Author: Gil

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A Cult of One

Before I got a Sirius radio, I used to listen to sports-talk a lot during my drive home. It was a choice of that, politics, or pop music that even I find unbearable. I grew tired of the institutional egomania of the Mike & the Mad Dog show, so I tended to listen to its alternative, the slightly less egomaniacal Michael Kay show on ESPNradio’s local NYC feed. Nowadays, I listen to Howard Stern replays, First Wave, the Big 80s, the Chill, Area 33, Classic Vinyl and, infrequently, ESPNradio’s national show.

In addition to the rampaging egomania, another thing that turned me off about these shows is the segments devoted to subjects other than sports. See, the funny thing about me is, when I tune into a station called ESPNradio, I actually expect to hear people talking about sports, not about how surprising last night’s episode of The Sopranos was, what the best John Wayne film is, or why the remake of Sabrina was better than the original. (Note: I have heard all three of these subjects discussed on “sports radio” shows.)

A few weeks ago, I clicked over to ESPN’s “The SportsBash” (a name that’s always made me uncomfortable. I mean, is it a party about sports? Is it about beating up sports?) during my evening commute. The host was talking about “cult classic” movies and, for some reason, I stuck with it. I guess I was hoping that he’d tell the audience about the transformative impact of Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees. Alas, what passed for “cult” movies was fare like Old School.

I was about to change stations, when the host said (paraphrasing), “I consider myself a little knowledgeable about cult movies, but I have to say, I’ve gotten about a dozen e-mails now telling me to see a movie called ‘Boondock Saints,’ and I gotta tell you, I’ve never heard of that one!”

The title was vaguely familiar, but I’d never seen it. I looked it up on Netflix when I got home:

Twin brothers Conner (Sean Patrick Flanery) and Murphy (Norman Reedus), feeling that their God-given mission is to cleanse the Earth of all human evil, set out to rid Boston of crime. But instead of joining the police force, these Irish Americans decide to kick criminal butt their own way — a la Charles Bronson. Willem Dafoe is the openly gay FBI special agent assigned to investigate.

We put the movie at the top of our queue, and watched it Saturday night. Amy asked, “Is it particularly important that Dafoe’s character is ‘openly gay’?” I told her that I didn’t know. Then he made his first appearance, at a crime scene. At that point he eyed one of the local cops for an instant, then put his headphones on, turned on his portable CD player — this was 1999, pre-iPod — and listened to opera while investigating the scene.

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m gonna guess that it’s kinda important that his character be out.”

His character goes on to engage in some pretty erratic behavior, as he begins to piece together the identities of the people who are knocking off Russian and Italian mobsters all around Boston. Dafoe’s crisis of conscience culminates in him showing up in a climactic scene in drag, the gratuitousness of which would be funny if he didn’t actually look halfway decent as a woman. It’s amazing what rouge, false eyelashes and a wig can do for a guy.

Sure, there are a couple of outlandish plot elements, and a lot of subtly gay moments of the twin brothers being all shirtless and pretty, but we also get Billy Connolly doing his Jean Reno / killing machine impression, Ron Jeremy as a mobster, and a closing-credit attempt at social commentary that’s unintentionally funny.

Which is to say, I’d recommend catching this flick (even though some of the cuts and transitions make little sense). It’s an entertaining post-Tarantino crime flick, in its over-the-top-itude.

So sports-radio shows can be good for something.

(Bonus trivia: the “ugly brother” knocked up Helena Christensen!)

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Absent Friends and Comedians

My weekend started with an 80-minute drive after work Friday evening. I managed to cover nearly 33 miles in that time, getting from Ramsey, NJ to a bar on Amsterdam and W. 83rd St. in NYC. Which is to say, there are certain aspects of living and working in NJ that can be frustrating. Traffic is a major headache, which is why I don’t schedule anything too tightly for NYC on weeknights.

For instance, I was heading in Friday for dinner with friends at a Thai (sorry, “Pan Asian”) restaurant that’s never done me wrong, and I asked them to set it up for 7pm, since that would give me enough time to make it through whatever traffic was en route, as well as some pre-dinner gin to help wash away the week.

I got to meet up with Mark F., a good friend of mine, for that pre-prandial libation. We shot the breeze for an hour or so, discussing the novels of Richard Price (he gave me a copy of Samaritan that evening), the music of Stan Ridgway, Michael Penn and X (the former of which he referred to as “the music equivalent of Raymond Chandler”), and the declining levels of service and professionalism in this world (I dumped my Mahwah Honda story on him). I also gave him his chanukkah present, even though he’s not Jewish. I told him not to open it till sunset on Friday, but we’ll see how that works out.

The easy familiarity of our conversation reminded me of how little I’ve seen of my friends in the past few months. Work has been tiring, but I should’ve been getting out a little more or getting people to come out to our palatial country estate.

I got an even bigger reminder of this at dinner a short time later, when I discovered that one of my closest friends has been engaged since September. She told me that she didn’t want to give me the news in something as impersonal as an e-mail or phone call, so she’d been waiting till we met up in NYC.

For three months.

This is in contrast to what I did after I popped the question back in May 2005, calling friends all over the country as I drove up the FDR on my way back to NJ, then blogging about it. But I’m such a whore, as you know.

Anyway, congrats to Elayne & Tim on their nuptials!

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Mars, bitches!

Gregg Easterbrook writes about the incredibly misguided lunar base initiative:

In deadpan style, the New York Times story on the NASA announcement declared, “The lunar base is part of a larger effort to develop an international exploration strategy, one that explains why and how humans are returning to the moon and what they plan to do when they get there.” Oh — so we’ll build the moon base first, and then try to figure out why we built it.

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Customer Disservice

Don’t even pretend that you’re interested in reading my long tirade about the service department at Mahwah Honda, my local Honda dealership, which managed turned a flat tire into an epic.

But if you do wanna get a peek into how balled-up and pissy I can get, feel free to check out the letter I wrote to the managers at the service department, under the title of “Worst car service I have ever received”.
Continue reading “Customer Disservice”

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Humans from Erf

Amy & I were clicking around this evening and came across Battlefield: Earth. We marveled over its badness, then checked out the Netflix page for it. Two great things occurred:

a) “Members who enjoyed this movie also enjoyed: Wild Wild West, Batman & Robin, Van Helsing, Planet of the Apes, and The Chronicles of Riddick”, and

b) This review: “I watched this movie for free one winter, working for a local cable company. Part of my job was to monitor the various cable channels to make sure there were no problems. And even though I was indirectly paid to watch, I still felt ripped off.”

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You’d think they’d be better at software piracy

The big year-end issue of my magazine is split between a directory of contract service providers (2nd half) and a series of profile pages of advertisers. Some of them by a profile/ad spread, others just buy a profile. My associate editor and I get the text and images in, lay them out, send low-res PDFs over to each client, and put in whatever revisions they request and send out more PDFs.

Since there are around 120 profile advertisers, you can imagine that there’s lot of project management involved. We also need a certain amount of perspective on which profiles are going to be smooth and which are going to “take some work.” Every morning, I open up a spreadsheet that contains the status of every “unapproved” company (their info gets moved to a worksheet called “Yay! Done!” when they’re approved). It reminds me which companies I need to harass and which ones I’ve yet to get started with because I know their profiles are going to be a major hassle.

When it’s a new advertiser, we have to engage in some handholding. When that new advertiser is overseas, this process can get a little more taxing. When the new overseas advertiser sends files from a program that you haven’t seen since 1998, it can make you throw your hands in the air. And when two of them send files from that same program. . .?

Today, I received e-mails from two separate accounts in India, and they both sent me files from Corel Draw. I looked at these attachments and their “.cdr” extensions and I thought, “Are they using Windows98? Did they send these e-mails over Prodigy? Are they just discovering Celine Dion and Titanic? Should I ask them to resend everything on a ZipDisk?”

It felt like the time I found my old collection of mix tapes up in the attic and realized that I don’t even own a machine that can play them.

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Cloudburst

“The things we crave are either near us or far, whereas time is about process. I have lived many years and I have learned not to trust process. Creation, destruction: these are not the real story. When we dwell on such things, we inevitably lapse into cliché. The true drama is in these relationships of space.”

–Emil Kopen

I’ve bought a lot of comic books over the years, but I’m not what you’d call a collector. When a store clerk asks if I want a bag-and-board for a new purchase, I answer, “No, thanks. I just read ’em.” I used to have some “valuable” comics, but I sold most of them off during college. I don’t remember what I needed the money for. A few years ago, I gave away a ton of “worthless” ones to some friends of mine. They treasure them.

You could say I own a couple of expensive comics, but that depends on your definition of “expensive”. Is $100 too much to spend on a hardcover collection of Little Nemo in Slumberland comic strips, reprinted at their original size (21″ x 16″)? Is $95 too much to spend on a three-volume slipcased edition of the complete Calvin & Hobbes, the best comic strip post-Peanuts? Is $125 too much to spend on the trade paperbacks of the final 100 issues of Cerebus? (Okay, don’t answer that one.)

And is $3,000 too much to spend on Hicksville?

There’s certainly nothing on its cover to indicate that Hicksville carries such an extravagant price. In fact, my edition reads, “$19.95 US / $24.95 CANADA”. It’s no rare, pulled-from-circulation issue, has no first appearance of Wolverine nor the death of a well-loved character (“Not a dream! Not a hoax!”).

But Hicksville brought me to the other side of the world, to small towns and jade factories, to wineries and bungee-platforms, to glaciers and Bunny Hell, to myself and beyond. It brought me to New Zealand.

Hicksville collects a story from the early-to-mid-1990s comics of Dylan Horrocks, about a comics journalist who travels to a small town to research the childhood of a famous cartoonist. The journalist discovers that everyone in this town is a comics aficionado. It’s a dream that I think all comics readers had at some point in their lives, that there’s a place in which we’re home.

But it wasn’t this vision that stayed with me over the years and led me to call my travel-industry friends to set up a two-week tour of the North & South Islands. I wasn’t naïve enough to think there was a comics Shangri-La waiting there. (That’s in Angouleme!)

What brought me to New Zealand was the sky. It’s no mean feat in a black-and-white comic book to convey such subtlety in clouds. In fact, Horrocks’ scratchy pen style would seem to dictate against it, mere outlines separating absence from absence. But there was something in his skies that stayed with me. I was captured by the romance of it, right down to the Maori name for the country: Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud.

In 2003, I decided to go there and see it for myself. My friend Liz set me up on an “adventure tour” group, which was an extensively mixed bag of people (one of whom has stayed a good friend ever since). For the first few days, all I saw were clouds. Oh, and rain. Lots of rain.

But by the time our tour headed to the South Island via the Wellington-Picton ferry, the sky cleared and I started to understand things that I can’t explain. By the end of the trip, at the peak of the Ben Lomond trail, a mile or so above Queenstown, I knew where I was.

A day later, I would spend 24 hours in planes and airports, replaying Emil Kopen’s remarks about space, not time, being the essence of storytelling, as I jetted from Queenstown to Auckland to LA to Newark. Today marks the third anniversary of my return from NZ. Time and space.

I bought my copy of Hicksville at a small press comics expo in Maryland in 1998. Dylan Horrocks was in attendance, signing copies (he’d been brought in to give a presentation on the history of comics in NZ). He made a sketch on the first page of my copy, along with the inscription, “Hey Gil! You’re always welcome in Hicksville!”

And I am.

(You really want to look through my photos from that trip.)