM used its position as underwriter to conclude every broadcast with a short, sweet little message about the importance of ethanol to the US future energy policies.

It didn't even register with me how NPR accepted ADM's support, tagged all of their shows and newscasts with ADM's message, and then when ADM had reached maximum political and branding profit from NPR they removed their support. ADM had gotten the laws passed that they needed and was no longer thought of as the single largest anti-trust fine recipient in history but instead 'the Supermarket to the World.'

Okay- you could argue that NPR was duped here. That they were unknowingly taken in by a wily corporation. But NPR reported many of the stories on ADM in the early 1990s. They were at the front of the reporting on these stories. And then suddenly a criminal corporation turns around and hands them millions of dollars in exchange for assistance rebranding and then drops them?

So, NPR here is clearly for sale. They are willing to do corporate whitewashing for a known bad-behaver like ADM on a short term basis so that ADM can get its ethanol legislation passed. This would be a hold-your-nose situation if it were ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX but this is NPR. The vaunted and rarified bastion of rational thinking and even (gasp) leftwing leaning.

I understand that news is a business but the corporate underwriting for public news outlets does not strike me as a feasible way to do business. It strikes me as funny that when I mentioned that I might be Hating On NPR today the response I got was "Why???" Even the notion that NPR might be hate-worthy strikes smart people- people I know to be reasonable and intelligent- as anathema. So here we have a news outlet with a track record for corporate payola and a reputation as an honest broker- that's incredibly dangerous. Certainly it is the responsibility of consumers of news to be discriminating and discerning, but NPR by nature of its position of being the apparent antidote to the right wing media noise machine gets a pinko pass from the grad students and pencil necks on the left. ADM has already shoveled tons of high-fructose corn syruped BS down this country's throat with National Public Radio's help. Who will be the next successful entity to pimp NPR's reputation for left-leaning and intelligence for its own good?

How about the Department of Homeland Security (2008)? How about Wal-Mart (2004)?

I think the thing that bothers me most about this is that NPR remains largely unsullied by their financial arrangements and assignations. They get off squeaky clean. Because of the style they bring, because of the scope of audience they reach, and because of the COMPLETE LACK OF ALTERNATIVES IN THE UNITED STATES, they seem to be beyond the reaching of Hating On... They are not.

I listen to the BBC, yo. It's always on. It's always strong. And there I'm only supporting a formerly oppressive multinational imperialist system. Instead of Wal-Mart. And that's something we can all feel good about.

The following people I am letting off the hook completely: Ira Glass, Garrison Keillor, Jad Abumrad, and Rob Krulwich.

This is just to say

2010-02-23T00:40:00.001-05:00

My Darling is blogging and I couldn't be happier.
Have a look at what she has to say when you have a moment.
Goodnight, my chickadees and Menihoonies.

Hating On... Zombieland

2010-02-19T16:54:00.001-05:00

[Hating On… is a new weekly feature of Twunch that will likely be discontinued next week. In this segment I propose to dump on something at length for no other reason than my own personal and professional frustrations. If you'd like to suggest a topic that needs some hating on, feel free.]

SPOILER ALERT. This is a blog about a movie I saw. So I'll likely be talking about stuff that took place in the movie. If you're looking to be surprised by things that happen in the movie, you shouldn't be reading it. But then you know that. Because you're a genius. I mean, look at you. You're hanging out on the Internet.

Zombieland fell into that 12%-15% of movies that I want to see in the theatre. 75% of movies I dismiss out of hand for one reason or another (romcom, teen vampire, starring Harrison Ford), then there is the next cut- the aforesaid 12%-15%- which are movies I try to find an excuse to see in the theater. I cannot initiate on a movie like this but I can respond. So if someone is interested and asks if I'm interested I can say honestly, 'Yes, I wanted to see that.' After that there are 5% that I will miss and feel bad about missing but promise to rent and then lastly there are the 5% of movies or so that I will actually see in a movie theater.

So Zombieland, having successfully snuck through the theaters without my seeing it, ended up in my DVD player last night.

I am a huge fan of zombie movies and by no means a purist. Shawn of the Dead is endlessly rewatchable. 28 Days Later I saw four times in the theater (thereby holding the record for last decade- though three of those screenings were at the dollar show.) 28 Weeks Later, I loved- even recognizing holes in the plot- for it's weird verite style and faithfulness to the spirit of its originator. I enjoy the old Romero films- but am glad that Danny Boyle decided to put a little giddyup in the zombies' step.

Rambo represents a simpler time.

Prior to Inglourious Basterds, zombies had kind of snuck in to fill the space that the Nazis snatched from the American Indians as the prime it's-okay-to-kill-these-people-because-they're-not-really-people people [take a minute, unpack the sentence, it's luxurious]. For fifty years, Nazis were the all purpose bad guy that you could kill en masse and not feel so bad about it. Sure, in the 80s you could kill Russians in a movie, but the US hadn't won that war yet and killing Viet Cong raised the massive amounts of ambivalence. (Obviously, there are outliers from these generalizations- Rambo for instance continues to massacre people to this day while Chuck Norris has moved right wing reactionary films to right wing reactionary hero.) But over the last fifteen years as it became less and less cool to feature movies where human beings were massacred, zombie movies quietly overcame Peter Jackson's orcs as the most appealing creature to kill. And it makes sense: zombies have no culture, no feelings, and no future. Really, you're doing them a favor, right? And since you're doing them a favor, it's okay to factor in style points in the grizzlyness with which you kill them.

But for me, the best part about zombie films is what they reveal about people who are placed in terrible circumstances. The flesh-crazed zombies are really a means to an end to force characters to make awful choices. You've been bitten. Do I kill you now? As a dramatic device, zombies are terrific. And as they have no higher level of intelligence their appearance is acceptably random and unanticipated. Writers can stuff zombies anywhere without having to justify why they are hanging out in the spooky Halloween costume shop or the hotel laundry room. Zombies just be hanging out, bro…

So, I'd been kind of counting down the days until Zombieland's release. It stars Woody Harrelson, an actor whose presence in movies I always appreciate. While there is an occasional 'The Cowboy Way', he's generally a good sign to have in a movie (his turn in 'No Country for Old Men' was one of my favorite parts about the movie). While he's not a transformative actor, he's easy to watch doing what he does. [Confession: 1990's most watched in the theater movie: Natural Born Killers- not really proud of that ].

So what the hell happened to Zombieland? By all accounts I don't know. Let's shoot this with some bullet points:

It's hard for me to imagine an actor working harder to steal Michael Cera's shtick than Jesse Eisenberg. This is probably patently obvious to anybody who's seen the two of them. But while Michael Cera is a really cerebral actor who's always doing stuff, Eisenberg is an empty suit. Harrelson would make me laugh without working very hard. And then the movie provided Eisenberg all these funny ideas- Irritable Bowel Syndrome, supertitled Zombie rules (thanks Scream), virginity, etc. and he never manages to be funny. Or interesting. Or much of anything. Might we have found comedy's Shia Le Beouerf?

The plot is lean, as in all zombie films. But in this movie, the plot is even leaner- this movie makes I Am Legend look like Dr. Zhivago. The female characters in the movie are ornamental and not of a great deal of ornament. Emma Stone reminds us that she was in Superbad with Michael Cera who is not in this movie but is represented by someone trying to do what he does. Super weird casting choice.

Same Idea. Different Woody.

Abigail Breslin represents the most interesting part of the movie for me because she's 12 and the romantic chemistry the film tries to generate between Eisenberg and Stone requires Woody Harrelson to hang out with Abigail Breslin in several scenes. Harrelson is not capable of bringing a point of view to the scenes he's in. And as I watched it seemed as though he was sizing up Breslin's twelve year old character. This is where the soul of zombie movies exist. Horrible choices need to be made to ensure planet earth's survival. And our man Woody is thinking two moves ahead. Alas, this clearly salient issue- this basic question of the survival of the human species- is ignored in favor of more absent-minded zombie killing. It's already an R Rated movie, guys!

Bill Murray cameo- a funny idea that went absolutely nowhere. Sort of dribbled into nothingness and then Murray's untimely death. With zero remorse.

Humane Extermination of plus-size zombie

Zero remorse seems to be the whole movie. Planet earth destroyed? Meh. Family dead? Meh. Killed Bill Murray? Whatevs, bro. Let's get more slow-motion footage of zombies being killed and of frolicking in the Native American gift shop!

One last thing: did you notice how many of the zombies in this movie were fat? It was practically a leitmotif. Look, that's a big fat zombie! Let's kill him extra good. I understand that zombies are stand-in human beings which allow real human beings to mete out incredible amounts of pain and gore. But why do these stand-ins have to be a platform for all manner of anti-fatty prejudice?

It's weird when an 82 minute movie makes me feel like I've wasted some time. But then I just spent an equal amount of time hating on it. So really I'm the big winner twice here.

So this concludes my first try at Hating On...
Honestly, it felt a little forced.

Omless...

2010-02-04T07:24:00.001-05:00

Last week, Brit, Deanna and I wandered into the park and shot this. And then I spent several hours editing it (so all of the hiccups and mistakes are my fault- just to be clear). It's by no means perfect but that said I am pretty proud of it. My goal is to make a bunch of these about trying to be a yoga teacher in New York. Feel free to let me know what you think. There was no script so anything funny in the movie is solely the fault of the actors.

Martin Scorsese Lied To Me.

2010-02-01T00:44:00.001-05:00

Martin Scorsese lied to me in 1990. In the movie, 'Goodfellas'. I didn't see it in the theater, so technically Martin Scorsese didn't lie to me personally until probably closer to 1994.

Come to think of it, I remember the night he lied to me. We were at Kristy's house in Chesterfield watching 'Goodfellas' which I think was on premium cable at the time. We hadn't gotten too deep in the movie when the phone rang and somebody said that OJ was driving really slow on television in a White Bronco. I don't remember a vote but the channel got changed and the car chase lasted approximately six hours and to this day I've never seen Goodfellas but in healthy, bacon sized chunks, on TNT and similar non-premium cable channels.

But on this particular night, I saw enough of the film to see a misrepresentation that has been with me my entire adult life. Here it is from Youtube, unless Youtube removes the video. You only have to watch the first thirty seconds.

If you didn't want to watch the video, I totally understand. Here's the transcript of the lie that I believed and followed like gospel for all my adult days. The voice is Ray Liotta doing an imitation of Jack Nicholson (an acting trick which Christian Slater had pioneered in Heathers two years earlier).

In prison, dinner was always a big thing. We had a pasta course, then we had a meat or a fish. Paulie was doing a year for contempt...and had a wonderful system for garlic.He used a razor and sliced it so thin....it would liquefy in the pan with a little oil. It's a very good system.

NO, IT'S NOT.

Here's the thing. For fifteen years I've been trying to slice my garlic so it would liquefy in the pan with a little oil. Fifteen years I've been sharpening knives and bearing down on cloves in the hope that eventually I will get this liquefied garlic that Scorsese told me I should be searching for. And for fifteen years garlic's been a so-so herb in my spice armory. It's never been a big gun.

Because of you, Marty Scorsese.

I mean, the movie seemed so on target. So gritty and real. So I bought every word of it. And for fifteen years I've had lousy flavorless garlic.

But the other day I bought a garlic press. And I tasted pressed garlic instead of these ludicrous slivers and the disparity in flavor is a revelation. Pressed garlic out performs chopped garlic everywhere. Sauteed. Roasted. Everywhere. It's not even close. I would NEVER go back.

But for fifteen years, I was sure I was doing it the right way. Because Martin Scorsese told me so.
Things like this make me question everything I think I know. That word epistemology haunts me. I feel like I know so many things and then I get a solid concrete example that my knowledge stream is tainted. If Scorsese lied, who else?

Lastly, don't go bringing up Anthony Bourdain and his disdain for garlic presses. That man smokes cigarettes and is by extension a moron.

An open letter to non-redheads. And also Conan O'Brien.

2010-01-22T11:41:00.002-05:00

You guys hate us. You do. I don't blame you for that. There is some evidence that your hatred for the redheaded man is biological. The original redheads were Neanderthals. We sat around without fire and without spears, subsisting on a diet of sticks and raw meat, and you saw us from your Cro-Magnon perch and decided we needed to be snuffed out. 100,000 years ago, you made this decision. Sure you snagged a little of our DNA by raping some of our less brow-protruding women, but the point was always genocide. [NB: Redheaded women have, since the great Cro-Magnon reckoning been fetishized as war prizes and therefore do not suffer the same stigma as the males.] Get the redhead. And even now, at this present day, you look at us with conflicting feelings of revulsion, fear of long arcing retribution, and a deep thirst to finish the job that your ancestors started.

For hundreds of years, redheads have attempted to resist genocide through achievement. The thought is that through undeniable achievement, the population at large will have no choice but to accept the redhead as exceptional. This one is different, they will say. And so Thomas Jefferson singlehandedly drafts the declaration of independence. Carrot Top reinvents prop comedy. Yahoo Serious reimagines the Einstein mythos. And for a time, the prevailing winds of media and public thought honor that redhead. Carrot Top receives a contract with 1800 Collect. Yahoo Serious is allowed to make a second movie. Thomas Jefferson becomes President. And then they all hit that Redheaded Ceiling and suffered nothing but back lash and recrimination. James T. Callender drops a dime on Thomas Jefferson about Sally Hemings. Carrot Top has become synonymous with bad prop comedy. Yahoo Serious lost his court case against Yahoo for copyright infringement.

There are only two positions that the non-redheads take with regard to the gingers: you make us mascots or you make us pariahs and essentially these two positions represent distinct points on a single trajectory which I describe here as "The Caruso Cycle":

Figure A: The Caruso Cycle describes the trajectory of social perception of Redheads. David Caruso attempted to make the transition from TV to Film and failed. As a result he has become an image of scorn and mockery.

If we examine this overlay this graph with other redheads, it becomes easy to see the pattern. Here is an example from ancient history of redheaded Greek King, Menelaus.

Figure B: Menelaus depictions in the media have grown less favorable over time.

And then there is the most recent example of redheaded media destruction, Mark McGwire.

Despite admitting to steroid use publicly, on National Television, McGwire is held to different standard than A-Rod, Andy Pettitte, Manny Ramirez, and others. What differentiates him from these other cheating ball players? Being redheaded.

Now we come to the latest casualty, a man who is at the peak of his popularity even as he stands at the precipice of personal destruction. Conan O'Brien:

Here you can see that Conan's career has described the achievement begets mascot status that we have seen in the previous examples. The nation appears to have rallied around his plight and turned Jay Leno into the villain. But science and history suggest that this is only temporary.

So, non-redheads, you see? This is what you do. I can't stop you. But I wanted you to know that I know. That we know. And some of us aren't playing anymore.

Conan, my brother. I'm reaching out to you. You are having a difficult time right now. Your show is being taken off the air. You appear to be receiving support from all quarters. Have NO FAITH in this support. Take your money and run away. Take that money and buy gold with it. Use that gold to buy an island. Fortify your island with a private army. Raise your children in seclusion. Disconnect from life on this planet. Because they are going to come for you the same way they have come after every redhead before you. It is only a matter of time before the stories come out. Before they tar and stain your burnished reputation. Lawsuits are coming, Conan. They non-redhead lawyers wait in the weeds.

You took the non-redheads money. Good for you.

Take it and don't look back.

Godspeed, Conan.

Yours Truly,
Eric Stoltz

Oedipus Complex

2010-01-20T09:22:00.003-05:00

The bed bugs are back.
Not in my apartment. But elsewhere in the building.
I've received two type written notes from one of the upstairs neighbors (on the third floor) detailing her struggles with bedbugs and her attempts to gain solidarity with the other neighbors so a united front could be presented to the landlord.

On the one hand, I'm impressed with her gumption. I tend to make my private indignities private. I will indulge in some blog/wallowing but I couldn't bear to tell my neighbors about it.

I think of Oedipus. Oedipus just wanted to get rid of the plague in Corinth. He'd solved the riddle of the Sphinx so he felt qualified. And he made a promise. And when he tried to cash that check, it turns out he'd caused the plague.

That's my fear. That when the bedbug mystery is ultimately unraveled and the DNA sequencing is completed, it will be determined that this entire pestilence is on my head. At which point I will have to gouge my eyes out. Probably. I'm not sure if that's what normally happens or if Oedipus was just going for style points.

The other neighbors want to bring in bug sniffing dogs (not joking) and inspect and treat all of the apartments in the building in one fell swoop. The guy they brought in last time works for a company called RoachMasters- a name that inspires very little confidence. He's inadequate. I saw him two months ago leaving the building with his chemical tanks and I said, "What you doing?" and he said to me, "Nothing. I could be here for anything."

So clearly the landlord has told him he is not to tell anybody anything. But how much do you have to tell? He walks around looking like he's wearing a Ghostbusters costume.

According to my neighbors, they get bites and they call the Landlord and he sends the guy from Roachbusters who comes in and tells them definitively that they do not have bedbugs and then they complain to the Landlord who tells them they have psychological problems.

The building is so nice. But now on trash day there are couches on the sidewalk. Nice stuff. And I know that these folks are only now coming to grips with what I figured out last year. Life has to change.

My bed is encased in two hermetically sealed encasements. Protect the bed. Done. I no longer have any wooden chairs. Or chairs with upholstery. My furniture has become metal folding chairs. Movies are watched on the floor with pillows. My living room has the look of a yoga studio because it is a yoga studio.

Since making these changes, I have had no problems. Sure I'll never own a couch again. But what did I need a couch for?

My neighbors want all out war, while I'm quietly hoping for appeasement. My neighbors are going to bring by a letter for everyone in the building to sign and send to the landlord. I'm going to sign it. I'll appease them too.

And soon the foul chemicals of inter-species war will once more be poured into my life and everything I own will once more be placed in Hefty Steel Sacks. The war machine springs to life and I go from Sophocles to Euripides. From Oedipus to Hecuba.

Once, in college...

2010-01-19T01:11:00.003-05:00

During what I believed to be my junior year, I was living in a most squalid and deplorable way. I lived college like it was a siege with lengthy periods of lethargy and slovenliness interrupted by brief caffeine-fueled jaunts of 'buckling down.'

It was during one of these deep periods of entropy when I came home to my apartment, walked into my bedroom, turned on the lights, and saw a full grown roach crawl out of my jeans that were lying on the floor. I don't know why the roach was in my jeans there on the ground but I do know that there and then I made a decision. I was not going to touch those jeans because they had a roach lately hanging out in them. Nor did I seek out the roach and kill it. I simply stepped over the jeans, into my underinflated waterbed, and went to sleep.

That weekend, I was lucky enough to bring a lady home. And my romantic skills at this time were such that I didn't feel it necessary to clean up the place before having her over and as she and I skipped to the bedroom and I turned on the light the same full grown roach crawled out of my jeans. I presume it was the same roach, perhaps I'm being optimistic.

The insect sighting cast a chill across the mood. I had to act quickly in order to save the evening. It was my house and she looked to me for reassurance. I took on a quizzical look and said, 'Hm. That's never happened before.'

The evening was saved and the next day I did laundry. The end.

What it took.

2010-01-18T01:26:00.002-05:00

I realize I'e been away for a bit. So rather than discuss that, let's talk about tonight, why don't we?
If you're like me (and man are you missing out if you're not) than you despise the Golden Globes. It's a simple thing to despise: 90 people from other countries arbitrarily pick the best movies of the year and the entire world has to take notice. They frequently pick the wrong movies. See Atonement. And they frequently pick terrible actors. See Madonna. And Paul Hogan.
But the bottom line is, they've got great placement and people use them to handicap the Oscars and so on and so forth.
But my problem with the Golden Globes tonight is strictly professional...

I make no secret that I've had no real job to speak of for a long time. For those of you who have been monitoring this space to see if that changed, good news. You can still monitor it. I'm definitely underemployed. I make no apologies for that. Laid off. Great recession. I'm just one man with a plan and no canal, Panama.

But I do odd jobs to make money. Nothing too terribly exciting but one of them is that I type up Hollywood press junkets. My friend sends me files and I type them and send them back. I type pretty well, and pretty quickly so typically this all works out.
The work is mind numbing as I'm not really and Us Magazine guy but very rarely you will get to type up something really funny or the words of a person you admire. Daniel Day Lewis was a cool interview. So was Ricky Gervais.

But most of the time, it's nonsense. Starlets and their careers. Stars and their avocations. The kind of stuff that numbs me to my core. I because I realize that I am basically an apparatchik of TMZ.

Well tonight, right now, this morning, it's 1:30 and the coffee is just brewing.

Because I'm waiting for the red carpet from the Golden Globes. Or the after party.
I'm not sure.

But I've been waiting for two hours to work until sunrise.

And here they come.

God help me.

Merrily Merrily Merrily

2009-10-20T00:02:00.003-04:00

I had a pint of strawberry ice cream and took a nap. Here is the dream that followed.

I am in a hotel in Vienna or Prague. One of the grand old cities and a city I have never been in before. I am traveling. I am well dressed, fittingly for travel in an old city, and on this particular trip I am traveling with my most valued possession: my old guitar. I am sitting in the upstairs section of this hotel's bar, not far from the staircase in what might best be described as an alcove. It is well-lit, too well-lit in fact. I attract the attention of another person at the bar.

He looks at me. He's younger than I am and looks like a combination of various people I've met before, but he's a stranger. He sees my guitar and asks if I play. I tell him I do. He asks me to play him a little something. We are functionally alone in our little alcove so I pull out my guitar with great pride and happiness, explain that I am no great shakes and proceed to play a catchy little twelve bar blues jingle. Satisfied that I have demonstrated that I do in fact play the guitar while not having overbent his ear to that end, I stop- in anticipation of some compliment.

"You're not terrible," the stranger says. He explains that twelve bar blues are always somewhat appealing no matter how poorly played. I ask if he is a musician. He says he is. I ask if he wouldn't mind playing something. He says he wouldn't.

He pulls from somewhere a violin bow and picks up his drink. He is drinking a Green Margarita with salt. He places the margarita on his shoulder beneath his chin and takes the bow to it and begins to play the margarita as though it were a violin. The music is beyond excellent. It is extraordinary, otherworldly, I am driven into a frenzy of wonder. He concludes, too soon in my opinion and I hurl the most ludicrous compliments at him.

My compliments enrage him. He finds me toadying and sycophantic. He takes his margarita and begins to lob icy swatches of it all over the alcove. He is making a spectacle of himself. Some of the margarita gets on me. Some of it gets on the gold leaf detailing of the wall, and on the marble floor. I grab a chunk of the ice and push deeper into the restroom of the alcove fearful of the outcome of this ruckus.

The hotel/bar is owned by frightening Eastern Europeans. I suspect in my heart they may be gangsters. I mop margarita from starched shirt in the bathroom and rush back out to protect my guitar when I am thrown to the ground by one of the mobster owners.

On the ground, I can see clearly that the head mobster has prosthetic legs. But rather than having prostheses that looked like the legs he once had, he has opted instead to stand on very small chicken feet, maybe four inches long. The chicken feet have been ornately carved and are deeply grooved and lacquered.

Then I woke up. I submit this to you without comment.

The strawberry ice cream was excellent.

Bug blog

2009-10-16T00:39:00.003-04:00

I don’t know where the terror came of bugs. The bed bug thing didn’t help. I told the story at length here once upon a time, but I whitewashed it. I rendered it episodic and hoped people would accept that. To me that story now reads like a blog about the one and only time I ever had herpes.

Once upon a time I lived in a tiny apartment in Sarasota with my girlfriend and we got termites. I pretended so hard that we didn’t have termites. That the tiny wings that collected on the window sills were coincidental. That the slow flying bugs that would cloud around the television set when it was on at night were something else, anything else. The kittens’ shadows would leap across the front of the set, snatching bugs out of the air with their paws. I remember reading the Illiad at the time and taking great pleasure in reading it aloud as I smashed bug after bug “Darkness and the strong force of fate.”

A year ago, on my birthday, Deanna was performing in Fort Myers (where she performs again. This year. On my birthday.) I flew down to see her show and then whisked her to Sarasota, to my parents condo where we would spend my birthday together in the sun and familiar surroundings. Arriving at the condo, after the ninety mile drive Deanna and I both had to use the bathroom. Luckily, the condo has two baths (one of its many perks) so there would be no waiting.

The master bath was fine. Spotless and unremarkable. I don’t recall who used the guest bath, only that there was screaming. There was, in that bathroom, a roach about two and a half to three inches long. Not even that big by Florida standards. But by New York standards we were looking at something prehistorically large- a relic from some Land of the Lost era. It had been locked in that room for a long time, it had left a mess everywhere and I mean a mess that even thinking about now sets my hairs on end. And it was jazzed up to do battle with Deanna and I.

The condominium has thick carpet everywhere except the bathrooms and the kitchen. The cockroach rattled around the bathroom for a brief moment before charging directly at Deanna and I who had not the time or wherewithal to arm ourselves with shoes. Once it had made it out of the bathroom, Deanna was going to stomp on it but then it dawned on me that a good stomping would leave remaindered bug carcass indelibly stamped into the carpet. I bade her hold!

The roach skittered and scampered into the guest bedroom. It had mass. Weight. Force. It had spent months on its own in the guest bathroom dining entirely on a bar of blue soap which upon later inspection had tiny teeth marks that even now raise the gorge in the back of my throat. It had been alone for all those months, and instead of putting its energy into breeding it simply grew. And grew. And grew.

And now it was in the guest bedroom where it had two twin beds to navigate between as well as a pair of bureaus to hide under. The light was poor in there. The carpet soft and deep. Deanna looked to me for a plan.

I had one.
“Why don’t we pretend it’s not here?”

The roach chuckled softly from beneath the bed. A clicking, clattering chuckle. It smacked its forelimbs against its carapace, determined to intimidate. Deanna declined my offer of armistice.

It was 12:30 in the morning and we were going to war. Implements were grabbed- a broom, a dust pan, a bowl. We were determined to terminate this roach with extreme prejudice but at the same time not to entomb his entrails within the berber carpet. For the next twenty minutes, the roach staged his own version of “the most dangerous game.” I’d move the bed, the roach would counter, I’d cut off an escape path, and the roach would call an audible. I’d get a clear shot at him and throw a sneaker directly at him. He would catch the sneaker and lob it back at me clucking his ganglia.

I had begun to despair as 1am rolled around. It was my birthday, I was losing a fight with a cockroach, the amorous vibe of the evening had given way to a general ill-at-ease brought about by armed conflict with a quarter pound bug, and no matter how this battle royale ended I still had six months of aggregate roach droppings to scrub. Then I got lucky. The roach made a miscalculation bringing him far enough out into the open that I could drop a bowl on him.

Once I was at a restaurant with my brother in Sarasota. A nice restaurant- he insisted that he take me some place nice- and I recommended this one. During the meal, a giant roach –possibly a relation of the one previously described- was loafing, loitering by the table leg of an unoccupied table. My brother pointed it out to the waitress who dropped a wooden bowl on top of him. It was decent solution but moments later the bowl was slowly moving across the hardwood like it was some kind of David Copperfield special.

The roach in the guest room couldn’t move the bowl across the berber, so I slid a dust pan underneath it.

“What are you going to do with him?” Deanna asked.

I felt like an emperor at the end of some gladiatorial display, this cockroach had fought bravely and now he was mine to do with as I saw fit.

And I let him go. In the direction of one my least favorite neighbors. And spent the next forty five minutes of my birthday gagging as I cleaned up his mess.

How I got engaged...

2009-10-01T11:36:00.010-04:00

By request, what follows is a lengthy and detailed account of my getting engaged.

There’s a big dead fish in my refrigerator.

I checked last night. And again this morning. In spite of the many indications that I am now engaged (the ring on her finger, the phone calls to family, emails, etc.) the most strikingly real one- the image that brings it all home for me- is the yawning and indignant mouth of the dead fish in the Tupperware.

My fiancée and I have been together nearly five years. We’ve been friends for seven. We’ve been in serious negotiations about getting hitched for over a year and a half. Two months ago we began talking about rings. This sped things up.

Engagement ring selection is, by design, a drag. You and your lovely begin plans to purchase a beautiful item of arbitrary value with arbitrarily determined positive characteristics (color, cut, and clarity!). The item will be worn by one of you her whole life. The people selling you this item will use every tool at their disposal to get you to purchase a more expensive item including appealing to guilt, low self-esteem, machismo, and jedi mind control.

There is a school of thought that the wearer of this item should have no idea what it will look like before it is on her finger. I do not subscribe to that school. We are getting married after all, not throwing a surprise party. So we started by describing what our ring would be like: it would be old, because I like old stuff; and it would not be a diamond, because Deanna said that diamonds were overpriced, cliché, boring, and of compromised ethicality.

Not only did I insist that Deanna go shopping with me, I sent her ahead to a place I’d seen a website for by herself. I had rehearsal, she had some time, and it was time to get the ball rolling.

“You go,” I said.
“I need an appointment,” she said.
“So make an appointment,” I said.
“No. I don’t feel right about it if there’s an appointment” She said.

This is part of the drag of ring shopping. You have to make an appointment to shop. Appointment is only three letters from disappointment. And if you walk into a 47th Street jeweler’s 8th floor studio and don’t buy a ring, and not only don’t buy a ring but lack the pre-requisite on-hand would-be fiancée, the jeweler is likely to be disappointed. He may even look at you with frustration and derision through his jeweler’s loupe, purse his lips, and make you wonder whether you are really of marriageable stock. But in spite of the terror of the jeweler’s scorn, she relented and went to the diamond district. She said although it was weird to go into an engagement ring store without a boyfriend, she had completed her mission: the place was on the up and up and had nice rings.

A week later we came back and visited the antique ring place together. As I said, my beloved and I were interested in a non-traditional ring. We were talking about sapphires, rubies, emeralds, all kinds of things. There was no stone that we were ruling out except diamonds. Passe, boring, ethically compromised diamonds. We were not those people. For about four minutes. Until the guy took out his rings. At which point, diamonds just look an awful lot better than those other stones. They do. Unless you have some sort of pathological block against diamonds which we thought we did. But we didn’t. And then we saw the ring.

Now the thing about the ring is that you’re not supposed to have a ‘the ring’. You’re supposed to fish a wide net of rings so that you can bargain. Pokerface. This ring is nice but we could also go another way. We like this ring well but we could take it or leave it unless you are willing to come to agreeable terms. We did not do that. Deanna saw a ring she liked and fastened on to it Gollum-style. Upon seeing ‘the ring’ the rest of the rings went back into their little boxes while Deanna continued to play with the ring. I did not inquire about prices with the jeweler just strained to look at the little hieroglyphs that were scrawled on the tiny adhesive tab on the ring. I could make out nothing. The jeweler sized her finger and took our information down and we left.

The jeweler never returned a single one of my phone calls or emails. He pretended as though the ring was his and he was not going to part with it unless I fought him for it. He would shake me off the phone, promising to call me back in fifteen minutes and then two days later I would be calling again. He would promise me to call me back with a quote at specific times. I called my father and asked him if jeweler’s were just like this. Perhaps this was a tactic: part of the crazy diamond ring dance. My father assured me it was not and then asked me why I was going into some tiny den of thieves on 47th Street when the Internet was full of lovely competition and rocks without sales tax. He had a point. And if I were buying a ring for myself and not for the best girl in the world who I want to have forever and ever it would make sense to add logical, deductive reasoning to the proceedings. But that is not the case and the Internet will have to wait for when I buy myself a pinky ring.

Eventually, I realized that this jeweler was not mad at me or a misanthrope. He’d just been burned too many times that he realized it made no sense to be eager. He’d seen my girl’s face. There was no reason for him to hurry. So he just slow-played us, never giving off even the slightest waft of eagerness. And when I finally picked up my ring and my credit card declined, his eyebrows didn’t even move.

“It’s just a new card.” I said.
“Of course.” He said.

A phone call to Visa later and the ring was mine, placed in a handsome blue velvet box. Spring-loaded at the push of the button to pop open like a switchblade.

This was Friday. Her birthday was the following Tuesday. I mentioned to the jeweler that I had planned to propose on her birthday and he responded “Ah. Saves you from buying a present.” On the one hand, I suspect he was trying to add value to the ring: this ring doesn’t cost you money! It saves you money! On the other hand, he was absolutely right. I could derive some psychological satisfaction that in some warped way, this was thrifty and sentimental. But the question of how to propose dogged me.
I thought of all the guys I’d heard about who did remarkable things with proposals on the scoreboard and fireworks and barbershop quartets. People who proposed on the French Riviera or in a vineyard or on a Yacht gently circling the island of Malta. Those people all had something in common: they had a lot more money than I did. I briefly thought about calling up a barbershop quartet, the poor man’s Malta-yacht, but declined when I imagined how strange it would be to watch the oddly-shaped men of the quartet sink back into the night after they’d sung.

The day before her birthday I called her father. Our conversation was brief but happy. We talked about baseball for about three minutes and then I mentioned that I was going to propose to his daughter on her birthday. He said a few nice things, but I kept thinking that I should say something else: something pithy and important. As I listened to him, I realized I’d said everything I needed to say when I told him I wanted to marry his daughter.

Her birthday began oddly. The day before her birthday, I got my haircut. The haircut turned out kind of bad. Deanna pointed out that I looked a bit like a flapper from the 20s. So the day began with some coffee from Starbucks and Deanna taking a scissor to my hair and rescuing it from the sexual liberation of the 1920s.

Deanna and I then sped off to the Bronx Zoo where we spent five hours flopping around every exhibit. I grew up in St. Louis where the zoo is free and taken in leisurely. But in the Bronx where it’s 50 bucks to take you and your date, the zoo must be marched briskly. I paid for gorillas, dammit! I had the ring in my pocket in case there was a moment at the zoo where I just had to propose. We walked through the butterfly garden, by the Bronx river, we took lots and lots of pictures. It was a terrific day, brisk weather, a zoo with an almost 28 Days Later-style lack of people, gorillas pulling faces, sea lions doing tricks. Even the train-ride home only took forty minutes.

Once home, Deanna and I went on a nice 5 mile run before dinner. We’d stop running over the last couple of months due to arguments about speed. I run too fast. She runs too slow. Sometimes she walks. Sometimes I bark about that. We ran that night through Queens and she set the pace. The sun was setting in Astoria Park as we ran through.

We got back home and changed. I put on exactly the same clothes I’d worn to the zoo, including the blazer with the ring in it and she put on a necklace that I’d given her for valentine’s day in 2006. It was an extravagant gift at the time but I had really liked it when I saw it and once that happened I couldn’t find anyway to talk myself out of getting it for her. It was the only piece of jewelry I’d ever given her and I loved that she was wearing it.

We went to a Greek restaurant right off of Astoria Park. We had eaten at this restaurant once before and ordered so much food that we nearly died. So there were discussions about how to limit this from occurring. The waiter came over, skinny, greasy, too young, too much jewelry, too much facial hair and took our order with great nonchalance. As he recited the specials, he mentioned that there was a red snapper special, and because red snapper is one of the very few fish that I can eat without too much prodding and because my beloved is a certified fish gobbler, I ordered it without listening too much to what he said.

After the salad and half of one appetizer we were full. And then he brought a 30 inch fish, complete with head and tail and placed it in the middle of the table. Its head pointed directly at me. Its dead eyes and brown burnt teeth. Across the table, my beloved slumped in her chair from the onset of feta-borne food coma and I made as much progress as I could removing flesh from carcass and fishbones from my mouth. Three out of every four bites were good, that lemony fishless taste that I can tolerate or even enjoy, but every fourth bite was so fishified that my eyes would water. For the rest of the meal, the red snapper watched me. Deanna said she would take it home as leftovers and she has apportioned her self several small red snapper and deli mustard sandwiches. But the head remains in the fridge, eternally curious through the Tupperware.

After dinner and complimentary dessert, we walked through Astoria park and I tried to casually discuss how long we’d been together. At the bottom of the hill, between the Hellgate and Triboro bridges I said to her that I’d spoken to her father and he said it was okay and I got down on one knee and asked her to marry me. Tears. The good kind of tears. The kind you hope for, strangely, when proposing to somebody. And a yes. The ring had done its job perfectly. And then the lovely walk back whereupon she explained how she kind of suspected it might be tonight and enumerated the many different subtle ways in which I’d kind of given myself away (“You asked if my parents would be home tomorrow. When have you ever asked that?”)

The walk home was the best part. The ending of one time and the beginning of another one. The fall breeze blows cold and you wrap up in this wonderful person next to you that you’re going to be with for as long as you get. And you’re embarrassed at how irrepressibly happy you are and how implausibly lucky you’ve been up until this point. Then you call your family and you get the joy of telling people and hearing them be happy for you.

After all the phone conversations with family, she and I went to a beer garden near the house and split a half liter of cherry wheat beer (the only beer she can tolerate). We took pictures of ourselves and listened to 80s music. We played with the ring and did what we always do, laughed ourselves silly at each other.

Bad Dream

2009-09-25T10:40:00.004-04:00

The night before last night I had a bad dream. It was not a terrible dream, one of the dreams which leaves you sobbing in the morning bereft of hope. More a standard bad dream full of anxiety and thrilling terror. The kind of thing that pops you out of bed for about fifteen minutes and forces you to watch TV for 15 minutes to bleach the part of the brain that had been tainted.

This dream was very straightforward and took place in my own apartment. In brief, there was a ruckus in the foyer outside my apartment door. I heard the ruckus and recognized the voice. It was the voice of a McDonald’s employee with whom I had recently had a disagreement and had swapped some pretty graphic insults (this part of the dream was known to me in the dream but I had no specific memory of what I said- only that I had said them). As I walked toward the door I saw the door was unlocked and that my would-be McAssailant could stream in through the door. I lunged for the dead bolt and through the lock just as he landed against the other side of the door with all his force. The lock held but the wood within the door clearly bulged. At which point he let forth all kinds of violence against my door and I watched knowing it would not hold. I stood and waited to be McAnnihilated.

I woke up.

I don’t like dreams. As a general rule, my dreams fall into one of three categories with some cross-over existing between catagories. First, the non-descript. I know that I have slept, suspect that I have dreamed, but in the short farty walk from bed to bathroom, the dream dematerializes entirely and falls into a file-folder in my brain entirely reserved for creepy de-ja-vu feelings. If there is a file in your mind containing all of your past dreams, would you want to see it? If you were a hot dog, would you eat yourself?

Second category: nightmares. My nightmares are, fortunately for me, exceedingly rare. And while I recognize the possibility that I have a constant stream of forgotten nightmares, when I have a bad dream they tend to be pretty substantial. I have in my mind a picture from a dream of midtown Manhattan being devastated by a nuclear blast that well rivals anything I have seen generated by Michael Bay. It was not my first post-apocalyptic dream. My nightmares set me off for a couple of days- an alertness and sensitivity to bad feelings or negative intuition. My semester of psychology leaps to the forefront of my psyche, “could you be trying to tell yourself something?” Lucky for me I lack the attention span to provide my deep-seated psychological ills the kind of attention that might result in any positive effect.

Third category: celebrity appearances. From time to time, my subconscious feels so neglected as to need to fully staff my dreams with celebrities. Conan O’Brien has guest hosted my dreams. We did some bit on his show after the first commercial but before the first guest that involved racing calamari squid down waterslides. I may have won. Conan, if you are reading, the calamari water slide bit killed. Killed. Sometimes there are minor celebrities who show up. I can recall having a bad dream about witnessing a murder. The murderer? Keanu Reaves’…roommate. That’s how the murderer was labeled in the dream. “He’s done it again!” “Can nothing be done to stop Keanu Reaves’..roommate?”

Carl Jung, one of the major forces in psychology, wrestled with dreams- made them the focus of his work. Serious Jungian psychologists will begin sessions with two questions: How did you sleep? Did you dream? I know this. I realize that there is a major literary industry in dream interpretation- that there are those out there who believe the answers to my psychological conundrums are being screened every night on the inside of my eyelids.

So if you know this, you the actively questioning reader posit, then when haven’t you started a dream journal? A dream journal, for the passively scanning dullard, is a book that you keep bedside and scrawl in without any kind of editorial process the moment you wake up.

And the truth is that I have kept a dream journal.

For one day.

One day in 2004, I tried to penetrate my fog of dyshappymalcontentedness by dream journaling. I don’t know where this idea came from but if I had to guess, I’d point the furry finger of blame at NPR. My dream journaling lasted a single day. A single dream. Is it possible that my subconscious, knowing that it was likely to be logged for the first time decided to roll over and show its most gleaming strangeness just for the joy of being posteritized?

I hope so.

The dream involved me being involved in a celebrity love triangle. I was the primary object of affection being vied for in a way that both flattered me and made me fearful of the anguished intensity of the rivals for my charms. Who were the two celebrities you ask? Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp.

My Father and the Moles

2009-09-11T12:01:00.005-04:00

About a year ago, my mother and father decided to celebrate my father’s retirement from the hospital by going on a five-week road trip to Nova Scotia. They loaded up their newly-acquired Prius and trekked thousands of miles up into the Canadian Northeast stopping at all points of interest along the way. It was, as my mother described it, the college road trip they’d always wanted to take but never got to. The photos were fantastic, they even stopped by my apartment in Queens on the way back and took me out to dinner. It was a lovely trip with one tiny specter looming in the background.

The Dow Jones at the beginning of their trip was around 13,500. And by the end of their trip was right around 8,000. My father’s retirement was heavily invested in the market. And to his credit he managed to go through with the trip despite what must have been heavy inclinations to break it off and busy himself with financial damage control. He did the trip and judging by the photos and the stories he did it right.

A few months later my dad had unretired. Money stuff. He took a job working reviewing hospitals all over the country. The pay isn’t like his previous job, but he travels two weeks a month to hospitals that have to treat him like a foreign dignitary. He gets sucked up to. Each hospital is different. He’d been an administrator as well as a doctor for 28 odd years so the work interests him. The work pleases him mightily and when Mom wants to go with him she can on the company’s dime. It is a lovely job with one tiny specter looming in the background.

My father is a cold blooded killer. And the job is cutting into his killing time.

Two years ago when moles invaded the yard my mother hired someone. A guy. The neighborhood mole guy. When you get truly suburban, as my parents have, there is a guy for everything. The neighborhood basement remodeling guy, the neighborhood lawn and landscaping guy, and now the neighborhood mole guy. The neighborhood mole guy charged like seven hundred bucks to set mole traps and then an additional 40 bucks for every mole he caught.

I don’t know if you are familiar with moles and the damage they do but my father has a “Hank Hill esque” relationship with his lawn and the brown veins of broken earth that began to show up on every corner of his lawn were slowly destroying him. My mother hired the mole guy. He caught seventeen moles. They paid over a thousand dollars to make their mole problem go away.

Only it didn’t actually go away. It just subsided into the fall when the moles, fat from the destruction they’ve reaped upon the lawn, descend into hibernation.

My father’s Italian heart pumps the blood of vengeance.

In 1992 my father installed central air conditioning in our three story brick house. The house, created in 1906, was not easily wired for the cold stuff and the expense was exorbitant. Unfortunately the tall oak trees situated by the eaves of the roof provided access to many squirrels who saw the piping and tubing for the central air as excellent construction materials for their nests. Thousands of dollars worth of central air conditioning work had been undone and destroyed.

As far as my father was concerned, it was on. His first solution was a firearm. He wanted to buy a sniper mat and a high powered rifle and lay on the roof of the breakfast room and shoot squirrels until he didn’t see squirrels anymore. My mother overruled him. So he got into his car and came back with iron traps. These traps were baited with something irresistible to squirrels (central air conditioning tubing?) and trapped the squirrels alive. In the ivy that surrounded the oaks by the house a large plastic rubbish barrel was filled with water. The squirrels’ high pitch yells as they sank to the bottom of the barrel lives with me still. Dozens of squirrels perished. My father, upset by the sheer waste of it all, skinned and ate one of the victims to see if perhaps the squirrels’ carcasses could be salvaged as edible meat. The image of the naked pink squirrel marinating in pyrex in the fridge lives with me still.

For three decades my father has waged a personal war against death. He’s worked in Intensive Care where people die as a matter of course. The war has casualties. He lost sometimes and at considerable personal cost, but more often than not he won and people got better. But I think that the way he prosecuted the squirrels, the ruthless efficiency showed another side of that battle. He’d fought death long enough to be friendly with it. There was no squeamishness, no chink in the armor where in which mercy might nest.

The squirrel population took a major hit that summer and when the dog would chase squirrels after that you could watch them scurry towards the oaks by the house and actually change their routes to avoid them. There death lies.

This summer my father has killed 42 moles. I know because he sends me spreadsheets. He sends me graphs comparing his mole killing to Albert Pujols homerun production (Pujols has at the time of this blog 47 homeruns). My father is a scientist first and foremost. He uses deductive reasoning to determine mole-behavior and then sets his traps based on that behavior. He has plotted out temperatures and humidity on spreadsheets, he has kept a record of the weight in grams of his victims, he has attempted to ascertain morphological diagrams of mole genitalia so he could better understand the gender of his victims. He has not, to my knowledge, performed autopsies but that seems like only a matter of time.

Baseball season is winding down and my father has several road trips still to make. My mother tolerates my father’s molegroms but does not participate. She sends apologetic emails to family members after my fathers’ lengthy and detailed updates which almost always arrive in spreadsheet form. But as a result when my dad is on the road, Pujols tends to pull ahead.

Fall is coming soon. The moles will retreat underground. My father is pushing hard to the end. He’s moved off of his own property, received permission from neighbors to widen the war into Laos and Cambodia. He’s curious about how much effect he can have on the mole population- there must be hundreds, if he kills fifty will it have an impact on their numbers next year?

The lawn looks great. An unimpeded swath of green and if you look closely at some of the outskirts and hinterlands you can see the spike traps strategically placed. The moles are losing badly and my father, far from being complacent, sees a mole-free subdivision as a possibility. Maybe when he re-retires.

Purging the buffer

2009-09-10T11:32:00.000-04:00

An Unfocused Series of Updates.

First.
A man stands in front of a car stopped at a red light on a largely deserted 21st Street in Long Island City, Queens. Tiannemen style, he bows at the front of the car with a fist to his palm. Judo style.

I only notice this because I’m walking home from rehearsal hoping for a meal of opportunity at one of the bodegas.

Suddenly, after bowing the man does three back handsprings culminating in a backflip. In the middle of the street. The car is still stopped at the red light. The man judo bows. Walks up to the side of the car and bows. The driver of the car rolls down the window enough to give the man a dollar. The man accepts the dollar bill. Judo bows. Sprints to the other side of the street where he hands the dollar to another man who I hadn’t noticed standing there before.

Green light. The car takes off. The man waits in the middle of the street. Red light. There’s only one car at the intersection, this time on the other side of the street.

Same routine. The man bows and then turns three handsprings, a back flip, a bow. And walks to the side of the window. No dollar. He bows. Does two handsprings and another flip right by the guy’s window. No dollar. Light is still red but not for too much longer. The guy stands in front of the car, bows, and does four back handsprings into a backflip landing in the splits right there on the concrete in the middle of 21st Street in Queens. Bows. Window comes down. Driver flips the guy a dollar. Guy bows and trots over to the man on the side of the street.

The guy btw, the flipping guy looked to be about 45 years old when I walked past him.

Second.
I’ve started taking improv classes (spellcheck suggests “improve”-suck it spellcheck) at Upright Citizen’s Brigade. I’ve only taken one class but I like it very much. I’ve taught improve to high school students and middle schoolers and adults but have neither skills nor knowledge which simply led me to feelings of shame and fraudulence. Some deep karmic hole feels like it’s being filled by taking these classes. Observations: I have no pride in my skills at improv and as such I don’t feel as at risk as I expected. The fundamental psychological state encouraged by the class, wherein all contributions are valid and helpful is really a place my mind doesn’t go right away. Discernment is a bitch to get over. I’ll keep you updated.

Third
Tonight I close Love’s Labour’s Lost, an extremely short and silly sixties-flavored cutting of Shakespeare’s (fairly forgettable) comedy. I play a clown in this one and sport an afro and very short jean shorts. I don’t have too much to do but what I have to do is pretty straightforwardly comedic and I feel more confident in doing that than I can remember. I’ve nixed a lot of my comic tension and effort. Clowning in Shakespeare is always fun because you can submarine other people’s intentions and status and attempts to be self-important. You can speak truth and be funny that way. As well as all of the other craven and deplorable ways that a man can try to be funny (like big hair and small shorts).

I get to play guitar and mandolin and sing in this show. And I haven’t made a hash of it like I have in other cabarets and benefits and performance opportunities where my mind wanders or I get seized with rockstar ambition. I’ve just enjoyed singing bad harmonies and playing simple guitar lines. I need to find a way to do more of that.

Fourth
I enjoyed Inglourious Basterds a great deal. And I’m, for some reason, quite defensive about this.

Fifth
It’s been six months since I was laid off. Quality of life not working at that that job has improved by several orders of magnitude.

Sixth
I stopped blogging for the last month. It kind of snuck up on me. I blame a couple of factors. First, the notion that people got really hacked off at me a couple months ago for something I wrote has been I think subconsciously prohibitive. I’ve been over thinking things. Secondly, I got really topical in my planning to blog. I even mentioned a couple of topics out loud.

Namely: Was Quentin Tarantino a proto-hipster? And If LSD is such a dangerous drug with such long lasting consequences why are there no support groups for the millions of people who have tried it?

I may still write that last one. But seriously, my blogging tends to suffer greatly from pre-planning.

Also, since my last blog the St. Louis Cardinals have won almost 70% of their games. And I’m an extraordinarily superstitious person about things like that. So I might have been trying to do my part to keep the streak. That said, I promise to do better in the near future. Particularly that I am once more out of shows or rehearsals and have an endless hash of time on my hands.

On Coming Out of Retirement

2009-08-11T12:35:00.003-04:00

In April a series of coincidences occurred that resulted in my being on stage last month for the first time in two years .

In September of 2007, I took a step back from acting.

I put together a play in the New York Fringe Festival and the amount of psychological force involved in having my work produced and acting in that production produced enough strain to result in massive disruptions in my personal life. I nearly lost the woman I love. I ended up parting ways permanently with a number of good people who had put a huge amount of their own work into the show. The show itself I was proud of but the human cost to put it up seemed unnaturally large and made me question whether any artistic endeavor that I was talented enough to put forward was worth what it cost me in real life ya-yas.

The experience forced me to start to examine my entire ‘career’ through that lense: cost/benefit analysis. What have I gotten versus what have I missed out on, etc. The costs became immediately apparent and overwhelming, while the benefits- transitory as they are- seemed nebulous and incalculable. I remembered the artistic and interpersonal battles, the crushing disappointments, the constant loneliness and insecurity, the weddings, baptisms, and funerals I had missed so that I could wear lousy costumes and do lousy shows. Missing an uncle’s funeral to do a bad Shakespeare play for 30 people really skews a cost/benefit analysis.

So I stepped back. I rebranded myself as a writer because at least my failures as a writer were easier to deal with. You fail by yourself as a writer. In a room. Alone. You know you suck but at least you can take comfort from the fact that nobody can see you sucking.

And then in April I was cast. In a play that had been nominated for a Pulitzer to be directed by theplaywright. I was to play a piano prodigy. I’d have to sing Schumann in German. I’d have to cry in a spotlight at the end of the play. The play had only two people and I was to be in every scene.

I wasn’t looking to be an actor again but I did really want to be in this play. It was leaps and bounds better than anything I had ever written- structured with ruthless economy and layered with misdirection that Houdini would have admired. The playwright, whom I met at the audition, was a smallish kind of man who it turned out would always wear cargo shorts, a t-shirt, sweatshirt, and sneakers. He struck me from the moment I met him as a guy who did nothing but write plays, a kind of savant. My first impression of the man was a desire to be friends with him. Not sycophantically but genuinely. Such was the dude’s aura.

For the months of May and June, I worked on my singing. I studied with my friend Daisy who convinced me that I would be fine. I’m a handwringer, and sometimes I can convince myself that I’m working when in fact all I’m actually doing is worrying for an hour. She got me to work instead of worry. She would sing, and then I would sing, and then her dog would bark and bark. We were the three most irritating people/dogs on the Upper West Side.

I read and reread the play. I sang by myself in a park by the East River. I went for long walks with the script. I guilted my girlfriend into telling me things would be okay. And then I left for Sarasota, Florida. To the condo that I used to live in that my parents still own. The dirty secret on my being cast: I didn’t need housing or a car and was therefore a big money saver for the theater company. A shot to the confidence to know you are a cost-cutting maneuver.

When I arrived I met Ken. The other actor. Ken was playing an older Viennese singing teacher. Ken is in his sixties and has a PhD from Harvard in German Lit that he’s never used. Ken had been on over a hundred television shows. I watched his work on Barney Miller on youtube and it was genuinely funny and real and good. Ken had done the play twice before including once in Vienna.

Have you ever been rescued before? It’s an extraordinary feeling. You have doubts and fears and the nagging feeling you’re about to make a complete ass of yourself and then you meet Ken. And suddenly a light goes on inside your mind and a single sentence flashes: “Oh! Everything’s going to be fine!” Such was my experience.

Even more so, the playwright was such a joy in the rehearsal hall I could scarcely believe my luck. Ken never wanted to hear what my direction was so every fifteen minutes or so the playwright would put his arm around one of us, walk us off in a direction for a few minutes and whisper in our ear. And then we’d go back to work. It was the friendliest form of direction I’d ever received- the director who was not your judge but your advocate, like a boxer’s corner man.

I worked hard. Harder than I’d worked before. I had no car so I had nothing to distract me. I had a play to do and a girlfriend to call in the evenings. For three weeks I got to work like this.

There was no personal baggage. I didn’t know either of these men. They were professionals the likes of which I had never worked with. The underlying attitude when they walked in the rehearsal hall seemed to be “Of course this is going to be great.” Success was a foregone conclusion, the rehearsal time was simply the pursuit of optimizing success. There were fights in the rehearsal hall between Ken and the director (never between me and anybody, a first for me in the rehearsal hall- I was too happy to be there to fight with anybody). The crazy thing was they’d fight like dogs, snarling and snapping and teeth bared but just like dogs five minutes later the things would be forgotten. No apologies. Only a tacit respect for the other’s strength of feeling and right to respond. It was so goddamned healthy.

There were technical problems. There are always technical problems. The play fell off the rails in previews, when a technical glitch stopped the second scene and the playwright literally left his seat in the house and jumped on to the stage to explain what happened to the audience and give the tech guys a chance to reboot. The night after we opened he had a sitdown with the two actors and the entire tech staff and hosted a roundtable discussion on how to make things better. No recrimination, a grimace at past mistakes, and a smile towards how they to make sure they never happened again. Of course this was going to be great.

I was too tense at the opening performance. Overplayed every moment in the first act. One of the critics savaged me for it. He was right. I had no complaints, he talked about great Ken was and how great the play was and how great the company was. If I had to take one in the shorts for the team, it didn’t bother me. I was kind of shocked by that. Typically bad reviews lived with me for months. Instead, I just did the show.

The show got better every day. So much better. Leaps and bounds better. Every night, as the lights would come up, I’d have the same thought. How much happier I was to be on this stage in this show than anywhere else on earth.

About Health Insurance

2009-08-05T09:32:00.002-04:00

A confession:

I don't have health insurance. As an adult, I have rarely had health insurance. The career that I have chosen (actor/writer/etc) has very high benchmarks for coverage, even within the unions. I have gotten to points where I have had health coverage thanks to acting work, but they do not last and my coverage lapses.

Worse yet, I have not been to a dentist in at least seven years. I am missing a filling in one of my back teeth. I have been missing that filling for nearly five years. I have attempted to work at jobs long enough to get dental coverage but the last job that I worked for nearly two years would not offer me dental because it was cheaper for them to keep me on as temporary worker. Permanently.

I have a lot of trouble talking about the health care issue because it is a line that absolutely divides you from others. If a friend of mine with health insurance gets gravely ill, his or her life comes to a screeching halt and (ideally) an insurance company works with him or her to get them the best care. However, if I get really sick, my options are much worse. I have to exhaust my limited savings and then begin to petition government agencies, charities, and family members for help. So I can stay alive.

The people who I most often end up discussing this issue with are my parents. My parents do have money. They are well off. And they know that if I get pancreatic cancer or swine flu or hit by a car, that the first place hospitals will come knocking for money is their door. And this makes them extremely uncomfortable. Which in turn makes me feel horrible as you can imagine.

I wonder from time to time what I would do if I were to contract something terminal, without health insurance. It is a head space rife with fantasies of self-destruction. I realize that I am doomed, pen some thoughtful letters to dear friends, and find myself a high bridge somewhere to leap from. Certainly, I wouldn't allow my parents to exhaust their retirement to pay for my slow demise, right? But the reality is not quite so sanguinely emo. More likely, I will contract something grave but treatable like Multiple Sclerosis, HIV, skin cancer, or a host of common-or-garden ailments that pop up and require a lifetime's worth of treatment. What responsibilities do I have for my own self-preservation in the face of these everyday tragedies?

I write, frequently tongue in cheek, about class on this blog. Is there a more class-stratifying issue than that of health care? From my perspective, there is not. The number of medical-related bankruptcies in this country is astounding. During an economic downturn, with so many new people off of the insurance roles it can only be expected to increase. This is not an issue to be fucked with by private enterprise whose shareholders clamor for bigger dividends irrespective of the human beings those companies serve. Profit motive must be removed from health care.

I write because the country is currently stuck in a debate whose gears seem to be gummed up by corporate greed and self-serving politics. The United States needs universal health care. I need health insurance that is not prohibitively costly.

And I'm willing to do my part.

I'm willing to make sacrifices. I'm willing to pay for a National Health Care plan with a line-item tax on my paycheck like FICA or Medicare. I'm willing to have the amount I can sue for malpractice restricted. And I'm willing to wait in line if I have to. What I'm unwilling to do at this point is die because it makes other people money. And that seems to be the alternative offered by some insurance companies and politicians.

On Becoming White Trash

2009-07-23T16:18:00.004-04:00

Sorry to have been away for a while.

I've been on my bicycle. I am in Sarasota, Florida without a car.

To ride a bicycle in a small, suburban, coastal town while wearing your hair long is to allow yourself to be profiled. The presumption most make in Sarasota about a white guy with a full compliment of teeth riding a bicycle is that I have lost my license due to excessive DUIs. This presumption has been made about me to my face several times without even a hint of condemnation. It could happen to anyone. When I point out that I am riding a bike voluntarily, brows furrow.

June 32nd.
I actually can't pin down this date precisely. I'm riding home from the Broadway Bar on Cocoanut Ave. (a part that gets a little hairy at night- I know this because I used to live there). I'm riding without a light on my bike after dark. I don't yet know that this is a criminal act. An SUV pulls out just as I'm riding by and slowly overtakes me on Cocoanut. I figure I don't present much of a target for robbing, but perhaps they want to fuck with me? Slowly they pull up next to me and power down the window. A young black man leans out the door and says,
"Yo, man. Got cush for the loc."
Those were the syllables as I heard them. I'm peddling on the shoulder in the darkness alongside the SUV trying to parse the words until I remember that cush is slang for marijuana.
I try to offer a conciliatory and non-judgmental answer.
"I'm sorry. I can't afford drugs."
The window goes up and they drive away.

July 5.
Eating dinner at Publix Supermarket on a bench out front. Turkey sandwich. A white man sits next to me. 50's. Mustache. Skin worn out from sun. Second hand clothes. You've seen this man before. He begins his spiel.
"Hey, brother. You want to buy a $130 food stamps card for $60 bucks? My friend is trying to sell it."
I inform him that I have no money. Incidentally, this turns out to be the best answer to every question I am asked on the street.
"That's cool. He's trying to buy crack. I don't mess with crack. I used to be rich. Lived in California. Then my lady got arrested. Skipped bail. And I lost my mobile home. My trucks..." the story went on like this for a while. I looked at other places to eat and wondered why I didn't leave but suddenly I listened again just in time to hear "...so last night there were three of 'em. Two older girls maybe 20 just having a great time lookin' at the fireworks and a younger one over off by a tree. I said, 'lady i bet you got a broken heart' she was like 'how'd you know?' and I said I just know. She wanted to come home with me but she was 17. Nothin' is worth going to jail for. I don't care how pretty she is. 'sides, I got my standards."
He smiled at the sheer piousness of his decision. I excused myself and got on my bike.

July 6.
There's a college across from the theater where I'm working. I worked out there with an alum who told me I could probably work out with no hassle. I have trouble finding the place, get turned around in and among the dormitories, find seemingly each false exit before finally getting to the gym. I work out for two hours and when I leave, there are police officer's waiting for me.
"Come here. We got a report you were casing the dorms."
I look at the police officer. Another big mustache. And a sidearm. I figure I'll just explain what happened. I do. He asks me for ID. I have none. He asks me for my name and begins writing down my information. I realize that he doesn't believe me. I realize that everyone whoever speaks to a police officer believes that they are going to be allright at the beginning. I realize that I don't know who to call if I get taken to jail. Do you call the director? The producer? I'm asked to stand off to the side for ten minutes while they run my name through the computer and my bicycle's ID through the computer. I bought the bike for 20 dollars seven years ago. The chances seem slim that it wasn't stolen. But today is my lucky day. He says, "You're free to go. You have no outstanding warrants. But if we see you on campus again you will be arrested for trespassing.

July 7.
I ride down Old Bradenton Road. A big fat hooker walks out to me as I'm riding by she calls to me and I take off my earphones (which are illegal to where while riding a bike). I look at her again. "Free samples!!" she yells at me. I pedal off trying to imagine how that works.

Nighttime.
Prior to getting a light for my bike, I would simply ride on the sidewalks at night. Sometimes the sidewalks were so far from a street light that after a car would blind you as it passed, your eyes wouldn't be able to see anything for fifty feet. A tree branch tried to remove my eyelid. I realized that I wasn't alone on the sidewalks, there were people in the darkness. Bike/human accidents tend to be ugly and tooth-extracting so I took to singing loudly as I rode in the hopes that my singing would provoke a response. When I finally did get my bike light, the first thing I noticed was a cat in the middle of the sidewalk that did not move even though I missed it by four inches.

WAL*MART
My friend Johnny quoted a comedian who pointed out that though Target and Wal*Mart are effectively the same, only Wal*Mart inspires entrants with a deep need to question where their lives went horribly wrong. I spent a lot of time at Wal*Mart. I don't make enough money to eat real food three meals a day so typically one or two of my meals are Zone Bars or Balance Bars. They cost a dollar each at Wal*Mart. I bought a wireless router and had to return it twice. The woman behind the counter at the return aisle (and that's a pretty sad and kafkaesque aisle to begin with) says to me: "Oh I know you. You're here all the time." I swear to her that I am not. "Oh yes you are, you returned five things last week." She's serious. So am I. The thought that I have a doppelganger who also shops at Wal*Mart sends me into a double existential tailspin. Decent red wine for 7 dollars.

Bike Death.
The red bike died. It started with a flat tire which I fixed and then a snapped chain which I have not yet been able to remedy. I bought a bike at Wal*Mart. It was too far to walk to Wal*Mart so I ran the four or so miles late at night. I was listening to a podcast while I ran and it was about scary stuff and I was frightened by a bush while running so I punched it. I didn't realize that when you're really scared you just automatically punch things. If and when I can afford a therapist, this might be a good thing to address. The new bike is silver and of the same genus as the old bike (Huffy). It was 84 dollars. I added my straw basket and night light to my new bike. It rolls pretty well.

Craigslist
I knew the bike death was imminent so I tried to keep an eye on Craigslist and pick up a bad bike even cheaper than 84 dollars. I found one last Sunday morning for 25 bucks. I called the guy and he was only 3/4 of a mile from my house. He didn't want to meet me. Didn't want to see me in person. Seemed weird but I took no umbrage. He gave me the following instructions. "Bike is behind my house. There's a receipt under the planter. Have a look at the bike. If you like it, leave the money under the planter and take the receipt."
Off I went. It felt sketchy going into the back of the guys house, a kind of high fenced yard with a barbecue pit, but those were the instructions. I looked at the bike. It was old and had more gears than I needed but I tried rolling it out away from the house and I noticed that the back wheel was catching against the body of the bike. Fixable, but I was done fixing bikes.
As I roll the bikes I see a man walking a dog. He sees me moving the bike and immediately grabs his phone and begins dialing. I think I see where this is going and decide to try to head it off:
"If you're, uh, calling the police, this is a, an, uh, craigslist thing."
It sounds preposterous but the guy turns his iPhone to face me and says.
"I'm not. I'm just checking my email."
He stares at me for a little while.
"But you're stealing that fucking bike."
I shrug and put the bike back. As I walk home I call my father in case I'm arrested, just to have things in motion. I'm supposed to be at the theatre in three hours anyway.

Bradenton
Bradenton is to Sarasota what New Jersey is to New York. It only exists to make Sarasota feel better. For instance, three days ago there was a murder two miles to the south of me in Sarasota. A guy shot another guy in the chest. Bradenton, not to be outdone, the following day reported a guy dismembered and set on fire two miles to the north of me.
In an attempt to fix the dead bicycle I went up to buy a new chain (my third purchased chain). The bike shop was 8 miles north of me so I did stop by where the burning pile of person was just to have a look and see if I could make anything out. I couldn't. The spot was a little cove behind an unrented building just off the main drag. When you set a body on fire, location is very important. These people had clearly done some homework. The ride through Bradenton was on a very busy street with very few sidewalks into a stiff headwind. 95 degrees for a bicycle is unpleasant but trying to do it on grass while hopping curves and the whole thing gets a little athletic for me. But Bradenton- oh what a sad Suburban nightmare you are.
The thing is, you car drivers, you forget what suburbs are: human deserts with tiny oases of strip-malls every three or so miles. When a strip mall becomes too successful or expensive another one is "developed" a few blocks away. When the neighborhood's population begins to recede, these oases also die leaving grassy-cracked parking lots and wornout signs. Somewhere between Steinbeck and Mad Max. And not a single mile of contiguous sidewalk.
Having got my chain, I turned towards home and stopped off at Blimpie for a sub. The man who made my sub was ten years younger than me but had teeth that look like they came off a Mayan skeleton. If you want street cred in Bradenton, it's all about teeth.
Meanwhile outside there were somewhere between seven and eleven cop cars, some of which had federal markings. A young kid with a shaved head and his blonde girlfriend were being cuffed by a football team's worth of police office.
The blonde shouts at someone who was rubbernecking "Hey, bitch! What you looking at? I'm fucking crazy! I'll kill you." I eat my sandwich and watch. Others now watch also. It's normal apparently. It's Bradenton.
I roll towards the theater and I see a guy with brown hair and a red shirt. The shirt is soaked with sweat. He's got a book bag and red rolling suitcase which he's pulling by the handle over the grassy non-sidewalk. He's sunburned to hell and gone and as I get closer and closer I realize that he looks like he's batshit crazy. I try and give him my now well-rehearsed non-judgmental look and his face just goes cuckoo for cocopuffs right at me.
"HEY EVERYBODY, IT'S CARROT TOP!!!"
He ejaculated these words with a kind of manic glee. I may have made his day.

In rehearsal...

2009-07-03T08:11:00.004-04:00

Day 10.

It's an emotional role. I was ready for the heavy lifting, but not the residual soreness. For hours afterwards my head was messed up. Images. Etc. The same stuff you use to get where you were going hangs around at the edges for a while since.

I studied this stuff. Once upon a time, in the same rooms I'm now rehearsing, I spent three or four hours a day four days a week for a year coming up with new and exciting ways to make myself feel terrible. Eleven or twelve of us in a room for an entire year with a misery sherpa pushing his students to go deeper inside of themselves- antagonize griefs, stoke childhood grudges, find your id and flog him with a coat hanger.

And we did. I did. With my mind I murdered, mangled, deceived, crafted scenarios of violation- for a year. And came home every day afterwards. The teacher taught this class used a term "acrobat of the heart". I think the term is clumsy, but it's meaning to me- the effortless taking of terrible emotional risk is very clear.

That year, 2002 to 2003, I felt a kinship with the people with whom I studied. We weren't curing cancer- more often we were doling it out and grieving over its occurrence for some assignment- but I think it's safe to say that we felt like we were. There was a genuine sense that we were hot shit- and this might be the natural outcropping of indulging every deep-seated, mean-spirited, childish fantasy we could come up with. (I use the first person plural here and irritates me- but I can think of no other way to show how dialed in I was to these other peoples frame of mind- there were no secrets- secrets slowed you down. Everything was shared. One guy tried to hide his sexual orientation during the year and it was painful to watch...)

We were good at angry- both the boys and girls. People could find rage. Everybody thinks they've been done wrong. Sad came slower for the boys than the girls, but one by one the tears came for the boys and the subsequent congratulations. Also, there was the spectre of being CUT from the program hanging over every class. So a nice emotional breakthrough could keep those feelings at bay for a couple days.

As a rule the class was not able to do sex. A part of the training centered on sex- and getting "related" to sexual activity. Horniness, as anyone who has seen a live sex show in Amsterdam knows, is difficult to reproduce on stage. True also in the classroom. The sex-based assignments (catchy turn of phrase, no?) were almost uniformly disastrous and far too embarrassing to list here (comments enumerating said assignments will not be published- you have been warned.) There was sex occurring licitly and illicitly outside of the classroom, but I couldn't say any more than anywhere else.

A siege mentality set in after six months of emotional work. Classes would be met with a hardness from the students. The eyes, once soft around the edges and quick to moisten, steeled over, strayed from the work on stage to smuggled crosswords puzzles and mindless doodles. February and March lasted a year and a half. Good work was greeted as indifferently as bad, weeping became a minimum wage job.

This may have been necessary. "Acting," as my then-girlfriend then pointed out to me, pointedly, after being treated to another of my lengthy whining screeds, "is hard." And it is. Or should be. And after a while, it became better to treat it with a little less respect and awe.

So now I'm back in rehearsal, doing the heavy lifting of emo-work (we never called it that, but my calling it emo makes me feel more ridiculous about it and somehow better) and I need to get my after work detachment back. Indifference has to be cultivated. Again. I punch in again at noon.

btw,
2 things that I share here.
1) Excellent article shared by stillman (whose blog still rules)on whether or not to respond to your critics...
2)This is a poach from beatdown's excellent screed re: toilets.
"I haven’t even talked about the toilets. There is a huge handicap stall, which I could never use because I don’t need to feel like I’m shitting in an open field."

Seriously, beatdown, I've walked by a half a dozen handicapped accessible bathroom stalls and I giggle every time. Thanks for that.