Month: October 2010

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What It Is: 10/11/10

What I’m reading: Re-re-re-finished The Iliad, at last! I’ve got a bazillion questions/observations to follow up on. This is the fourth time I’ve read Homer’s poem, but the first time that I ever really felt for Achilles’ plight. In past readings, I think I focused too much on his descent into vengeful madness. Also, I considered him to be a bit of a douche. This reading, I found myself invested in his character in full, and feeling a great deal of sadness as he deteriorates into nihilistic gloom. I’m going back to The Odyssey next, where Achilles makes a sad return.

What I’m listening to: Simple Things and Fields.

What I’m watching: God’s Cartoonist, that Jack Chick documentary.

What I’m drinking: Bombay Sapphire & crappy ol’ tonic. We were traveling.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Spending the weekend with their grey-pal Tut. He seemed pretty sad to see them go when we picked up the boys on Sunday. One of Tut’s owners e-mailed to let us know that everything was going fine; she told us that the dogs were all playing musical beds in the living room, and that Otis had cruised on upstairs immediately after entering the house. Otis has a habit of blindly zooming through any new house he enters, not exactly exploring, but trying to get to their furthest reaches ASAP. Anyway, Tut sleeps downstairs in the living room at night, so his owners thought Ru & Otis would be alright doing the same. Instead, one of the owners wound up sleeping downstairs with them, because my boys wouldn’t stop whining about being left to sleep away from people.

Where I’m going: I’ll probably head into the city this weekend for a little shopping-reconnaissance, and also to buy an accordion from an ex-girlfriend.

What I’m happy about: Getting to see a little bit of Kansas City, attending the fun wedding of one of Amy’s pals, and getting to catch up with an old high school pal I haven’t seen in around 15 years.

What I’m sad about: Not getting to see a college pal of mine in the area, whom I haven’t seen in 10 years. I tried, but she was busy during our scant window of free time.

What I’m worried about: The encroachment of The Jersey Shore. At our hotel in KC this weekend, we had to change rooms twice. The first time, it was because the room stank of cigarette smoke. Our second room was located next to The Loudest People Ever, a bunch of 20somethings who were in town to PARTY!!! We thought we could put up with it, but after the ruckus failed to abate at any time that Friday afternoon, and we could only cower in fear at the thought of what the four or five people would be like when they got back to their room drunk at 3 a.m., I decided to go back to the front desk to see if we could get a quieter room. As I waited for the elevator, the occupants of the next room joined me, heading out to PARTY!!! It was a pack of four, and I sweartagod, the two women looked like

  1. a cross between Snooki and J-WOWW, and
  2. J-WOWW without boob-implants and 70% more haggard.

I got to the front desk while they were making their standard ruckus in the lounge area, and I quietly said, “I’m in 221, and my room is next to Those People. I need you to find us a room not next to them.” The clerk’s eyes widened and she said, “I’ll get you up on the fourth floor, where it’s quiet. We’ve been getting complaints about that room for the last few hours.”

Now, the guys were standard post-frat sluggards, with beer-bellies, khaki shorts and baseball caps for non-baseball teams, but the ladies were in too-tight sheer white t-shirts, bras sticking out, and “worn” jeans that made them look like frayed sausages. I thought, “What hath Jersey Shore wrought?”

What I’m pondering: Starting a series of posts about Achilles/Odysseus/Homer under the title Man Of War. You guys interested in my ruminations on the subject, or participating in an online conversation about Homer?

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Who Am I?

I’m the guy who’s been trying to simplify his life a little.

Recently, I concluded that Sports Illustrated and ESPN (the) Magazine are two magazines that I rarely get around to opening. SI has been sending me increasingly desperate renewal offers, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to resist. I know there are some good articles in the mag, but there’s also an awful lot of crap and I can always find the good stuff on SI’s site.

ESPN was initially a gift subscription from my brother, around 1999. Subsequently, they nested the bi-weekly magazine as a freebie in my $40 annual fee for ESPN.com Insider material. I still enjoy reading some of that online columnists, so I’ve kept that membership.

Like I said, I rarely opened the mag anymore, but I looked through an issue a while back and concluded that I was so not the target audience, which apparently consists of fantasy sports addicts, motorsports fans, and XXXXXX-treme snowskateBASEjumpers, between the ages of infantile and dude. A few weeks ago, I e-mailed customer service to find out how to cancel the magazine subscription but keep the online membership. Naturally, you can buy all sorts of things through the ESPN website, but cancellation? That requires a phone call to customer service. I was too busy to take care of it last month (work-stress, social anxiety, whatever), but the issue I received in the mail yesterday served as a reminder.

ESPN has done a number of “theme” issues lately, for purposes that are beyond me. Maybe it’s easier for the editors to keep track of things, or maybe it was preferred 2 to 1 by a focus group of college-age men who want to smell like Usher while drinking Captain Morgan. Regardless, the current ish is “The Body Issue,” ESPN’s attempt to compete with the obsolete SI swimsuit edition by featuring naked athletes covering their junk. It’s meant to be aspirational, I think, because there are a bunch of ads for body-building supplements and athletic wear (along with Usher’s cologne, Captain Morgan, and Rogaine).

I have no objections to naked athletes in a magazine. Sure, none of them are exactly pretty, but I guess the point is that a super-human body trumps an average face. I do, however, draw the line at paying a company to feed me shit (or, to quote Malcolm Tucker, arse-spraying mayhem).

See, in the midst of The Body Issue, ESPN included an article about what issues from bodies. Accidentally. In the midst of sporting events.

Yes, they commissioned and published It happens, about athletes shitting themselves mid-game. That targets a demographic I hope I never belonged to.

So I called ESPN’s customer service to cancel my subscription last night.

The operator complied, then told me that the standard practice in this case is to keep my ESPN.com membership going and donate my print subscription to a local boys’ or girls’ club.

I told her, “Given that the new issue includes The Shitting Report and the recent ‘List’ ish included an athlete’s recommendations for strip clubs across the country, what’s say we pass on donating the magazine to the youth of America, alright?”

“Oh, dear.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

So, I’m the guy who let his SI subscription lapse after a dozen years and canceled his subscription to ESPN.

(You can see which magazines I’m still receiving and draw your own conclusions about who I am, I guess.)

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Desk Jockey

I keep ibuprofen and deodorant in my desk at the office. At Merrill Lynch, things worked a little differently:

As he was being escorted out the door, according to an H.R. executive, Semerci asked that someone retrieve some money taped inside a drawer in his desk. When the security personnel went to get the money, they discovered it was nearly $10,000, in sequential hundred-dollar bills.

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Chick Magnet

Last night / this morning, I watched God’s Cartoonist, a documentary about Jack T. Chick. I’d seen his comic-book-style religious tracts since I was a kid. Tammy, our next-door neighbors’ mom, made it her Baptist mission to save our souls.

She’d leave general interest ones on us, but when I was a teen, Tammy made sure to give me Dark Dungeons, the tract about why Dungeons & Dragons will surely send your ass to hell. A few years ago, she put Love the Jewish People in my mailbox. I mean, I assume it was her and not some bizarre anti-Semitic joke by other neighbors.

I thought the stories were just fine, but was entranced with the different visual styles of the cartoonists. I marveled at the jaunty, comic style of some of the strips, and their contrast with the Neal Adams-esque realist style of others. Sure, I hated the use of typesetting instead of hand-lettering, but I thought it was awesome how just about everyone got consigned to the lake of fire after death.

(I was kinda fuzzy on the notion of the various sects of Christianity as a kid; I had no idea why one group of Christians would believe the leader of another group of Christians to be the Antichrist. I didn’t really pick up on interdenominational hatred till college, so I never got why the comics had it in for Catholics, Mormons, Christian Scientists, et al. I always thought everybody just hated Jews. Go figure.)

Anyway, I enjoyed the heck out of the documentary, with its combo of interviews, excerpts of Chick’s tracts, and pseudo-animations of same. I thought the movie did a great job of not belittling Chick, even while many of the interview subjects (esp. Dan Raeburn) unloaded on the hate-filled content of some of the comics. (I’d link to the trailer, but it actually focuses on all the “bad” parts and makes the movie look like more of a hit piece than it really is.)

I really dug the varying perspectives and the attempts at filling in the enigmatic history of Jack Chick and his publishing company, but the Rev. Ivan Stang stole the show. He was entrancing with his good-natured, not-quite-earnest take on Chick’s comics and how they helped him start the Church of the Subgenius. I just loved Stang’s Texas groove and his marvelously dancing eyebrows. I’d better get slack.

The commentators and the strips themselves do a great job of conveying how the tracts’ simplicity is the key to their enormous success. There’s a neat discussion of the art style of one of Chick’s cartoonists, and how he may have been part of the “muscular Filipino school” of comics drawing, but the movie doesn’t go too in-depth about the comics craft of the tracts.

In all, I was thrilled to learn about Chick’s life and the leaps into weirdness he made over the years, as influential figures led him to rail first against the Illuminati/Masons/Druids (?), then Catholics, then witches/Satanic possession. And every other group out there (although there’s no racial animus, just religious).

At the office this morning, I thought the documentary would make a fun topic of conversation. I mentioned it to one of my coworkers, a drunken racist who thrills for early- and mid-century Americana. Chick was from a later period (c.1970 to today), but surely he’d have an opinion on Chick’s work.

He had no idea what I was talking about.

I decided to check with a couple of other co-workers, each in their early-to-mid-50s. Not a one had heard of Chick or knew what the tracts were. When I showed them samples online, they were amused, but had no recollection of ever seeing one. “You never came across one of these on a park bench or a bus-stop?” I asked. Nope. “But there are like a billion of them in circulation!”

English - This Was Your Life.gifI started asking the younger staff, figuring perhaps they’d seen them growing up. Not a one. Eventually, I found one person who knew what I was talking about: our circulation manager, who’s a few years younger than me and a big comics fan. He didn’t remember any of them in particular, but he knew what I was talking about. I was hoping we could bond over This Was Your Life and its beyond-creepy rendition of a giant faceless God.

Still, this was even worse than the time I polled the office to see if anyone knew who Paul Weller is. Two people out of fifty knew of him, The Jam or Style Council. But this? Weren’t Chick tracts everywhere? How could they never have seen one? Now, my office is neither in WASP Central nor Rome. But somehow, ‘nary a person in it lived close enough to people who wanted to save their souls, Baptist-style.

I e-mailed Tammy’s son Todd about this (and the documentary today). In the evening, he wrote back, “That’s funny, because I was out running this morning and I found one of those tracts on the railing of the bridge. I figured I should leave it for some poor soul lost in sin — besides, I have the whole collection (ha-ha).”

When I told my wife I was watching the documentary last night, she told me, “Don’t erase it! I want to watch that!” When she was growing up, she said, they used to have tracts on a spinner rack at the Assemblies of God meeting place. Which is a church, but not her church. (I’m still a little unclear about all these denominations.)

So now I’ve gotta ask: you’ve seen Jack Chick tracts before, right?

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What It Is: 10/4/10

What I’m reading: That Iliad. Patroklos just went down, so things are about to get out of hand.

What I’m listening to: Sir Lucious Left Foot, A Friend of a Friend, In Our Nature, and some Steve Earle.

What I’m watching: Boardwalk Empire, Bored to Death, and Eastbound & Down. That’s a pretty sweet Sunday night lineup by HBO (not that we stay up to watch ’em). Oh, and the stupidest finish of a college football game I’ve ever seen (not that I watch much college football): LSU beating Tennessee when too many Volunteers volunteered to make the goal-line stand on the last play of the game. I mean, I’ve seen teams called for 12 players on the field, but FOURTEEN PLAYERS, all lined up? We “joke” that LSU coach Les Miles may be a slow adult, but to see his idiocy get trumped by another coach? I should make a “Special Olympics Bowl” joke here, but I’m not that mean. Oh, wait . . .

What I’m drinking: Dry Fly & Q-Tonic, although I spent most of the week dry, in hopes of getting off the stress-induced cycle of drinking and/or taking a Xanax in order to get to sleep. Why I chose to do this during a heavy-duty production week, I don’t know. I should’ve waited till this week, when there’s less work stress to pervade my brain.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Going on another long-ass hike on Sunday. On Saturday, Ru pulled his R. Kelly trick and peed on Otis’ head when they were out for their morning walk. Oh, and they played grab-ass.

Where I’m going: Kansas City for the wedding of one of Amy’s pals

What I’m happy about: Finishing my October issue (pretty much) on time.

What I’m sad about: The Ultimate Trailer Show on HDNet got cancelled. This is a serious problem, because Robert Wilonsky’s show was just about the only way I found out about good upcoming movies. If it weren’t for that show, we’d never have heard about Louis, and I’d have missed out on one of the best musical experiences of my life. So, grr. Basically, we’d just open Netflix when Wilonsky’s show was on, and plug in movie after movie. In fact, our next Netflix delivery comes from a UTS episode: The Good, The Bad and the Weird. (UPDATE: and, my wife reminds me, without UTS & Wilonsky, we’d never have discovered In the Loop, which is among my favorite comedies.)

What I’m worried about: That I’m forgetting something. I’ve been pretty stressed lately, and my memory’s been addled as a result. Friday, walking the dogs, I had some song lyrics in my head, but couldn’t recall the song they were from. It took a day or two before it came back to me: Babylon Sisters. But that made me sad because that’s also the title of a book for which my pal Sang, who died in January, designed the cover.

What I’m pondering: Achilles and fate (again). I hope to write at length about a couple of thoughts on the subject, but I need to finish the poem again first. I love how each re-read finds me focusing on a different key; last time (2007), I made a muddled attempt at figuring out the role of the gods in the action & the characters’ lives. Now that doesn’t seem like too much of an issue to me.