I told my parents I was gay on St. Patrick’s Day in 2005, effectively ruining a pleasant corned beef dinner. I was three months away from graduating college, and I wanted to integrate the worlds I lived in. My college friends knew, but essentially no one from home did. I blame the closure of the bowling alley in my hometown; with no alternatives, the favored pastime there had become discussion of unplanned pregnancies, divorces and the various other ways young people had disgraced their good family names. In any case, I knew I had to tell my parents before someone else did.
More than ten years later, those worlds still aren’t integrated. Here in Los Angeles, I’ve constructed this Neverland of gay nerds with whom I can talk to about Chun Li and Barbara Gordon and Princess Zelda in the same sentence and not get looked at like I’m some kind of space alien. When I go home, I revert. I don’t pack the cutoffs. I leave behind the purple V-neck T-shirt and take the blue one. My life as I live it in Los Angeles does not get discussed unless I force it.
I went home earlier this year, and my mom asked how I was doing. “This guy I used to know in Santa Barbara passed away, and also I got dumped,” I said. Mom: “Oh, I’m sorry your friend passed away.” That bait dangled, untouched. I chose not to force it. Because the divide has remained over the past decade, it is hard for me to make that drive up Highway 5, knowing that I’m going to sit through days and days of questions about what’s growing in my garden, the activities of college friends I haven’t kept in touch with and the name of my apparently singular female friend — “Megan? Stephanie? Which is it? Wait, there are two?” — at the exclusion of anything more personal.
The single best example of this refusal to talk about the gay son’s stubborn gayness occurred while I was helping my mom clean out the liquor cabinet, which had been chiefly stocked over the years by visiting New Zealanders landing at SFO with duty-free offerings and the belief that my family drinks the hard stuff. I stood on a step ladder and handed bottles down one by one, and my mother, who often narrates what she’s doing, read the labels out loud as I passed them to her. “Smirnoff Vodka. Bombay Sapphire Gin. Beefeater Gin.” Then I passed her a bottle of Mount Gay rum. Mom: “Oh, it’s…. it’s rum.” The bottle later vanished.
As I do on most holidays at home, I spent this past Thanksgiving dutifully working — the big turkey dinner, raking leaves, getting ahead of freelance assignments — with the closest connection I have to any other world being Scruff, usually sitting unattended on the dresser in my childhood bedroom. Having come off from being the only gay at a wedding the previous weekend, I desperately felt like I needed something, even if that something wasn’t much of anything. At home, Scruff is mostly glimpses into the sad life I’d have led if I’d stayed in town: torsos that can’t host. I don’t really engage. It’s just a window on a world that reminds me that I’ve made good choices for myself. Well, that and an occasional invite to go up to San Francisco, unsolicited and politely declined. (Me: “I live in L.A. and I’m really only interested in dating,” and every time I say that I feel like I might as well be saying “I live in Chicago and I hate wind” or “I live in Maui and I’m allergic to sunsets.”)
With all that said, you can appreciate my surprise at what my mother said when she and I got into an argument about politics — why I can’t vote for a candidate running on a conservative social platform and why liberal politicians are apparently ruining the country with wasteful economic policy. I countered with all the examples of the good that liberal politicians have done in the face of conservative opposition, and the conversation eventually turned to the point that it was liberals, not conservatives, would made it possible for me to get married one day.
Mom: “Well, as the parent of a gay person, I understand that.”
It was followed by a “but” about taxes, of course. I was stunned that it happened at all. In the ten years since I told my parents I was gay, I’d never heard either of them ever refer to me as a gay person. (My grandmother referred to gays as “people who are that way,” and that euphemism has endured in the family long since.) I got hung up on that one sentence to the point that I think I lost the argument, just because my brain wouldn’t process anything aside from the fact that my mother acknowledged something that’s fairly important to how I live my life but which had gone unspoken, at least when I’m in the room.
I hugged my mom and told her it was good talking to her. It was the least acrimonious ending to a political argument in the history of my family.
It may not seem like much, especially to those weirdos with enthusiastically supportive families, but it was the single marker of progress I’ve had in a struggle that’s been going on for ten years. There’s still a lot to do yet — I recently mentioned that I was hoping to adopt a dog soon and was quickly cautioned against getting one that is too small — but it’s my single greatest takeaway from this Thanksgiving trip home.
(Yes, picture is unrelated. I needed a picture. It was this or a display shelf of Mount Gay rum.)
Sunday, November 29, 2015
Friday, November 27, 2015
Thirty Thanksgiving Questions for Which I Have No Answer
Excluded from the list: the traditional and constant “Why are you making that face?”
1. “Why aren’t you using a placemat?”
2. “But if you’re eating at the table, why aren’t you sliding the placemat over so your plate is on top of a placemat?”
3. “Well, what is a placemat for, then?”
4. “Why are you wearing a jacket and a sweater inside?”
5. “Also, why does everyone keep saying it’s cold in here when it’s clearly so hot?”
6. “Doesn’t it feel better to be eating dinner at a reasonable hour?”
7. “What made you decide to grow a mustache?”
7. “What made you decide to grow a mustache?”
8. “Did you have that at the wedding?”
9. “Did the groom say anything to you about it?”
10. “Did the bride say anything to you about it?”
11. “Did the bride’s parents say anything to you about it?”
12. “Well then how long are you keeping it for then?”
13. “Is this something all of your friends are doing?”
14. “Why are you using two kinds of mustard on your sandwich?”
15. “Why isn’t anybody eating the lemon pie that I bothered to go out and buy at the grocery store?”
16. “Why doesn’t your phone make the typing noise when you’re writing a text?”
17. “Why are you sitting in your bedroom watching your iPad rather than talking to your family?”
18. “Who is this Jessica Jones and is she your friend from L.A.?”
19. “Is she related to John Ritter?”
20. “Are you sure?”
21. “Didn’t they try that with Wonder Woman in the ’70s and no one watched it?”
22. “Why was that new James Bond so violent and also why were the women in it so unattractive?”
23. “Why don’t you see if any of your friends from high school are in town?”
24. “Do you use the placemats I sent you?”
25. “Do all your T-shirts have V-shaped necks now?”
26. “Isn’t that shirt too small for you?”
27. “If you get a dog, where is it going to sleep when you come home to visit?”
28. “Won’t that make the outside dogs jealous?”
29. “Who took the toaster out again after I put it away?”
30. “When are you coming home for Christmas?”
BTW, unsure but willing to guess that this is the “Why are you making that face?” face. It is actually just my face.
Read more:
a funny story
Friday, November 13, 2015
How to Buy Your First Suit When You’re an Idiot
You are thirty-three years old and don’t own a suit, not because you’ve been attending weddings and funerals in cutoffs and flip-flops but because you live in California, where rules about formal dress are bendy like yoga and palm trees. Should the need for formal dress arise, you have been cobbling together Frankenstein suits from old slacks and blazers you’ve accumulated over the years, from your dead grandfather and from the dead grandfathers of others, and so far this has been enough.
This, however, will not be enough for your college roommate’s wedding. Despite the fact that he wore cutoffs and flip-flops when you first met in the dorms, he has made the improbable decision to marry a woman of fashion, who actually even works in fashion and who has big ideas about clothes and the way we should wear them. As such, you have been told that you must acquire a suit — like, an actual suit, one that is comprised of especially garment-pieces that, when united, add up to more than the sum of their parts, and yes that’s a fantastic wedding metaphor.
In short, your college roommate’s bride will drag you kicking and screaming into a new phase of adulthood, the color scheme for which is apparently tonal gray — and yes, that’s another great metaphor.
This is how you get your first suit (by which I mean how I got my first suit, but I assume the process works identically for everyone).
One: Pout. The suit will cost money that you could spend on other things that would be more fun — for example, several T-shirt cannons with which you could enliven your college roommate’s wedding ceremony. “What, Nathan? You said she likes fashion,” is what you’d tell him after he wrestles you to the ground and while his family attempts to restore some semblance of order.
Two: Throw up your hands in despair. You are gay but not, like, suit gay, and the process of just going out and buying an appropriate suit is a task on the level of, say, building a working automobile out of sticks and tape. This is a subject to which you have literally given no thought over the course of your life, and your friends (who are also not suit guys but are closer to that than you are, perhaps) ask, “Well, what kind of suit do you want?” you can only say, “I don’t know. A wedding suit? A nice one that doesn’t cost that much money.”
Three: Get lost in all eleven pages of the bride’s PDFed suiting guide. (Yes, eleven. Yes PDFed.) This document lays out all suit-related possibilities. You are overwhelmed and cannot imagine how you could make tonal gray work for you without looking like a lower-tier member of the Power Rangers who specializes in legal affairs.
Four: Recall that you have friends who actually own a tailor shop specializing in bespoke suits. Recall that they live in New York. Recall that New York is not in California. Contemplate writing them a note in crayon that reads “U MAKE SUIT?” with a recent picture of yourself stapled to it. Decide against it.
Five: After much procrastination, go to Macy’s and find the men’s suit department to be a windblown shanty town without hope or light.
Six: During a visit home, you begrudgingly go to the Men’s Wearhouse, the place your parents recommended as having given your brother great deals on several suits that you imagine coming stuffed in some sort of KFC-style suit bucket. You regret being so judgmental when the salesclerk turns out to be well-versed in suitology and able to explain it to a dolt such as yourself. He measures you. He tells you that your shoulders are wider apart than they would normally be on a man of your height, and that your hips are unusually narrow. Even though this would be a compliment in a different context, it comes across as something you apologize for. You stand in front of the triple-mirror and compare your shoulders to your hips. “No, I think this is normal. This is okay, right?” you think. You decide to purchase a formal suit from a mall chain whose name is a pun.
Seven: You take the suit back to L.A. and find a tailor. He takes your measurements, checks your crannies. He gets all up in there like a T.S.A. agent trying to get a promotion. You wonder if the pants are being restitched based on a relief map of your balls. He asks what you want, and you say “It feels baggy. I’d like it a little more fitted.” He assures you this can be done, regardless of the spacious nature of Men’s Wearhouse garments. “We can do whatever you want,” he tells you. “I want T-shirt cannons,” you think but do not say aloud.
Eight: Days later, you try on the altered suit. “How do you like it?” the tailor asks eagerly. You can’t tell. It’s different, yes, but it’s nowhere near the fit to which you’re accustomed with jeans and T-shirts that have been tumbled and re-tumbled in the dryer over the span of years and maybe a decade. “Yeah, I’m not sure,” you say, remembering the comparison to the automobile made out of sticks and tape. You realize you have no idea what a properly fitted suit feels like. “It’s supposed to do this where my butt is?” you ask. The tailor seems annoyed. “It’s a suit. It’s not going to fit like jeans,” he explains. You can’t actually protest. You really couldn’t be any less out of your league here, and though you remember him saying that “whatever you want” part, you can’t think of a way to voice your concerns without implying that you understand suits — which, again, you do not.
Nine: You see the suit hanging in your closet every time you open it to retrieve one of the garments you do understand. You fear the suit. You may hate the suit. You think back to your brother’s wedding, when a tailor took your measurements for a rented suit and then delivered you a formless, baggy thing that you hated silently and then, after drinks, not so silently. It was chocolate brown. You looked like a zoot suiter in a Hershey’s commercial.
Ten: Finally, you try the suit on again. Your roommate is unable to advise if it’s doing what it’s supposed to do. You suppose that you just own this thing now. Maybe you should wear it to the grocery store and see what happens?
And this is how you’ve come to acquire your first suit.
Am I doing it right? Is this how tonal gray works? Am I an adult now? Is this what adulthood looks like?
Another take:
(And yes, by the way, this is in fact the same college roommate who declined my awesome suggestion for a song to walk down the aisle to.)
This, however, will not be enough for your college roommate’s wedding. Despite the fact that he wore cutoffs and flip-flops when you first met in the dorms, he has made the improbable decision to marry a woman of fashion, who actually even works in fashion and who has big ideas about clothes and the way we should wear them. As such, you have been told that you must acquire a suit — like, an actual suit, one that is comprised of especially garment-pieces that, when united, add up to more than the sum of their parts, and yes that’s a fantastic wedding metaphor.
In short, your college roommate’s bride will drag you kicking and screaming into a new phase of adulthood, the color scheme for which is apparently tonal gray — and yes, that’s another great metaphor.
This is how you get your first suit (by which I mean how I got my first suit, but I assume the process works identically for everyone).
One: Pout. The suit will cost money that you could spend on other things that would be more fun — for example, several T-shirt cannons with which you could enliven your college roommate’s wedding ceremony. “What, Nathan? You said she likes fashion,” is what you’d tell him after he wrestles you to the ground and while his family attempts to restore some semblance of order.
Two: Throw up your hands in despair. You are gay but not, like, suit gay, and the process of just going out and buying an appropriate suit is a task on the level of, say, building a working automobile out of sticks and tape. This is a subject to which you have literally given no thought over the course of your life, and your friends (who are also not suit guys but are closer to that than you are, perhaps) ask, “Well, what kind of suit do you want?” you can only say, “I don’t know. A wedding suit? A nice one that doesn’t cost that much money.”
Three: Get lost in all eleven pages of the bride’s PDFed suiting guide. (Yes, eleven. Yes PDFed.) This document lays out all suit-related possibilities. You are overwhelmed and cannot imagine how you could make tonal gray work for you without looking like a lower-tier member of the Power Rangers who specializes in legal affairs.
Four: Recall that you have friends who actually own a tailor shop specializing in bespoke suits. Recall that they live in New York. Recall that New York is not in California. Contemplate writing them a note in crayon that reads “U MAKE SUIT?” with a recent picture of yourself stapled to it. Decide against it.
Five: After much procrastination, go to Macy’s and find the men’s suit department to be a windblown shanty town without hope or light.
Six: During a visit home, you begrudgingly go to the Men’s Wearhouse, the place your parents recommended as having given your brother great deals on several suits that you imagine coming stuffed in some sort of KFC-style suit bucket. You regret being so judgmental when the salesclerk turns out to be well-versed in suitology and able to explain it to a dolt such as yourself. He measures you. He tells you that your shoulders are wider apart than they would normally be on a man of your height, and that your hips are unusually narrow. Even though this would be a compliment in a different context, it comes across as something you apologize for. You stand in front of the triple-mirror and compare your shoulders to your hips. “No, I think this is normal. This is okay, right?” you think. You decide to purchase a formal suit from a mall chain whose name is a pun.
Seven: You take the suit back to L.A. and find a tailor. He takes your measurements, checks your crannies. He gets all up in there like a T.S.A. agent trying to get a promotion. You wonder if the pants are being restitched based on a relief map of your balls. He asks what you want, and you say “It feels baggy. I’d like it a little more fitted.” He assures you this can be done, regardless of the spacious nature of Men’s Wearhouse garments. “We can do whatever you want,” he tells you. “I want T-shirt cannons,” you think but do not say aloud.
Eight: Days later, you try on the altered suit. “How do you like it?” the tailor asks eagerly. You can’t tell. It’s different, yes, but it’s nowhere near the fit to which you’re accustomed with jeans and T-shirts that have been tumbled and re-tumbled in the dryer over the span of years and maybe a decade. “Yeah, I’m not sure,” you say, remembering the comparison to the automobile made out of sticks and tape. You realize you have no idea what a properly fitted suit feels like. “It’s supposed to do this where my butt is?” you ask. The tailor seems annoyed. “It’s a suit. It’s not going to fit like jeans,” he explains. You can’t actually protest. You really couldn’t be any less out of your league here, and though you remember him saying that “whatever you want” part, you can’t think of a way to voice your concerns without implying that you understand suits — which, again, you do not.
Nine: You see the suit hanging in your closet every time you open it to retrieve one of the garments you do understand. You fear the suit. You may hate the suit. You think back to your brother’s wedding, when a tailor took your measurements for a rented suit and then delivered you a formless, baggy thing that you hated silently and then, after drinks, not so silently. It was chocolate brown. You looked like a zoot suiter in a Hershey’s commercial.
Ten: Finally, you try the suit on again. Your roommate is unable to advise if it’s doing what it’s supposed to do. You suppose that you just own this thing now. Maybe you should wear it to the grocery store and see what happens?
And this is how you’ve come to acquire your first suit.
Am I doing it right? Is this how tonal gray works? Am I an adult now? Is this what adulthood looks like?
Another take:
(And yes, by the way, this is in fact the same college roommate who declined my awesome suggestion for a song to walk down the aisle to.)
Read more:
a funny story,
nate
Friday, November 6, 2015
All About Octopussy
Yes, this is another post about Bond girls. I had to write about them for work, and the research yielded a few surprises, and the best of these by far is an explanation for why the hell anyone ever thought “Octopussy” would be an appropriate name for any human character, to say nothing of Bond’s love interest.
In Octopussy, Maud Adams plays the character whose nickname is “Octopussy,” thereby making this one film the only in the entire series to be named for female lead. Even separate from that name, she’s a standout character: She’s a moderately villainous businesswoman and jewel-smuggler who also happens to own a circus and live on a floating palace in India. Hey, get stuck with a name like “Octopussy” and you have to compensate somehow.
The film is loosely inspired by an Ian Fleming short story titled “Octopussy,” in which the name refers not to a human character but to someone’s pet octopus. And doesn’t the name make a lot more sense in that context? The story actually begins with its antagonist addressing the octopus directly: “‘You know what?’ said Major Dexter Smythe to the octopus. ‘You’re going to have a real treat today if I can manage it.’” Smythe later goes on to call the octopus both “Pussy” and “Octopussy.”
However, in reworking the story for the thirteenth James Bond film, the writers apparently thought, “No, this is a name that a human female should have. I see nothing wrong with that.” Dexter Smythe is already deceased at the outset of the film and seen only in photograph form. He’s mentioned as having been an octopus aficionado. Octopussy explains her name, kinda-sorta, with a single line that ties the film back to its source material: “My father became a leading authority on octopi. He loved them. His pet name for me was ‘Octopussy.’” Her actual name is never actually spoken within the film. (This Bond wiki page alleges that it’s Octavia Charlotte Smythe, but it’s apparently not her official real name.)
Awkward though it might be, that’s how Maud Adams ended up playing a character named “Octopussy.” The fact that she owns a circus might also be notable just in that the other Bond girl to have the word “pussy” in her name — Pussy Galore in Goldfinger — also leads a circus of sorts: Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus, a group of female aviators who may or may not all be lesbians.
Adams had already appeared as a secondary Bond girl in The Man With The Golden Gun: Andrea Anders, a character with a name so non-ridiculous that it’s shared by a sitcom actress. (She’s half of the trashy neighbor couple living next to Phil and Claire on Modern Family.) Adams also makes an uncredited appearance in A View to a Kill, which probably set s a record for any non-Moneypenny, non-Judi Dench Bond actress.
And that end note as as good as any to point out that Duran Duran’s theme song for A View to a Kill might just be the best Bond theme song of all — yes, even better than Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger”.
In Octopussy, Maud Adams plays the character whose nickname is “Octopussy,” thereby making this one film the only in the entire series to be named for female lead. Even separate from that name, she’s a standout character: She’s a moderately villainous businesswoman and jewel-smuggler who also happens to own a circus and live on a floating palace in India. Hey, get stuck with a name like “Octopussy” and you have to compensate somehow.
The film is loosely inspired by an Ian Fleming short story titled “Octopussy,” in which the name refers not to a human character but to someone’s pet octopus. And doesn’t the name make a lot more sense in that context? The story actually begins with its antagonist addressing the octopus directly: “‘You know what?’ said Major Dexter Smythe to the octopus. ‘You’re going to have a real treat today if I can manage it.’” Smythe later goes on to call the octopus both “Pussy” and “Octopussy.”
However, in reworking the story for the thirteenth James Bond film, the writers apparently thought, “No, this is a name that a human female should have. I see nothing wrong with that.” Dexter Smythe is already deceased at the outset of the film and seen only in photograph form. He’s mentioned as having been an octopus aficionado. Octopussy explains her name, kinda-sorta, with a single line that ties the film back to its source material: “My father became a leading authority on octopi. He loved them. His pet name for me was ‘Octopussy.’” Her actual name is never actually spoken within the film. (This Bond wiki page alleges that it’s Octavia Charlotte Smythe, but it’s apparently not her official real name.)
Awkward though it might be, that’s how Maud Adams ended up playing a character named “Octopussy.” The fact that she owns a circus might also be notable just in that the other Bond girl to have the word “pussy” in her name — Pussy Galore in Goldfinger — also leads a circus of sorts: Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus, a group of female aviators who may or may not all be lesbians.
Adams had already appeared as a secondary Bond girl in The Man With The Golden Gun: Andrea Anders, a character with a name so non-ridiculous that it’s shared by a sitcom actress. (She’s half of the trashy neighbor couple living next to Phil and Claire on Modern Family.) Adams also makes an uncredited appearance in A View to a Kill, which probably set s a record for any non-Moneypenny, non-Judi Dench Bond actress.
And that end note as as good as any to point out that Duran Duran’s theme song for A View to a Kill might just be the best Bond theme song of all — yes, even better than Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger”.
Read more:
james bond,
movies,
names
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
I Am an Expert in Matilda
Hi. This is Matilda. She is a dog who has spent more time at my house than most of my human acquaintances have.
You may remember her as the dog who is an affront to my masculinity and who also was once the victim of a skunk attack. I am watching her for a week because her owner had to go to Venezuela for some weird operation, and I feel I am now an expert in all the facets of this dog’s personality.
You can be one too! Here are all the sides to Matilda.
And that is everything Matilda is. You’re an expert too now.
In closing, a moment of classic Matilda:
You may remember her as the dog who is an affront to my masculinity and who also was once the victim of a skunk attack. I am watching her for a week because her owner had to go to Venezuela for some weird operation, and I feel I am now an expert in all the facets of this dog’s personality.
You can be one too! Here are all the sides to Matilda.
Staring
Hiding
Winking One Eye and Then the Other
Dozing in High-Foot-Traffic Areas of My Home
Sniffy Curiosity
Licky Curiosity
Rolling in Dirt
Having a Butterfly Land on Her Head and Completely Shutting Down Emotionally as a Result
Checking Hourly on the One Spot She Once Saw a Cat to See If the Cat Is in That Exact Spot Again
Making Concerned Whimpering Noises That Kind of Sound Like She’s Trying to Say Either Her Name or “Macaroni”
Arbitrarily Refusing to Walk Down Certain Blocks in My Neighborhood
Peeing on the Lawns of People Who Are Currently in Their Front Yards or Otherwise Able to Watch Her Pee on Their Property
“Wait, Is This Food or Not?”
Sighs
Farts (or, If You Will, Butt-Sighs)
Thrusting Her Head Beneath Your Hands (or Sometimes Feet) in an Effort to Get Pets When You Are Not Actively Petting Her
Running Into the Room Seeming Alarmed, Then Looking Around and Returning From Whence She Came in a Vaguely Disappointed Fashion
Begrudgingly Consenting to Being Held Like a Baby
Leaving Blond Hairs on Black Floors
And that is everything Matilda is. You’re an expert too now.
In closing, a moment of classic Matilda:
A video posted by Drew (@kidicarus222) on
Read more:
dogs
Monday, November 2, 2015
Lesser Bond Girls
No one can hold a candle to Pussy Galore, of course. That seems dangerous, first of all, but in the history of James Bond women, no one has a name that is quite so on-the-nose perfect-awful.
However, I have learned that there exists a whole harem of Bond girls who only appear in the books written after the Ian Fleming era and who have ridiculous-amazing-exceedingly awkward that the world needs to know about.
Here is a list of them. No elaboration is needed, I feel, just the news that these characters exist.
Okay, one of those I made up. But is it really that implausible? All these seem on par with the sex pun-laden Bond girl names from the actual movies. Also, once tried to Weird Al all the James Bond movie titles with limited success. I have no idea what work I was avoiding in doing this, but it must have been really heinous. I cannot think of a way to make a food pun for Spectre and feel like a failure.
However, I have learned that there exists a whole harem of Bond girls who only appear in the books written after the Ian Fleming era and who have ridiculous-amazing-exceedingly awkward that the world needs to know about.
Here is a list of them. No elaboration is needed, I feel, just the news that these characters exist.
Lavender Peacock
Persephone “Percy” Proud
Sukie Tempesta
Ebbie Heritage
Clover Pennington
Elizabeth “Easy” St. John
Hera Volopoulos
Heidi Taunt and her sister, Hedi Taunt
Felicity Willing
Ophelia “Philly” Maidenstone
Edua Blessing Ogilvy-Grant
Jeopardy Lane
Rosebud Spreadeagle
Okay, one of those I made up. But is it really that implausible? All these seem on par with the sex pun-laden Bond girl names from the actual movies. Also, once tried to Weird Al all the James Bond movie titles with limited success. I have no idea what work I was avoiding in doing this, but it must have been really heinous. I cannot think of a way to make a food pun for Spectre and feel like a failure.
Read more:
james bond,
names,
the lists
Sunday, September 20, 2015
This Is a Post About Undo Dog
Warning: This post is a fairly deep drill-down on a minor footnote in video game culture. If obscure Nintendo lore is not your thing, kindly move along and wait for a less niche post.
One of the most insignificant video game characters ever has recently returned to my life: Undo Dog. He’s technically a Mario character, though only in the loosest sense of the expanded Marioverse. He first appeared in 1992’s Mario Paint, a sort of Nintendo approximate of Photoshop that came packed with the Super NES Mouse and allowed players to draw and paint images and create crude animations that couldn’t be uploaded or transferred off the game pack in any way. Mario-branded but not really all that Mario-specific, the game came out when I was only ten, and I loved it. And one of the things I loved most about it was Undo Dog, the game’s equivalent of CTRL+Z.
Here, watch and listen.
Even at ten years old, I was a sucker for anything canine, and the fact that Nintendo chose to imbue one of the most functional aspects of Mario Paint with a dog personality is a great example of why I am a lifelong Nintendo loyalist. And the fact that the icon border around Undo Dog’s face was revealed in his “dancing in the tool tray” animations to be a weird, square collar? I was in love — with the character design but also with whatever clever person who implemented it.
I felt catered to — and that rarely happened when I was younger.
Given my history on this blog writing about various Super Mario games, it shouldn’t surprise you that even back then, I had an encyclopedic knowledge of them. I knew everything that a North American fan could know, and I was a strong supporter of the series’ also-rans. When Super Mario Kart came out in September 1992, the only thing that seemed more pressing than beating the game on every conceivable level was dreaming up ideas for the inevitable sequel, and I sank hours into this task. I drew maps for tracks based on levels from Subcon, the setting of Super Mario Bros. 2, and Sarasaland, the setting for Super Mario Land, and handpicked the characters that would join the roster of Mario Kart racers. No lie: I even drew new versions of the Super Mario Kart box art that featured then-unknown characters like Princess Daisy (the ruler of Sarasaland and a character most players wouldn’t have recognized back in the day), Birdo (Super Mario Bros. 2’s Yoshi prototype, essentially, and also the most gender-complicated bipedal dinosaur in the history of video games) and Wario (the minor Super Mario Land 2 villain that no one cared about once upon a time).
All of these characters eventually did become playable in later Mario Kart games, I should point out. However, my never-distributed, beyond-unofficial concept art also included characters like Pauline (the Donkey Kong damsel who has since been made to look like Sofia Vergara), Wart (the Super Mario Bros. 2 villain who has subsequently showed up as a Zelda character but never again as a Mario character) and an ultra-obscure Mario D-lister named Heavy Zed, who was in retrospect not a character in any way.
Heavy Zed was a big, dumb owl that Mario would hop onto in Super Mario Land 2 and prompt him into waking up and fluttering in a single direction until Mario encountered a second Heavy Zed, which he’d then hop onto. Essentially, he was a platform lift, like the dolphins in Super Mario World, but ten-year-old me didn’t care: He had a name and therefore deserved realization as a playable Mario character. Yeah, I had some big ideas.
Included on this wishlist was Undo Dog, just because he also had a name and I had seized on him as a thing worth paying attention to, and I drew him into my terrible mock Super Mario Kart 2 art, stockade collar and all. In retrospect, it seems silly and misguided in the way most fan fiction seems to anyone not at the heart of the subject matter’s core fandom. Time passed, and although I admit to being guilty of jotting out the occasional dream Mario Kart roster during my free moments — E. Gadd from Luigi’s Mansion! Dixie Kong! Captain Syrup! — I forgot about dumb ol’ Undo Dog.
And then Super Mario Maker came out. For those who don’t know, Super Mario Maker is essentially the game that Mario Paint should have been, and it allows players to create their own Mario levels and then upload them to be enjoyed by others. Presentation-wise, the game owes a great debt to Mario Paint, and this includes the implementation of Undo Dog as the CTRL+Z function, twenty-three years after the fact.
Here is a trailer to help you understand why Super Mario Maker is weird but great.
But there’s an additional reason I’m writing about Undo Dog today. One of the more fan service-y aspects to Super Mario Maker is that its Super Mario Bros. mode includes the ability to “costume” Mario as various characters from other Mario games — Bowser, Dr. Mario, Rosalina, etc. — as well as characters from other franchises — Zelda from Zelda, for example, or Kirby from Kirby or even the Wii Balance Board from Wii Fit.
This is remarkable is that it plays into the new Smash Bros. style Nintendo is applying to all its franchises, in which characters from games that have little in common get to interact. I mean, hell — Super Mario Maker allows you to sub in Ness from Earthbound, the squid-kid from Splatoon, Foreman Spike from Wrecking Crew and even Lottie the Otter, from and Animal Crossing game that hasn’t even been released yet. And mixed up into all this is Undo Dog.
Per the game’s instruction manual, which doubles as an art book:
I’m not saying this makes Undo Dog a shoe-in for the next Mario Kart, exactly, but my inner ten-year-old is gratified to see the most minor of video game characters resurrected in my adult life, in a new age where Nintendo has gone Crisis on Infinite Earths with every game. I don’t think my placement of Daisy, Wario and Birdo in the Mario Kart karts was prescient, necessarily, but I’m currently placing more money on Undo Dog than I am on Heavy Zed, were that a bet to be made in some dank corner of the nerdy internet. And that is a surprising thing for a longtime video game fan to say, twenty-three years later, just like it was surprising to get a new Kid Icarus game after so many years and finally see a Super Mario Bros. 2-themed track in a Mario Kart game.
Go Undo Dog, you sneezing marvel, you. May your video game career be long and unusual.
One of the most insignificant video game characters ever has recently returned to my life: Undo Dog. He’s technically a Mario character, though only in the loosest sense of the expanded Marioverse. He first appeared in 1992’s Mario Paint, a sort of Nintendo approximate of Photoshop that came packed with the Super NES Mouse and allowed players to draw and paint images and create crude animations that couldn’t be uploaded or transferred off the game pack in any way. Mario-branded but not really all that Mario-specific, the game came out when I was only ten, and I loved it. And one of the things I loved most about it was Undo Dog, the game’s equivalent of CTRL+Z.
Clicking him undoes whatever disastrous aesthetic decision you made, and he makes a crude bark noise when you click. If you let the mouse sit idle, he also dances about in the tool tray in the bottom of the screen, and if you opted to create your sixteen-bit masterpiece without background music, he’d occasionally sneeze. (He was allergic to silence, we gathered.)
Here, watch and listen.
I felt catered to — and that rarely happened when I was younger.
Given my history on this blog writing about various Super Mario games, it shouldn’t surprise you that even back then, I had an encyclopedic knowledge of them. I knew everything that a North American fan could know, and I was a strong supporter of the series’ also-rans. When Super Mario Kart came out in September 1992, the only thing that seemed more pressing than beating the game on every conceivable level was dreaming up ideas for the inevitable sequel, and I sank hours into this task. I drew maps for tracks based on levels from Subcon, the setting of Super Mario Bros. 2, and Sarasaland, the setting for Super Mario Land, and handpicked the characters that would join the roster of Mario Kart racers. No lie: I even drew new versions of the Super Mario Kart box art that featured then-unknown characters like Princess Daisy (the ruler of Sarasaland and a character most players wouldn’t have recognized back in the day), Birdo (Super Mario Bros. 2’s Yoshi prototype, essentially, and also the most gender-complicated bipedal dinosaur in the history of video games) and Wario (the minor Super Mario Land 2 villain that no one cared about once upon a time).
All of these characters eventually did become playable in later Mario Kart games, I should point out. However, my never-distributed, beyond-unofficial concept art also included characters like Pauline (the Donkey Kong damsel who has since been made to look like Sofia Vergara), Wart (the Super Mario Bros. 2 villain who has subsequently showed up as a Zelda character but never again as a Mario character) and an ultra-obscure Mario D-lister named Heavy Zed, who was in retrospect not a character in any way.
Heavy Zed was a big, dumb owl that Mario would hop onto in Super Mario Land 2 and prompt him into waking up and fluttering in a single direction until Mario encountered a second Heavy Zed, which he’d then hop onto. Essentially, he was a platform lift, like the dolphins in Super Mario World, but ten-year-old me didn’t care: He had a name and therefore deserved realization as a playable Mario character. Yeah, I had some big ideas.
Included on this wishlist was Undo Dog, just because he also had a name and I had seized on him as a thing worth paying attention to, and I drew him into my terrible mock Super Mario Kart 2 art, stockade collar and all. In retrospect, it seems silly and misguided in the way most fan fiction seems to anyone not at the heart of the subject matter’s core fandom. Time passed, and although I admit to being guilty of jotting out the occasional dream Mario Kart roster during my free moments — E. Gadd from Luigi’s Mansion! Dixie Kong! Captain Syrup! — I forgot about dumb ol’ Undo Dog.
And then Super Mario Maker came out. For those who don’t know, Super Mario Maker is essentially the game that Mario Paint should have been, and it allows players to create their own Mario levels and then upload them to be enjoyed by others. Presentation-wise, the game owes a great debt to Mario Paint, and this includes the implementation of Undo Dog as the CTRL+Z function, twenty-three years after the fact.
Here is a trailer to help you understand why Super Mario Maker is weird but great.
But there’s an additional reason I’m writing about Undo Dog today. One of the more fan service-y aspects to Super Mario Maker is that its Super Mario Bros. mode includes the ability to “costume” Mario as various characters from other Mario games — Bowser, Dr. Mario, Rosalina, etc. — as well as characters from other franchises — Zelda from Zelda, for example, or Kirby from Kirby or even the Wii Balance Board from Wii Fit.
This is remarkable is that it plays into the new Smash Bros. style Nintendo is applying to all its franchises, in which characters from games that have little in common get to interact. I mean, hell — Super Mario Maker allows you to sub in Ness from Earthbound, the squid-kid from Splatoon, Foreman Spike from Wrecking Crew and even Lottie the Otter, from and Animal Crossing game that hasn’t even been released yet. And mixed up into all this is Undo Dog.
Per the game’s instruction manual, which doubles as an art book:
I’m not saying this makes Undo Dog a shoe-in for the next Mario Kart, exactly, but my inner ten-year-old is gratified to see the most minor of video game characters resurrected in my adult life, in a new age where Nintendo has gone Crisis on Infinite Earths with every game. I don’t think my placement of Daisy, Wario and Birdo in the Mario Kart karts was prescient, necessarily, but I’m currently placing more money on Undo Dog than I am on Heavy Zed, were that a bet to be made in some dank corner of the nerdy internet. And that is a surprising thing for a longtime video game fan to say, twenty-three years later, just like it was surprising to get a new Kid Icarus game after so many years and finally see a Super Mario Bros. 2-themed track in a Mario Kart game.
Go Undo Dog, you sneezing marvel, you. May your video game career be long and unusual.
Read more:
nintendo,
super mario bros.,
super mario maker,
video games
Thursday, September 10, 2015
Ten Things I Can Tell You About Los Angeles
As of this week, I have been living in L.A. for five years. I have learned next to nothing about the city and therefore have no business offering opinions about it one way or the other. Go ask someone else for practical advice. However, while this more knowledgable person is thinking, read these ten bits of non-advice and non-entertainment that don’t matter toward anything or anything else.
One: If you see Reese Witherspoon in a coffee shop, don’t make eye contact with her. She will slap you to the ground without hesitation and then force you to give her the names and address of your parents, whereupon she will threaten to find them and slap them to the ground should you ever dare to make eye contact with her again. Yes, this really happened. No, I am not joking. Witherspoon’s iron talons control this city. We must rise up.
Two: Sally Field, meanwhile, is a tiny little bird who shops for produce in a methodical, precise manner that only makes sense to her. You will conclude this exact thing when you see her in the produce aisle — and yes, this will eventually happen to you because it happens to all L.A. residents. The Sally Field Bird is your aunt, you will suspect, against all reason. You will grasp her hand tenderly as she picks through a stack of bananas, and without speaking a single word you gaze into her eyes and know that you should take her home, toss an afghan on her and bring her a piping hot mug of Constant Comment, at which point she will regale you with stories from the set of Beyond the Poseidon Adventure. Yes, this also really happened. It happens every time I go grocery shopping. Grocery shopping here is weird.
Three: There exists a series of “secret stairways” that connect much of residential Los Angeles. A holdover from the city's bygone streetcar transportation system, these stairways today allow residents in the know the opportunity to see a homeless man take a dump and then act like you’re the rude one for intruding on his personal space.
Four: The air quality is, in general, poor, but it’s at its worst at a Los Feliz brunch, where it will be just dripping with asshole. You will sit there, desperate for food and too hungry to speak, and eventually the conversations of nearby tables will ring in your ears — one woman with pendulous chandelier-earrings telling a story that has no beginning or end. It’s just the middle of a story that will be interrupted by another middle of a story told by another chandelier-earring. “Can you believe it? It was Kelly, and she was wearing a yellow hat,” says one, in reference to nothing. But then says another: “And then the door opened and I was like ‘I’m not sure you’re even really Persian.’” Says a third: “Pineapple preserves. Spackle. Grackle. Hinge joint.” Your brunch never actually comes and you die on the spot.
Five: People ask where I live, and when I tell them, some respond with “Atwater? I’ve never even heard of that.” This is the best possible hint that this person and I will probably not have much to talk about.
Six: The quickest way to elicit sympathy from your fellow Angelenos is to say, “I actually walked here.” They will immediately assume some sort of financial or legal calamity has rendered you a pedestrian, and nothing you can say to the contrary will relieve them of this suspicion. They may ask if you need a place to crash. This sort of misunderstanding is how I imagine the majority of the city’s guesthouses and poolhouses have come to be occupied.
Seven: The west side is a myth — a foggy limbo where the once-living shuffle about aimlessly in the service of malevolent entities known as children. They say it’s great, but their accounts are unverifiable: No one who’s been sent to investigate has actually gone and returned, and come on — if they live there, can we actually trust them? Affirmations about the west side from someone who lives there is like an eight-year-old who only eats bologna sandwiches saying that bologna sandwiches are the best food. You shouldn’t be questioning the taste of the bologna kid. You should be asking yourself why the hell you’re discussing food with someone who only east bologna.
Eight: Wherever you end up in the city, you will have arrived too late. Before you got there, the neighborhood was better — had nicer restaurants or cooler bars or attracted a different sort of person or offered more for less or had houses that could be bought more cheaply or had this awesome house with this big front yard that the owner filled with these, I guess, totem pole-like wooden carvings that everyone loved, but a few months ago one of the carvings toppled over and hit a pregnant lady and now they’ve all been taken down and really, the neighborhood lost a piece of its soul when that happened. Yeah, the sculpture should have been secured or something, but there are a lot of theories about what the fuck that pregnant lady was doing there in the first place, and it’s still a loss for the community. I think you can see some photos of it on Google Street View, but it still wouldn’t be the same, you know?
Nine: You will happen across houses and other buildings that you recognize from the movies you love. You will get excited about it. You will tell your friends about it. Even if they’re not half as impressed as you are, you never want that enthusiastically nerdy little kid inside you to go away, because how is it possible that you have come to live in the place that made all the stories that you loved so much?
Ten: You will happen across the Mulholland Drive house and face a moment of introspection over whether you've become a Betty or a Diane.
Full disclosure: Some of the stories described may not have played out precisely as I have written them here. However, each grew from a kernel of truth, and when those kernels generated corn plants, I took them and synthesized high-fructose corn syrup.
Here’s to another five years of ignorance and uselessness.
One: If you see Reese Witherspoon in a coffee shop, don’t make eye contact with her. She will slap you to the ground without hesitation and then force you to give her the names and address of your parents, whereupon she will threaten to find them and slap them to the ground should you ever dare to make eye contact with her again. Yes, this really happened. No, I am not joking. Witherspoon’s iron talons control this city. We must rise up.
Two: Sally Field, meanwhile, is a tiny little bird who shops for produce in a methodical, precise manner that only makes sense to her. You will conclude this exact thing when you see her in the produce aisle — and yes, this will eventually happen to you because it happens to all L.A. residents. The Sally Field Bird is your aunt, you will suspect, against all reason. You will grasp her hand tenderly as she picks through a stack of bananas, and without speaking a single word you gaze into her eyes and know that you should take her home, toss an afghan on her and bring her a piping hot mug of Constant Comment, at which point she will regale you with stories from the set of Beyond the Poseidon Adventure. Yes, this also really happened. It happens every time I go grocery shopping. Grocery shopping here is weird.
Three: There exists a series of “secret stairways” that connect much of residential Los Angeles. A holdover from the city's bygone streetcar transportation system, these stairways today allow residents in the know the opportunity to see a homeless man take a dump and then act like you’re the rude one for intruding on his personal space.
Four: The air quality is, in general, poor, but it’s at its worst at a Los Feliz brunch, where it will be just dripping with asshole. You will sit there, desperate for food and too hungry to speak, and eventually the conversations of nearby tables will ring in your ears — one woman with pendulous chandelier-earrings telling a story that has no beginning or end. It’s just the middle of a story that will be interrupted by another middle of a story told by another chandelier-earring. “Can you believe it? It was Kelly, and she was wearing a yellow hat,” says one, in reference to nothing. But then says another: “And then the door opened and I was like ‘I’m not sure you’re even really Persian.’” Says a third: “Pineapple preserves. Spackle. Grackle. Hinge joint.” Your brunch never actually comes and you die on the spot.
Five: People ask where I live, and when I tell them, some respond with “Atwater? I’ve never even heard of that.” This is the best possible hint that this person and I will probably not have much to talk about.
Six: The quickest way to elicit sympathy from your fellow Angelenos is to say, “I actually walked here.” They will immediately assume some sort of financial or legal calamity has rendered you a pedestrian, and nothing you can say to the contrary will relieve them of this suspicion. They may ask if you need a place to crash. This sort of misunderstanding is how I imagine the majority of the city’s guesthouses and poolhouses have come to be occupied.
Seven: The west side is a myth — a foggy limbo where the once-living shuffle about aimlessly in the service of malevolent entities known as children. They say it’s great, but their accounts are unverifiable: No one who’s been sent to investigate has actually gone and returned, and come on — if they live there, can we actually trust them? Affirmations about the west side from someone who lives there is like an eight-year-old who only eats bologna sandwiches saying that bologna sandwiches are the best food. You shouldn’t be questioning the taste of the bologna kid. You should be asking yourself why the hell you’re discussing food with someone who only east bologna.
Eight: Wherever you end up in the city, you will have arrived too late. Before you got there, the neighborhood was better — had nicer restaurants or cooler bars or attracted a different sort of person or offered more for less or had houses that could be bought more cheaply or had this awesome house with this big front yard that the owner filled with these, I guess, totem pole-like wooden carvings that everyone loved, but a few months ago one of the carvings toppled over and hit a pregnant lady and now they’ve all been taken down and really, the neighborhood lost a piece of its soul when that happened. Yeah, the sculpture should have been secured or something, but there are a lot of theories about what the fuck that pregnant lady was doing there in the first place, and it’s still a loss for the community. I think you can see some photos of it on Google Street View, but it still wouldn’t be the same, you know?
Nine: You will happen across houses and other buildings that you recognize from the movies you love. You will get excited about it. You will tell your friends about it. Even if they’re not half as impressed as you are, you never want that enthusiastically nerdy little kid inside you to go away, because how is it possible that you have come to live in the place that made all the stories that you loved so much?
Ten: You will happen across the Mulholland Drive house and face a moment of introspection over whether you've become a Betty or a Diane.
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(via) |
Here’s to another five years of ignorance and uselessness.
Read more:
a funny story,
los angeles
Thursday, September 3, 2015
The Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street (Abbreviated)
When Wes Craven died, my first thoughts were of Scream and how much that movie had shaped my understanding of pop culture. However, the only piece I wrote about Craven this week focused on the outlier in his filmography: Music of the Heart, Craven’s single non-horror feature and the movie he made in the break between Scream 2 and Scream 3.
And now, along similar lines, another one of Craven’s most unusual legacies: 1993’s Mahakaal, also known as the Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street.
I actually watched this a few nights ago. It’s something I’d only recommend for hardcore Bollywood fanatics and diehard Freddy Krueger fans. (These groups must share some overlap, and I’d guess that Mahakaal is a godsend for these people.) For me, the film was interesting when it chose to cleave especially close to the source material and when it chose to diverge drastically from it.
Mahakaal runs nearly two and a half hours long, and a lot of this time has the characters singing and dancing for no reason, even after they realized they’re being stalked by the monster. Bollywood movie rules trump slasher movie rules, I guess. As a result of the lengthy run time and the long, long spans when nothing particularly interesting happens, I did a quick and dirty recut of the film, in case you also are mildly curious what a Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street might be like but don’t have two and a half hours to spend watching Indian youth sing about how great it is to be in love.
Here, then, is a eleven-minute version of the Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street.
In making this, I tried to highlight the scenes that were most directly inspired by the original as well as the weirder additions — like the unsettling Michael Jackson impersonator, who may or may not be speaking English.
Some notes:
I’ve done this public service before, in case you’re interested in the Cliff’s Notes versions of movies you’d otherwise not bother to watch. My first one was actually an early Wes Craven movie: 1984’s Invitation to Hell, which features Susan Lucci as the devil and Robert Urich as a dad who has to kick the shit out of Punk Brewster and Bastian from The NeverEnding Story. The second was The Visitor, which I kind of hated but which still has some moments of primo WTF-ness that are worth watching. And finally I made a nine-minute version of the most David Lynchy moments from the one bizarrely Twin Peaks-themed episode of Darkwing Duck.
And in case you have two and a half hours to spare, the whole of Mahakaal is currently posted on YouTube here — with subtitles.
In closing, please enjoy the full discotheque sequence, just one of the many musical scenes that had me asking “Why are you singing and dancing still? Did you forget that your friends just got butchered?"
And now, along similar lines, another one of Craven’s most unusual legacies: 1993’s Mahakaal, also known as the Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street.
I actually watched this a few nights ago. It’s something I’d only recommend for hardcore Bollywood fanatics and diehard Freddy Krueger fans. (These groups must share some overlap, and I’d guess that Mahakaal is a godsend for these people.) For me, the film was interesting when it chose to cleave especially close to the source material and when it chose to diverge drastically from it.
Mahakaal runs nearly two and a half hours long, and a lot of this time has the characters singing and dancing for no reason, even after they realized they’re being stalked by the monster. Bollywood movie rules trump slasher movie rules, I guess. As a result of the lengthy run time and the long, long spans when nothing particularly interesting happens, I did a quick and dirty recut of the film, in case you also are mildly curious what a Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street might be like but don’t have two and a half hours to spend watching Indian youth sing about how great it is to be in love.
Here, then, is a eleven-minute version of the Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street.
In making this, I tried to highlight the scenes that were most directly inspired by the original as well as the weirder additions — like the unsettling Michael Jackson impersonator, who may or may not be speaking English.
Some notes:
- The weird mix of horror and whimsy make me think this movie’s DNA has about as much in common with Hausu as it does with A Nightmare on Elm Street.
- It should be noted that the main character, Anita (but pronounced ah-nee-TAH rather than uh-NEE-tah) frequently dresses like Rosie Perez probably did around the time this movie was made.
- The villain doesn’t speak — and that’s odd, considering that even in the first film Freddy Krueger gets a few great lines and this remake seems interested in stuffing in comedy as often as possible.
- The only character whose name bears any similarity to its counterpart in the original is Seema, the main character’s best friend. In the original, Amanda Wyss plays the role and the character’s name is Tina. Seema lasts longer than Tina does, and instead of dying at a sleepover she dies at a hotel, where the group of young people is staying only because they get stranded. I wonder if there’s some cultural reason that the group was forced to spend the night together rather than just choosing to shack up.
- For what it’s worth, the death of the Rod character — the main character’s best friend’s boyfriend — may actually be creepier in this version than it is in the original. I always thought that bedsheet snaking around the actor’s neck seemed hokey. Mahakaal literalizes the scene.
- Notably, the main character’s parents aren’t divorced in this version, and both Anita’s cop dad and housewife mother help vanquish the bad guy in the end. Sure, Mom doesn’t do a whole lot, but she’s there in a way Ronee Blakley’s checked-out, alcoholic character isn’t in Nightmare.
- Though there’s a scene with a waterbed in Mahakaal, the Johnny Depp analogue doesn’t die in it. He survives to the end of the film, in fact.
- I wonder if the appearance of Anita’s dead sister is supposed to mimic the white-clothed “ghost girls” who sing the creepy jump rope rhyme in the original.
- There is, tragically, no Mahakaal 2 that’s rife with homoeroticism. Are you listening, Bollywood? Because I would watch that movie.
I’ve done this public service before, in case you’re interested in the Cliff’s Notes versions of movies you’d otherwise not bother to watch. My first one was actually an early Wes Craven movie: 1984’s Invitation to Hell, which features Susan Lucci as the devil and Robert Urich as a dad who has to kick the shit out of Punk Brewster and Bastian from The NeverEnding Story. The second was The Visitor, which I kind of hated but which still has some moments of primo WTF-ness that are worth watching. And finally I made a nine-minute version of the most David Lynchy moments from the one bizarrely Twin Peaks-themed episode of Darkwing Duck.
And in case you have two and a half hours to spare, the whole of Mahakaal is currently posted on YouTube here — with subtitles.
In closing, please enjoy the full discotheque sequence, just one of the many musical scenes that had me asking “Why are you singing and dancing still? Did you forget that your friends just got butchered?"
Read more:
horror movies,
movies,
nightmare on elm street,
wes craven
Saturday, August 29, 2015
Best Entree-Ordering in a Lead Role
Early in the series run of Tiny Toons, there was an episode that took place in Hollywood. Just like the old Looney Tunes shorts once did, this episode features caricatures of the real-life celebrities. Also just like with the old Looney Tunes cameos, most of the references went over my head. I was eight. What can I say?
However, I came across one of them just recently, and it’s worth noting that it’s one of the few jokes in the episode that is not dated. Meryl Streep orders dinner in a restaurant, then promptly receives an award for ordering dinner in a restaurant. She yawns through a “thank you” and then stuffs the statuette into her purse, which is already full of awards.
I’m fairly certain that this would have been my introduction to Meryl Streep’s reputation as an award magnet. It may have been the first time I’d heard of her at all, really. (She-Devil came out in 1989, but I can’t remember if I saw it in theaters or not.)
The joke is that Meryl Streep is such a good actress that it’s nigh impossible for her not to collect awards left and right. When the episode aired in 1990, Meryl Streep was the best. Twenty-five years later, she still is. Yes, I heard you muttering about your Julianne Moores and your Cates Blanchett, but Meryl is just one Oscar away from tying Katharine Hepburn’s record for the most ever won by a single actor, and she’s already the most-nominated actor ever. Every other actress of a certain age starring in a somber film about people coming to terms with things is just lucky that Meryl is not springboarding off their corpses, squashed-Goomba-in-Super Mario Bros.-style, to reach even greater heights of success.
(Sorry.)
There’s no big take-away here, just a quick observation that in an industry defined by change and in which women especially cycle in and out of fashion with alarming speed, Meryl Streep is a constant.
MERYL STREEP IS MY CONSTANT.
For the record, there was one celeb joke that little, pea-brained me got right off the bat.
Do you get it? It’s because Roseanne is fat. I cannot recall if eight-year-old me found this funny.
The sequence also burns off a Cher cameo just to make a “compact car” pun.
The joke that would end up having the greatest significance in my adult life, however, is a teeny-tiny background one appearing on the valet sign.
Twenty-five years later, this Los Angeles resident can tell you that this has also has not really changed.
Tiny Toons, previously:
However, I came across one of them just recently, and it’s worth noting that it’s one of the few jokes in the episode that is not dated. Meryl Streep orders dinner in a restaurant, then promptly receives an award for ordering dinner in a restaurant. She yawns through a “thank you” and then stuffs the statuette into her purse, which is already full of awards.
I’m fairly certain that this would have been my introduction to Meryl Streep’s reputation as an award magnet. It may have been the first time I’d heard of her at all, really. (She-Devil came out in 1989, but I can’t remember if I saw it in theaters or not.)
The joke is that Meryl Streep is such a good actress that it’s nigh impossible for her not to collect awards left and right. When the episode aired in 1990, Meryl Streep was the best. Twenty-five years later, she still is. Yes, I heard you muttering about your Julianne Moores and your Cates Blanchett, but Meryl is just one Oscar away from tying Katharine Hepburn’s record for the most ever won by a single actor, and she’s already the most-nominated actor ever. Every other actress of a certain age starring in a somber film about people coming to terms with things is just lucky that Meryl is not springboarding off their corpses, squashed-Goomba-in-Super Mario Bros.-style, to reach even greater heights of success.
(Sorry.)
There’s no big take-away here, just a quick observation that in an industry defined by change and in which women especially cycle in and out of fashion with alarming speed, Meryl Streep is a constant.
MERYL STREEP IS MY CONSTANT.
For the record, there was one celeb joke that little, pea-brained me got right off the bat.
Do you get it? It’s because Roseanne is fat. I cannot recall if eight-year-old me found this funny.
The sequence also burns off a Cher cameo just to make a “compact car” pun.
The joke that would end up having the greatest significance in my adult life, however, is a teeny-tiny background one appearing on the valet sign.
Twenty-five years later, this Los Angeles resident can tell you that this has also has not really changed.
Tiny Toons, previously:
Read more:
cartoons,
meryl streep,
tiny toons,
tv
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Saved by the Bell: The Expanded Bayside Universe
If you know diddlypoop about Saved by the Bell, this image should strike you as very strange. Do you know why?
One of the more popular posts on my blog concerns Saved by the Bell and the Tori Paradox — the idea explained in Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs about how final season of the show seemingly takes place in two realities. In one, Zach, Slater, Screech and Lisa are friends with Kelly and Jessie. In the second, the first four are friends with Tori, but Kelly and Jessie don’t exist and maybe never existed.
Of course, there’s a reason for those random final season episodes that feature Leanna Creel but not Tiffani Thiessen or Elizabeth Berkley — it’s all in the original post, if you haven’t had it explained for you — and Klosterman posits that this odd split is actually one of the more realistic things about Saved by the Bell: In his high school experience and mine is well, there were certain people who simply never overlapped. When I went to my ten-year reunion, I met a number of people for the first time. We’d graduated in the same class and had mutual friends but had simply made it through the end of senior year without having met each other. To this day I’ll have conversations with the four or five people from high school whom I still talk to where they’ll insist that I must have known one person or another and I’ll have to convince them that no, their fancy-ass friend simply never crossed into the circles that constituted my high school experience.
Today, my blog is now the No. 1 Google hit for “tori paradox,” and I get a considerable number of hits each month from people who want to know why the hell the last season played out the way it did. I also get hits from people trying to find the image I included in the post and the thing that made be write about it in the first place: a DVD boxed set for the fifth season of the show that seems to include all seven Bayside students — including Kelly, Jessie and Tori — in the cover art.
Since posting it, I’ve gotten comments and emails from people telling me that the image is at least Photoshopped if not from a bootleg version of the boxed set, and that Leanna Creel would have never been in the same promo photo as Thiessen and Berkley.
Today, I stumbled upon what appears to be one of those promo photos.
That is most definitely Tori, with her curly hair and leather jacket, her hand being cupped in a creepy fashion by Mr. Belding’s.
For all I know, I might have scanned right over this image before and not noticed why it was unusual, but yeah — apparently Tori did meet Jessie and Kelly, at least offscreen. According to Google Image Search, this photo is attached to this Time story about the Saved by the Bell cast, but it doesn’t actually appear in the article itself.
I don’t think that DVD box art was faked. I mean, what are the odds that the entire cast was present for a group photo and then someone would digitally insert Leanna Creel into the one shot where everyone is positioned in almost the same arrangement, wearing the exact clothes? I just wonder how this shoot was proposed to Thiessen and Berkley: “Yeah, you’re not on the show anymore, but we need to take this photo so ten-year-old Drew Mackie will be able to rest his mind that the final half of the final season taking place in an alternate dimension where you never existed.”
That’s how I want it to have gone down, anyway.
There is one more weird aspect to Leanna Creel being on the Saved by the Bell that I’m not sure gets raised often enough in discussion about the last season — and I don’t doubt that someone, somewhere, probably drunk or stoned, is bringing this up, asking “Dude, do you ever wonder about what happened to Kelly and Jessie that they just never mentioned them again? Do you think Tori killed them and everyone was too scared of her to say anything?” Back when Saved by the Bell was Good Morning, Miss Bliss, it starred Hayley Mills as the title character, before she too was blinked into nonexistence and the setting of the show switched from Indianapolis to L.A.
Keeping that in mind, isn’t it very suspicious that this exists?
Before she played Tori, Leanna Creel played one of the triplets in The Parent Trap 3, Mills’ next project after the end of Miss Bliss. Creel and her two identical sisters appeared opposite Mills again just a few months later in The Parent Trap 4: Hawaiian Honeymoon, the whole of which is viewable on YouTube.
Clearly, there’s some conspiracy involving clones, abduction, false identities and Tori being a sleeper agent being sent to Bayside to make sure the populace abided by the terms of various residents’ permanent removal. But perhaps I’ve said too much already.
One more bit: Have you ever seen the unaired pilot of Good Morning, Miss Bliss that features Brian Austin Green, Jaleel White and Jonathan Brandis but not Zack, Lisa, Screech or any of the original Saved by the Bell characters? And a schmaltzy theme that I’m pretty sure is sung by Hayley Mills herself? That suggests Olivia Newton-John having too much red wine and getting uncomfortably wistful?
Because that is totally a thing.
Weird TV, previously:
One of the more popular posts on my blog concerns Saved by the Bell and the Tori Paradox — the idea explained in Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs about how final season of the show seemingly takes place in two realities. In one, Zach, Slater, Screech and Lisa are friends with Kelly and Jessie. In the second, the first four are friends with Tori, but Kelly and Jessie don’t exist and maybe never existed.
Of course, there’s a reason for those random final season episodes that feature Leanna Creel but not Tiffani Thiessen or Elizabeth Berkley — it’s all in the original post, if you haven’t had it explained for you — and Klosterman posits that this odd split is actually one of the more realistic things about Saved by the Bell: In his high school experience and mine is well, there were certain people who simply never overlapped. When I went to my ten-year reunion, I met a number of people for the first time. We’d graduated in the same class and had mutual friends but had simply made it through the end of senior year without having met each other. To this day I’ll have conversations with the four or five people from high school whom I still talk to where they’ll insist that I must have known one person or another and I’ll have to convince them that no, their fancy-ass friend simply never crossed into the circles that constituted my high school experience.
Today, my blog is now the No. 1 Google hit for “tori paradox,” and I get a considerable number of hits each month from people who want to know why the hell the last season played out the way it did. I also get hits from people trying to find the image I included in the post and the thing that made be write about it in the first place: a DVD boxed set for the fifth season of the show that seems to include all seven Bayside students — including Kelly, Jessie and Tori — in the cover art.
Since posting it, I’ve gotten comments and emails from people telling me that the image is at least Photoshopped if not from a bootleg version of the boxed set, and that Leanna Creel would have never been in the same promo photo as Thiessen and Berkley.
Today, I stumbled upon what appears to be one of those promo photos.
That is most definitely Tori, with her curly hair and leather jacket, her hand being cupped in a creepy fashion by Mr. Belding’s.
For all I know, I might have scanned right over this image before and not noticed why it was unusual, but yeah — apparently Tori did meet Jessie and Kelly, at least offscreen. According to Google Image Search, this photo is attached to this Time story about the Saved by the Bell cast, but it doesn’t actually appear in the article itself.
I don’t think that DVD box art was faked. I mean, what are the odds that the entire cast was present for a group photo and then someone would digitally insert Leanna Creel into the one shot where everyone is positioned in almost the same arrangement, wearing the exact clothes? I just wonder how this shoot was proposed to Thiessen and Berkley: “Yeah, you’re not on the show anymore, but we need to take this photo so ten-year-old Drew Mackie will be able to rest his mind that the final half of the final season taking place in an alternate dimension where you never existed.”
That’s how I want it to have gone down, anyway.
There is one more weird aspect to Leanna Creel being on the Saved by the Bell that I’m not sure gets raised often enough in discussion about the last season — and I don’t doubt that someone, somewhere, probably drunk or stoned, is bringing this up, asking “Dude, do you ever wonder about what happened to Kelly and Jessie that they just never mentioned them again? Do you think Tori killed them and everyone was too scared of her to say anything?” Back when Saved by the Bell was Good Morning, Miss Bliss, it starred Hayley Mills as the title character, before she too was blinked into nonexistence and the setting of the show switched from Indianapolis to L.A.
Keeping that in mind, isn’t it very suspicious that this exists?
Before she played Tori, Leanna Creel played one of the triplets in The Parent Trap 3, Mills’ next project after the end of Miss Bliss. Creel and her two identical sisters appeared opposite Mills again just a few months later in The Parent Trap 4: Hawaiian Honeymoon, the whole of which is viewable on YouTube.
Clearly, there’s some conspiracy involving clones, abduction, false identities and Tori being a sleeper agent being sent to Bayside to make sure the populace abided by the terms of various residents’ permanent removal. But perhaps I’ve said too much already.
One more bit: Have you ever seen the unaired pilot of Good Morning, Miss Bliss that features Brian Austin Green, Jaleel White and Jonathan Brandis but not Zack, Lisa, Screech or any of the original Saved by the Bell characters? And a schmaltzy theme that I’m pretty sure is sung by Hayley Mills herself? That suggests Olivia Newton-John having too much red wine and getting uncomfortably wistful?
Because that is totally a thing.
Weird TV, previously:
Read more:
chuck klosterman,
hayley mills,
leanna creel,
saved by the bell,
the parent trap,
tv
Saturday, August 8, 2015
The Greater Pop Culture Context of Xanadu
I truly love Xanadu. I don’t ironically love it. I don’t love it because I laugh at it. I don’t even love it for its camp value. I love Xanadu because there’s something earnest in it.
I also maybe love it because the first time I saw it I had taken codeine cough syrup — for medical reasons, I should point out, but thank you nonetheless, UCSB student health services! And although every subsequent viewing has been comparatively less twinkly, even the most sober viewing makes me think of that first time, in all its hazy, grape-flavored glory.
Codeine or no codeine, I’ve seen the movie many times, but it wasn’t until I had to write about it for People that I realized it’s not just a weirdo roller-disco fantasy existing out its own, as a vestige of the ’70s that somehow squeaked into the ’80s. It’s a movie that has a lot of connections to classic movie musicals, and I felt like other pop culture nerds who love Xanadu would be interested to know how it fits in.
(BTW, the majority of all this information is in the People piece as well, but I felt that it was all weird and surprising enough that I merited posting twice.)
Foremost, while it’s not a remake of the 1947 musical Down to Earth, exactly, it’s heavily inspired by it. Down to Earth has Rita Hayworth playing Terpischore, the muse of dance, who descends to the world of mortals, falls in love with a Broadway producer and helps make his new musical a success. (Xanadu, meanwhile, has Olivia Newton-John playing Terpischore, arriving on Earth to inspire the guy from The Warriors to start a roller-disco, and I guess that was the early 1980s equivalent of putting on a popular stage musical?)
Down to Earth is kinda-sorta a sequel to the 1941 film Here Comes Mr. Jordan.
Down to Earth isn’t a continuation of the story, but it does feature three characters from Here Comes Mr. Jordan, two of them being played by the same actors from the first film. Here Comes Mr. Jordan also features a plot about otherworldly beings meddling in the lives of mortals, but in this case, it’s angels.
Here Comes Mr. Jordan was based on Harry Segall’s play Heaven Can Wait, which was later remade as the 1978 film Heaven Can Wait, starring Warren Beatty.
The play was adapted into a movie a second time in 2001 with Chris Rock, though confusingly it used the title of the semi-sequel, Down to Earth.
Outside of that chain, it gets more complicated. Xanadu stars Gene Kelly in his final role as Danny Maguire, a former band leader who has lost his muse. In the 1944 movie Cover Girl, Kelly plays a character by the same name, who works in a nightclub — you know, like an aspiring bandleader might. Also, the film has Kelly romancing Rita Hayworth, who would go on to play the muse in Down to Earth.
It’s just a coincidence, but it’s a happy one, in that it allows both Xanadu and Cover Girl to project onto each other a little, and make the former seem like another spiritual successor to the latter. When Kelly’s character dances with Kira, you can imagine that he’s thinking of Rita Hayworth, and in a way, Kira is that character.
Furthermore, the big Xanadu scene that Kelly shares with Newton-John has them dancing together in a way that’s remarkably similar to how Kelly danced with Judy Garland in the 1942 film For Me and My Gal. Check the two sequences out, back-to-back.
Kelly himself choreographed the scene, and to me, it makes Xanadu a more of a reflection on his long show business career than I realized before. And that’s sweet, in a way, because that makes me feel less bad about Kelly’s final film being labeled a commercial flop, even if it was a flop that eventually found a cult following of codeine-addled weirdos.
And there’s one more: The dance sequence for “Don’t Walk Away” transforms into a cartoon. This animation was one of the first projects done by Don Bluth, who had only recently left Disney at the time when Xanadu came along.
From here on, Bluth went on to do The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail and The Land Before Time. You could make the argument that Xanadu therefore provided a first stepping stone for Bluth on the road to becoming a successful animator independent of Disney. You could even make a Xanadu-Arrested Development connection, since the latter’s Bluth family got its name from Don Bluth, but they wouldn’t have had Bluth not become a famous, recognized name. Xanadu helped make that happen. Thanks, roller-disco movie!
In the end, of course, Xanadu became a Broadway hit that received all the praise that Xanadu the movie didn’t get. (Below, you can watch the stage version of Xanadu in its entirety, if that’s something you feel like doing on a Saturday.)
And that’s cool, but to me not quite as cool as the fact that it’s a Broadway musical adaptation of a roller-disco classic that was a remake of a sequel to a film that had already been adapted into a movie and which had been a Broadway play in the first place.
Dem muses, I tell you.
I also maybe love it because the first time I saw it I had taken codeine cough syrup — for medical reasons, I should point out, but thank you nonetheless, UCSB student health services! And although every subsequent viewing has been comparatively less twinkly, even the most sober viewing makes me think of that first time, in all its hazy, grape-flavored glory.
Codeine or no codeine, I’ve seen the movie many times, but it wasn’t until I had to write about it for People that I realized it’s not just a weirdo roller-disco fantasy existing out its own, as a vestige of the ’70s that somehow squeaked into the ’80s. It’s a movie that has a lot of connections to classic movie musicals, and I felt like other pop culture nerds who love Xanadu would be interested to know how it fits in.
(BTW, the majority of all this information is in the People piece as well, but I felt that it was all weird and surprising enough that I merited posting twice.)
Foremost, while it’s not a remake of the 1947 musical Down to Earth, exactly, it’s heavily inspired by it. Down to Earth has Rita Hayworth playing Terpischore, the muse of dance, who descends to the world of mortals, falls in love with a Broadway producer and helps make his new musical a success. (Xanadu, meanwhile, has Olivia Newton-John playing Terpischore, arriving on Earth to inspire the guy from The Warriors to start a roller-disco, and I guess that was the early 1980s equivalent of putting on a popular stage musical?)
Down to Earth is kinda-sorta a sequel to the 1941 film Here Comes Mr. Jordan.
Down to Earth isn’t a continuation of the story, but it does feature three characters from Here Comes Mr. Jordan, two of them being played by the same actors from the first film. Here Comes Mr. Jordan also features a plot about otherworldly beings meddling in the lives of mortals, but in this case, it’s angels.
Here Comes Mr. Jordan was based on Harry Segall’s play Heaven Can Wait, which was later remade as the 1978 film Heaven Can Wait, starring Warren Beatty.
The play was adapted into a movie a second time in 2001 with Chris Rock, though confusingly it used the title of the semi-sequel, Down to Earth.
Outside of that chain, it gets more complicated. Xanadu stars Gene Kelly in his final role as Danny Maguire, a former band leader who has lost his muse. In the 1944 movie Cover Girl, Kelly plays a character by the same name, who works in a nightclub — you know, like an aspiring bandleader might. Also, the film has Kelly romancing Rita Hayworth, who would go on to play the muse in Down to Earth.
It’s just a coincidence, but it’s a happy one, in that it allows both Xanadu and Cover Girl to project onto each other a little, and make the former seem like another spiritual successor to the latter. When Kelly’s character dances with Kira, you can imagine that he’s thinking of Rita Hayworth, and in a way, Kira is that character.
Furthermore, the big Xanadu scene that Kelly shares with Newton-John has them dancing together in a way that’s remarkably similar to how Kelly danced with Judy Garland in the 1942 film For Me and My Gal. Check the two sequences out, back-to-back.
Kelly himself choreographed the scene, and to me, it makes Xanadu a more of a reflection on his long show business career than I realized before. And that’s sweet, in a way, because that makes me feel less bad about Kelly’s final film being labeled a commercial flop, even if it was a flop that eventually found a cult following of codeine-addled weirdos.
And there’s one more: The dance sequence for “Don’t Walk Away” transforms into a cartoon. This animation was one of the first projects done by Don Bluth, who had only recently left Disney at the time when Xanadu came along.
From here on, Bluth went on to do The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail and The Land Before Time. You could make the argument that Xanadu therefore provided a first stepping stone for Bluth on the road to becoming a successful animator independent of Disney. You could even make a Xanadu-Arrested Development connection, since the latter’s Bluth family got its name from Don Bluth, but they wouldn’t have had Bluth not become a famous, recognized name. Xanadu helped make that happen. Thanks, roller-disco movie!
In the end, of course, Xanadu became a Broadway hit that received all the praise that Xanadu the movie didn’t get. (Below, you can watch the stage version of Xanadu in its entirety, if that’s something you feel like doing on a Saturday.)
And that’s cool, but to me not quite as cool as the fact that it’s a Broadway musical adaptation of a roller-disco classic that was a remake of a sequel to a film that had already been adapted into a movie and which had been a Broadway play in the first place.
Dem muses, I tell you.
Read more:
gene kelly,
movies,
olivia newton-john,
pop culture minutiae,
rita hayworth,
xanadu
Thursday, August 6, 2015
Alternatives
I could do what you’re suggesting. I could. I mean, it’s definitely a possibility.
But I’m going to suggest a sort of Plan B for what I can do, and I’m asterisking it with the note that it’s an equally appealing option to me, and that’s this: I, instead of what you’re suggesting, could also just eat poison.
So let’s think about it like this: Here in one hand is your suggestion, which could totally happen and I want you to understand that I’m acknowledging the likelihood of this particular eventuality. And over here, in the other hand, is me eating a heaping handful of poison and dying on the spot — just ingesting these kill pills like they were M&Ms and then shitting myself and dropping dead. Now do you see where my hands are? Neither option is tipping the scales here — neither your suggestion, which is totally an idea, nor mine of taking an action that will result in my immediate and painful death.
Now it’s also important to consider that there’s a third option, which I feel merits equal consideration. In lieu of the first two suggestions, I could also fill my bed with venomous snakes and then go take a nap in it — just, like, curl up with these angry vipers and let them do what they will with me and let their deadly venom course through my veins and then die in my writhing snake bed knowing that this is what I chose in lieu of what you wanted me to do.
Hey, now — wait a minute. I gave your suggestion all the consideration it deserved, and now I feel like you’re not really hearing me on my counter-proposals. But I get you. Maybe these don’t seem like the way to go to you — and believe me, I’m very clear that you have some strong ideas on how I should spent my time — so maybe I need a fourth option that’s less extreme.
So how about this? I take this lamp right here, and I break the lightbulb but don’t remove the shattered glass stub from the socket. And then I take the lamp and fuck myself with it right now. I think it’s the quickest of the possible solutions, mostly because I don’t have poison pills or snakes immediately handy. (And come on — I think that was probably your first quibble with the previous options.) But the lamp is right here, and we could just take care of this now. It’s quick. It’s immediate. You’d get to watch, of course. And afterwards someone can call janitorial services to deal with an aftermath that will surely be grisly on a nightmarish level.
So this is me, batting the ball back to you and saying, “Hey there, person who likes ideas. Which of these seems like the best to you?
Where are you going?
Fine, shut the door. Leave me to make the big decision on my own.
[pulls out phone]
Hi, is there some kind of waiting period for buying your most poisonous snakes? Yes, I can hold.
But I’m going to suggest a sort of Plan B for what I can do, and I’m asterisking it with the note that it’s an equally appealing option to me, and that’s this: I, instead of what you’re suggesting, could also just eat poison.
So let’s think about it like this: Here in one hand is your suggestion, which could totally happen and I want you to understand that I’m acknowledging the likelihood of this particular eventuality. And over here, in the other hand, is me eating a heaping handful of poison and dying on the spot — just ingesting these kill pills like they were M&Ms and then shitting myself and dropping dead. Now do you see where my hands are? Neither option is tipping the scales here — neither your suggestion, which is totally an idea, nor mine of taking an action that will result in my immediate and painful death.
Now it’s also important to consider that there’s a third option, which I feel merits equal consideration. In lieu of the first two suggestions, I could also fill my bed with venomous snakes and then go take a nap in it — just, like, curl up with these angry vipers and let them do what they will with me and let their deadly venom course through my veins and then die in my writhing snake bed knowing that this is what I chose in lieu of what you wanted me to do.
Hey, now — wait a minute. I gave your suggestion all the consideration it deserved, and now I feel like you’re not really hearing me on my counter-proposals. But I get you. Maybe these don’t seem like the way to go to you — and believe me, I’m very clear that you have some strong ideas on how I should spent my time — so maybe I need a fourth option that’s less extreme.
So how about this? I take this lamp right here, and I break the lightbulb but don’t remove the shattered glass stub from the socket. And then I take the lamp and fuck myself with it right now. I think it’s the quickest of the possible solutions, mostly because I don’t have poison pills or snakes immediately handy. (And come on — I think that was probably your first quibble with the previous options.) But the lamp is right here, and we could just take care of this now. It’s quick. It’s immediate. You’d get to watch, of course. And afterwards someone can call janitorial services to deal with an aftermath that will surely be grisly on a nightmarish level.
So this is me, batting the ball back to you and saying, “Hey there, person who likes ideas. Which of these seems like the best to you?
Where are you going?
Fine, shut the door. Leave me to make the big decision on my own.
[pulls out phone]
Hi, is there some kind of waiting period for buying your most poisonous snakes? Yes, I can hold.
Read more:
a funny story
Thursday, July 30, 2015
A List of Words That Can Be Rendered Hilarious With One Errant Keystroke
I’m talking beyond public, whose comedic possibilities have already been thoroughly explored.
And yes, for most of these, I learned the hard way, and yes, the first one just yesterday.
On a related note, the adjectival form of the word pus must be avoided in written form at all costs. Also, true story: Once I typed Josie and the Pussycars in a headline. It wasn’t more obscene, strictly speaking, just more surreal in a way that made me wish pussycars were a thing.
And yes, for most of these, I learned the hard way, and yes, the first one just yesterday.
- faces
- genial
- trust
- tuckered
- named
- Scotch tape
- exotic
- wore
- ditties
- wonton
- hose
- curt
- shot
- shirt
- snitty
- shift
- trump, as a verb or a proper noun
- discount, which can be tragically but wonderfully turned into discocunt
- and of course, superheroes, which becomes the obscure but nonetheless evocative word superherpes when you type just one letter incorrectly
On a related note, the adjectival form of the word pus must be avoided in written form at all costs. Also, true story: Once I typed Josie and the Pussycars in a headline. It wasn’t more obscene, strictly speaking, just more surreal in a way that made me wish pussycars were a thing.
Read more:
all things verbal
Sunday, July 26, 2015
Why My House Wasn’t in a Movie About Fresno
Here is a phone conversation, re-created some artistic license, that happened about a year ago.
Location scout: Do you want your house to be in a movie?
Me: Not really.
Location scout: We’ll pay you!
Me: How m—
Location scout: Not very much though.
Me: Well, no, then. That sounds like a hassle.
Location scout: We’d need you out of there for, like, two days.
Me: But I just moved in.
Location scout: So you’re not used to it yet!
Me: I need to go.
Location scout: But Hollywood magic!
Me: What’s this movie?
Location scout: It’s called Fresno!
Me: Bye.
Shortly after I moved last year, I got a note tacked to my door from a location scout asking if I’d be interested in allowing a crew to film a movie in my house. This was one of the most Los Angeles things that had ever happened to me, and I was tempted. But when I called for details, I said no, ultimately for two reasons. First, just having newly moved in, I wasn’t eager to get displaced from my home. Second, the film was called Fresno and something about the thought of my home being one that could exist in Fresno didn’t sit well. I like my home. I strive for a non-Fresno aesthetic. Being told “Your home could be a place in Fresno” is kind of like being approached about being the subject of a makeover show — “You’re a ‘before,’ and we want to make you an ‘after,’ you shapeless, sad glob.” Only they weren’t actually promising to “after” my house — just highlight its “before”-ness.
Last weekend, nearly a year later, I watched the Outfest screening of the new movie by Jamie Babbit, who directed But I’m a Cheerleader. The film featured Natasha Lyonne, who also starred in Cheerleader, alongside Judy Greer, who starred in every other movie this summer. (Seriously, she’s been in Tomorrowland, Jurassic World and Ant-Man. Can’t help feeling proud for little ol’ Fern Mayo.) It’s a solid indie comedy, and the title is Addicted to Fresno.
The working title, I learned, was Fresno.
In retrospect, I missed out.
Having watched the film, I’d guess that the location scout was looking for one of two homes featured in it: the one that Lyonne and Greer’s characters share or a second where Greer’s character meets one played my Molly Shannon. Greer and Shannon meet up again on the street, in a spot in Atwater Village that’s literally a five-minute walk from where I live. I cross by it everyday, and consequently I get to think about how I missed my chance to experience Hollywood magic in the form of having my walls repainted, having my furniture rearranged and my floors scratched up, to say nothing of having to camp out at a friend’s while a film crew looked at the art on my walls and saying, “Nah, this sucks. Move it out of the shot.”
Good movie, though.
Of course, that title Fresno can and should only belong to one thing: the 1986 Carol Burnett miniseries that made fun of night-time soaps like Dallas, Dynasty and Falcon Crest, that focused on Fresno’s glamorous-but-cutthroat raisin industry and that hinged around the idea that setting a story about glamorous people in Fresno is inherently ridiculous.
The entire four hours of Fresno, I have learned, are available on YouTube, and I’d like to suggest a Fresno-themed movie night if anyone else is down.
Location scout: Do you want your house to be in a movie?
Me: Not really.
Location scout: We’ll pay you!
Me: How m—
Location scout: Not very much though.
Me: Well, no, then. That sounds like a hassle.
Location scout: We’d need you out of there for, like, two days.
Me: But I just moved in.
Location scout: So you’re not used to it yet!
Me: I need to go.
Location scout: But Hollywood magic!
Me: What’s this movie?
Location scout: It’s called Fresno!
Me: Bye.
Shortly after I moved last year, I got a note tacked to my door from a location scout asking if I’d be interested in allowing a crew to film a movie in my house. This was one of the most Los Angeles things that had ever happened to me, and I was tempted. But when I called for details, I said no, ultimately for two reasons. First, just having newly moved in, I wasn’t eager to get displaced from my home. Second, the film was called Fresno and something about the thought of my home being one that could exist in Fresno didn’t sit well. I like my home. I strive for a non-Fresno aesthetic. Being told “Your home could be a place in Fresno” is kind of like being approached about being the subject of a makeover show — “You’re a ‘before,’ and we want to make you an ‘after,’ you shapeless, sad glob.” Only they weren’t actually promising to “after” my house — just highlight its “before”-ness.
Last weekend, nearly a year later, I watched the Outfest screening of the new movie by Jamie Babbit, who directed But I’m a Cheerleader. The film featured Natasha Lyonne, who also starred in Cheerleader, alongside Judy Greer, who starred in every other movie this summer. (Seriously, she’s been in Tomorrowland, Jurassic World and Ant-Man. Can’t help feeling proud for little ol’ Fern Mayo.) It’s a solid indie comedy, and the title is Addicted to Fresno.
The working title, I learned, was Fresno.
In retrospect, I missed out.
Having watched the film, I’d guess that the location scout was looking for one of two homes featured in it: the one that Lyonne and Greer’s characters share or a second where Greer’s character meets one played my Molly Shannon. Greer and Shannon meet up again on the street, in a spot in Atwater Village that’s literally a five-minute walk from where I live. I cross by it everyday, and consequently I get to think about how I missed my chance to experience Hollywood magic in the form of having my walls repainted, having my furniture rearranged and my floors scratched up, to say nothing of having to camp out at a friend’s while a film crew looked at the art on my walls and saying, “Nah, this sucks. Move it out of the shot.”
Good movie, though.
Of course, that title Fresno can and should only belong to one thing: the 1986 Carol Burnett miniseries that made fun of night-time soaps like Dallas, Dynasty and Falcon Crest, that focused on Fresno’s glamorous-but-cutthroat raisin industry and that hinged around the idea that setting a story about glamorous people in Fresno is inherently ridiculous.
Read more:
a funny story,
fresno,
los angeles,
movies
Sunday, July 12, 2015
If Everybody Wants You, Why Isn’t Anybody Calling?
Listening to Laura Branigan’s “Gloria” is like being trapped at lunch with a friend who is so focused on criticizing some extraneous person that you begin to wonder about the nature of the obsession. “You’ve been going on and on about this Gloria person. Are you sure you actually don’t like her?” you ask at long last. “I think you’re in love with her.” Your friend puts down her fork. Your insight was not appreciated.
So that, only you can dance to it.
I’ve actually been wondering what Gloria’s deal was for a while now. It’s been eight years since I posted about the strange lyrics on this blog, and it took me until this week to find out why this song exists.
Here’s the story.
The song was initially released in 1979. Sung in Italian by Umberto Tozzi, this version of “Gloria” is a straightforward love song about a man infatuated with a woman who may be imaginary but whom he nonetheless misses “in the air,” “like salt” and “more than the snow melts the sun,” at least according to this translation .
Jonathan King translated the lyrics into English later that same year. Tozzi later re-recorded this version as well.
Eventually Laura Branigan decided she too should record a version, but simply re-using Jonathan King’s translation proved doubly difficult. Had she just kept the subject of the song as is — this alluring woman named Gloria — it would have skewed too sapphic for mainstream pop in the early ’80s. And simply substituting all the references to Gloria with a man named Mario didn’t have the same impact. Thus, Branigan and a collaborator re-wrote “Gloria” as essentially a hate song, with the narrator calling out the subject for living life bigger than she should.
(Note on the Gloria-Mario business: The Wikipedia page on the matter cites People Weekly as the source of this info, but I can’t find the article, and a search of the People.com archives, if that’s the publication it’s trying to refer to, turns up nothing. However, the search did lead me to a 1983 article that refers to Branigan’s gay following as “the AIDS circuit,” and that is certainly something that helps us see where were are as a society now versus thirty years ago.)
The song broke records on the Billboard Top 100, so clearly these creative decisions helped it connect with American audiences, but isn’t that an odd solution to the problem? “We have this catchy song, and we don’t want to our girl to sound like a lesbo, so let’s just have her be obsessively critical about this Gloria bitch?” Lyrics such as “Feel your innocence slipping away / Don’t believe it’s coming back soon” seem intended more to hurt than help, but I suppose constructive criticism hasn’t ever been a big theme in pop music. Of course, today, Branigan would have just covered the song as is, and no one would have blinked an eye about her singing a love song about a woman.
That’s the explanation. In case you’re ever along for the ride, listening to “Gloria” and someone points out how odd the lyrics are, offer them this background, even if it doesn’t completely explain why Gloria is living under an alias. (Spies? Spies!) Personally, I want someone to write Gloria: The Movie and further flesh out the world of sin and scandal that this woman has descended into, a la the movie adaptation of “Ode to Billy Joe.”
And speaking of that, is it strange to anyone else thatthere’s not been a movie version of “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia”? Doy, there totally was a Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia movie.
So that, only you can dance to it.
I’ve actually been wondering what Gloria’s deal was for a while now. It’s been eight years since I posted about the strange lyrics on this blog, and it took me until this week to find out why this song exists.
Here’s the story.
The song was initially released in 1979. Sung in Italian by Umberto Tozzi, this version of “Gloria” is a straightforward love song about a man infatuated with a woman who may be imaginary but whom he nonetheless misses “in the air,” “like salt” and “more than the snow melts the sun,” at least according to this translation .
Jonathan King translated the lyrics into English later that same year. Tozzi later re-recorded this version as well.
Eventually Laura Branigan decided she too should record a version, but simply re-using Jonathan King’s translation proved doubly difficult. Had she just kept the subject of the song as is — this alluring woman named Gloria — it would have skewed too sapphic for mainstream pop in the early ’80s. And simply substituting all the references to Gloria with a man named Mario didn’t have the same impact. Thus, Branigan and a collaborator re-wrote “Gloria” as essentially a hate song, with the narrator calling out the subject for living life bigger than she should.
(Note on the Gloria-Mario business: The Wikipedia page on the matter cites People Weekly as the source of this info, but I can’t find the article, and a search of the People.com archives, if that’s the publication it’s trying to refer to, turns up nothing. However, the search did lead me to a 1983 article that refers to Branigan’s gay following as “the AIDS circuit,” and that is certainly something that helps us see where were are as a society now versus thirty years ago.)
The song broke records on the Billboard Top 100, so clearly these creative decisions helped it connect with American audiences, but isn’t that an odd solution to the problem? “We have this catchy song, and we don’t want to our girl to sound like a lesbo, so let’s just have her be obsessively critical about this Gloria bitch?” Lyrics such as “Feel your innocence slipping away / Don’t believe it’s coming back soon” seem intended more to hurt than help, but I suppose constructive criticism hasn’t ever been a big theme in pop music. Of course, today, Branigan would have just covered the song as is, and no one would have blinked an eye about her singing a love song about a woman.
That’s the explanation. In case you’re ever along for the ride, listening to “Gloria” and someone points out how odd the lyrics are, offer them this background, even if it doesn’t completely explain why Gloria is living under an alias. (Spies? Spies!) Personally, I want someone to write Gloria: The Movie and further flesh out the world of sin and scandal that this woman has descended into, a la the movie adaptation of “Ode to Billy Joe.”
And speaking of that, is it strange to anyone else that
Read more:
music,
overanalyzing lyrics
Saturday, July 4, 2015
In Which Jada Pinkett Gets an Obscene Phone Call
Sometimes your celebration of America begins with poking around online and finding a German-language poster for Scream 2. For a piece of promotional art that came out in the late ’90s, this poster pings all your old movie nostalgia censors. It reminds you of something that would have come out two decades earlier.
The American poster for Scream 2 features Pinkett too, but in the same ghostly white as Neve Campbell. (And yeah, in the first version of this post, I assumed that it was Courteney Cox appearing on the left side of the poster before a commenter pointed out that Cox does not have brown eyes. On second look, that is totally Jada Pinkett. I guess the white skin threw me.)
It’s interesting that this German poster, and only this German poster, puts Pinkett front and center in the way Barrymore appeared on the first poster and doesn’t change her skin tone.
You don’t even mind that during the scant few minutes that Jada Pinkett actually appears in Scream 2, she never uses a phone, to say nothing from using an old-fashioned pay phone receiver. And you wonder what aesthetic debate went into the decision to feature Pinkett’s skin as being brown. Of course, her skin actually is brown, and that’s actually an important aspect to the role she plays in Scream 2, what with the discussion with Omar Epps about African-American representation in the horror genre and the general tendency to kill off the black guy first.
In the poster for the first movie, Drew Barrymore’s face shows up ghostly white.
The American poster for Scream 2 features Pinkett too, but in the same ghostly white as Neve Campbell. (And yeah, in the first version of this post, I assumed that it was Courteney Cox appearing on the left side of the poster before a commenter pointed out that Cox does not have brown eyes. On second look, that is totally Jada Pinkett. I guess the white skin threw me.)
It’s interesting that this German poster, and only this German poster, puts Pinkett front and center in the way Barrymore appeared on the first poster and doesn’t change her skin tone.
Read more:
die wunderkammer,
horror movies,
movies,
scream
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