Liquid America

On the 2011 New York Yankees

2011-10-07T00:17:00.004-04:00

About thirty minutes ago, for the second consecutive year, the Yankees season ended with a strikeout by Alex Rodriguez, the worst great player ever, and, like Johnny Cash before me, I hung my head. Another season over, another countdown to spring training begun.

Considering that the Yankees started the season with basically one real starting pitcher, the fact that they even made it this far is pretty impressive. They won 99 games this year, including the postseason, had at least one legitimate MVP candidate- Curtis Granderson; man, he had the kind of season I'm going to tell my kids about, Ted Mosby-style, whether they want to hear it or not- a potential Rookie of the Year in Ivan Nova- for once they brought up a young pitcher and didn't immediately ruin him by messing with his head and switching him from the pen to the rotation and back again. I guess the Hughes-Chamberlain Double Debacle finally got its point across.

Some history was made. Mariano Rivera made his "Greatest Ever" title official. The Yanks hit three grand slams in one game, which had never been done before, and my mom called to make sure I was watching. That's how you know when something happening in sports is a big deal; when my mom knows about it. Also, I know this is a cliche, but I'll never forget where I was when Derek Jeter got his 3,000th hit. I was behind my couch, walking into the kitchen to check on fish & chips. Dad was in the director's chair, Mom and Courtney were on the couch. I raised my arms above my head in triumph, like I'd had something to do with it. I think the food ended up burning.

And I'm not going to lie- in March the whole world had the Boston Red Sox winning the World Series, and then they choked it all away in one glorious flameout. I can't help but smile about that. Seriously, when they officially blew it last week, I grinned so wide it hurt my face. I can't help it. They're like the Popli kids. I just hate them so much...

It was a good season. I miss it already.

Let's go Brewers.

Novel In A Month Part Two Update #4 - Goodnight

2011-07-04T23:37:00.002-04:00

Novel In A Month Part Two Update #3 - Crunch Time

2011-07-04T09:21:00.003-04:00

DAY: 33(?)

WORD COUNT: 47,674

WORD COUNT SHOULD BE: 48,333

Okay, so- it's the Fourth of July. Obviously. Happy 4th, everyone.

So, here's the thing- I'm not going to be done with the novel by the end of the day. Which, I realize now, looking back at the original post, I said I would be. But I should be up to 50,000 words by the end of the day, which was the revised goal I set for myself a week or so ago, and... well, didn't mention because I didn't actually realize it was a revised goal. I thought 50,000 words, done or not, was my target all along.

Oh well.

Still, though! 50,000 words! Nothing to sneeze at!

Okay, back to work.

Novel In A Month Part Two Update #2 - Home Stretch?

2011-06-26T21:51:00.002-04:00

DAY: 25

WORD COUNT: 26,371

WORD COUNT SHOULD BE: 41,675

Yeah... this isn't going well. I'm going to have to basically write 5,000 words a day for the next week if I want to hit 50,000 by July 4th. Should be... no fun at all, actually.

More as it develops.

Novel In A Month Part Two Update #1 - Oh Captain My Captain

2011-06-14T06:43:00.005-04:00

DAY: 13

WORD COUNT: 15,179

WORD COUNT SHOULD BE: 20,004

Okay, so... clearly, I'm behind.

I went two (nonconsecutive) days last week without writing so much as a word, as I was rather sick early in the week, and exhausted later in the week. I stayed home sick from work on Thursday and made a big chunk of progress, going from 7,100 words to 11,400, but it still wasn't enough to get me back on pace. At this point I'm about 5,000 words behind where I ought to be as of the end of the day yesterday. This is less than pleasing to me, but after last night I've discovered a new approach, inspired in part by reading the "Writing Totems" section of No Plot, No Problem! by Chris Baty (founder of NaNoWriMo) and in another part by watching this guy play baseball.

For the uninitiated*, that is Derek Jeter, shortstop and captain of the New York Yankees, who is (as of last night) six base hits away from his 3,000th career hit. This is, again for the uninitiated, an important number for a baseball player, as it effectively guarantees entry into the Hall of Fame. Also, when and if he does get the hit, he will be the first Yankee in the franchise's illustrious history to reach that particular milestone.

So, what does this have to do with me? Well, I have decided, as a motivational tool, that I will write a number of words equivalent to Derek Jeter's career hit total every day until he hits #3,000, at which point I will (possibly) re-evaluate my approach. As part of this approach, when I write (at home) I will be wearing my replica Yankees home jersey, emblazoned on the back with the number 2** (and NO NAME, GODDAMN IT!) on the back, which was bought for me by Courtney back in Christmas of 2009. This worked last night, as I logged (over) 2,994 words over the course of two writing sessions (one in the early morning, one late, late at night). More on this as it develops.

* Also for the uninitiated: ... seriously? He's like one of the most famous athletes in the world. Where do you live, a cave?

** Jeter's number. Seriously, whoever you are, look at a newspaper every once in a while. Jeez.

Novel In A Month Part Two

2011-05-31T19:44:00.004-04:00

“(P)art of my problem in the past… has been keeping details on my progress and on the project to myself for the duration of my working on it…. I have come to the conclusion that this is fucking stupid. Thus, I am asking you all to bother me about this particular project whenever possible. Liquid America will be going dark… in terms of conventional updates for the duration of my work on this project, but I’ll be quasi-regularly posting updates on my progress: word counts, observations about the inevitably deleterious effect this undertaking will have on my sleep, brief excerpts (perhaps) and what-have-you. Any encouragements (or, if I’m slacking off, chastisements) will be welcomed here, or however else you choose to notify me.”

-Me, October 2008

“I am on no real deadline this time, at least not yet. Sporadic updates will follow as time allows.”

-Me, October 2010

“I’m an idiot.”

- Me, May 2011

So... wait, what did I do? I basically looked at the approach that I took toward writing my only finished work in years and said “Nah, I’m going to do it differently this time” and expected it to work? That’s what I did? What the hell is wrong with me?

Hi, everyone, my name is Brendan and I haven’t written diddley-crap in months. Actually that’s not entirely true. Technically I’ve written the minimum 50,000 words required to complete a novel, but the problem is those 50,000 words are spread over like three different projects. Which is annoying. Three projects started, petered out, overthought and ultimately abandoned. Hell damn ass.

So, after thinking it over and talking about it with Courtney, Tom, Devon, and others, I’m going back to what worked for me the first time. I’m giving myself till July 4^th to finish another novel, which I will be officially starting work on at midnight tonight. I’ve done some preliminary work for it, not really an outline but more of a “series bible” for the concept, but all the actual writing of the project will take place between midnight tonight and the end of the first Monday of July. I’ll be updating with word counts and suchlike sporadically between now and then, and encouragement, harassment and haranguing are welcomed and encouraged.

And away we go!

Fixing the NFL Draft, Liquid America Style!

2011-04-29T09:08:00.004-04:00

The first round of the NFL Draft (aka the only round anyone cares about) was last night. The first overall pick, by the Carolina Panthers, was Cam Newton, who has graciously accepted a pay cut. The Giants drafted a cornerback named Prince Amukemera, who I know nothing about but who, I assume based on his name, will be the first ever background Star Wars character to play professional football.

As part of my ongoing effort to make all sports just a little more wacky and unpredictable (and also to update this blog at least once a month), I now present five ways to make the NFL Draft a little more fun...

1.) The last-place team gets to draft any currently active NFL player from another professional roster, but at the expense of all their subsequent picks. So, for example, last night the Panthers could have drafted Peyton Manning with the first pick, but then the Colts would have gotten all of Carolina's subsequent picks, in addition to their own. (The new team would have to pay the drafted player his contractually guaranteed salary, and the drafted player would have to remain with his new team for at least one full season.)

2.) Draft order in all even-numbered rounds is determined randomly, by the commissioner pulling team names out of one of those lottery/bingo tumblers.

3.) All contract offers give the player the option of selecting what's behind "Door #2" instead. Maybe it's $40 million guaranteed, maybe it's a donkey in a top hat. But you don't know, do you, kid? So what's it gonna be?!

4.) In all odd-numbered rounds after the first, announcements of draft picks are made by the team mascots. Teams without official mascots better damn well get one.

5.) The final player remaining in the draft gets to play for whatever team he wants, regardless of who actually has the last pick.

The Worldwide Leader on The Worldwide Leader

2011-03-17T09:52:00.003-04:00

Last night, I was briefly watching President Obama on SportsCenter fill out a NCAA tournament bracket, and I thought to myself, "Well, I can't wait for people to give him shit over this." Less than twenty-four hours later, this morning, I was watching Morning Joe on MSNBC, and the host was talking about how, with all that's going on in the world (natural disaster and potential nuclear devastation in Japan, violent uprising in Libya, couple of wars, disastrous economy), why is Obama filling out NCAA brackets on ESPN?

Now, here's the thing: I don't like college basketball. I'm not even particularly enamored of Obama. So I would not necessarily stick up for either of them. But it's always been strange to me how people who don't like/agree with the president, any president, seem to expect him to have a superhuman level of focus on the issues of the world, whatever those issues may be. People who don't like the President expect him to be working all the time, even though they think he's not good at his job. Again, not just Obama, but any president, because I'm sure that five years ago there were liberals just like me (maybe even me personally) complaining about "Why is George W. Bush throwing out pitches at baseball games when he should be focusing on the two wars he started?!"

The President has a stressful job. I come home from work every day and I watch a little ESPN even if it's about, like, golf or Nascar or college basketball or whatever, because I had a busy day and I need to relax a little bit, and I work at a mid-level property insurance company. The President is the President. He's got a lot on his mind. Let the guy watch some basketball!

Besides, everyone he picked to go to the finals was a number one seed. It's not like he really put a lot of thought into it.

Oh, COME ON, MLB Network!

2011-02-24T17:19:00.003-05:00

MLB Network's "Top 75 Robbed Home Runs of All Time" list is bullshit. They ranked Endy Chavez's catch in Game 7 of the 2006 NLCS as Number 2. NUMBER 2!!! Ridiculous. That was the most incredible catch in the history of catches. If the Mets had gone on to win that game and go to the World Series, they would have built a forty-foot statue of Chavez out of solid gold in front of Citi Field, and they would have been right to do it. #2. Jesus. #1 was some rather pedestrian leap by Gary Matthews Jr. off Gary Lamb during a regular season Astros/Brewers game. Pff! That's what I say, readers. I say "Pff!"

Number two.

Horseapples.

The River Runs

2011-01-18T09:53:00.002-05:00

My phone has been abuzz since last night with automated emails from Google Alerts, which I have set up to notify me whenever the name "Marcus Thames" appears in a news article. It seems that Liquid America's favorite baseball player is heading west to join the Los Angeles Dodgers. As Courtney pointed out last night, it would have been better to see him go to the Showaltimore Orioles- at least then we'd get to see him play on a semi-regular basis. Oh well- it was fun while it lasted.

Hmmm... I wonder if I'll get a Google Alert after I post this. Let's find out!

By The Way...

2011-01-14T16:22:00.004-05:00

... it's 20-freaking-11. How the HELL did that happen?

I know I voluntarily suspended blogging until I finish a second novel, which I haven't worked on in literally months because I've been without a computer, but I just realized now that it's kind of nuts. I'm going to be thirty years old this year. That really snuck up on me.

Also, Liquid America Fun Fact- the earliest post on Liquid America Classic is dated 2/2/2004, which means I've been maintaining some kind of blog for nearly eight years. Longer, probably- in fact, longer definitely, since before I started what became Liquid America Classic at livejournal.com, I had some other blog hosted by some other site, the name of which escapes me. Eight years. Jesus. I sure do love the e-sound of my own web-voice. But eight years pretty much means, I think, that I was blogging before blogging was cool. Eat it, Huffington Post!

If all goes according to plan I should be buying a new laptop early next month, then I'm going to really push myself to finish the new novel as fast as I can. Until the next time I "briefly" suspend my suspension of blogging, Liquid Americans...

The Year In Humor 2010

2011-01-01T07:42:00.005-05:00

There were a lot of tough decisions in the one-liners this year. Not so much in the exchanges, but I had to cut the original list of one-liner candidates literally in half to get it down to twelve. Enjoy, and Happy New Year!

The Top Twelve One-Liners

1. "I've got a long day of wishing it were tomorrow ahead of me." - Tom, on a Thursday

2. "There's a cat here sitting on top of a doghouse like he won." -me, outside Joe's

3. "Guatemala is the Mexico of Mexico!" -my sister Alicia, on the wisdom of attending our cousin's wedding in Guatemala

4. "He walked on the moon. What'd YOU walk on today?" -Courtney, re: Buzz Aldrin on DWTS

5. "I can do it! I want to be a strong, independent woman... hold this." -Courtney

6. "Stop crying! If I wanted another baby I'd go make one!" -Mother of the Year, on the ferry

7. "There's Jackson, there's Madison, and there's this Japanese kid Rooki who's too fat to do anything." -my sister Alicia, on the roster of her son's play group

8. "I can't wait for the Tim Tebow sex tape... wait, wait, no!!!" -Joe

9. " ‘Overbay’ sounds like Pig Latin." -Courtney, re: Toronto Blue Jays infielder Lyle "Bover" Overbay

10. “I just closed my eyes & prayed for my sunglasses.” – Courtney, after getting run over at the plate during softball

11. "What is this, some kind of rocket ketchup?!" -Courtney, re a particularly difficult to remove food stain

12. "We're being invaded! Release the gorillas!" -Tom, on how to use zoos for national defense

The Top Twelve Exchanges

1. "I'm cold."

"Do you want my gloves?"

"No, I want your pants!" -Courtney, me, Courtney

2. "I was making an egg for breakfast this morning..."

"Good story alert!" -me, then my sister Veronica

3. “Doesn’t this always happen on Friday occasionally?”

“Yes. Yes, this always happens occasionally.” –my boss Ed, me

4. "How's your stomach doing after lunch today?"

"Fine."

"My stomach's like, 'Yeah... you're a bitch.'" -Courtney, me, Courtney

5. “It’s better than sticking his head in dudes’ crotches.”

“Yeah, Brendan!” – Vin, then Joe

6. "I have 14 months left on my annual pass."

"When did you buy your annual pass? Two months from now?" -Paul, Tom

7. “Number forty-two… Juan Pablo Montoya!”

“BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!” –the announcer at a Nascar race, then the completely non-racist crowd

8. "Does it bother you that I have celebrity crushes?"

"Not really. Does it bother you that all my celebrity crushes are on dudes?"

"... a little bit." - Courtney, me, Courtney, on my (NON-SEXUAL) celebrity crushes

9. "Do you only know this from Paul & Simon Rock Band?"

"... Paul & Simon?"

".... shit."

-Me, Jen, Me, regarding a Simon & Garfunkel song

10. “I’ve always wanted to go to Milk & Things!”

“You have? Why?”

“Because I don’t set very high expectations for myself!” – Courtney, me, Courtney, re: a rather crappy deli by my parents' house

11. "Franks & beans for dinner? Don't mind if I do!"

"I was unaware you'd converted to Orthodox Cowboy." -me, Devon

12. "What book are you reading now?"

"None! It's by nobody." -me, Courtney

Fear Not!

2010-12-07T10:14:00.003-05:00

My laptop has been retrieved from the repair shop, though it has not been repaired. Apparently there was a serious buildup of lint in the cooling system*, which caused the motherboard to overheat and die. So I need to get a new computer, which will probably happen between now and.... well, it'll probably happen.

So blogging continues to be suspended, as does most work on the new novel, but I just wanted to update and alleviate whatever concerns I like to think people have and say this: there WILL be a Year In Humor 2010 posted here on January 1st, 2011.

Keep on keepin' on, Liquid Americans.

* I should post the picture the guy took of the lint buildup. It looks like an entire sock got sucked into this vent on my computer. It's weird.

Quick Update

2010-11-23T08:31:00.006-05:00

I LIVE, LIQUID AMERICANS!!!!

The novel is... not going well. I have hit a snag in that my laptop sort of stopped working about a week ago and has yet to be repaired. I have been writing though, sort of... kind of... not really. I snagged a quiet hour at the Insurance Mine last week to bang out the below, and submitted it to McSweeney's, who rejected it rather politely this morning. That's the way the ball bounces, I suppose.

Anyway, since it won't be appearing anywhere else anytime soon, I humbly submit it for your approval & enjoyment.

A McDonald's Night Manager in Downtown Gotham City Addresses His Employees

Okay, everyone, come on over here, if you could? Kyle, Lisa, Manuel? Yeah, Scott, come out from the back, okay? This is the first time a lot of you are on this shift, and it’s not like afternoons or mornings, okay? There’s some... let’s call them “colorful” customers who stop by frequently on this shift, and we all know who I’m talking about, so before things get crazy we’ve got some stuff to go over.

Kyle, you’re my pointman on drivethrough, okay? You’re going to be taking the orders. For your own good, and I swear to God I’m being serious here, do not suggest a Happy Meal for Robin. I’ll say this again- Do. Not. Offer. Robin. A Happy Meal. He doesn’t think it’s funny. The kid’s like fourteen and he’s got like a dozen black belts, he doesn’t want apple slices and a wind-up helicopter. Okay? Seriously. Remember Lonnie? Lonnie tried to be cute and gave the Boy Wonder his Quarter Pounder in a Happy Meal box and now Lonnie’s probably never going to get rid of that limp. Don’t jackass around with Robin.

Manuel? Manny? Are you paying attention? This is SERIOUS, guys, come on! You won’t be rolling your eyes in two hours when a friggin’ tank rolls up to the pay window and a spiked leather gauntlet hands you a twenty and you don’t have the proper change ready! Okay? It’s not a joke!

Lisa, you’re on the pickup window. I took the liberty of double-stocking the condiment bins, all right? So you’ll definitely have enough ketchup and sweet-and-sour sauce and anything else they might ask for. And don’t be a stickler on the sauces, either, please. I know, I know, I know, you’re only supposed to give ranch dipping sauce if the customer orders Chicken Selects. I know the rules. I wrote the rules, okay? But if The Batman wants ranch dipping sauce with his Double Filet-O-Fish, then The Batman gets ranch dipping sauce with his Double Filet-O-Fish. If he wants tartar sauce with his McNuggets, then you smile and give him the goddamn tartar sauce, okay? We’re not here to judge. The guy’s friends with Superman, for crying out loud, so just give him his condiments.

What’s that, Scott? I’m sorry, what? I’m being uptight? Is that what you said?! Well excuse the hell out of me for being a little uptight, Scott. Excuse me for wanting to be sure that The Caped Crusader gets his proper order in a timely fashion. I’m so, so sorry. But how about this, Scott? You think it’s no big deal, you think it’s just another shift, great, fine. You manage the night shift. I’ll go in the back and put Big Macs together and you can run the show out here. And then when Batman pulls in and orders a number two meal with a Diet Sprite and gets a number four with a Dr. Pepper, you can deal with it. Because he always checks the bag, Scott. HE ALWAYS CHECKS THE BAG! He’s the greatest detective in the world, you think he’s not going to double-check his fast food order? And it’s not like he just pulls a U turn and goes back to the drive-through, guys. He parks in the lot and he comes inside, and if you think The Batman comes in quietly through the front door, you've got another thing coming! He swings in through the window, or he drops through the ceiling tiles, and whose paycheck do you think those repairs come out of, Scott?!

And who does he blame for the botched order, do you think? Do you think he blames the fry cook? Do you think he blames the kid on the pay window? Who do you think he blames, Scott? Who? Tell me who! That’s right, Scott, he blames the night manager! He blames me, because you little bastards couldn’t get your acts together. And I have to get a talking to in that gravelly demon monster voice he does. “Hhhrrrrr, I specifically asked for no pickles on my McRib!” And heaven forbid the fries are soggy, you guys. Soggy fries gets me a night of hanging upside down from the top of the Playplace with my ankles wrapped in high-test nylon cord and a certain Dark Knight can’t let me go till dawn because The Joker’s occupied City Hall. Again! Last time I was up there till eight-thirty the next morning before some old Brit in a tux came and cut me down.

So, yeah, guys, excuse me for wanting to make sure we get it right tonight. Excuse me for wanting to make sure that our grim vigilante protector gets his order right and gets his order quickly. I’m sorry I’ve got a little something called standards. If you don’t like it, go work at Burger King. Only you can’t, because Two-Face firebombed the Burger King last week. Now let’s get to work!

'Til next time, kids!

We Now Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Blogging...

2010-10-06T21:53:00.003-04:00

All Liquid America activity will cease until such time as I complete a second novel. I am starting work on it in earnest tonight, with Game 1 of the ALDS between the Yankees and Twins on in the background. I will be employing the same bullheaded, write-til-its-done approach that got me through what became Square State in a month last year, but I am on no real deadline this time, at least not yet. Sporadic updates will follow as time allows. No one break the Internet while I'm gone.

Thank you.

"October, and Kingdoms Rise, and Kingdoms Fall..."

2010-10-01T08:47:00.004-04:00

I am listening to a song called "The Golden Voice of Vin Scully" by Dan Bern & Common Rotation, from the album Dan Bern Live in Los Angeles. I fell in love with this song the very first time I heard it. I don't think I've ever listened to it just once; when it comes up on iPod Beebelebrox, I usually start it over three or four times before moving on. (Here are the lyrics.) In fact, if it weren't followed on the album by "Osama in Obamaland" (another Dan Bern song I immediately loved), I probably never would have heard the rest of the album. The song as I hear it is (at least superficially) about having a rough day (or life) but everything being okay because, at the end of the day, the singer gets to listen to a baseball game. Specifically a Dodgers game, called by broadcaster Vin Scully.

I love this song, because I feel like it's a little bit about me, and because it makes me a little sad. I love baseball, but I feel like I missed a golden age of broadcasting. I always look forward to watching games, at home, or live, or (especially) on the couch with Courtney, but there isn't a single sports announcer to whom I regularly listen who doesn't annoy me at least a little bit. I will never write a song called "The Golden Voice of John Sterling."

Just about a month left. You'll be missed, baseball. Hurry back.

Two Hundred & Fifty Spoilerish Words About "The Event"

2010-09-27T15:37:00.001-04:00

Episode Two of The Event airs tonight on NBC. Courtney and I watched the pilot last week and were sufficiently intrigued to give episode two a look. We’ll see what happens. The primary reason I wanted to watch the pilot at all was a particularly calculating one: NBC was positioning it to be considered “the next Lost,” and on the off-chance they’re successful, I want in on the ground floor. So I knew about this going in, that they were going for a Lost vibe. Not only did I know about it, I consciously embraced it as the primary reason I wanted to watch. But I didn’t know that they were so serious about making it the next Lost that the first episode would actually feature a planeload of people disappearing mysteriously. I get what you’re going for, NBC, but that just seems a little too on-the-nose.

Also, the pilot featured a fictional American President as played by actor Blair Underwood, who- despite having a rich white girl’s name- is a black man. I can only presume this character will be a regular. This makes me wonder if for the next two-to-six years, all fictional depictions of the President will be people of color, and when and if Hollywood will get around to making movies or shows with black Presidents who are villainous, like Gene Hackman in that one movie. Of course, Underwood’s character could be pure evil for all I know. But he seems pretty okay. Time will tell.

79.30 > 95.80

2010-09-26T19:45:00.006-04:00

The San Diego Chargers just lost to the Seattle Seahawks, 20-27. I am happy about this result, because I dislike the San Diego Chargers for a completely illogical reason: the Chargers wanted to draft Eli Manning out of college in 2004 draft, but Manning refused to play for them (for some reason), resulting in the Chargers and the New York Giants doing a draft-day trade that sent Manning to New York and Phillip Rivers and some other draft picks to San Diego. Three years later, Eli Manning used his magic powers to make one of the most incredible plays in the history of professional football, a play so amazing that it made me legitimately concerned that my father would have a heart attack, and lead the Giants over the undefeated New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII. This game (and more specifically this play) is pretty much responsible for my becoming a football fan, and also for my theory that all a person needs to become a serious sports fan is to watch one truly great game.

But if the Chargers had drafted Manning, this game wouldn't have happened. Manning wouldn't have led the Giants to the Super Bowl and teleported away from the Pats' defenders, he wouldn't have launched that pass, David Tyree wouldn't have grabbed it, Vin wouldn't have called my cell phone screaming "WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?!", and I wouldn't have become a football fan. None of that would have happened, and as weird as it sounds, if none of that had happened, my life would be different right now. And I am seriously happy with my life right now. Virtually none of this happiness has to do with football, but still. If everything that happens to us affects everything else that happens to us (which I believe it does), then that game/pass is partially responsible for the current state of my existence.

Of course, in theory, had the Giants drafted Phillip Rivers, he could have flourished here in a way he hasn't in San Diego. Maybe he would have taken control of the offense from day one and led the New York Football Giants to an unmatched run of Super Bowl championships. Maybe he would have crafted a dynasty. Maybe he would have made the exact same play in the exact same game at the exact same time. But it wouldn't have been exactly the same. It wouldn't have been as impressive, if only because Rivers looks like he should be making amazing plays all the time*, and Eli Manning looks like a bit of a dork. It wouldn't have happened the same way, and thus my life would be different.

So, basically, I dislike the San Diego Chargers because six years ago, they tried to ruin my life, but didn't. But still- what the hell did I ever do to them?! Jerks.

*He also looks like Sam Worthington, the single worst actor of my generation. One more mark against the Chargers.

Progress

2010-09-20T17:55:00.001-04:00

Sometimes when I'm on the ferry I look out at the water and think about all the work that went into mastering ocean travel. Hundreds, maybe thousands, probably tens of thousands of people throughout human history worked their whole lives, built boats, set sail, got lost, caught scurvy, drowned, froze, suffered all manner of horror and misfortune because they wanted... NEEDED to know what was on the other side of the ocean. They built their boats and drew their maps and took their chances and had their adventures, and now, I and tens of thousands of people get on a boat every day and take off across a vast blue expanse and we all HATE it. It takes too long and it's too crowded and it never runs on time. We gripe and frown and listen to our iPods and somewhere the pioneering, inventive geniuses who made it possible look down at us and marvel at how soft and unappreciative and jaded we
all are.

I swear, it's enough to make a guy start taking the express bus.

Immortal Invincible Iron Fist Men of the World, Unite!

2010-09-16T16:12:00.003-04:00

For my birthday a few weeks back, Tom gave me a copy of the Marvel Omnibus edition of The Immortal Iron Fist. IIF was a critically acclaimed series that spun out of Marvel's "Civil War" event and established an intricate mythology for the character of Iron Fist, aka Danny Rand, aka Luke Cage's sidekick and owner of some totally gay yellow slippers. It was a pretty awesome series and coincidentally I had recently been thinking about digging out the single issues and re-reading them, so it was a timely and much appreciated gift.

IIF was written for most of its run by Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction, with a few issues handled by Fraction on his own. The Omnibus edition collects all of these issues, which- all due respect to Duane Swierczynski, who followed them on it- were really where the series was at its peak. Without going into an overabundance of detail, at the end of the series, Danny Rand learns that his family fortune was based on villainous exploitation of sacred magic, and sets about dismantling his financial empire dollar by dollar. He literally starts giving away great big chunks of money, and starts a dojo in the inner city where underprivileged kids can have hot meals, do homework, and also learn how to effectively kick each other in the face.

This, on its surface, is not entirely remarkable. When I first read it, back in 2007-ish, I didn't think too much about it, but I remember liking it, and I still do. However, in 2007, I had not yet read Matt Fraction's most recent issues of Invincible Iron Man (because, y'know, he hadn't written them yet.)

Ever since the end of the "Siege" event storyline, Invincible Iron Man has been, in effect, a comic book about a businessman. After his personal fortune was decimated and his memories of the last few years were wiped, Tony Stark finds himself in the unpleasant position of having to rebuild his corporation from the ground up. In the course of doing this, he hires several technically minded people to help him with his new mission statement- Stark, you see, wants to use the repulsor technology that powers Iron Man to provide free energy to the entire world.

An admirable goal? Of course. An interesting idea? Sure. Technically well-executed? And how. What I'm looking for in a superhero comic? Not exactly. Lately IIM has read kind of like a comic book version of The West Wing. It's a lot of smart characters saying very well-written dialogue with practically no action around it. Don't get me wrong, I love The West Wing, but it would make a terrible comic book.

But Fraction's banked a lot of goodwill with me for his previous work- Punisher War Journal, a short-lived team book called The Order, his creator-owned Casanova comic and the aforementioned Immortal Iron Fist- as well as being one of the more consistently entertaining people I follow on Twitter, and on the few occasions I've actually talked to him in person, he seems like a nice guy and he's always been really friendly and engaging. So, while Invincible Iron Man is kind of a frustrating book, I'm sticking with it just because I like the guy who's writing it. Also I kind of suspect that the whole "Stark Resilient" storyarc is actually a satire that isn't overtly funny, and that sooner or later I'll get the joke.

Anyway.... damn it, what the hell was I even talking about?

.....

.... oh, right!

Matt Fraction writes another prominent title for Marvel, The Uncanny X-Men. I don't read X-Men books, but I'm always kind of vaguely aware of what's going on in them, and lately the X-Men have been living on Alcatraz Island in a mutant-only commune that, they have declared, is a sovereign nation. Or at least they were a few months ago.

So, I was thinking about this the other day, and between Iron Fist giving away his money to help poor kids, Iron Man losing all his money and deciding to use his genius to help the developing world, and the X-Men declaring themselves independent of America, I could only come to one conclusion. That conclusion is this: Matt Fraction is a damn dirty hippie socialist radical and must be stopped!

... okay, probably not really. And, if he is, then more power to him.

But even still, I'm pretty sure I can get myself on Fox News with this theory. I mean, kids could be reading these comics. AMERICAN kids! We can't have them thinking that it's good to help others at your own expense! I could spin this into a new career, conservative comic book punditry, espousing ideas I don't really believe in for fame and profit.

Too bad this plan involves an unjustified public takedown of a person whose work I admire, who is espousing ideas with which I agree, and who has been really cool on the handful of occasions I've gotten to talk to him.

... stupid conscience.

Top of the Hill

2010-09-14T08:53:00.006-04:00

A while back I was reading the "Recommended" section of Joe Hill's website and he recommended a book that I wanted to check out, specifically because he recommended it in audiobook form and it's read by Ron Perlman, and I think Ron Perlman should narrate everything. But, I couldn't remember the title, so I just went back to refresh my memory* and I scrolled down some and remembered something else on the "Recommended" page that had impressed me at the time but about which I had also since forgotten.

Near the bottom of the page, Hill lists the books that made him want to be a writer and gives a quick review of some of them. The third book on the list is The Dead Zone, by Stephen King. He gives it a (much-deserved) glowing review and then moves on to The Fixer, by Bernard Malamud. The reviews are good and they make me want to read (or in the case of The Dead Zone, re-read) the books, but the review of The Dead Zone is noteworthy because, as I've pointed out here before, "Joe Hill" is the pen name of Joseph Hillstrom King, Stephen King's oldest son. So he reviewed this book without making any mention of, or even alluding to, the fact that it was written by his father.

This once again makes me think that not only is Joe Hill a very good writer (if my father wrote a book I couldn't review it without saying, at least once, "Oh, by the way, my dad wrote this"; I'd try, but it wouldn't work), but also preternaturally secure about his own personal identity. His father is probably the most successful writer of a certain genre of fiction in American history, if not the most successful writer of any genre, and despite Hill's pen name, this is no secret. Yet Hill has worked with his father (on a novella called Throttle), and doesn't shy away from showing that he is influenced by him (in Locke & Key) and inspired by him (in his brief review of The Dead Zone). It seems like the kind of thing the child of a great artist would go out of his or her way to avoid, but Hill hasn't done that... except, you know, for the fake name and all.

So, once again, kudos to you, Joe Hill. And thanks for the recommendations.

*It's called City of Thieves, by David Benioff, but that's not really relevant to my larger point.

Brendan on the Moore*

2010-09-13T14:01:00.010-04:00

Once upon a time, I would have followed comic book writer Alan Moore anywhere. Then he started writing... well, he started writing comic book porn about Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and I kind of cooled on him a bit. But he's still kind of a fascinating character, and a hell of a writer. So when Twitter was all abuzz last week with talk of some interview he gave, I promptly went and checked it out. The interview in question- found here- is partially (mostly) about the idea of DC Comics releasing prequels, sequels and tie-ins to Moore's iconic graphic novel Watchmen (an idea that I found so stupid and offensive that I said to at least one person that, if it happened, I would never buy another DC Comic again for the rest of my life). The short version of (Moore's side of) the story is, basically, that DC can probably do whatever they want with Watchmen but haven't because whoever runs the joint, in effect, has their head so far up their ass that they don't even know they can. Moore goes on to make an excellent point, one with which I could not possibly agree more...

"At the end of the day, if they haven’t got any properties that are valuable
enough, but they have got these ‘top-flight industry creators’ that are ready to produce these prequels and sequels to WATCHMEN, well this is probably a radical idea, but could they not get one of the ‘top-flight industry creators’ to come up with an idea of their own? Why are DC Comics trying to exploit a comic book that I wrote 25 years ago if they have got anything? Sure they ought to have had an equivalent idea since? I could ask about why Marvel Comics are churning out or planning to bring out my ancient MARVELMAN stories, which are even older, if they had a viable idea of their own in the quarter-century
since I wrote those works. I mean, surely that would be a much easier
solution than all of this clandestine stuff? Just simply get some of your
top-flight talent to put out a book that the wider public outside of the comics field find as interesting or as appealing as the stuff that I wrote 25 years ago. It shouldn’t be too big an ask, should it?"

He may be nuts, but he's also absolutely right.

Also, earlier in the article Moore says this...

"I had nothing but love for the comics industry when I entered it. It could
all have been so different."

This made me feel kind of bad for Alan Moore. The conventional wisdom these days is that Moore is a wildly talented asshole who thinks he's better than everyone else in his field** and that he is maybe-kinda-sorta completely off his rocker. But reading that made me think that maybe that isn't the case. Maybe it's not as simple as that. Maybe he's just sad. He had a vision (what that vision is, I don't really know) of what the comics industry could be like but everyone else around him decided that they'd rather just make a boatload of money.

And it's not like Alan Moore has a problem with money. If you read the interview he mentions that DC was late on some royalty checks (though I think he spelled it "cheques") to him, so it's not like he just doesn't care. If you are so inclined to track down his pitch for Twilight of the Superheroes, it's riddled with ideas for tie-in games and figures and memorabilia and stuff. It's not like the guy is some kind of anti-capitalist loon. But it seems like he wanted to make art within a framework that was once an art form posing as an industry, but at some point turned into an actual industry, and that disappointed him. It disappointed him so much that he went a little mad, and that's kind of a shame.

Still, I really hope Marvel gets around to collecting his Marvelman run sooner rather than later. Even if it does mean my copy of Olympus won't be worth that much anymore.

*An obscure and idiotic pun that is only funny to me. Don't worry about it.
** A belief supported by the fact that he is probably better than anyone else in his field.

The Reclusive River

2010-09-04T14:58:00.001-04:00

I am at the Yankee game with Courtney, sitting in the left field bleachers. As such, I cannot see right field, or any of the surely amazing plays being made by Marcus Thames. I did get to see him fly out twice, though, so that's something.

ALSO, for my birthday on Wednesday, Courtney gave me a custom-made Yankees away jersey with #38 (Thames' number) on the back. Because she is awesome. Thanks again, babe!

The Boom Tubes Jammed With Broken Heroes On A Last Chance Power Drive...

2010-09-02T09:54:00.006-04:00

There is a school of thought which dictates that a joke is not funny if one has to explain it. This is as school of thought to which I generally subscribe. Given this, even though only two regular readers of Liquid America are familiar with the backstory of the below image, I present it without explanation.

Enjoy.

Winnie-the-Pooh: Businessman #4

2010-09-01T12:20:00.003-04:00

After the most prolific month in Liquid America history, let's kick off September (and the last year of my 20s) with some W-t-P:B action, shall we?!

Winnie-the-Pooh: Businessman #4

"Monday, Monday"

The River, Relatively

2010-08-31T11:21:00.004-04:00

You know what I really love? Baseball. Excluding actual people, the only thing I love more than baseball is comics, and it’s a pretty tight race between the two. This puts baseball slightly below comics but also above such other generally good things like, say, pizza and freedom of speech. America could be taken over by a fascist dictator who bans mozzarella cheese, but if he left Major League Baseball and Marvel Comics alone, I would probably pass on joining la revolucion.

But you know what I really hate? Baseball statistics. There are so many of them that they are effectively meaningless and do nothing but ruin the fun of the game.

For example, last night Liquid America’s favorite baseball player, Marcus Thames, hit a home run for the New York Yankees during an 11-5 clubbering of their secondary rival, the Oakland Athletics. It was the fifth game in a row in which Thames hit a home run, which is awesome because I really like Marcus Thames, and I really like when the Yankees win baseball games, so when Marcus Thames helps the Yankees win baseball games… well, then, all the better for me.

This morning I poured my cereal and made my toast and sat down to watch SportsCenter, which as an American man I am Constitutionally obligated to watch. During the highlights of the Yankee game, one of the anchors (It was either Neil Everett or Stan Verrett, I can never remember- the black guy, at any rate) said the following about Marcus Thames…

“Thames has homered in five straight games…”
(My Internal Reaction: “Yeah, Marcus Thames! Woo!”)
“… making him third all time…”
(“Wait, what? Third all time?”)
“… tied with seven others…”
(“Um…”)
“… with consecutive home run games…”
(“Well that’s still pretty impressive.”)
“… for the Yankees…”
(“All right, still.”)
“… since 1920.”
(“Okay, enough already.”)

Who cares?! Who gives a shit that Marcus Thames has done something noteworthy and that “only” seven other people have done that exact thing, and not only that, but that (at least) two other people have done something even more noteworthy?!

Then, like an hour later, I got an email from ESPN with the daily SportsCenter rundown, which noted the following…

Marcus Thames homered for the Yankees, who continue their uncomfortably long hug with the Rays atop the AL East. In fact, Thames has now homered in 5 straight starts for the Yankees. And since 1920, the only Yankees with a longer streak we called Gehrig (6), Maris (6), and Mattingly (8). Ever heard of them?

Now, again, it’s impressive that The River has overflowed five games in a row. I think it’s great. But to compare him (kinda) to Lou Gehrig, Roger Maris and Don Mattingly is, I’m sorry ESPN, completely frakking insane. Gehrig, Maris and Mattingly are three of the greatest Yankees ever and at least one of them is in the conversation of “Greatest Baseball Player of All Time.” Marcus Thames, as much as he will always have a special place in the section of my heart reserved for baseball, is… well… not in that conversation. He’s not even near that conversation. He is, probably, a serious player in the discussion of “Greatest Baseball Player of All Time Who Is Named ‘Marcus,’” but that’s about it. Comparing great accomplishments to the accomplishments of greats lessens both. Mentioning Thames in comparison to the likes of Gehrig and Maris and Mattingly just brings into stark relief the fact that Marcus Thames is just another ballplayer, at a time when he should be being praised.

The good/great thing about statistics is they allow for comparisons between players from different eras. But that is also the terrible thing about them. It should be enough that Thames, who hasn’t seen much playing time this year, is playing really well and helping his team stay (tied) on top of their division during a difficult and injury-plagued stretch run. But it isn’t enough. No one ever just says, “He’s doing really well.” They say “He’s doing as well as this guy and this guy, but not as well as these guys.” Statistics, and the comparisons of them, render individual accomplishments- and, from a fan’s perspective, the memories associated with those accomplishments- less special. Now, when Marcus Thames inevitably hangs up his spikes, I won’t look back and fondly tell my nephew or my kids or whoever about the time he ripped five homers over the course of a long weekend to get the Yanks to the playoffs. I’ll look back and remember, “Huh. Marcus Thames almost did something really great back in, what, like, 2010?”

But at least I’ll always have that shot off of Randy Johnson. Because I have no idea how many people have hit home runs in their first at-bats, and you know what else? I don’t damn well want to.

Atrium Comics Update!

2010-08-30T13:37:00.001-04:00

Atrium Comics- It's Still August!

Urge to Kill.... Rising...

2010-08-30T11:45:00.004-04:00

Every time I post a comment on this blog in response to a comment someone else made, I get an email notifying me about it. Blogger emails me to tell me that I have commented on my own blog. Like I don't know?! I just did it!

Stupid Internet! How can you give us such great things as Wikipedia and that video where the baby panda sneezes and scares his mom, and still be so dumb?!

The River Is Wild

2010-08-29T19:23:00.002-04:00

Liquid America's favorite baseball player, Marcus Thames, has hit five home runs in his last five games. If he keeps this up, the Yankee merchandising machine may finally release an actual "THAMES 38" T-shirt.

Fingers crossed!

Who Put All This Crap Music On My iPod?!

2010-08-27T10:31:00.004-04:00

A while back, someone (possibly my mother) sent me an email forward full of pithy observations about modern life. I enjoyed a lot of them, particularly the one about how cyclists are all dicks, and one observation in particular made a lot of sense to me. It was something to the effect of “In theory I like all the music on my iPod. In practice, I like about every fifteenth song in the Shuffle.” I can’t speak for anyone else, but this was particularly true for me. While listening to music on my iPod I will frequently click around for up to a minute at a time trying to find a song I want to listen to, which seems like it shouldn’t be the case. This is my music. It is my music because I enjoy listening to it. Not having to hear songs you don’t like is, I think, the entire point of the iPod’s existence*. If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t have put it on there. Right?

Wrong. Turns out, not only is there a lot of music on my iPod that I don’t like, there is a lot of music on my iPod (the trusty iPod Beeblebrox) that I don’t even know. See, my personal music acquisition habits pretty much go like this:

- I will purchase and immediately listen to any album released by Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, John Fogerty, Dan Bern, The Black Keys, Jakob Dylan, or U2, though U2 is on thin ice after No Line on the Horizon.
- Courtney will occasionally make me a CD.
- If Devon tells me I will enjoy an artist, I will acquire some music by them, usually by asking Devon to send me some via email. Because short of uprooting my entire life and moving to another coast, I pretty much do what Devon tells me to do.
- If Esquire magazine enthusiastically endorses a particular song, I will usually purchase that song.
- If I enjoy the music in a movie I see, I will probably purchase that movie’s soundtrack.
- If Amazon or iTunes is offering something for free, I will download it, because free stuff is always good, even when it sucks.

Those last three are the ones that screw up what should be a smooth and effortless process of 21st-century music consumption. I purchase this music, by artists I have usually never heard of, and when these songs come up in the Shuffle, I immediately bypass them to get to music by someone I know I like.

There are currently 4,738 songs on iPod Beeblebrox, my trusty MP3 player. 396 of these songs are by Bruce Springsteen. 349 are by Tom Waits. 162 are by Dan Bern. 124 are by John Fogerty (either solo or with Creedence). 85 are by The Black Keys. So my (current) five favorite artists account for just about 24% percent of the music on my iPod.

(Quick aside, by the way, about The Black Keys. They’re a two-man group that plays blues rock. I’m pretty sure I read about them in Esquire and bought their first album because it was really cheap. When I first dialed that album, The Big Come Up, up on iPod Beeblebrox, I didn’t love it at first. I remember driving home from Courtney’s listening to the first few tracks and thinking, “This is just a couple of white guys trying to sound black.” And then I remembered that that’s basically all rock & roll is, and I immediately loved it.)

Anyway, those numbers mean that, basically, about quarter of the time, I will be happy with whatever comes up in the Shuffle. The rest of the time, maybe I get a song I like and want to hear, but maybe I don’t. Over 75% of the time, it’s a crap shoot. With those numbers I might as well just listen to the radio, like a caveman.

I was thinking about this today, and decided to go through the list of artists on my iPod, and I found over 100 names of bands (or individuals) that I swear I’ve never heard of before. These are the people responsible for the soundtracks and free downloads and Esquire-approved iTunes downloads that comprise what now seems like an overly high percentage of the music on iPod Beeblebrox. These names are presented below, as my sister would say, “just for shits.”

Also, because why not, I have included five names on that list that are not actual bands. Anybody who can pick out all five wins… I dunno. Something cool.

The Action
Aisha Duo
Alan Vega
The Album Leaf
Art Pepper
Avi Buffalo
Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni ba
Beach House
Beast
The Belle Stars
Ben Sollee and Daniel Martin Moore
Big Cisco
Big Momma Thornton
Black Gold
Blind Mamie Forehand
Blitzen Trapper
Black JKS
Bloodstone
Bukka White
Calexico
Canned Heat
The Cave Singers
The Centurions
Chantal Kreviazuk
Charlie Feathers
Chase the Sun
City Wolf
Clem Snide
Cliff Edwards
Cocorosie
Crooked Hook
Crystal Shawanda
Dance Vampires
Dark Captain Light Captain
The Dave Brubeck Quartet
Dave Van Ronk
The Dead Weather
The Delmore Brothers
Doves
Eddie Beram
Eddie Floyd
Eels
El Vez
Elliot Easton’s Tiki Gods
Foals
Fruit Bats
G TOM MAC
Graham Isaacson
Gran Ronde
Grupo Fantasma
Habib Koite and Bamada
The Handsome Family
Hank Ballard & The Midnighters
Hank Snow
Jacques Loussier
Joe Pass
Joey & Rory
John Hiatt
Karsh Kale
Kevin Michael
Kitty Wells
Lole Y Manuel
The Louvin Brothers
Luis Bacalov
M. Ward
Male Bonding
Maria McKee
Marion Raven
Meeting of Important People
Meiko Kaji
Neu!
Nick Perito
Nick Quixotic & the Windmills
Noonday Son
No More Kings
Pino Donaggio
The Posies
The Prisonaires
The Republic Tigers
Revolution Mother
Ron Sexsmith
Royal Trux
The Ruby Suns
Russell Brower & the Eminence Symphony
Santa Esemeralda
Say It Twice
Shivaree
Son House
Stephen Bruton
Swedish
Radio Jazz Group
The Temper Trap
Tex Beneke
Thomas Canning
Tomoyasu Hotel
The Tough Alliance
Tyondai Braxton
The Vampire Sounds Incorporation
Vaughn Monroe
Willy Deville
The Yelling
Zarah Leander
The Zipline Tango

Enjoy!

* For the record, when I say ‘iPod” I really mean any kind of personal music playing device that plays MP3s. It’s just easier to say “iPod,” but this applies even if you have a Zune or something. It’s like saying “Give me a Band-Aid” when you really mean “Give me whatever brand of adhesive bandage you have handy, I’m fucking bleeding here.”

Barbarian With A Baseball

2010-08-25T13:21:00.003-04:00

(It would appear that at some point in the near future, due to a lack of funds, the Playing Field blog at LookingGlassMagazine.com will be shutting down. This is too bad, as I really enjoyed writing for them. Hopefully that situation will change but if not, then not. Until then, I present what would have been my piece for this past Monday, "Barbarian With A Baseball." Thank you.)

Have you ever seen the movie Coyote Ugly? If not, don’t. I hate this movie, but not because it is bad (although it is extremely bad). I hate it because at one point the male romantic lead acquires a copy of Amazing Spider-Man #129, which features the first appearance of The Punisher, and refers to it as “the Holy Grail of comics.” This infuriated me then and still gets me a little riled now. The Holy Grail of comics is Amazing Fantasy #15, the first appearance of Spider-Man. Everyone knows this.

Don’t get me wrong, I like The Punisher. He’s a fascinating character. While most comic book heroes are noble figures driven to fight evil out of a deep sense of personal justice, or a desire to protect those weaker than them, or a feeling of great responsibility, The Punisher is a serial murderer driven by rage. He was wronged in the past, and that experience, coupled with his innate physical prowess and years of intensive personal training, have convinced him that he is entitled to do things that others are not. He wears a uniform and fights the same villains as all the other heroes in the Marvel Universe, but he is not like them, in that makes it his personal mission to enforce laws for which he has no respect.

In related news, Roger Clemens was indicted for perjury last week. Clemens, who over twenty-four Major League seasons pitched for the Red Sox, the Blue Jays, the Yankees, the Astros, then the Yankees again, testified before Congress in 2008 that he had never taken performance enhancing drugs. This was in response to statements from various sources that Clemens had used steroids in the seasons following his departure from the Red Sox.

When Clemens left the Red Sox after the 1996 season, Boston’s GM at the time, Dan Duquette, commented that Clemens was in the twilight of his career. Clemens had spent his whole career with Boston until that point, set a single-game strikeout record (20 over nine innings, since matched, twice), won an MVP award and come within a slow grounder through Bill Buckner’s legs of winning a World Series. It doesn’t hold a candle to the event that birthed The Punisher, but I imagine being shown the door and told he was on the decline was pretty upsetting to Clemens. After that, the stories go, he started taking steroids. It doesn’t seem like much of a leap to think that he did so to prove Duquette and the Red Sox wrong.

I remember watching Clemens’ testimony before Congress back in 2008 while I was, coincidentally enough, waiting at a courthouse to serve jury duty. I and others in the waiting room watched carefully, listened, and when it was done collectively shook our heads and commented either to ourselves or each other about what a bad job of lying Clemens had done.

For the record, this was in New York, where Clemens had spent five seasons (or so) and won two championships. Given Clemens’ dominance as a Yankee, he should have been regarded as a hero in New York, but even the Yankee fans in that jury room (myself included) doubted his testimony and thought of him, basically, as kind of a jerk. He may have worn the uniform and faced the same opponents as the rest of our heroes, but he was not like them. Yes, he’d won two World Series, but he’d also thrown at the head of fellow New York star Mike Piazza, and whipped a jagged chunk of bat at him in the 2000 World Series. He once expressed a desire to throw at the head of Hank Aaron. He seemed to be fueled by rage, a rage that made him think he was above the rules that governed the rest of us, and allowed to do things that other people are not. The big difference between The Punisher and Roger Clemens, though, is that now Clemens might actually have to answer for his actions.

Also, The Punisher never got to be on The Simpsons.

The Politics of Apathy

2010-08-23T10:40:00.001-04:00

If you had asked me six months ago, “Hey, Brendan, there’s plans to build a mosque like two blocks away from the World Trade Center site. What do you think about that?” my answer would have been “I don’t.” If pressed to elaborate, I would have likely said something to the effect of “No, I really don’t think about it. I don’t care. Did the people building this thing pay for the land and get all the proper clearances from the city? Yes? Is it going to affect my commute in any way shape or form? No? Because I commute through downtown every morning and…? No, it’s not? You’re sure? Okay. Then, fine, whatever." If you then came to me an hour later and said, “Oh, hey, turns out they’re not going to build it there,” I probably would have said “Um… who’s not going to build what where?”

That’s what would have happened six months ago.

If you came to me today and said, “Hey, Brendan, there’s plans to build a mosque like two blocks away from the World Trade Center site. What do you think about that?” my answer would be something to the effect of “Well, Person, this is America. And because this is America then people, all of them, even the brown ones, are allowed to pray to whoever or whatever they want, wherever they want, regardless of how it make some other people feel. This group should absolutely build their mosque, which is also a community center and like a gym and a restaurant, I think, in the exact spot they want to, because telling someone they can practice their religion freely, just, y’know, not around here, is contrary to the entire point of America.” And if you came to me an hour later and said, “Oh, hey, turns out they’re not going to build it there,” I would probably say something like “Well, that’s sad news and I seriously might just have to move to Canada at this point because I can’t take this bullshit ‘society’ of ours anymore.”

Now, the reason for this fundamental shift in my reaction isn’t because I am suddenly a serious fan of the religion of Islam or because I’m suddenly all about urban development or anything like that. Basically the reason I’ve gone from having literally no opinion on the issue to having a strongly held opinion about which I am emphatic is almost entirely because the issue is now being actively opposed by public figures for whom I have nothing but disdain. Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani and others have weighed in on the issue and declared that such a structure shouldn’t be built, primarily because it would be insensitive to the memories and families of those that died on 9/11*.

I can’t decide if this is a valid reason to have an opinion. Historically I disagree with these people on most other issues, so I have taken the position that I disagree with them on this one, but my base position- that of one-hundred-percent not giving a shit what happens one way or the other- remains unchanged. Deep down I’m not in favor of it and I’m not opposed to it. I wouldn’t even say I’m ambivalent, because that suggests that I have feelings about both sides of the question when I don’t. I’m apathetic. I don’t care. I really, really, really don’t.

But these people who I dislike do care, and that makes me care, because I want them to lose. I want them and their entire navel-gazing, saber-rattling, fear-mongering, two-faced, half-witted, jingoistic, hypocritical, Bible-thumping, racist, gay-bashing, xenophobic side to lose, and lose in public, and lose big and lose hard and lose sore. I want them to lose so bad that their book sales plummet and their Twitter followers vanish and their reality shows get cancelled and no one ever takes their picture or pays their speaking fee or votes for them again. I don’t even want my side to win, because I don’t have a side. I just want theirs to lose.

I just don’t know if this is crazy, or normal.

*I could get into a whole thing about that, but that’s not what this is about.

There Is Every Possibility I Will Be Doing This All Night

2010-08-19T22:26:00.001-04:00

Have I mentioned lately how much I love the game Canabalt?

Because I really do.

Office Intrigue!

2010-08-17T10:02:00.002-04:00

Okay, so, here's the situation: I'm in the kitchen at the office, putting some things in the refrigerator and cleaning out the measuring cups I just bought. I have my headphones on (listening to "Answering Machine" by The Replacements, if it matters) and a woman from the rating department walks in. She fills up her cup from the water cooler, goes to the sink, picks up some paper towels, then stops and looks at me like she's waiting. So I get out of the way of the refrigerator, then she just shakes her head, and leaves. It immediately becomes clear to me that she was talking to me the entire time she was in the kitchen and ended by asking me a question that I didn't hear.

Now, to be entirely clear...

1.) In my opinion, my headphones are pretty clearly visible. That is to say, she knew I had them on.

2.) This woman did not look at me, gesture, wave, or do anything to get my attention or indicate that she was addressing me at all. I did see her mouth moving, however. She was just talking, for around a minute, with no acknowledgment from me at all. It just never occurred to me that she was talking to me, even though we were the only two people in the room.

3.) I do not have any relationship with this person to speak of. We know each other's names and will say hello if we happen to be in the same elevator, but we are by no means friends. We are barely acquaintances. In other words, there was basically no reason at all for me to expect that she would talk to me.

So, the question: was I being rude? Should I take my headphones off when I'm in someone else's company even though I do not expect- or want- to end up having a conversation with them? Because clearly I don't think I should, but I am willing to allow for the possibility that I am incorrect.

Playing Field- "Chipper Jones' Days of Future Past"

2010-08-16T14:27:00.000-04:00

Last week, Chipper Jones of the Atlanta Braves tore his ACL making a play at third against the Houston Astros. The injury has ended his season. Jones, who is thirty-eight years old, had been considering retirement at the end of this season, and now it appears that his career might be over in a way he never intended or expected. That “might” is an important word. Jones has had surgery to repair the knee, and it is possible he could be ready for Opening Day 2011. This, as many things often do, made me think about the X-Men...

Winnie-the-Pooh: Businessman #3

2010-08-16T12:47:00.002-04:00

I completely forgot about this Liquid America feature. UNTIL NOW!!!!

Winnie-the-Pooh: Businessman #3

"Roo's Coverage Will Not Change"

Atrium Comics Update!

2010-08-12T09:01:00.000-04:00

Atrium Comics- Coming In August. Seriously.

Let's Hug It Out

2010-08-10T09:13:00.002-04:00

Warning: Here be spoilers about the current season of the show Entourage. If you care, go away.

I’ve been watching the show Entourage for pretty much the entire time it’s been on. If I believed in feeling bad about enjoying things, I would categorize this show as a guilty pleasure. I’m pretty sure it’s kind of a bad show, with little in the way of redeeming artistic value. Chuck Klosterman described it once as “a male Sex and the City,” and while I’ve never seen an episode of Sex and the City*, I think he’s probably right. Entourage started out with a lot of potential as a satire of Hollywood celebrity culture but has since, seemingly, come to embrace it, which is kind of annoying.

The premise of the show, for anyone who may not know, is that Hollywood actor Vincent Chase (played by Adrian Grenier, who a friend from Jim Hanley’s once described as looking like “a beautiful homeless man”) lives a life of movie star luxury surrounded by his two best friends Eric (Kevin Connolly) and Turtle (Jerry Ferrara) and older brother Johnny (Kevin Dillon). Vince is represented by volatile and profane superagent Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven, who’s won like a gajillion Emmys for the role). At the start of the show’s first season, seven years ago or so, the three main characters who aren’t Vincent Chase are pretty much content to be hangers-on whose identities are wholly defined by their relationship to Vince. This eventually becomes problematic for all three, at varying rates of speed- Eric is sick of it by late in season one, and it takes the other two another couple of years to start yearning for individual personal identities. I find this interesting, since a lot of TV shows, particularly comedies, don’t really depict a whole lot of personal growth by their characters at all, but in a way Entourage is entirely about personal growth.

What fascinates me about the show, and keeps me watching, is the question of how far the writers and producers of are willing to go with this. If the show is about four individuals gradually evolving away from their codependence on each other, then the logical endpoint of that overarching story is that Vince, Eric, Turtle and Johnny will no longer need each other in the way they once did, and their relationships will eventually become fundamentally different. The problem with this is that the entire premise of the show is these four guys hanging out all the time. But if these four guys logically evolve to a point where they don’t need to/can’t hang out all the time, then there’s no show. So the point of the show will inevitably kill the premise of the show, and I find it immensely interesting to watch and wait for this to happen, and also to see the myriad ways the writers find to prevent the characters from reaching their full potential as people**.

This season, the show’s seventh, already more than half over, has been leading up to a storyline about Vince having a substance abuse problem. This is a rather heavy topic for a historically light show, and I suspect it may be an excuse to get the four main characters back in each other’s company almost constantly. If so, it would be kind of a daring move, and pretty admirable for the show to have taken that kind of chance in the name of keeping the premise alive. But I just read that this season is the penultimate one for the show, and it will end in summer 2011. I guess it’s finally being allowed to eat itself.

* In fact I can't even swear it's not actually called Sex IN the City, and I don't care enough to look it up.
** So far, Eric is the only member of the main cast who has not suffered some major and improbable career or personal setback and had to go crawling back to Vince; he is the most clearly realized adult presence on the show. Turtle and Johnny have both hit the skids on various occasions.

Playing Field- "An Old Hope"

2010-08-09T13:06:00.002-04:00

On Wednesday, three years to the day after hitting his 500th home run, Alex Rodriguez connected on a 2-0 pitch from Toronto Blue Jays starter Shaun Marcum and drove it over the center field wall at Yankee Stadium, ending a twelve game streak without a home run, breaking an 0-for-17 skid, and becoming the seventh player to reach 600 home runs for his career. The Yankees went on to win, 5-1...

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other*

2010-08-04T16:49:00.003-04:00

Last week I wrote about going to a book signing by author Joe Hill. He was promoting the third collected edition volume of his (and artist Gabriel Rodriguez’s) comic book series Locke & Key. It was a good time, with some fun stories from Hill and interesting insights into the creative process of a comic book- apparently Locke & Key is a reworking of an unpublished and deeply flawed novel called “The Briars”; also, Hill and Rodriguez have been in the same room together exactly once- and he autographed my copy of his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, so that was cool.

The next day, I dug out my copies of the first three volumes (“Welcome to Lovecraft,” “Head Games” and “Crown of Shadows”) of Locke & Key, as the fourth volume (“Keys to the Kingdom”) is starting soon and there were significant delays in the publication schedule of the third volume so I wanted to make sure I was all caught up. I read “Welcome to Lovecraft” and “Head Games” on Friday of last week and “Crown of Shadows” on Monday. Reading them straight through, I started to notice that the story contained elements very similar to the novel It, by Stephen King, who also happens to be Joe Hill’s father**.

Now, the similarities are pretty broad- both works take place in a small New England town and concern an incredibly powerful evil force that has terrorized the town for several generations; also, both feature a bias attack against a gay couple as a plot point- and may be coincidental. If someone else was writing Locke & Key, or if I didn’t know who Joe Hill’s father was, I probably wouldn’t have thought anything of it. In fact, I probably wouldn’t even have realized it, since I read It half a decade ago and rarely think about it. But because I do know who Joe Hill’s father is, the similarities jumped off the page and whacked me in the face upon my re-read of Locke & Key.

I’m not saying any of this to disparage Joe Hill. Quite the opposite- he seems like a cool guy and he’s one of my favorite writers, and if anything, I think it’s admirable. It must be very, very hard to be Joe Hill. I’m currently working on a novel that, when I first came up with the story, felt to me like I was ripping off Stephen King. I went ahead and started writing it anyway, since, well, it’s hard to write anything in the broadly defined horror genre without kind of ripping off Stephen King; he’s sort of done it all.

But it’s one thing to rip off a master of a particular genre and quite another to do it when said master is also your dad. Granted, it’s not like Stephen King is the first writer to do a story about an unspeakable ancient horror under a sleepy New England town- HP Lovecraft did it; so did August Van Zorn- but he’s the only one who you’re going to get compared to if you share DNA with him. It invites a different level of criticism than would be levied at another writer. But it’s gutsy. It’s brave, actually. Locke & Key is excellent. It's one of the best comics out there right now. If someone said to me, “Hey, Brendan, I don’t really care for superheroes but I’m interested in comics, what should I read?” I would hand them Locke & Key***. But if Hill had worried about similarities to his father’s work, and been overly concerned with avoiding them and subverted the story he wanted to tell to avoid it being compared to It, the comic wouldn’t be as good. If he’d set the story in, say, Arizona instead of New England, he wouldn’t have been being true to himself and to his story.

So good for you, Joe Hill. Keep up the good work.

* This is a deliberately confusing title. A million points to anyone who figures it out.
** Hill (real name “Joseph Hillstrom King”) has used a pen name his entire career so he wouldn’t garner unwarranted success based solely on who his father was. Apparently even Hill’s agent didn’t know about his parentage until shortly before his first novel was published.
*** Among other things, but Locke & Key would be near the top of that pile.

Playing Field- "Now Batting, Number 00110010"

2010-08-02T13:32:00.000-04:00

A while back, I wrote a novella about a fictional baseball team based in Detroit. Shortly after finishing it, I was kind of bored one weekend so I fired up my Playstation, popped in MLB 10: The Show, and created twenty-five players based on the team in my story. I put them on the Tigers and started playing a season mode. I, clearly, am a huge dork...

Atrium Comics' First Official Apology

2010-07-30T16:00:00.003-04:00

So, Remember When I Said I'd Be Done In July?

Voices In My Head

2010-07-29T18:52:00.002-04:00

I am sitting in a Barnes & Noble on 82nd & Broadway, with Courtney (who finds it HILARIOUS that I am blogging from my phone), waiting for author Joe Hill (20th Century Ghosts, Heart-Shaped Box, Horns, Locke & Key) to star a reading/signing. I missed Hill's last appearance in the city due to a blizzard this past winter, so I'm pretty excited that he's come back. But I'm also apprehensive. I love seeing writers I admire in person, but I HATE hearing them talk for the first time, because their voices never, ever sound like they do in my head while I'm reading their books. Which is to say, none of them ever, ever sound like me.

Also, Hill is the oldest son of Stephen King, which makes him like the Jakob Dylan of novelists. I have a question for him about his last novel- Horns- and whether or not it was a difficult decision to make a direct reference to the movie "Carrie" (as he did), but I am concerned that it might come off as disrespectful. Hopefully not. I almost hope there isn't time for questions. We shall see, I suppose.

Ten minutes to go... and now Courtney is doing an impression of me typing on my phone. Awesome.

Adios, Liquid Americans!

Playing Field- "Party Like It's 444"

2010-07-26T14:09:00.003-04:00

Any day now, an American League pitcher will throw a fastball when he should have thrown a slider, and someone will promptly edit that hapless hurler’s Wikipedia page to note that he gave up Alex Rodriguez’s 600th home run. Baseball people will go through the motions talking about history and legacy and tradition for a little while, and then it’ll be back to business as usual. But no one will really care...

Playing Field- "The New Mutant"

2010-07-19T14:19:00.004-04:00

I have begun contributing to the Playing Field sports blog at lookingglassmagazine.com, the website of my friend Mike's startup magazine, Looking Glass. I'll be posting there every Monday, so please give it a look. Thanks!

The New Mutant at Lookingglassmagazine.com/playingfield

Hypertheticals... LIQUID AMERICA STYLE!!!

2010-07-16T15:25:00.001-04:00

About a month ago, Chuck Klosterman, one of my favorite writers, released a product called Hypertheticals. A collection of fifty large index cards containing hypothetical scenarios and questions, Hypertheticals is an expansion on a running theme in Klosterman’s prior books, particularly Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs and Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas. Half of the questions are new, and half are from his earlier work. Courtney and I spent about an hour going through them the night I bought them, and it was a great time. On the way home that night, I came up with my own “hyperthetical,” related below. Replies are encouraged. (Replies are always encouraged, but in this instance particularly so.)

Today I Am Your Champion...

You go to see your favorite musician perform live in concert. By virtually every conceivable standard, the show is excellent. Your favorite musician and his/her backing band play for three hours and do two encores. The set list is a mix of your favorite musician’s big hits, his/her less popular songs that you nonetheless really enjoy, unexpected cover versions of classic songs, and rarities that he/she almost never performs live. The artist closes the show with a stirring rendition of your favorite song (or, at least, your favorite of his/her songs.) The venue is acoustically perfect and conveniently located to your place of residence, your seats are excellent, and the tickets were acquired at an extremely reasonable price. The show immediately becomes one of your top five best concert-going experiences ever (though not, for whatever reason, your absolute favorite.)

Three weeks later, you are at a sparsely populated bar and by a stunning coincidence, you happen to meet your favorite musician. After the initial shock, you speak to this person for several minutes, and finally you mention that you attended their show three weeks earlier. Before you can continue, the artist makes a face and interrupts you, saying, “Oh, man, I’m so sorry.” The artist goes on to tell you that the show you attended was, in his/her own opinion, the single worst live performance he/she ever put on in their entire long and respected career. The artist even goes so far as to offer you your money back, there on the spot.

Does this revelation have a negative effect on your fond memories of the concert? Do you take the artist’s money?

Mini-Monday Grab Bag!

2010-07-12T09:24:00.002-04:00

- Liquid America’s favorite baseball player, Marcus Thames, hit his third home run of the season against the Mariners yesterday, in an 8-2 Yankee victory. In related news, Thames is the hitter featured in the photo that accompanies the Wikipedia article about “Batting (baseball).” I swear to God I did not do this.

- This article kind of says what I’ve been saying about John McCain for a while (that he should shut up and go away), or at least tries to explain why he is the way he is now (i.e. the type of person about whom I would say “Shut up and go away.”)

- I have purchased a new razor in anticipation of shaving my goatee soon. I am now the proud owner of a Gillette Fusion Pro Glide. I’m pretty sure that I am most susceptible to advertising when it comes to grooming products. Because I saw an ad display for this thing that had it rotating and spotlit from below like it was the greatest product ever in the history of commerce, and within like forty-eight hours later I’d bought one. At least when I got sucked in by Levi’s it took me a few weeks.

Also...

2010-07-06T13:39:00.006-04:00

On the 4th of July, Liquid America's favorite baseball player, Marcus Thames, returned from a stint on the DL and hit a pinch-hit, extra-innings, walkoff single to beat the Toronto Blue Jays. I feel compelled to mention this even though it happened two days ago because this particular act of mini-heroism got the tiniest of notes on the back page of the Daily News.

That was an inset in the bottom right hand corner of the back page. The sneaker to the left, the one that is nearly as large as AJ Burnett and Marcus Thames' upper bodies, belongs to LeBron James, the most hotly pursued of the roughly 11,000 NBA players who became free agents last week.

The ridiculous coverage afforded to all of this makes me hate basketball even more. It's baseball season, god damn it! The first-place Yankees just beat a division rival in dramatic fashion on the 4th of July, and the next day's biggest sports story, according to the Daily News, was, basically, "Still Nothing on LeBron." I hope he stays in Cleveland, or goes to play in Greece or something. Bastard. Stealing The River's well-deserved thunder.

... I wonder if I can get noticed by the YES Network as the only media outlet* that specifically covers Marcus Thames?

*Shut up, I am too a media outlet.

The Thrill of Victory, The Agony of Defeat & The Sheer Pointlessness of a Zero-Zero Tie*

2010-07-06T13:07:00.002-04:00

Apparently Uruguay and the Netherlands are playing in the semifinals of the World Cup later today. Uruguay made it to the semifinals last week when they beat Ghana in overtime, or whatever they call it in soccer, but they only made it that far because a Uruguayan player, Luis Suarez, used his hands to whack away what would have been Ghana's winning goal. This sort of thing would be acceptable if Suarez was Uruguay's goaltender, but since he's a forward, he was subsequently thrown out of the game and (I think) the remainder of the tournament, as well he should have been, because he is a dirty, dirty cheater.

I was just briefly** discussing this with two coworkers- one of whom is of Uruguayan descent, the other of whom is from China, where soccer matters- and they were disagreeing with my assessment of Suarez, to whom I was referring at the time as "that soccer guy who cheated." They were both telling me about what a smart play it was and how it was a smart move and how the guy did the right thing. Now, I'm sorry- I don't dispute that it was on some level a worthwhile move, as it kept him and his team from elimination. It was daring and I can actually respect it. It shows heart and guts, if not an overabundance of brains and honor.

But it was not the "right" thing to do. It was, in fact, the most completely wrong thing one can do in a soccer game and, the more I think about it, arguably the most flagrant rule violation possible in all of sports. I can't think of an act in any other sport that would be such an overt act of cheating that would not immediately result in the play or action being overruled or reversed. It's like if, on the 18th hole of the Masters, Tiger Woods picked his ball up off the tee, RAN to the hole and dropped it in, and they gave him a hole in one... which, now that I've put that out there, could be almost as fun a variation on a sport as bounce castle football or ice tennis.

Someone get me ESPN 8 on the phone, stat!

* Paraphrased from a line by inaugural Top 5 Tuesdays! honoree Dan Rydell (Josh Charles) on Sports Night. Full quote: "We'll bring you the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, and because we've got soccer highlights, the sheer pointlessness of a zero-zero tie."

**Every conversation I have about soccer, if I can help it, is brief. Unless the initial topic of that conversation is "Sweet mojambo, is soccer ever boring."

I'm Back, Baby!!!

2010-07-02T09:09:00.002-04:00

What the what? I have a blog?!

Things have been going batshit crazy at The Insurance Mine lately and I've been too busy and/or frustrated and/or exhausted (and in most cases all three) to get around to updating lately. June was the only completely silent month in the history of Liquid America's current incarnation. Sorry about that.

ANYWAY, in the news today, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has ordered that some 200,000 employees of the state of California be paid minimum wage ($7.25 an hour) until the legislature of that state passes a budget. The employees will then be retroactively paid their full wage when a budget is passed. Now, this is noteworthy for a couple of reasons, but the reason I felt the need to share it is this: it is so weird to me that The Terminator has the power to do this. I know, I know, he's been active in politics for however many years and he was elected and everything, but it's just so weird. Schwarzenegger was in some great movies (The Terminator, Terminator 2, Twins) but he was also in some pretty ridiculous crap (Jingle All The Way, Collateral Damage, End of Days, The 6th Day, Eraser, the list goes on.) I just don't understand how anyone in California takes him seriously.

It's like if Sylvester Stallone was somehow my boss. He'd be telling me to get my inspection reports filed on time and I'd just be thinking, "But you're Demolition Man..." Not, somehow, "But you're Rocky." Rocky I can respect.

I WILL Stay Thirsty, Thank You Very Much

2010-05-29T09:14:00.003-04:00

A while back I wrote this post about how embarrassingly susceptible I am to television commercials. Since then I have switched over completely to Levi's jeans, largely due to those weird ads from last year, which was the primary impetus behind writing that post. Recently, though, I find that I've been affected by advertising in a completely bizarre way. The commercials in question can be found here and are analyzed much more intelligently here. They are, of course, the "Most Interesting Man in the World" ad campaign for Dos Equis beer.

I love these commercials. I think they're ingenious, even they are ripoffs of all those Chuck Norris jokes that were so popular a while ago. I would watch a movie starring The Most Interesting Man in the World. If they made a TV show about the character, like they foolishly did with the Geico cavemen, I would watch every episode and probably buy it on DVD.

And the most insane part is this: the commercials actually make me want to buy the product. This is what commercials are supposed to do, of course, but I don't drink beer! I don't drink anything with alcohol in it, I never have, and I never intend to start. Yet, when some no-name geriatric actor looks into the camera and says "Stay thirsty, my friends," I start thinking, "You know what? I am thirsty. I could go for a Dos Equis right abouWHAT AM I SAYING?!?!"

Hm. I wonder if they make a non-alcoholic version...

Atrium Comics

2010-05-23T23:44:00.002-04:00

I've decided to try my hand at creating and self-publishing my own comic books using the art style I showcased in the previous two installments of Top 5 Tuesdays! The name for this self-publication venture is (if Jen gives the thumbs-up) going to be Atrium Comics, and I'll be maintaining a separate blog as well as a separate Twitter account to give updates about what I'm doing with it. I will be posting links to these updates here as well, in all likelihood. Links just like this one.

More as this develops.

Better Late Than Never

2010-05-21T10:28:00.002-04:00

ARRGH!!! I saw Iron Man 2 two weeks ago and I still haven't written reviews of the two movies I saw before that. Deadline ignoring powers, activate!

Date Night: When I first heard about this movie my reaction was, "Tina Fey and Steve Carell in an action comedy? Sign me up!" And sign up Courtney and I did, one lovely Saturday afternoon at the historical Pavilion Theatre in Park Slope.

The plot of Date Night is pretty straightforward- a bored married couple goes into the city for a night out, pretends to be other people to get a table at a fancy restaurant, and gets caught up in the criminal intrigue that was waiting for the people whose table they ganked. Hilarity and mild peril ensue, as well as a cab chase through Manhattan. As far as the "regular folks caught up in action movie plots" comedy subgenre goes, I'd place Date Night squarely between The Big Lebowski and Pineapple Express. It's not a transcendent comedy experience, but it never forgets that it is a comedy and not an action movie.

Speaking of Pineapple Express, the only real complaint I have about Date Night is this: James Franco is woefully underutilized. He has a one scene cameo as half of the couple whose identities were usurped by Carell & Fey, and he's hysterical in it, but then he vanishes (literally out a window) and is never seen or mentioned again. I've never seen a performance by James Franco that I didn't enjoy, and he makes a lot of weird career choices (doing a guest arc on a soap opera, writing a book of short stories, appearing on 30 Rock as a version of himself who is in love with a pillow) that I can't help but respect. I would have liked to see more of him in this movie, but it was not to be.

Also, the seats at The Pavilion are double plus supercomfortable.

DVD Purchase: Probable, especially if there is commentary by the two stars.

Kick-Ass: After we saw Kick-Ass, Courtney and I went to Modell's to buy pants for softball. While she was in a fitting room, Devon texted me to ask how the movie was. I told him, "Like if Tarantino made a superhero movie scripted by the staff of The Onion." I think I'm going to stick with that description. For anyone who knows me even a little, I can offer no higher praise.

More specifically, I loved the following things about this movie:

- Nicolas Cage: His decision to talk like Adam West Batman while in costume as Big Daddy makes up for Gone in Sixty Seconds.

- Comic book art: A quasi-animated sequence outlining the origin of the characters Big Daddy & Hit-Girl was drawn by John Romita Jr., the Marvel Comics legend who pencilled the series on which the movie was based.

- It was better than Wanted, the other big screen adaptation of a Mark Millar comic: Of course, the video generated by a colonoscopy camera is better viewing than Wanted.

- Hit Girl: To paraphrase my friend Vito, if after seeing 13 year old Chloe Moretz beat the hell out of like forty grown, armed men during the course of the movie, people still claim to think that the character of Robin wouldn't work "realistically," then they are just kidding themselves.

DVD Purchase: Definite.

A review of Iron Man 2 will be along... I dunno, eventually.

How Has No One Ever Nicknamed This Guy "The River"?

2010-05-18T09:20:00.008-04:00

Liquid America's favorite baseball player, outfielder/first baseman/once & future DH Marcus Thames, hit a two run walk off home run last night to beat the Boston. I heard it on the radio while driving home from Courtney's, and very nearly punched through the roof of my car in excitement. When I got home I watched the postgame on YES and it was a monstrous home run, gone when it left the bat, Thames standing at home plate watching it go, sure of himself, bat still in hand, then he circled the bases with his fist in the air, all of the Bronx cheering his name, the ongoing epic of the Yankees versus the Red Sox inducting another hero (or villain, depending on your perspective) into its ever-expanding pantheon.

Then, AJ Burnett hit him in the face with a pie.

I can't decide if this damages the majesty of the moment, or enhances it.

S

2010-05-14T02:40:00.002-04:00

"I don't care what you believe. Just believe."
-Shepherd Derrial Book (Ron Glass), "Serenity"

This afternoon I bought a black T-shirt with the Superman logo on the chest. You know the logo I'm talking about. The pentagonal red-and-yellow shield with the stylized "S" in the center. There was some study done a couple of years ago that determined that the Superman logo is one of the most instantly recognizable symbols in the entire world, after the crucifix and the Mickey Mouse ears.

Brief history/geeky aside: when Superman first debuted in 1938, the logo and its meaning were much simpler. It was a letter S in a yellow triangle and it stood simply for "Superman." As time went on and the design and mythology of the character evolved, it took the form it is known for now, and it was established in the continuity of the comics that the S-logo is the Kryptonian symbol for hope. Conveniently enough, the Kryptonian symbol for hope looked a heck of a lot like the first letter of Kal-El's superhero codename. Funny how things work out.

Anyway, the shirt I bought today is the seventh or eighth garment I've owned bearing this logo. I've also had a keychain in the shape of Superman's shield for as long as I can remember, well over a decade. This isn't just because I really like the character of Superman (though I do, even though I haven't read Superman comics in years due to decisions by DC Comics that I think are utterly moronic). There's more to it than that.

The symbolism of that logo is very powerful for me. It means more than a fondness for a particular character. It represents that character, who is himself representative of a great many things. He's not just strong. That's reducing him, and that's what the fake tanned human porcupines who have the S in the colors of the Italian flag on the back of their Escalades think. Perhaps more than any other character in the history of fiction, Superman represents a certain ideal and a certain set of values and ethics that I find admirable. Yes, he is strong, but he's also fair, and honest, and he believes in himself and always tries his best, and he protects people who are weaker than he is from those who would prey on that weakness, and he never lets down those who count on him. Those are all qualities to which we should aspire.

So when I wear the S on my shirt or my tie or carry a faded metallic representation of it in my pocket, it's not because I'm a comic book geek (although I am, and proud of it). It's because I believe in what it stands for. That might seem silly to some people, but there it is.

Goodnight, my friends. Look up in the sky.

A Completely Anticlimactic 200th Post

2010-05-11T20:14:00.005-04:00

No Top 5 Tuesdays! this week, folks. I've been all thrown off between excessive busy-ness at work, a mysterious ailment befalling my faithful steed, the mighty Rex Vanning, and just sort of general scatterbrainedness. In the place of T5T!, though, I present the following doodle, which was definitely NOT drawn during a particularly boring meeting at The Insurance Mine.

That would be the Eleventh Doctor preparing to escape from some Daleks. This was done before I watched Victory of the Daleks, the third episode of the current series, which was probably the worst episode of Doctor Who I've ever seen. It involved the Daleks, the most terrifying, destructive, hateful, genocidal creatures in the universe, resurrecting themselves in bright, color-coded metal shells instead of their traditional grayish-blackish-drabness. Incredibly stupid. They're genocidal maniacs, for crying out loud, not the f'ing Power Rangers.

Rivulet of Awareness

2010-05-03T10:16:00.001-04:00

On the morning of May the third, year of our Lord two thousand and ten, I stirred honey into my earl grey tea with a plastic fork. The honey came from a plastic squeeze container in the shape of a fat and happy bear. When shopping for honey, if given the option of buying a plastic squeeze container in the shape of a bear or buying a plastic squeeze container in the shape of anything else, always always always go with the one shaped like a bear.

Tea's a funny drink. These days it carries with it all sorts of ludicrous political connotations and also there is a sense, albeit possibly a sense which exists only within my own mind, that it is somehow the wimpy man's coffee. My girlfriend drinks coffee. I drink tea. Sometimes I worry about this.

Anyway, here's what's funny about tea, at least tea that comes from a teabag, which my tea does. You take the teabag and you put it in a container of hot water, give it a few minutes, then dump the teabag in the trash, squeeze some honey in, and drink your tea. But the actual size of the container doesn't matter. You could dissolve your tea into six ounces of water or twelve ounces of water or twenty ounces of water, but you still get the same amount of tea. I'm currently drinking tea from a plastic mug bearing the logo of the corporation for which I work. We got these mugs for free about a year ago as part of the company's attempt to be more environmentally friendly. The mug is actually green, which I feel is too on the nose. My coworkers hate these mugs, because they were given to us by management, and whatever management does is, by definition, wrong. Some of my coworkers actually went out of their way to buy their own stock of styrofoam coffee mugs, because intentionally poisoning the earth is preferable to accepting a gift from management. I cannot envision any possible future in which I am not at least a little enraged by this, even if I were to stop working here and never see any of these contrary, obstructionist, extruded-polystyrene-foam-o-philes ever again.

Anyway, the mug from which I'm drinking tea holds about sixteen ounces worth of fluid. I know this because it holds a twelve ounce can's worth of Coke easily, but not a twenty ounce bottle's worth of Coke. I only filled it about halfway with water, though, because I know from experience that when I fill it all the way with water and dissolve a teabag into it, I can barely taste the tea. When I fill this mug to the brim with water, then dissolve the tea into it and squeeze in some honey, it just tastes like I am drinking very hot, slightly sweet water. But I still consumed the tea. When I have tea at home in the morning I use an almost comically small teacup and still only one teabag, and even though I consume at most a quarter of the amount of liquid that can be held by my mug at the office, I still consumed the same amount of tea. The amount of tea I consumed has nothing to do with the amount of liquid I drank. One of these days I'm going to get a shot glass, cram a teabag inside, fill it with water, squeeze a drop of honey in there and knock it back before heading out the door, and I'll still get the same amount of nutritional benefits (one percent of the daily recommended amount of potassium, plus caffeine and "healthful antioxidants," according to the box) as I would if I had a coffee mug "full" of tea.

While I was writing this, a coworker of mine, who we'll call Joel, was talking with another coworker of mine, who we'll call Sally. They were standing at the printer near my desk and Joel was telling Sally about the merits of the express bus over the subway line she takes to commute. Apparently while slightly more expensive, the express bus would be a more direct, convenient, and faster commute for Sally than the train line she takes. This is not interesting in and of itself- in fact, the entire conversation, which I could not help but overhear, was incredibly boring- but I was nonetheless riveted due to the fact that Joel talked about this, without Sally interrupting even once, for ten straight minutes without stopping.

This is incredible to me for two reasons.

First, I cannot envision any scenario in which another person would talk to me for ten minutes about such a mundane topic and I would not either

A) nod and say "Uh-huh" at regular intervals,
B) make an excuse as to why I could no longer continue the conversation or
C) kick this person in the shins until they stopped talking to me.

But Sally did none of these things. Instead she listened attentively for the entire lecture. In fact, she just went into Joel's office with follow-up questions. What the hell is going on here? It is worth noting that Sally is from another country and English is not her first language. In fact, the way she speaks it, it's barely a language at all. I feel bad saying that because Sally is in fact a monumentally sweet woman who tries very hard, but I am a lazy grouch and as a result she frequently infuriates me. Also, she is one of the aforementioned people who bought personal stocks of styrofoam cups. But I mention that her English is poor because it is entirely possible and indeed likely that she did not understand everything Joel was saying. If she had, I daresay she would have gotten bored extremely quickly.

The second reason the whole conversation (if you can call it that, which I don't think you can since only one of the participants was doing any actual talking) was fascinating to me is the sheer length of time that Joel talked about the relative merits of the express bus versus the subway. I have never in my entire life heard someone go on for so long about such a mundane topic. If you asked, for example, me to explain the relative merits of, say, commuting via the Staten Island Ferry and a series of subway trains versus commuting via the express bus, I would give a thirty-second explanation, specifically, "The ferry is free and the subway is a lot cheaper than the bus, and the bus is subject to traffic problems while the ferry & trains are not. Also, there are no express bus stops by my house." This is the stock answer I give whenever I am asked this question- I have been asked this question at least once a month for the last five years- and it takes me no longer than thirty seconds to say the whole thing, and I am one of the most verbose people I know. I'm the guy who just wrote six hundred and thirty words about tea, for crying out loud. But I can't muster more than forty about why the ferry is my preferred form of mass transit. But this guy Joel, boy howdy, he's got some strong feelings about that express bus.

Anyway, I need to buy a spoon. That was my original point when I started writing this. Seriously, who stirs tea with a plastic fork? What am I, a caveman?

"War Never Changes..."

2010-05-01T11:08:00.002-04:00

About a year and a half ago (or so), Bethesda Softworks released a video game called "Fallout 3." It was, as the name suggested, the third in the "Fallout" series, an action RPG set in a post-nuclear-apocalyptic wasteland, which I had never played before but about which I had only heard good things. Also, Bethesda had been responsible for "The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion," a game I had absolutely loved (and still do.) So I was really looking forward to Fallout 3.

Problem was that it came out in early October of 2008, which coincided perfectly with the time period in which I planned to write a novel-in-a-month. I knew full well that if I allowed myself access to this game during that month, I would become distracted from my work and not finish on time. So when it came out, I picked up my pre-ordered copy at Best Buy on Tuesday evening, put the game in my bag and, on Wednesday morning, handed it to Tom with strict orders to not release it to me under any circumstances until I had provided him with proof that a first draft had been completed. Tom was up for the challenge, and held onto the game for the next month, ably deflecting my occasional attempts to get it back early. He returned it to me after I was done with Draft One of what would become "Square State," making the handoff as I dropped him off from a celebratory weekend in Atlantic City.

The game was well worth the wait. The storyline, graphics, sound, gameplay engine, voice work, character creation process, alignment system etc. were all a cut above what I'd come to expect from video games at that time. I played the game fairly obsessively for months, and then on and off for literally the next year, working my way through all of the additional, downloadable quest lines until I reached the raised level cap (Level 30: Last, Best Hope of Humanity) with my second character, "Jack Shaftoe*".

Fallout 3, for anyone who hasn't played it (and everyone with even a passing interest in video games should), is set in and around the ruins of Washington DC, in a future that has been devastated by nuclear war. Among the various threats one's character faces after emerging from the radiation-shieled "Vault" where he (or she) grew up are gigantic, super-strong, heavily armed monsters known as "Super Mutants," which are kind of like really mean Hulks. Really mean Hulks with gatling guns. The Super Mutants are among the primary antagonists of the game, and as you progress in level you have to kill a LOT of them. The area of the game world most heavily populated by the Super Mutants is the National Mall area, and probably the most memorable encounter with one (a monster-of-cinema-sized variant called a Super Mutant Brute) occurs in the ruins of the Rotunda in the Capitol Building.

The reason I bring this all up is this: I am in Washington DC & its environs for the weekend, with Courtney, to visit her dad. We took a bus down & on the way into the city proper we passed the Capitol Building, and on the car ride from the bus to her dad's place, we passed the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the Washington Monument and the White House. And all I kept thinking the whole time, as we drove through the seat of American history and democracy, was: "I killed a Super Mutant there... and there... and THERE... annnnnnd THERE..."

As personal connections to the nation's capital go, I'm sure one could do worse.

*My first character, Kairo Carpenter, accomplished the goal of the main quest line at around level 14. Quasi-ironically I had intended for my second character to be less overtly heroic than my first, but I just couldn't stick to the more amoral choices the game offered. As Devon would say, "Fucking paladin bastard!"

Winnie-the-Pooh: Businessman #2

2010-04-30T16:23:00.003-04:00

Sometimes my job makes me legitimately hate myself. At The Insurance Mine today we bound a particularly big account and the email we got informing us of this legitimately improved my mood. I disgust me.

Winnie-The-Pooh: Businessman #2

"The Peterson Account"

Why Did I Watch This Show?

2010-04-29T17:45:00.002-04:00

There was this cartoon show on back in the 90s called "ProStars*." The premise, basically, was that Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson were, in addition to being superfamous athletes, also superheroes who fought evil & helped kids using special equipment based on their respective sports. It was probably a shit-terrible show, and even as I watched it as a kid, I was confused as to why I was doing so, because as a kid I didn't even like sports, professional or otherwise. I didn't like sports until I was in my twenties. I GUESS I watched it for the same reason anyone watches any awful show when they're a kid- I watched it because it was on TV.

Anyway, I was listening to an ESPN podcast a while back in which ESPN analyst Bill Simmons and writer Chuck Klosterman talk about their feeling that Jordan and Gretzky have handled their roles- as "the best ever" at his particular sport- poorly. And this got me thinking, "Man... that cartoon show really overestimated Bo Jackson's place in sports history." I mean, yeah, Jackson was double-plus superfamous at the time, and he killed two sports with one stone (without Jackson, you have to have two characters there- a baseball player & a football player- instead of just one**) but I don't think anyone would seriously contend that Bo Jackson was the greatest baseball or football player ever. I don't even think anyone would contend that he was the best two sport athlete ever (that would probably be Jim Thorpe. Or Air Bud.)

I realize that wasn't the point of ProStars- it was supposed to be three really famous celebrity athletes, not three historically great athletes- but still.

* NOT "All-Star Squadron," like I thought when I first started writing this; All-Star Squadron was a comic about the JSA.
** Ken Griffey Jr. & Joe Montana. Probably.

Top 5 Tuesdays! #30

2010-04-27T21:43:00.007-04:00

(Order FCHS today!)

Winnie-the-Pooh: Businessman #1

2010-04-24T13:54:00.005-04:00

The other day at work I was making some tea, got some honey on my hand without realizing it, then checked my phone, only to get honey on the keypad of my Blackberry. After I was done being mad about this, it gave me an idea for a webcomic.

And thus, Liquid America proudly presents the first installment of...

Winnie-the-Pooh: Businessman #1

"The Midnight Oil"

“Not A Cloud on Your Horizon, Your Heart Finally Okay…”

2010-04-23T08:28:00.001-04:00

It was not the best movie I’ve seen this year* and it wasn’t the worst**, but Remember Me was definitely the most surprising movie I’ve seen in 2010. The first surprise was the fact that I saw it at all, as based on the trailers it was not apparently the sort of movie I’d usually watch. But Courtney wanted to see it so when she got back from an interminable (okay, three days) trip to Virginia, we got dinner at Legends and headed up to 42nd Street to catch a 7:30 showing.

The second surprise was that I actually rather enjoyed it. As a stalwart movie snob- I admit that some of the movies about which I am snobbish are in fact unmitigated crap, but they’re my unmitigated crap- I have conditioned myself to react with harsh and dismissive scorn to any film that prominently features an actor who teenaged girls find attractive, and as I understand it this Robert Pattinson chap fits that description. My inherent prejudices were quickly overcome, however, by the premise of the movie: put briefly, Pattinson plays a brooding rich kid from a broken home who is (half-justifiably) arrested by irritable cop Chris Cooper. Shortly thereafter, Pattinson’s best friend (Some Guy either intentionally or accidentally doing a spot-on Hal Sparks impression) learns that Cooper’s daughter, played by Claire from Lost, goes to the same school (NYU, much to the delight of the lovely NYU alumna with whom I saw the movie) as they do. The friend convinces Pattinson to seduce the girl and subsequently humiliate her to get back at her old man***, and Pattinson gives it a go but, of course, ends up falling in love with her. Then she finds out, is (understandably) enraged, leaves, and he has to win her back.

Now, what is so arresting about this premise? On the surface, nothing. It’s a by the numbers plot seen in about half of the teen-oriented comedies of the last thirty years. But what’s interesting about is that Remember Me is not a comedy. It’s a drama. It has its funny moments but even they are presented as serving the greater dramatic impact of the story. Everyone is very serious and glum and straightfaced, except for the aforementioned best friend character, who seems like he wandered out of a Freddie Prinze Jr. movie from ten years ago and ended up in this one. It got me thinking about the inherent differences between comedy and drama and wondering if the difference is just a matter of perspective. I kind of think that it is, at least in most cases. A comedy like The Hangover could easily be re-worked as a serious movie, and something like Crazy Heart could be approached as a story about a lovable, goofy drunk. I’m not saying that this makes Remember Me an exceptionally good movie, necessarily, (nor is it a bad one) but I certainly didn’t go into it expecting to be inspired to contemplate the very nature of fiction.

The third surprise qualifies as a pretty major spoiler, so, you know, don’t read any further if you care.

SPOILERS BEGIN

By the end of the movie, which takes place in the early 2000s, Robert Pattinson’s character is starting to patch up his relationship with his father (Pierce Brosnan, showing off one of the most forced fake American accents I’ve ever had to listen to), a high-powered corporate magnate of some kind**** who has shut himself off from his kids (Pattinson has a younger sister) after the suicide of his oldest son. After he patches things up with Claire from Lost, Pattinson goes to his little sister’s schmancy private school, puts the fear of God into some bitchy little adolescents who bullied her at a party, and is subsequently arrested. Brosnan bails him out and they have an uncharacteristically good-natured exchange at the police station, and make an appointment to meet at Brosna’s office a few days later. Pattinson arrives on time but Brosnan is late because he takes him limo to pick up his daughter and take her to school. Pattinson waits in his father’s office, chatting with his father’s secretary about how things have been looking up for him lately, and goes to the window to look out at the city, at which point we find out that his father’s office is near the top of one of the Twin Towers. Back at the sister’s school, the teacher writes the date on the blackboard and it is, of course, Tuesday, September 11th, 2001. Hard cut to black. At that point I expected the movie to be over but instead it faded back up and showed the various supporting characters learning about the 9/11 attacks and responding accordingly, while a Pattinson voiceover talks about life and appropriate dreary music swells in the background.

So….. yeah. What had been a fairly by-the-numbers kind of story takes this hard left at the end into incredible, borderline offensive tragedy. I say borderline because I wasn’t really offended but I could see how someone would be. Courtney made the good point afterward that seeing the movie in Manhattan, as lifelong New Yorkers, is a probably a vastly different experience than someone going to see it in, like, Iowa.

The thing is, though, something had to happen at the end- it was not a movie that would have worked with a happy ending, but simultaneously by the waning moments of the third act the story had worked itself into this corner where a more conventional tragic end would have just felt random and senseless. So while I didn’t necessarily like that the writers used 9/11 as their get-out-of-movie free card, I can’t help but respect the fact that, realizing that any tragedy at all would be random and senseless, they went with a tragedy so huge and real that its randomness and senselessness would not seem out of place. To have the girlfriend hit by a truck or the guy killed during a convenience store robbery or some other minor, localized tragedy would have been forced; ending this random person’s story with a massive tragedy that has nothing to do with him on a personal level, however- that’s just realistic.

SPOILERS END

The fourth surprise is that Pierce Brosnan’s American accent was terrible. I mean, awful. I don’t know anyone who actually sounds like that. I know I mentioned it once already but something that bad deserves a second commentary.

DVD Purchase: Not terribly likely. I enjoyed it well enough but not enough to ever intentionally watch it again, particularly knowing the specifics of how the movie ends up.

* So far that’s still The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus but Iron Man 2 is less than a month away.
** Green Zone was the worst.
*** How exactly this will do anything but infuriate her well-armed father with the power to put them in prison, I am not entirely sure.
**** The specifics of Brosnan’s business are never delved into, so I’m going to go ahead and assume he is actually meant to be James Bond under extreme deep cover.

Two Long For Twitter

2010-04-22T08:37:00.004-04:00

1.) My work computer is so antiquated that my browser frequently crashes when opening because the home page (msn.com) has updated to a point where this version of Internet Explorer (Version 6.0, which was released when I was still in college) can't always handle it. This literally disgusts me. I am trying to estimate how much trouble I'd get into if I tried installing Google Chrome here at the Insurance Mine. Probably a lot.

2.) I just had a weird shopping experience at the Duane Reade on 34th and Park. I went in there to buy deodorant, soap and shampoo and while there decided to pick up a case of bottled water as well; I've been trying to drink more water and save some money, and buying 24 bottles of water for 10 bucks or whatever is obviously preferable to paying a dollar for the same size bottle at the newsstand in my office. Anyway, I lugged the case to the front and paid for my purchases, and as I was cramming my Old Spice, Pert Plus and Dove Men + Care into my rapidly deteriorating bag, the lady who rang me up tore open the case of water and started putting the individual bottles into a large bag. Before I realized what she was doing, she had taken out half the bottles, then she got a new bag and put the rest in that. So now instead of one large, neat, easily stored case of water under my desk, I have two big, misshapen sacks of randomly placed bottles of water there. I don't know if I'm so much annoyed by this as I am confused. Why would she do that without even asking?

Liquid America Status Report

2010-04-20T14:32:00.001-04:00

Since last week's installment of Top 5 Tuesdays! generated near-universal acclaim (Curse you, Brandon Keene! We'll see who reserves judgment on whom!), I have decided to start doing all the T5T! lists in the black & white photo-comic format from now on. However, since this is a rather time-consuming process, Top 5 Tuesdays! will now be posted every other week instead of every week (not that I've been posting them on anything close to a weekly schedule this year anyway, but whatever.) Thanks to everyone who commented for your kind words and encouragement.

Also, stay tuned to Liquid America for more news on Have Love, Will Travel, the short story I intend to adapt into minicomic format.

Additionally, I have a serious backlog of movie reviews to get to- hopefully I'll be all caught up by the time Iron Man 2 rocks my face off on May 7th.

That's all for now. See you real soon.

Top 5 Tuesdays! #29- Everything Looks Better In Black & White

2010-04-12T23:56:00.004-04:00

"And You May Say To Yourself, 'My God, What Have I Done?!'"

2010-04-09T09:12:00.004-04:00

I love a good time travel story, and I usually even kind of like a bad one. Something about the idea of going to the past, or to the future, has always held particular appeal to me. I’ve never tried seriously to write one, though I have the germ of an idea for one that I’ll hopefully get to someday.

I also enjoy the work of one mister John Cusack. Star of my favorite movie ever (High Fidelity) as well as plenty of other gems and also City Hall, Cusack’s involvement in a movie pretty much guarantees that I’ll at least try to see it. So when John Cusack does a time travel movie, you can bet whatever you feel like betting that I will be there to see it, and when I completely forget that it came out and Courtney reminds me about it on a Saturday afternoon when we have no other firm plans, you can bet double that amount.

Hot Tub Time Machine is, in effect, an extended, post-Judd-Apatowian riff on the old time-travel trope of “time travelers must avoid changing the past to ensure the continued existence of their timeline.” Arguably the best cinematic example of this story is Back to the Future and its sequels*, and that’s not the only thing Hot Tub Time Machine ganks from that franchise.

- Kid whose only friend(s) is/are for some reason vastly older than he is? Check.
- Same kid travels back in time and is disturbed by the revelation that, at his age, his mom was kind of promiscuous? Check.
- The aforementioned time traveling kid endangers his own existence by being in the past? Check.
- Scene where a musically inclined time traveler plays a song that won’t be released for years to come? Check**.
- Crispin Glover? Specifically, Crispin Glover playing a character whose life is vastly and unintentionally improved by the actions of time travelers without his knowledge? Check and double check.

Our heroes- middle aged losers Adam (Cusack), Nick (Craig Robinson), Lou (Rob Corddry) and Adam’s nephew, young loser Jacob (Clark Duke)- are transported back to the 1980s after an illegally imported Russian energy drink (“Chernobly”) gets into the works of the hot tub at their hotel suite. They’re in a hotel suite because Lou tried to kill himself and Adam and Nick took him back to Kodiak Valley, the ski resort where they partied in the 80s, but really they’re in a hotel suite for the same reason that an energy drink turns the hot tub into a time machine- because if not, then the movie wouldn’t happen.

They are sent back to a particularly pivotal weekend in their young lives and told by a mysterious janitor (Chevy Chase, ‘cause why not?) that everything needs to go like it did when it first happened, or they will not be able to travel back. Where HTTM differs wildly from BTTF is this: instead of worrying about the potential negative ramifications of time travel like Marty McFly and Doc Brown did, Adam & Co disregard that old rule of time travel and set about trying to fix their lives before they screw them up. Adam tries to patch things up with the girlfriend whose heart he broke, Nick tries to save his band from dissolution, and Lou tries to get revenge on the ski patrol guys who beat him up. The only one really concerned about making sure things go according to plan is Jacob, who realizes based on the date that the weekend to which they’ve been transported is the same one in which he was conceived. He tries desperately to ensure that this happens, and in so doing hopes to learn the identity of his father.

The movie has it’s share of gross-out humor- there is, if I remember correctly and I like to think that I do, at least one joke each on the subjects of vomit, urine and semen- and occasionally veers into self-aware wordplay humor that, while I enjoyed it, kind of doesn’t fit with the rest of the movie’s screwball farcicality. There’s a running gag about how the Crispin Glover character- a bitter, one-armed bellhop in the present day; a jovial, two-armed bellhop in the 80s- constantly almost gets into horrible accidents that is probably the most well-constructed series of jokes I’ve seen in a movie in years, and the answer to the question of who Jacob’s father is gets resolved somewhat predictably, completely illogically, and very amusingly.

There is also a dancing guy in a bear suit who appears throughout the movie for no readily apparent reason What more does one need?

DVD Purchase: Almost definitely.

* The Back to the Future franchise, by the way, is in my opinion the only classic movie franchise that has not been shit all over by its creators with excessive, money-grabby sequels, spinoffs or remakes. That and, maybe, the Bond movies. Of course, now that I’ve said that, some soulless fuck is going to cast Zac Efron and Martin Lawrence in Back 2 Tha Future, just to spite me.
** Apparently “Let’s Get It Started” is the 21st century’s “Johnny B. Goode.” Who knew?

Burning Bright, In the Forests of the Night

2010-04-08T08:56:00.004-04:00

"Who do you think you are? Me? Update your blog."
-Lou, yesterday

Dan Bern, one of my favorite singers, has a song called "Tiger Woods," and the refrain is "Sometimes I wish I was Tiger Woods, Tiger Woods, Tiger Woods" and it gets repeated a few times. I saw him play at a bar in Pennsylvania around Christmas, right after all the shit broke about Tiger's serial infidelity, and when he did the song he paused after that part and said, "Although now might not be one of those times."

I bring this all up because I saw some new Nike commercial this morning which is just a black & white shot of Woods and a voiceover of some old man asking, basically, "Okay, Tiger, what were you thinking and what have you learned?" This was weird on its own, and vaguely reminiscent of those Levi's ads from last year which, by their sheer black & white unconventionality, compelled me to start buying a new brand of jeans. But then, whilst walking to work about two hours after seeing this commercial, I found out the voice was a recording of Tiger's father, Earl- who is quite dead- and now it's just creepy.

Welcome to America in the 21st Century, everyone. Here we use video of rampant adulterers being lectured from beyond the grave in order to sell sneakers. Enjoy your stay.

In Local News...

2010-03-27T11:12:00.002-04:00

I'm sitting in the waiting room of Heartland Medical by the mall and was just asked by one of my fellow patients to move because, and I quote, "everyone's all germy." Now, there's not a lot of seats available, but I got up and moved anyway because she's not wrong and I don't want to catch rude & crazy from her.

Anyway, after I got up I picked up an old issue of "New York" magazine and in the "Neighborhood News" section there is an item from Riverdale, the section of The Bronx where I almost went to college and both of my sisters and my brother-in-law went to college. The item is as follows...

"A local paper wondered whether several incidents of stuffed animals being tied to trees were the work of gangs, voodoo practicioners, goths, mentally disturbed individuals, or performance artists."

Now, let's be honest: it could easily be all five. Like the idea of a gang of crazy goth performance artists who practice voodoo is completely beyond the realm of possibility.

This is why newspaper journalism is dying: no one looks at the big picture anymore.

My Finest Parallel Park EVER!!!

2010-03-25T10:15:00.002-04:00

I turned the wheel all of twice to accomplish this masterpiece. For anyone who doesn't think this is a big deal, you should know that backing up Rex Vanning is like backing up a school bus. It ain't easy.

Also, I can update Liquid America from my phone now. Anything gets too wordy to go on Twitter, now I have a fallback. Woo.

Oh Captain My Captain

2010-03-24T09:50:00.002-04:00

So Chris Evans, an actor perhaps most famous for his role as Marvel Comics superhero Johnny Storm (The Human Torch), has been cast as the lead in the upcoming Captain America movie. I have no problem with this casting choice, for a few reasons.

First of all, Evans was the best part of the two Fantastic Four movies; his performance as Johnny Storm was spot-on.

Second of all, I've seen him in other movies in which he was perfectly acceptable, and at least one movie (Cellular, which should have been terrible) that kept my interest solely because of how watchable he was.

Third of all, Marvel has yet to let me down in casting their major characters for the movies. (Nicolas Cage doesn't count; Ghost Rider is not a major hero.)

The only thing that makes me think this is a weird and perhaps bad decision is this: Evans played the modern-age Human Torch in the movies. The original Human Torch was a character created in the thirties who was eventually a member of The Invaders a team of superheroes who fought Nazis. Captain America director ("Uncle") Joe Johnston has confirmed that The Invaders will be in the movie. My concern is this: if they do put the Invaders in, and they do use the original Human Torch as part of the team, there is no way- none- that they are going to be able to resist some sort of wink-and-nod to the fact that the guy playing Cap also played a version of the Torch. It's going to happen, and I can't stand it. There should be no winking and nodding. There should be no wry meta references in the Captain America movie. Captain America does not break the fourth wall. Captain America stands on top of the fourth wall and waves a flag and kicks Hitler in the teeth.

Don't get me wrong. I am anticipating enjoying this movie. I am also anticipating, at around 70 minutes in, when Evans-as-Steve-Rogers meets the Human Torch (played by Some Guy) and the Torch bursts into flames and Evans/Rogers smirks and says, "What'll they think of next?", letting out a groan and a forehead-smack so loud that I get ejected by an usher.

"Long As I Remember, Rain Been Coming Down..."

2010-03-22T08:52:00.003-04:00

Green Zone was a strange moviegoing experience for me in that it probably never would have occurred if not for the terrible weather we had on the East Coast last weekend. Courtney and I left Brooklyn early Saturday morning to go to Lehigh, PA, and watch my godson Jamie perform in a play. This required driving for about a hundred miles through gray skies, heavy winds, nonstop rain, mist kicked up by fellow motorists, and just general horrible-ness. The drive there was bad. The drive back, in the late afternoon/early evening, was god-awful. The rain and wind had only gotten heavier, and now it was dark on top of everything. It was probably the most second most stressful drive of my entire life. By the time we made it back to Staten Island and I pulled off the highway with a sigh of relief, I was so tense that my back, neck and shoulders were locked up and in pain. Courtney and I had been thinking about going to the movies, but given the weather it would have probably been better for us to simply return to her apartment and call it an evening. But, after two hours on various highways, and uncomfortable as I was, I desperately wanted to stop driving, so we decided to take a break at good ol’ Staten Island Stadium 16.

Pickings were slim, but I kind of wanted to see Green Zone and Courtney, understanding saint of a woman that she is, agreed, even though she had no real interest. I was basing my guess that we’d enjoy the movie on the fact that we both enjoyed the Jason Bourne franchise, which had the same star (Matt Damon) and the same director (Paul Greengrass, at least for the second two movies). I had read a review (somewhere; can’t locate it for the life of me now) that described Green Zone as being kind of like The Hurt Locker meets the Bourne movies.

This, to put it mildly, was inaccurate. Green Zone is probably not a bad movie- it’s probably not a particularly good one, either- but it is not even remotely the movie I was expecting it to be. Damon plays an Army officer tasked with finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He and his anonymous, interchangeable team of soldiers are becoming increasingly frustrated because- surprise!- there’s none to be found. Damon starts sniffing around the intelligence source providing the location of these weapons, only to learn… well, at this point I’d have to go into more detail than I care to. Suffice it to say that Damon solves the mystery about twenty minutes after Courtney and I did, but it looked like he had a lot more fun getting there than us, and he was in a war zone.

The problem with Green Zone is this: it’s set early in the occupation of Iraq, right before George W. Bush’s idiotic “Mission Accomplished” photo op on the aircraft carrier. Damon’s character- with help from a CIA agent played by Brendan Gleeson, a reporter played by Amy Ryan, and a gimpy Iraqi local played by Some Guy- is trying to solve the mystery of the inaccurate source to, at least in part, prevent Iraq from coming apart at the seams. But the movie came out in 2010, and we all know that Iraq did come apart at the seams. It is completely impossible- or at least it was for me- to root for this guy to win, when I know that even if he does win, it’s not going to damn well matter. If it was an over the top dramedy like Inglourious Basterds, it’d be one thing, but Green Zone is very, very serious about itself. It presents as a serious movie, and serious movies don’t rewrite history (at least not really recent history).

Worse, it’s dull. As I said, I was expecting a little Hurt Locker (the most entertainingly tense movie I’ve ever seen since… well, since ever, maybe) and a little Bourne, and I got neither. There’s a lot of political/espionage chatter that might have worked if penned by a Sorkin or a Mamet, but in the hands of Brian Helgeland* it’s just jabbering. As for the action, I was perhaps unfairly expecting Damon and Greengrass to give us Bourne 4: Jason of Arabia, with a bunch of scenes involving Matt Damon duking it out in fast-motion with Republican Guards and Iraqi insurgents. Instead, the first time Damon gets into a physical altercation with someone (Jason Isaacs, as an American special forces soldier whose demeanor and mustache can only be described as "dastardly," an adjective rarely appropriate in modern film), he gets his ass handed to him. Worse, he doesn’t even get his ass handed to him gracefully. I’ve seen better fight choreography in schoolyards.

I, clearly, have very little good to say about Green Zone, but I will give it this. The characters, when referring to the (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction for which they are all searching, never once call them “WMDs.” They refer to them as “WMD,” which is much more grammatically correct. They are not, after all, weapons of mass destructions.

DVD Purchase: Not bloody likely.

*I may have mentioned this here before, but writer/director Brian Helgeland is one of the most creatively schizophrenic people in Hollywood. He won a well-deserved Oscar for writing modern classic LA Confidential, was nominated again for the almost-as-good Mystic River, and also penned the Denzel Washington/Tony Scott version of Man on Fire. He directed A Knight’s Tale, a legitimately good, fun movie despite its goofy premise, and a spot-on adaptation of Richard Stark’s The Hunter (Payback, with Mel Gibson, who fired Helgeland halfway through production when Helgeland wouldn’t give the story a Hollywood ending; Helgeland’s version was eventually released as Payback: Straight Up, a Director’s Cut DVD, and is awesome). He also, however, was the writer of The Postman (a movie that I used to think was unfairly maligned and I now realize is justifiably maligned) as well as writer/director of The Order, a movie so bad that Heath Ledger allegedly starred in it to destroy his career and allow him to start over from scratch.

What I Wish Was Happening In Washington Right Now

2010-03-19T09:03:00.003-04:00

Josh: Forgive my bluntness, and I say this with all due respect, Congressman, but vote yes, or you're not even going to be on the ballot two years from now.
Katzenmoyer: How do you figure?
Josh: You're going to lose in the primary.
Katzenmoyer: There's no Democrat running against me.
Josh: Sure there is.
Katzenmoyer: Who?
Josh: Whomever we pick.
Katzenmoyer: You're bluffing.
Josh: Okay.
Katzenmoyer: I'm in your own party!
Josh: Doesn't seem to be doing us much good now, does it?
Katzenmoyer: Against an incumbent Democrat. You'll go to the press and endorse a challenger?
Josh: No sir. We're going to do it in person. See, you
won with fifty-two percent, but the President took your district with fifty-nine. And I think it's high time we come back and say thanks. Do you have any idea how much noise Air Force One makes when it lands in Eau Claire, Wisconsin? We're going to have a party, Congressman. You should come, it's gonna be great. And when the watermelon's done, right in town square, right in the band gazebo... You guys got a band gazebo?
Katzenmoyer: Josh...
Josh: Doesn't matter, we'll build one. Right in the band gazebo, that's where the President is going to drape his arm around the shoulder of some assistant DA we like. And you should have your camera with you. You should get a picture of that. 'Cause that's gonna be the moment you're finished in Democratic politics. President Bartlet's a good man. He's got a good heart. He doesn't hold a grudge. That's what he pays me for.

from "Five Votes Down," S01E04 of The West Wing, written by Aaron Sorkin

Of course, this wouldn't work in Staten Island- McCain won Staten Island- but it'd work someplace!

Top 5 Tuesdays! #28- Elementary, My Dear Liquid Americans...

2010-03-09T20:58:00.004-05:00

This was supposed to be a real quick one tonight before Lost but it ended up being an average length one written during Lost. These are my five favorite stories featuring the character of Sherlock Holmes- my second favorite fictional character ever- not written by his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

5. All Consuming Fire by Andy Lane: (1994) This novel features Sherlock Holmes teaming up with Doctor Who. If Batman had showed up it would have become my new favorite book.

4. "A Study in Emerald" by Neil Gaiman: (2004) This Hugo award-winning offers a twist on the classic Holmes/Watson pairing, merging Doyle's detective with the old-god mythos of HP Lovecraft. (Note: Clicking that link will open a .PDF copy of the story.)

3. "The Doctor's Case" by Stephen King: (1987) I just read this for the first time this evening after wanting to for literally years. I had just never gotten around to it before, and it was worth the wait. King's presentation has Watson solving the mystery for a change, and depicts Holmes's deductive ability as almost superhuman, an unusual take to say the least.

2. The Final Solution: A Story of Detection by Michael Chabon: (2004) In Wonder Boys, Chabon's rumpled antihero (and inaugural T5T! honoree) Grady Tripp talks about how his editor and best friend, Terry Crabtree, wrote one piece of fiction in his entire life, a short story about an aged Sherlock Holmes meeting a teenaged Adolf Hitler. Given the title of this slim novel by my favorite author- both a play on the title of Doyle's "The Final Problem," last of the first batch of Holmes stories, and a reference to the Nazis' plan for systemic genocide- I had hopes that this book would be an expansion of that idea. It wasn't, but it was still pretty good.

1. The Seven Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer: (1974) Doyle tried to kill off Holmes in "The Final Problem" in 1893 but public outcry forced a resurrection ten years later. This pastiche story posits that during "The Great Hiatus" (as it is known among Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts and scholars) Holmes descended into madness fueled by his addiction to the then-legal drug of cocaine, and grew to believe that his former math tutor, one Professor Moriarty, was a criminal mastermind. The great detective became a danger to himself and others, leading Watson and Holmes's brother Mycroft to place Sherlock in the care of noted psychotherapist (and former cocaine addict) Sigmund Freud. Half of this novel concerns Holmes's detox and rehab, and the other half concerns Holmes, Watson and Freud on an adventure that (temporarily) prevents World War I. Meyer wrote two more Holmes novels- The West End Horror and The Canary Trainer (one of the worst books I've ever read)- but neither of them approached the cleverness and quality of this one.

Next Year? FIFTEEN Best Picture Nominees! Who's With Me?!

2010-03-08T09:06:00.007-05:00

The Oscars were last night. I had a great time watching them over at Courtney's, and decided after reading all the Twitter coverage of them to offer my own thoughts.

Pre-Show: Kathy Ireland was working the red carpet for ABC and spoke to Miley Cyrus, saying something to the effect of "Miley, you've mastered comedy." Also, Sherri Shepherd referred to Taylor Lautner from those Twilight movies as the most famous movie werewolf in history. Dear Kathy Ireland and Sherri Shepherd: you are both idiots.

Hosts: Neil Patrick Harris, star of the embarassing man-crush Top 5 Tuesdays! I'll never write, did the opening musical number, presumably because Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin cannot sing. I don't really like NPH's voice, but I like that he sings, if that makes any sense. Martin, one of my heroes, and Baldwin, whose character Jack Donaghy is also one of my heroes, were perfectly acceptable as hosts.

Presenters: Elizabeth Banks presented the Science & Technical Awards and delivered her scripted jokes like she didn't know they were jokes, Tina Fey and Robert Downey Jr. presented the screenplay awards and made me wish they were in a movie together, Robin Williams presented Best Supporting Actress because last year's Best Supporting Actor, sadly, couldn't, and the microphone they gave Zoe Saldana and Carey Mulligan to present the short film awards they presented was way too short.... oh, wait, nevermind, I just got it. That's hilarious.

Best Supporting Actor- Christoph Waltz as Colonel Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds: I like everyone who nominated in this category- Woody Harrelson, Christopher Plummer, Stanley Tucci and Matt Damon- but this was a well-deserved award, to the point where I would have been angry if any of those other guys had won (even though I think Tom Waits should have been nominated for The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus; I am, however, admittedly biased about that). Waltz was the most compelling actor in this movie, and I kind of hope that now he gets a little more face time in the advertising for video releases and such; it's high time everyone stopped pretending that Inglourious Basterds is about Brad Pitt.

Best Supporting Actress- Mo'Nique as Mary Lee Johnston* in Precious: I didn't see Precious. I never will. I refuse. Everything I've read about it tells me that is nothing but relentlessly bleak poverty porn, and I have no interest in it. I'm sure Mo'Nique was good and all, and that's great, and she gave a nice speech, but still. The only performance I'd seen in this category was Maggie Gyllenhaal in Crazy Heart, in which she was entirely acceptable, so I can't really comment on the rest of the field.

Best Animated Feature- Up: There was zero suspense in this category. Up was nominated for Best Picture. The other Best Animated Feature nominess- Coraline (which was awful), The Fantastic Mister Fox, The Princess & the Frog and The Secret of Kells- were not. Therefore, logic dictates that Up must be the superior film. Why even bother with the other four nominations?

Best Documentary Feature- The Cove: It's like my grandfather always said. He said, "Kid, if you want to save dolphins and stuff, get Fisher Stevens to produce a documentary for you." Granddad always had really specific aphorisms, but he was spot on with most of 'em.

Best Original Song- "The Weary Kind" from Crazy Heart, by Ryan Bingham and T-Bone Burnett: I'm sorry, but this wasn't even the best song in the movie (the best song in the movie is "I Don't Know," if only for the lyric, "I could write a book about what I don't know."). But it was central to the plot of the film, so I guess that makes it better or something, I don't know**.

Best Original Screenplay- Mark Boal for The Hurt Locker: This is when I realized that, after Christoph Waltz, my favorite movie of 2009, Inglourious Basterds, would be getting passed over for the rest of the night. I really liked The Hurt Locker, don't get me wrong. But man, I loved Inglourious Basterds

Best Adapted Screenplay- Geoffrey Fletcher for Precious: Didn't see Precious, am not going to (see above) but now I might try and find a copy of the script. I enjoy reading screenplays, and apparently Geoffrey Fletcher is from New York and shops at Jim Hanley's Universe, which A) is awesome and B) explains why there was a huge poster for Precious up at the store for months last year.

Best Actor- Jeff Bridges as "Bad" Blake in Crazy Heart: I read somewhere this weekend that one of the major storylines of any Academy Awards ceremony is "It's Time," in which a venerable, oft-nominated actor finally gets a win, and while that's definitely what this was, I don't imagine that's all this was. He was great in this movie. And he gave a heck of a speech that no one would have dared play him off early in.
Quick aside: Jeremy Renner was nominated for The Hurt Locker and was introduced/praised by Colin Farrell, with whom he co-starred in the movie SWAT. While he was talking about Renner, a still image of the two of them in SWAT appeared on the screen behind them. Now, I really like the movie SWAT, but it is pure ridiculous action-movie twaddle, and I will bet all the money in my pockets against all the money in your pockets that this is the first, last, and only time anything from it will be shown on an Oscar telecast.***

Best Actress- Sandra Bullock as Lee Ann Tuohy in The Blind Side: I was talking with my mom about this this morning and she said that she's always thought Sandra Bullock was "good" in anything she'd seen her in, and it's nice that she won. Which I guess is true, so this might also qualify as an "It's Time" kind of thing, but it's not like Sandra Bullock got passed over for a lot of stuff in the past. I mean, Miss Congeniality isn't exactly Oscar bait. I'm not saying she shouldn't have won- I didn't see any of the movies that the nominated actresses were in- and I think it's nice that she did, I'm just not sure that it's the long-awaited payoff that it's been sort of pushed as.

Best Director- Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker: I really liked The Hurt Locker and Kathryn Bigelow also directed one of my favorite movies ever, Point Break (talk about action movie twaddle), and apparently no woman has ever won Best Director, so this is probably one of those "It's Time" things too. Bigelow definitely deserved this one over her ex-husband James Cameron, but I don't know if she deserved it over Quentin Tarantino. But I'll get over it.

Best Picture- The Hurt Locker: Of the five Best Picture nominees I actually saw (this, Avatar, Inglorious Basterds, Up and the inexplicable nominee District 9), I was really, really pulling for this one... to come in second to Inglourious Basterds. Oh well. At least it wasn't Avatar, which I enjoyed well enough, but wasn't anything to write home about.

Annnnnnd, done. See you next year, when my predicted favorite movie of 2010- Iron Man 2- will get no "serious" nominations and I'll grumble about how, I dunno, the Coen Brothers remake of True Grit or the Aaron Sorkin/David Fincher Facebook movie were really, really good, but not Iron Man 2 good.

* Wait, what? Her character was named Johnston? What the frak?
** See what I did there?
*** That quick aside was longer than the rest of my comments. Oops.

Five Years.... God Help Me...

2010-03-07T08:24:00.003-05:00

In celebration of my impending five year anniversary at The Insurance Mines, Liquid America is proud to present the twenty-five most important things I’ve learned about the business world in that time.

Corporate Guideline #1: Long-term, the glue on Post-It notes is effectively worthless.

Corporate Guideline #2: Having “off-the-record” conversations on a speakerphone is just stupid.

Corporate Guideline #3: A man’s desk may contain, at most, a maximum of ¼ of the decorations of his nearest female colleague’s desk. (Corollary to #3: Unless said man is openly gay.)

Corporate Guideline #4: The importance of a meeting is inversely proportionate to how long it has been scheduled ahead of time.

Corporate Guideline #5: Delete nothing.

Corporate Guideline #6: If you liked it, they wouldn’t have to pay you, now would they?

Corporate Guideline #7: Can’t skip: holiday party, dept. head’s birthday, immediate supervisor’s birthday. Can skip: everything else.

Corporate Guideline #8: Do NOT warn newly hired trainees about what they’re getting into. After all, nobody warned you.

Corporate Guideline #9: Until proven false, assume all rumors about why someone was recently fired are true; adjust behavior accordingly.

Corporate Guideline #10: Best pens, in ascending order: ballpoint, felt tip, gel.

Corporate Guideline #11: Best paper fasteners, in descending order: binder clips, paper clips, staples.

Corporate Guideline #12: Best highlighter colors, in ascending order: blue, pink, green, yellow.

Corporate Guideline #13: If you must admit your shortcomings, be prepared with an action plan to correct them, often a fake one. (From Devon) (Corollary to #13: Ideally, this plan should directly endanger someone else’s job. This will show that you “mean business.”)

Corporate Guideline #14: If you spend your lunch hour at your desk, you cannot get mad about people bothering you.

Corporate Guideline #15: If a co-worker is eating a sandwich at their desk while reading the newspaper and listening to an iPod at around noon, leave them be.

Corporate Guideline #16: Don’t mention your company by name on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc, unless you actively want to get fired.

Corporate Guideline #17: Exhibit a basic knowledge of how to work Microsoft Office to anyone over 60 and they will think you’re a wizard.

Corporate Guideline #18: There is no one who cannot be justifiably fired after a quick perusal of their browser history.

Corporate Guideline #19: If your company had any interest in going paperless, it would’ve happened already. Don’t waste your time.

Corporate Guideline #20: When planning ethical violations, do not shout one's cover story

Corporate Guideline #21: If you get someone hired, you are ultimately responsible for everything they do, for better or for worse.

Corporate Guideline #22: Some of your coworkers will complain about management even when management does nice things for the employees. Do your best to ignore this.

Corporate Guideline #23: That juice in the fridge is not communal juice and you damn well know it.

Corporate Guideline #24: Dress codes are stricter for men than they are for women.

Corporate Guideline #25: Whenever possible, blame difficulties on an absent supervisor or a present subordinate.

Top 5 Tuesdays! # 27- My Brother In Law's Right; This Island Needs A Parking Garage

2010-03-02T09:50:00.002-05:00

One of my neighbors rents a room to a college student. This college student drives a white SUV with California plates and frequently parks in front of my house, in a spot that I have come to consider "mine." In the best of times, this annoys me. When I got home last night and found him there, in the spot I spent an hour and a half digging out after the snowstorm on Friday, I was livid. What follows are the five things I considered doing, but did not do, to the automobile in question...

5.) Double park there overnight, blocking him in.

4.) Leave a note to the effect of "Hey asshole, learn snow etiquette or go back to California. Love, The Guy Who Spent All Afternoon Digging This Spot Out on Friday."

3.) Draining the air from his tires. All of them.

2.) The ol' "banana in the tailpipe" gag.

1.) Going inside, changing into dark clothes and gloves, getting some tools, removing his license plates, and dropping them down the nearest convenient sewer.

Instead I went inside, had a glass of milk, and went to sleep.

This Week's Top 5 Tuesdays Will Be Pre-Empted by The Olympics

2010-02-23T20:22:00.004-05:00

Also because I didn't write one.

In lieu of that, however, I present a new link added to Liquid America, specifically to an avant-garde webcomic/photoblog entitled Darren Died Tonight, by a man who I barely know on most levels but feel rather close to on others, "The Reverend" Brandon L. Keene. The Rev and I first met sometime back in 2005(-ish) when I traveled with The Brothers Cocozza down to Sarasota to visit Devon at New College. Devo, Tom, Vin and I made our way over Brandon's apartment on our last night there, and hung out in his yard with a little blond math genius and a guy named Bryce. It was a very weird evening, and I am reasonably certain that Brandon doesn't remember it.

The Rev and I became reacquainted in Ought-Eight, when I spent a week in Portland. Shortly after my flight landed Devon took me to a restaurant called The Cricket. Brandon met us there and we complimented each other's hats. Later on that week we bonded over a mutual love of Doctor Who and the songs of Jim Steinman. A few months after that I started a Twitter account and we began following each other. A few months after THAT I had a brief, late-night breakdown that Keene offered helpful advice on via the Interwebs. Late last year, he sent me a very encouraging Facebook message, out of the clear blue, essentially encouraging me to get working harder on my writing. In that message, he made the first mention (to me at least) of his upcoming project, Darren Died Tonight.

Last week Tom and I were talking about comics (I know, I know; try to contain your shock) and specifically we were talking about Grant Morrison, and how it's difficult to rip off his style since Morrison's entire thing is that he writes stories that make no sense at all, but does so with such style and energy that it doesn't matter. Tom put it like this: "You usually get the idea that behind all the confusion is someone who is blazingly intelligent," an apt description of Morrison's work, and a dead-on assessment of Darren Died Tonight. I'm not going to say I entirely understand it, but I do enjoy it.

Give it a look. Just... not at work. It's hosted on a website called "Erotisphere.com," a guide to the various adult entertainment venues in Portland, OR, maintained by Devo's housemate Drew, who was kind enough to let me sleep on his couch for a week a few years back.

Enjoy

“Valentine, the Destroyer, Valentine, Move Along…”

2010-02-22T12:53:00.003-05:00

Valentine’s Day is not a movie I would have seen six months ago. I was not then part of its target audience. But since then many things have changed in my life, and now I am part of its target audience, because Valentine’s Day is a movie aimed squarely and completely at people like the kind of person I am now. I am, of course, referring to the key “people with beards” demographic.

But seriously, folks, Valentine’s Day is a movie for people in relationships. No single man or woman should go to see this movie. I can’t imagine any single man or woman would want to; they would instead go see The Wolfman or Avatar or something. But I’ve already seen Avatar, I don’t want to see The Wolfman, and I have a girlfriend now- the wonderful Courtney, whose beauty is eclipsed only by her preternatural skill at Wii Baseball- so on Monday evening, it was off the Pavilion Theater in Park Slope we went for a 7:20-ish showing.

To try and summarize the plot of this movie would be an exercise in futility, as there is no plot per se. Instead there’s, like, seven plots. It seemed to me that director Garry Marshall grabbed half a dozen mediocre romantic comedy scripts, gave them to an assistant, said “Cut out all the slow, crappy parts,” then called everyone he could think of and said, “Hey, come be in this movie.” Then they did, because Garry Marshall made Pretty Woman and created Happy Days, so you pretty much have to do what he says.

There’s sort of something in here for everyone- for older couples there’s the Hector Elizondo/Shirley MacLaine plotline, for younger couples there’s the Topher Grace/Anne Hathaway plotline, for teenagers there’s the plotline with Emma Roberts and The One Person In The Movie Who Isn’t Even Remotely Famous, and so on. Jamie Foxx and Jessica Biel and Queen Latifah float around in the background of these various plots, not really getting involved at all, and the movie constantly cuts back to Bradley Cooper and Julia Roberts as strangers on an airplane whose purposes in the film are kept secret, with varying degrees of success (I figured out Julia Roberts’s role about halfway through; Bradley Cooper had me puzzled until literally the last five minutes of the movie).

It’s also worth noting that there are a lot of Oscar winners floating around this picture. Between Julia Roberts, Jamie Foxx, Kathy Bates (who appears so briefly I keep forgetting she was even in it) and Shirley MacLaine, there’s four Oscar winners, plus a number of nominees. It’s like the Con Air of inoffensive romantic comedies.

I didn’t love the movie, but I liked it a lot more than I expected to, except for one thing. And now, the spoiler warning.

SPOILER WARNING: I am now going to discuss specifics of the plot. If you have any intention of seeing this movie, stop reading.

Eric Dane, one of two Grey’s Anatomy cast members in this movie (Patrick Dempsey shows up too), plays an aging professional football player, a quarterback, named Sean Jackson. Jackson spends most of the movie moping around because his significant other has left him for reasons unknown. He is involved in a minor car accident with George Lopez (who’s also in the movie, as the best friend/partner of a florist played by Ashton Kutcher), who offers some unintentional wisdom about love only working when it is obvious to everyone. His management team- Jessica Biel as his publicist and Queen Latifah as his agent- tell him that his current team has let him go and he is now a free agent, so he calls a press conference. The media arrives expecting him to announce his retirement, but instead he talks about how football has damaged his ability to live his life the way he wants, and deprived him of having a family. Then he announces that he’s gay. People are shocked and amazed, and Jamie Foxx (as a sports reporter) asks if he intends to retire, and he insists that he does not. The character and the plotline then, more or less, completely vanish for the rest of the movie, until the final few minutes in which Jackson’s boyfriend returns, having seen the press conference, and they have a tender and completely non-graphic reunion.

This was the most bothersome part of the movie for me. Not because I have a problem with a depiction of a same-sex relationship, but because it was by far the most original and interesting of the myriad plots, but was given the least amount of screen time. Everything else was a variation on something we’ve seen a thousand times in romantic comedies before- the best friends who don’t realize they’re perfect for each other, the girl who’s hiding an embarrassing secret from her new boyfriend, the teenagers who are hilariously prevented from getting laid- but a football star whose relationship is in shambles because he won’t come out of the closet? That’s a new one on me. Garry Marshall and his cast of thousands had a fresh, interesting story on their hands but for whatever reason they decided to bury it under a pile of shopworn clichés (fairly entertaining clichés, admittedly, but clichés nonetheless), probably because you don’t unseat Avatar at the box office with a movie about gay football players. But they didn’t even try, and that kind of irks me.

Otherwise, though, Valentine’s Day was a generally enjoyable little rom-com, which is not something I could have seen myself admitting six months ago. Next February, when it will inevitably be in heavy rotation on TBS, it’s worth a look.

DVD Purchase: It’ll probably be out in time for our one year anniversary, and Courtney liked it a lot more than I did, so maybe.

Just Over A Month To Go!

2010-02-21T08:28:00.004-05:00

A while back I wrote this post about- well, partially about- Marcus Thames, a generally unremarkable but solid baseball player who was the key figure in my favorite baseball moment ever. I just learned (via The Onion, of all places) that Thames is returning to the Yankees organization for the 2010 season, as one of the three outfielders the Yanks have acquired to equal one Johnny Damon. So that's pretty great, even though he may not even make the major league roster.

More Sports I Prefer to Basketball

2010-02-17T20:26:00.006-05:00

While I don't like either the Winter or the Summer Olympics, for reasons perhaps best expressed by Chuck Klosterman in this article, I think I prefer the Winter Games. I think the reasons for this are twofold.

First, I feel like the interesting events in the Summer Games are not given sufficient coverage. I never see fencing on TV, or the hammer throw, or the javelin, or any of that weird track and field stuff. They show running and swimming, which in my opinion isn't even sports. That's training. They also show an unbelievable amount of gymnastics, which I think is dumb. But, for the last ten minutes, I've been watching snowboarding, and I'm almost interested. If nothing else, at least these people are dressed in wacky pants, and also in almost every Winter Olympic event, there is the strong possibility that someone is going to crash into a huge pile of snow, which would be a shame, but damn good television.

Second, the Summer Olympics take place in... wait for it... the summer, during which all of my sports attention is focused on Major League Baseball. The Winter Olympics start right after the Super Bowl and wrap up right before spring training really begins in earnest. They happen in my personal negative zone of professional athletics, one in which my attention is not otherwise divided. If they took place during weeks four, five and six of the NFL season, I'd probably be incredibly pissed off that I was watching speed skating right now.

Top 5 Tuesdays! #26- Cancelled Comics Cavalcade!

2010-02-16T23:06:00.005-05:00

It's almost midnight and I just got back from a great staycation with Courtney in sunny Brooklyn. I've been neglecting Liquid America a bit, so let's try a quasi-follow-up to last week's post and talk about my favorite cancelled comics.

5. The Order by Matt Fraction and Barry Kitson: You know, I remember I loved this book, but it ran for so little time that I honestly can't remember why. A trip down to the basement archives may be in order. (10 issues)

4. The Thing by Dan Slott and Andrea DiVito: I miss this book for no other reason that one day at Jim Hanley's, writer Dan Slott, an all-around friendly and cool dude, told me and Tom about what would have happened in the second eight issue arc, had he been allowed to write it. It would have been the most daring thing anyone had even done with The Thing, in my opinion, and it's a shame that I was like the only person who bought this book. (8 issues)

3. Captain Britain & MI: 13 by Paul Cornell and Leonard Kirk: Somehow people did not buy a book about a superhero team featuring a parallel universe Captain America, a Muslim nurse who wields Excalibur, a secret agent who throws fire, a guy who wears a Union Jack for clothes, and a shapeshifting alien who made himself look like John Lennon. Not even fighting Dracula on the moon could save this book. (15 issues)

2. All-Star Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder by Frank Miller and Jim Lee: I actually don't know if this was cancelled officially or not. It hasn't come out in over a year. A lot of people hated this book because it featured Batman using profanity and utilizing extreme brutality, but it's a logical intrapolation (the opposite of extrapolation; also a word I may well have made up) of the Batman depicted in Miller's classic The Dark Knight Returns. They also disliked that it came out infrequently, but quite honestly if a writer like Frank Miller and an artist like Jim Lee feel like putting out three comics a year, then that's fine by me. (10 issues, so far)

1. Nextwave by Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen: There is something double-plus super postmodern about Marvel doing a comic that parodies The Authority, written by the mad genius who created The Authority. Also, the 5th issue had a variant edition that was completely uncolored, and a contest to see who could color it best. I miss this book like it was a dead relative. Not, like, a particularly close relative, but still. (12 issues)

Top 5 Tuesdays! #25- Independents Day

2010-02-09T12:50:00.008-05:00

This week's Top 5 Tuesdays! is going to be a very niche entry, as it consists of a list of my five favorite comic books not published by either Marvel Comics, DC Comics or any subsidiaries (Marvel MAX, Icon, Vertigo, Wildstorm, etc.) thereof. I have limited myself to books that are still currently being published, which is why stuff like the Image run of Powers or Oni's Barry Ween: Boy Genius doesn't show up here.

5.) Atomic Robo by Brian Clevinger & Scott Wegeman (published by Red 5 Comics): This series is like Hellboy, but with a robot and a better sense of humor (which, admittedly, Hellboy had in spades at the start, but it has since gotten depressingly serious about itself).

4.) Irredeemable by Mark Waid & Peter Krause (published by Boom! Studios): Mark Waid wrote the greatest comic book fight scene ever (in Kingdom Come), but comics being what they are- a character/property-based business that supports an art form - he could never tell the story of "What if Superman became evil?" and have it truly count. So he worked around it by creating Irredeemable, the tale of a world in which a decidely Superman-esque hero known as The Plutonian loses his mind and becomes the greatest threat the world has ever known, murdering people by the hundreds and hounding his former allies as they struggle in vain to stop his rampage. What sounded initially like a three or four issue premise has been growing strong for a year, and now has an almost-as-good spinoff (Incorruptible) under its belt.

3.) Casanova by Matt Fraction & Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon (published by Image Comics): Tom and I have a running quasi-disagreement about writer Matt Fraction. Tom thinks he's a good writer who writes boring stories, and I just think he's a good writer. I should probably lend him Casanova, which is an example of what I like to call "pure comics"- balls out ridiculous action weirdness (in the first few issues, the hero kidnaps a robot before being captured by an international peacekeeping force, then wins a staring contest against a floating three-headed monster in a casino before shooting his way out and traveling through time; oh, and the casino is on a UFO)- but we'd probably still disagree.

2.) Invincible by Robert Kirkman & Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley (published by Image Comics): Here's what's great about Invincible, maybe th best superhero comic of the last ten years. There was this subplot about two supporting characters- Omni-Man and Allen the Alien- escaping a Viltrumite prison. It happened over the course of, like, four pages. If Invincible was published by Marvel or DC, there would have been a three issue miniseries about it, and it would have been delayed forever and taken six months. It's like reading an entire line of comics in one book. Everything I've read about Robert Kirkman makes me think he's probably kind of a jerk, but the guy wrote an entire summer crossover event- "The Invincible War"- into one reasonably priced issue, and that's pretty awesome.

1.) The Goon by Eric Powell (published by Dark Horse Comics): When all is said and done on this book, it might actually be my favorite comic book series of all time. I can't think of any book that, in so relatively short a number of issues (33 issues, a few one-shots, and one long-form graphic novel), has scared me, made me laugh, made me cry, made me disgusted and made me once, literally, pump my fist in celebration. It has nothing even resembling a steady release schedule, but it's so good that I can't even care.

EDIT: All that stuff I said that happened in the first few issues of Casanova actually happens in the first issue. Kidnapped robot. UFO casino. Three-headed monster staring contest. One issue. Pa-zow!

Return of the Random Thought

2010-02-04T13:37:00.005-05:00

If I'd known that after the Republicans lost the White House, no one whose politics differ from mine would have held their tongue and accepted, however begrudgingly, the political reality with which they were faced, I wouldn't have done so either over the last eight years.

Or, to be more specific about it, If I'd have even a vague inkling of how unbelievably whiney, loud, petulant, angry, and condescending conservatives in this country (particularly the ones with whom I work and to whom I am related) would have been about Obama, I would have not missed a single opportunity over the course of 2000 - 2008 to point out that George W. Bush was a warmongering, reactionary, bigoted redneck half-wit whose success in politics was predicated entirely on his last name, and I would have probably also added that he couldn't string two coherent English sentences together to save his life, lacked even a basic understanding of the nation's economic realities, and, while I'm at it, pretty much stole the 2000 election in the first place.

Just saying.

Top 5 Tuesdays! # 24- And Then We Came to the End...

2010-02-02T20:51:00.004-05:00

I just realized I forgot to do T5T! this week, and the season premiere of Lost is on in eight minutes, so I figure I'll bang one out about what I'm hoping for from the final season of the show:

5. At least one episode where they tease that the whole mess has been a dream, then take it back by the end of the episode.

4. A Desmond/Sayid fight. A misunderstanding brawl kind of thing, like when Captain America meets Batman.

3. Yet a third John Locke.

2. Sawyer to keep his shirt on for an entire episode.

1. The male leads on the show to move on after finally realizing that Kate is wildly unlikable.

Finished that just in time. Good for me.

EDIT/SPOILER WARNING: Sweet mojambo, I actually kind of got #3 in the first episode of the season.

Oh, Like You DON'T Wish You Wrote For "The Onion"...

2010-02-01T13:36:00.004-05:00

Local Man Pleased With New "Last-45-Minutes-Of-A-Movie" Channel

STATEN ISLAND, NY- Local insurance worker Brendan Johnston, 28, was thoroughly pleased this weekend with his free trial of new cable channel HBO45, which airs nothing but the final forty-five minutes of films.

"I caught the tail end of Leatherheads, that football movie with [George] Clooney and Jim from The Office [John Krasinski], which was pretty good," Johnston told reporters earlier today. "I'd been wanting to see it for a while but now I know how ends, so I can finally take it off my Netflix queue." Later that day, Johnston watched the final quarter-hour of Clear and Present Danger, a film he has seen half a dozen times before.

"It worked out great because that movie doesn't really pick up until the last half hour or so," he commented. "And I wouldn't have time to watch the whole thing anyway, I had to get over to Joe's for six."

Additionally, before going to bed, Johnston viewed HBO45's daily airing of "Rocky Balboa," grateful that the channel's commitment to only broadcasting the most interesting third of a movie allowed him to bypass all the crap about the restaurant.

HBO45, which airs the third acts of older films as well as the last few reels of contemporary hits, is just part of the sample package of channels and features currently being offered by Verizon FiOS. Also included is Showtime's "That One With That Guy" channel, which offers descriptions of movies in the viewing guide rather than actual program titles, and the "Insta-Flip" option, which automatically switches the TV to The History Channel during commercial breaks in sporting events.

"Honestly, I think we're going to have to sign up for that one permanently," Johnston said. "Dad can't get enough of it."

At press time Johnston was "really looking forward" to Tuesday's 8:00-8:45 airing of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, since even though he no real interest in the film, it will "give (him) something to do before Lost starts."

"The Angel Rides With Hunchbacked Children, Poison Oozing From His Engine..."

2010-01-31T15:52:00.004-05:00

There is a technique in dramatic writing known as “Chekhov’s gun.” It is named after the Russian playwright/author/doctor/starship pilot Anton Chekhov, who famously elucidated it in various ways; the first phrasing of it that I ever heard, and the one that sticks with me, was “If you write that a rifle is hanging on the wall in Act One, it must be fired by Act Three; otherwise, don’t have it there.” Or, in other words, there should not be unnecessary elements to a story. This is sort of like foreshadowing, but not really.

Now that I’ve hung that gun on the wall, so to speak, on to Legion. From the moment I saw the trailer for this movie, I knew that my going to see it was inevitable. Not because it looked like it was going to be a good movie, because it certainly didn’t (and wasn’t), but because it looked like it was going to be an entertainingly terrible movie (which it was). I’m a big fan of crap movies as long as they don’t take themselves terribly seriously and clock in at under two hours. Legion looked like it was going to fit squarely into this category, and had the added bonus of looking like it would also fall into the highly specific subgenre- highly derivative action movies with a science-fiction/fantasy element- of which I am a big fan. Other movies in this category include Equilibrium (which was basically The Matrix/1984/Fahrenheit 451), Gamer (The Running Man/Surviving the Game/Rollerball) and The Chronicles of Riddick (Space Macbeth)*, and probably many, many others that I haven’t gotten around to seeing. Based on the trailer, Legion looked like it would fall into that category, and that it did. It was Terminator 2/The Prophecy/From Dusk Till Dawn. Angels come to destroy mankind because God said so, but a good angel (Paul Bettany) decides to save them by holing up in a dive eatery in the middle of the desert with a racially diverse group of survivors. Gunplay and explosions ensue.

Let me be entirely clear: Legion is not a good movie in any traditional sense. I enjoyed it, but I also enjoy Super Mario Brothers. It’s a B-movie, a low-grade, relatively short, intellectually undemanding piece of schlock that would have been a Sci-Fi Channel Original** if only they’d had a little less money. I don’t know what good actors like Paul Bettany and Dennis Quaid are doing here when they could be out auditioning for the role of The Riddler*** or making Innerspace 2. It’s such a B-movie, in fact, that I spent most of the movie thinking that the quasi-famous members of the cast (Kate Walsh, Lucas Black, Tyrese Gibson and Jon Tenney) were in fact no-name actors who’d been hired because they looked like Kate Walsh, Lucas Black, Tyrese Gibson and Jon Tenney. The movie’s so bad it makes people not look like themselves. There are several scenes of child endangerment that are legitimately terrifying, but not in an entertaining way; in a “wow, this seems kind of cheap and exploitive” kind of way. The obvious finale, setting up for a sequel that if produced will likely go straight to DVD, is annoying but I expect nothing less from any movie these days that isn’t a straight Oscar-bait drama.

However, don’t get me wrong: I liked it. I’d watch it again, if it was on TV and I didn’t feel like thinking for a little while. It’s not the kind of movie you watch to be blown away by the performances or the story or the effects, it’s the kind of movie you watch because you want to see some shit blow up, and on that count it delivers. There are some bright spots. Paul Bettany’s pretty cool in it as the archangel Michael and I think they used up most of their effects budget on Kevin Durand’s bulletproof razor wings (he plays the angel Gabriel), but it was worth it. And, believe it or not, Legion has a very technically sound screenplay.

Hear me out.

(NOTE: At this point the review of Legion briefly turns into a discussion of the movie Avatar, containing mild spoilers for both films. You’ve been warned.)

On Boxing Day, after giving gifts to all my servants and household staff, Courtney and I went to see James Cameron’s much-hyped Avatar. I had been reluctant to see this movie for a while because I felt I would absolutely hate it, but this turned out to not be the case. I didn’t love it, I didn’t think it was the greatest movie ever made, it didn’t give me clinical depression because I don’t get to live on Pandora****, but I liked it well enough. However, after it was done, Courtney and I both had one big problem with it, specifically this: near the end of the movie, when the peace-loving space Indians (the Na’vi) are about to be invaded by the evil human mercenaries (not American military, no matter what conservatives want you to think about the movie), they send emissaries to all the other tribes of the Na’vi to call for backup. Okay, fine, understandable, right? Well it would be, if there had been any indication whatsoever earlier in the film that there were, in fact, other tribes of Na’vi. The only group of giant blue aliens we’d been shown until that point were the ones who lived around the big tree that sat atop the big deposit of McGuffin ore. They were the only ones that the evil mining corporation, or the movie, cared about. Three huge groups of backup aliens came out of the clear blue sky to help out our heroes.

Now, maybe it’s unreasonable to assume that an entire planet on which intelligent live has evolved only has a small, extremely localized population of it. Maybe the part where they talked about the other tribes got cut out of the movie. Maybe I should have just assumed there’d be more Na’vi than just the ones who lived in the big tree. But I didn’t, and I’ll bet a lot of other people didn’t either. I’ll also bet that most of them didn’t really care, but I did. It bothered me that Cameron didn’t hang those other tribes on the wall in Act One so he could “fire” them in Act Three.

How, you may ask, does this relate back to Legion? Like this: when the audience is first introduced to the employees and patrons of the diner that will soon be attacked by evil angel zombie guys, Dennis Quaid (the grizzled, alcoholic owner-operator of the place) is trying to fix an old TV that is (literally) hanging on the wall. It’s playing a fuzzy airing of It’s a Wonderful Life (which features a wing-less angel, wocka wocka) and he spends several minutes adjusting the antennae and whacking it and cursing at it to work. Nothing more is said about it after the crisis starts and Michael arrives to save the people in the diner (well, some of them). After some gunplay and explosions, the angel Gabriel arrives to take care of business personally, and he and Michael fight in the diner. Michael is at a disadvantage since he cut off his wings, but is still extremely strong, and at one point in the fight, rips the TV down from the wall and clobbers Gabriel with it, which (briefly) gives him the upper hand.

Now, am I saying that this makes Legion a better movie than Avatar? No, of course not. Are the guys who wrote and directed it (Scott Stewart & Peter Schink) more skilled filmmakers than James Cameron? Not until they make something as good as Aliens, they’re not. But they hung Chekhov’s TV on the wall in Act One, so the bad guy could get cracked in the mouth with it in Act Three, and that means a lot to a moviegoer like me. Sometimes it’s the little things.

DVD Purchase: Definite. In about four years, when I go to Best Buy some Tuesday night in October to pick up the 6-disc special edition Blu-Ray I pre-ordered of the Avengers movie and see that Legion is available on DVD for seven bucks.

* I actually hate this movie, but it’s still Space Macbeth.
** I will call it SyFy when hell freezes over.
*** I actually want David Tennant to play The Riddler, but I realize this is probably a delusional fantasy that will never come to pass.
**** This has actually happened to people.

Top 5 Tuesdays! #23- Hey, Sportsfans

2010-01-26T08:29:00.004-05:00

Now that the Jets are out of the playoffs, the Giants were never in them, the Yankees and Mets are still about a month away from having pitchers and catchers report to spring training, and the Rangers and the Knicks play sports I don't care about (and do so terribly, at that), I am facing a few weeks of not caring about any active sports teams. So, for this week's Top 5 Tuesdays! I will be listing my five favorite non-New York based sports teams.

5. The Montreal Canadiens: Here in New York our two baseball teams are "The New York People from the North" in the American League and "The New York People Who Live In Cities" in the National League. The Canadiens have embrace this tradition of having your team name not be intimidating or cool, but just really, really descriptive.

4. The Phoenix Suns: Because it must be hard to be literally the only team in their particular division of the NBA's Western Conference that isn't based in California, and also because Chuck Klosterman wrote an article about Steve Nash once and he seems like an interesting dude.

3. The Indianapolis Colts: I know they just beat the Jets in the playoffs, but I'm a Giants fan, so I don't really care about that. They're a better team than the Jets as far as I can tell, with a better quarterback (probably the best quarterback in the league) in Peyton Manning, and, also, the last time they won the Super Bowl, the Giants won the next year, and I am nothing if not superstitious when it comes to sports. So, with apologies to Tom, Vin, Lincoln, my uncles and the people of New Orleans, let's go Colts! (By which I really mean "Let's go, older brother of my team's quarterback! Inspire some greatness-sparking sibling jealousy in Eli!")

2. The Los Angeles Dodgers: I root for the Dodgers for the admittedly irrational reason that I want them to win the National League pennant and face the Yankees in the World Series. The Yankees against Joe Torre and Manny Ramirez in the Fall Classic would be downright Shakespearean.

1. Whatever Team Beats the Red Sox: In any game, at any point during Major League Baseball's preseason, regular season, or postseason. Seriously.

Random Thought

2010-01-25T12:03:00.000-05:00

I dislike the current Hollywood obsession with remakes, but nevertheless I think someone ought to remake King Kong. I know, I know, Peter Jackson just remade it a few years ago and it was idiotic, but I’m saying someone should do it in a contemporary setting. With the advent of things like viral video and reality television and terrorism paranoia, a story about a documentary crew that kidnaps a giant monster for entertainment purposes and then the monster escapes and goes on a rampage through Manhattan could be done in a really interesting way, I think. It could be like Cloverfield, only less vague about what’s going on and with a highly marketable gorilla instead of a weird, quasi-Lovecraftian spider-thing that isn’t clearly visible till the last ten minutes and doesn’t even have a name.

“Take a Woman Like You, To Get Through, To the Man in Me”

2010-01-22T12:54:00.002-05:00

Last Sunday, at around 5 pm, Courtney and I decided that the next day, she and I would go see a 5:30 screening of Crazy Heart at the Angelika Theater on Houston Street. Around six hours later, Jeff Bridges won a Golden Globe award for his role in Crazy Heart. As a result, between then and 5:30 on Monday, everyone else in Manhattan also decided to go see Crazy Heart at 5:30 at the Angelika. I seriously haven’t seen a theater that crowded for something that wasn’t a summer blockbuster’s opening night ever. We got there with time to spare and still had to sit in the antepenultimate row of the small theater (which, as it happened, was the same theater where we’d seen Whatever Works on our first date some five-plus months ago) and by the time the opening credits started we were sharing the three-seat row with a middle-aged man who ate rather noisily throughout the film.

None of this, however, detracted from our enjoyment of Crazy Heart, which was very good. The story was not complex: Jeff Bridges plays Bad Blake, a once-famous, now down-on-his-luck country singer, bitter at life, who finds redemption in his relationship with a single mother (Maggie Gyllenhaal), fucks it all up, and has to decide where to go from there. If this all sounds familiar, it’s because basically the exact same thing happened in The Wrestler, but Crazy Heart has a more satisfying ending and more (if not necessarily better) music.*

On that subject, as Courtney pointed out afterward, there was a lot of music in this movie, moreso than you usually in a movie about musicians (fictional or otherwise). You don’t usually get a lot of straight performance scenes. There’s a lot of them in That Thing You Do! but those scenes mostly involve plot or character development; you only see The Oneders just get up there and sing maybe twice. I don’t think Stillwater performs a full song in Almost Famous, and I don’t remember a whole lot of performance scenes in Ray or Walk the Line. But in Crazy Heart, Jeff Bridges is almost constantly singing and playing the guitar, and most of the time, that’s all there is to it. There’s not a whole lot of acting involved. The music is good- the “theme” to the movie, “The Weary Kind” won a Golden Globe and will probably get nominated for an Oscar- as far as country songs go (I like country music in theory; in practice, though, I think I just like Johnny Cash), it was just surprising at how much of it there was, and there’s something to be said for the fact that the actors did their own singing.

Anyway, comparisons to The Wrestler are inevitable for this movie, and in addition to having a more satisfying ending, it also has a more satisfying performance from its lead. I liked Mickey Rourke a lot in The Wrestler but let’s face it, in his portrayal of a star who peaked in the 1980s, destroyed his body, and hit the skids, he was basically playing a version of himself. Jeff Bridges, on the other hand, has been consistently employed and consistently praised for his film work for nearly forty years. He’s been nominated for three Oscars and co-starred in one the top-grossing films of 2008. He is anything but washed up, but was completely believable and indeed moving as a man whose livelihood and career was in ruins. This is important because, as in The Wrestler and other films that are highly praised despite uninspired plotlines**, the story is less important than the performance. After the initial sequence of the film- most of which, in what I can only assume was an intentional nod to (arguably) Bridges’ most famous role, takes place in a bowling alley- I forgot that I was watching The Dude.

The other performances are pretty solid as well. I have no great affection for Maggie Gyllenhaal but she’s good in this, and Robert Duvall is his usual excellent self in the small but key role of “Bad Blake’s Friend Whose Name I’ve Forgotten And May Never Have Known”. Colin Farrell is also very good in the role of Tommy Sweet, a former protégé of Bad Blake who has found larger and more widespread, mainstream success; if Bad Blake is a Merle Haggard or Waylon Jennings style country star, Tommy Sweet is in the vein of someone like Keith Urban***. This is the one instance in which the plot of the film diverges from a formula in that Tommy, a character who I expected to be, and who could easily have been written as, an antagonist, is actually a good guy who wants to help his old mentor out, if only Bad would let him. I’ve never had particularly strong feelings one way or another about Colin Farrell as an actor- he was in one movie I liked (SWAT), one movie I hated (Daredevil) one movie to which I was largely ambivalent (Phone Booth), and that one episode of Scrubs- and then he kind of disappeared for a while, it seemed. But between The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (in which he has the most screen time of the three pretend Heath Ledgers) and this, I hope to see more of him in the future.

DVD Purchase: Possible. I really liked it but much like The Wrestler (which I own, somewhat foolishly), it’s not a movie I can see myself watching multiple times. The soundtrack, however, I will be purchasing very soon.

* I really liked the music in Crazy Heart, but Springsteen wrote a song for the end credits of The Wrestler and it’s also got “Sweet Child O’ Mine” in it, so I’m a touch partial to the earlier film.
** Training Day, for example, is a straight-to-video plot elevated by Denzel Washington’s awesomeness. I am tempted to put the Pirates of the Caribbean movies into this same category (replacing “Denzel Washington” with “Johnny Depp,” and the phrase “straight-to-video” with “Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie), but feel I will catch all kinds of hell for it.
*** I guess. I don’t know anything about Keith Urban except that he is more famous and less regularly cowboy-hatted than a country singer reasonably ought to be.

I'm So Disgusted I Can't Even Think Up A Clever Title

2010-01-20T12:59:00.005-05:00

Yesterday in Massachusetts, the Senate seat previously held by deceased Democrat Ted Kennedy was won in a special election by Republican Scott Brown, a Massachusetts state senator and lieutenant colonel in the National Guard. He defeated the Democratic candidate, Mass. attorney general Martha Coakley, and independent candidate Joseph Kennedy, who is no relation to the "real" Kennedys and was presumably hoping no one would realize that. This is a huge deal in historically liberal New England. For some historical perspective, it is worth noting that the last Republican to hold this seat lost it to a young war hero by the name of John F. Kennedy. (And that's my last use of the word "Kennedy" for the remainder of the post.)

Brown's surprising success in the campaign and his subsequent election have garnered national media attention, as it lowers the Democratic majority in the Senate from 60 to 59, depriving them of a "supermajority" and potentially derailing passage of healthcare reform, which was of course a key platform of President Obama's campaign. The loss of a supermajority means that Democratic control of the Senate is no longer, in the parlance of our time, "filibuster-proof."

A filibuster, basically, is a political strategy in which a Senate vote on a bill is delayed by an opposing member refusing to yield the floor. This is often accomplished by the member continuing to speak indefinitely, even if what he or she is saying has no bearing whatsoever on the matter at hand. Anyone who is familiar with the works of Aaron Sorkin will likely remember that one episode of The West Wing ("The Stackhouse Filibuster," Season 02, Episode 17) in which a Democratic senator filibusters a Bartlet-supported bill for reasons unbeknownst to the White House staff; in this episode, the senator reads from cookbooks, the rules of cards, etc., to "extend the debate," but really to prevent the vote. (This episode utilizes the same structure as the Sports Night episodes "Dear Louise" and "Louise Revisited," and also borrows a little from "Kafelnikov" but if I start talking about how early episodes of The West Wing echoed Sports Night, I'll end up filibustering my own point.)

Anyway, the only way to stop a filibuster is with a three-fifths vote to tell the speaker to, in effect, sit down and shut up. Now that there are only 59 Democrats in the Senate instead of 60 (three-fifths of 100), they can't do that to any Republican or group of Republicans who may decide to filibuster the healthcare bill. This could delay or even prevent altogether the passage of much-discussed (and, some believe, extremely necessary) legal reform.

So, why am I telling you all this? I'm telling you all this because I was thinking about it last night, as my arch-conservative sister Alicia gloated about how dejected MSNBC commentators Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews sounded, and I came to the following conclusion: the idea of a filibuster- which political commentators on TV and online and in newspapers have been talking about as if it is some kind of brilliant, devious, cunning political strategy- is the stupidest thing I have ever heard of.

Basically what we're talking about here is the political equivalent of someone threatening to hold his breath until his face turns blue. "I don't like what you're trying to do," the filibuster says, "but I can't legitimately stop you from doing it by countering your points or changing your mind, so instead I'm going to chatter on and on until you get sick of listening to me and give up on it." This a strategy being threatened by one half of our political leaders, and worried over by the other half. And the rules of the Senate, ostensibly a serious, respectable organization comprised of adults, allow this! These people are in charge of the laws we live by, and one of their debate trump cards is tantamount to sticking their fingers in their ears and going "La la la, I can't hear you!" What the hell is next, the Speaker of the House presiding over a budget vote and calling "No backsies!"?

Proponents of the filibuster practice would likely point out that this is a legislative strategy employed for as long as politics has existed, all the way back to ancient Rome, but they also fed people to lions for sport in ancient Rome, so nuts to that. Just because something has been done a certain way forever doesn't mean it's a good idea. This goes back to something I was saying a while ago about politicians not taking their important jobs as seriously as they should. Anyone who would employ a filibuster is exploiting an old, stupid rule because they don't want to admit defeat, and anyone who would openly worry about it is almost worse; instead of fretting over someone filibustering the bill out of existence, they should be focused on creating a bill that everyone can agree on. But I guess that's asking for too much mature thinking and adult behavior from a group that still refers to their time off as "recess."

* * *

Quasi-related to the above is this article. It is an Esquire magazine profile of Rod Blagojevich, former governor of Illinois, who as everyone hopefully recalls was ousted from office last year and charged with various crimes in relation to his ("alleged") attempt to trade then-President-Elect Barack Obama's Senate seat for political favors and/or massive amounts of money. In the article, by regular Esquire contributor Scott Raab, Blagojevich defends his innocence, despite the hours of tapped phone calls in which he attempts to sell the Senate seat, and claims that his behavior was entirely acceptable and, in fact, necessary to benefit the people of Illinois. I personally found the article utterly fascinating, particularly the parts where Blagojevich compares himself to Galileo and claims that he is "blacker than Barack Obama." It reads like I imagine an interview with Lex Luthor would. "It was all for the good of Metropolis! I could save the world if not for that blasted Kryptonian! I'm the real hero!"

Top 5 Tuesdays! #22- Coming Attractions

2010-01-19T08:53:00.003-05:00

After a brief hiatus since I spent last Tuesday putting the finishing touches on my newly cleaned room (following much appreciated and downright Herculean assistance from Courtney on Saturday), Top 5 Tuesdays! is back with the five movies I am most looking forward to in 2010. Now, mind you, I'll probably something like six times this many movies, if last year is any indication, but these are the five that I'm really chomping at the proverbial bit for.

5. Toy Story 3 (June): This beat out several potential #5s including Date Night (Tina Fey and Steve Carell in an action-comedy? Yes please), The Expendables (Dolph Lundgren’s triumphant return to the big screen) and The Green Hornet (Seth Rogen vs. Col. Hans Landa? All right, Hollywood, I’ll bite), but Pixar has never once let me down.

4. Clash of the Titans (March): For two reasons. First, I have seen three of the four movies directed by Louis Leterrier- The Transporter, Unleashed and The Incredible Hulk- and have thoroughly enjoyed each of them (I enjoyed Unleashed, perhaps, on a level that Leterrier did not necessarily intend, but whatever). Second, when I finally saw the trailer for this after several days of Lincoln gushing about it on the Twitter, I got actual chills upon the arrival of the Kraken. It would appear that I’m just going to have to accept Sam Worthington’s presence in movies from now on.

3. Kick-Ass (April): The first issue of the comic this movie is based on was the best first issue of a comic that I’ve ever read. The series has been released inconsistently since but it’s never flagged in quality.

2. The Town (September): Ben Affleck co-wrote and directed one of my favorite movies of 2007, Gone Baby Gone, and his follow-up co-stars Jeremy Renner, star of one of my favorite movies of last year, The Hurt Locker. I never really expected to be looking forward to anything Ben Affleck does (and I still haven't quite forgiven him for Daredevil), but here we are.

1. Iron Man 2 (May): I’ve been waiting for the sequel since approximately .000004 seconds after Iron Man ended. The addition of Sam Rockwell and Don Cheadle (sorry, Terrence Howard; I liked you as Jim Rhodes, but you're no Don Cheadle) to the cast, as well as the fact that presumably this will start Marvel Films down the road to 2012's Avengers movie, makes this a must see for me. In fact, I'm going to go watch the trailer again right now.

"What Does It Matter? A Dream of Love, A Dream of Lies..."

2010-01-11T12:07:00.004-05:00

(Ever since I've maintained a blog, from the short-lived Diaryland days to the post-college Livejournal to now, I've always wanted to put up reviews of the movies I go to see, because I go to see a LOT of movies- I saw thirty new movies in 2009, some of them* multiple times- and because... well, just because. So I'm going to start trying to do that this year. I won't be giving a star rating like I did with my double-sized Top 5 Tuesdays! about my favorite movies of 2009, but instead will rate the movies like I do while watching them, specifically by the likelihood of my purchasing them on DVD/Blu-Ray. So there we have that.)

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

I wish I was more familiar with the films of Terry Gilliam than I am. I know more about the films he HASN'T made- an adaptation of Watchmen long before Visionary Director Zack Snyder got his mitts on it, the seemingly cursed The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, an adaptation of Good Omens- than the ones he has (Time Bandits, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas). Devon will likely never forgive me for this, but I'm reasonably certain that (until this past Saturday night) I've never actually watched a Terry Gilliam movie straight through; I've seen 12 Monkeys but in bits and pieces, most of The Fisher King the same way, and about half of The Brothers Grimm (for some reason). Oh, and Monty Python & the Holy Grail, which he co-directed. I've always wanted to watch them, but I want to watch literally hundreds of movies that I'll probably never get around to. Stupid job.

I was finally prompted to go see a Gilliam film with the recent release The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, for two reasons. First, it was the final film of Heath Ledger, who died a third of the way through production and who (even before his stunning performance in The Dark Knight) was one of the few actors of my generation who didn’t annoy me on general principles. Second, and foremost, it featured Tom Waits, my second-favorite singer/songwriter ever and no slouch in the acting department, as The Devil, a part which, having listened to Blood Money and “What’s He Building In There?” as often as I have, I rather feel he was perfect for. I was so excited about this casting choice, actually, that I described the movie to Courtney as “It’s a movie where Tom Waits plays the Devil. We have to go see it!”, (patience of a saint that she has, this was enough to convince her) and completely neglected to mention Ledger’s involvement.

Having finally sat down and watched a Gilliam film straight through, I now realize I have some serious Netflix Queue updating to do. Imaginarium was amazing. The plot- the titular Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), who is an immortal magician with vaguely defined but considerable mental powers, enlists an enigmatic drifter (Ledger) to help him outwit the Devil (Waits), who has designs on the soul of Parnassus’s daughter (Lily Cole)- is the stuff of fairy tales, but the film is in a modern setting. Unlike many movies I’ve seen about magic in a contemporary environment, Imaginarium is neither goofy nor brooding about it, but matter-of-fact. There are no melodramatic moments where a character reacts with over-the-top incredulity and there are no winks to the audience about the impossibility of the events onscreen. The film is about magic in the real world without ever suggesting that there is anything weird about that, which I found refreshing and admirable.

Ledger, as he usually was, is very good in the movie, though on occasion shades of his Joker voice poked through. Perhaps the highest compliment I can give the movie, something I couldn’t even say of The Dark Knight the first few times I saw it, is that at no point during it did I think, “I am watching a dead man.” His death is worked around by the fact that on three occasions throughout the film his character (named Tony) travels to a dream world by means of a mirror in Doctor Parnassus’s trailer. When he does so, the character is physically transformed and portrayed by other actors (Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell**). They are all very good, and the metamorphoses understandable within the context of the story. One of the sequences seems to directly acknowledge the death of the film’s star, and memorialize him, though Gilliam insists that the script was not altered after Ledger’s death.

The dream world sequences, by the way, are amazing. Without going into too much detail, they are at varying points light and dark. When light, they are cartoonish without being silly, and when dark they are suitably nightmarish without being all that scary, and there's at least one part that seems a direct if unspecific nod to Gilliam's old Monty Python days. They're eye-catching and inventive, and the best visuals I've seen in a non-Pixar movie in a long time.

And then there’s Tom Waits. Bowler-hatted, pencil-mustached, cigarette-holder-puffing Tom Waits as Mr. Nick, aka The Devil. On the drive to the theater, I commented to Courtney that I really hoped Waits (who has also appeared in such films as Down By Law, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mystery Men, Domino and Gilliam’s The Fisher King) wasn’t just doing a cameo, and I was very pleased when that hope was realized. He’s onscreen almost as often as Ledger, and from the moment when he first emerges from the shadows to taunt Parnassus with the unmistakable voice like whiskey-soaked gravel to which I so often listen, he gives the liveliest, most watchable performance in a movie chock full of them. (In addition to Ledger, Plummer, Depp, Farrell, Law & Cole, the film features cinema stalwart Some Guy, and Mini-Me.)

Now, admittedly, I’m biased. I’ve been a fan of Tom Waits’s music for almost ten years, and he’s been making it for over thirty with virtually nothing in the way of the mainstream acceptance or praise that I feel he so richly deserves. But this might change all that. Imaginarium was given a limited release on Christmas Day, which means it qualifies for this year’s Oscar nominations, and while I’m admittedly biased, I honestly think Waits has a shot at a Best Supporting Actor nod. So I will be up early on February 2nd, watching the announcement of the nominations and hoping that the Academy gives me an opportunity to tell the world “I told you so!”

DVD/Blu-Ray Purchase: Definite. Considering that I once purchased a DVD of a movie I had never even previously seen (specifically Down By Law) because I knew it starred Waits, one that I've seen and thoroughly enjoyed is a no-brainer.

* 500 Days of Summer, Funny People, Inglourious Basterds
** All of whom, apparently, redirected their salaries for the film to Ledger’s young daughter, which is nice.

I Miss Baseball

2010-01-08T12:04:00.003-05:00

A few days ago Randy Johnson announced his retirement from baseball. Johnson, for the unitiated, is arguably the second-best left-handed pitcher in major league history. A glowering, shaggy, gangly, impossibly tall (6'10") redneck, Johnson played for six teams during his twenty-plus year career- the Montreal Expos, the Seattle Mariners, the Houston Astros, the Arizona Diamondbacks, an ignominious stint with my beloved New York Yankees, and finally the San Francisco Giants- winning 303 games, striking out 4,875 opposing batters, winning the World Series once (in 2001) and the Cy Young award five times. He also pitched a perfect game in 2004, and appeared in an episode of The Simpsons (though not the baseball episode of The Simpsons, which is weird).

Johnson was involved in some of my favorite baseball moments. These include, but are not necessarily limited to, the time when he threw a pitch that intercepted the flight path of a dove (the dove lost) and a game he pitched against the Blue Jays during his time with the Yankees when he protested to an umpire, loud enough to be heard on the radio, "Fuck you, that was not outside!" (He was immediately ejected from the game). He also had a say in one of my least-favorite baseball moments, stinking up the Bronx against the hated Tampa Bay Devil Rays (as they were then known) during a sweltering day game I attended in 2005-ish.

But he was also involved in what remains, and probably always will remain, my favorite baseball moment ever. While the Aaron Boone home run in the 2003 ALCS was the most memorable and the Yankees World Series win this past October was the most satisfying, neither are my favorite. My favorite baseball moment occurred in June of 2002, when I was just starting to get into the sport. My dad was watching an afternoon game between the Yankees and the Diamondbacks. Johnson, who had won World Series Co-MVP the year before for dismantling these same Yankees, was on the mound. I was in the TV room, at the computer, only about half-paying attention. Marcus Thames, a rookie outfielder, came to the plate for his first ever major league at-bat. Going up against Randy Johnson, who even then was already considered one of the greats, a surefire Hall of Famer, would be daunting for any player, much less a rookie playing his first game in Yankee Stadium. Johnson wound up, dealt, and Marcus Thames, a generally unheralded rookie who'd never seen a pitch in the majors before that moment, turned it around and sent it 300 plus feet in the opposite direction over the centerfield wall. His first at-bat, against one of the greatest lefthanded pitchers ever, became his first hit, RBI, and home run.

I was stunned. My dad was stunned. The Yankee commentators and, I'm sure, Thames and Johnson were pretty stunned as well. "He should retire right now," my dad commented, referring to Thames. "He's not going to top that." He didn't retire, he went to the Tigers later that year, spent a few years there in a largely part-time role, shuffling between AAA and the majors, and is currently a free agent in negotiations with the Indians and the Blue Jays. (I hope he ends up in Toronto.)

The Thames home run off of Johnson is my favorite baseball moment not because it won a championship or even a game, nor because it marked the arrival of a great player (as much as he will always have a special place in my heart, Marcus Thames is not a great player) or the downfall of another (Johnson had several more good, though not great, years after that). It's my favorite baseball moment because it encapsulates and really defines what I love so much about the game: the fact that on any given afternoon between April and November, in any given stadium across the country, someone average can come out on top over someone great. A normal person can do something that should be impossible and become, on some small level, a hero. At least until the next inning starts.

86 days and counting...

Top 5 Tuesdays! # 21- Hail to the King

2010-01-05T08:51:00.003-05:00

I'm about 400 pages into Under the Dome, the new Stephen King novel my parents gave me for Christmas. So far it's pretty good, kind of an anti-The Stand: instead of a major mystery crisis forcing people from all over America to converge on one spot, a major mystery crisis locks the inhabitants of a small Maine town within the city limits... and, as you may well imagine, hilarity ensues. (No it doesn't.)

The really noteworthy thing about Under the Dome is its size. It weighs in at over a thousand pages in hardcover form, and books that long always throw me off. Usually when I've read 400 pages of a story, I'm almost done with it instead of not even at the halfway mark, but that's not how the illustrious Mr. King rolls. The guy likes to hear himself type. Of course, I can't judge, because so do I, and he's a lot better at it than I am.

With that in mind, I present the first Top 5 Tuesdays! of the new decade, my five favorite novels by Stephen King!

5. It: The commercial for the miniseries based on this gave me nightmares as a kid (the COMMERCIAL!), but when I read the book as an adult, I loved it. It was the first book I read on my commute to and from the Insurance Mine. Got me through most of the first two months in fact, as this is another of King's superheavyweights.

4. Cell: I saw the villain from this book- a black zombie in a Harvard sweatshirt- on the train once. I legitimately yelped... in retrospect, he was probably not an actual zombie, just homeless, but he was damn close.

3. The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower: The conclusion to the epic series that I call "my Lord of the Rings." A lot of people don't like how it ended but A) it ended the only way it logically could and B) I came up with my own, altogether more heartwarming ending that I choose to believe is the series' actual finale. Is this ridiculous? Kinda. But there we have it.

2. Carrie: Even though I've never actually seen the movie, I knew what happened in this story before I read it. This knowledge did not make the story any less horrifying or heartbreaking.

1. The Stand: When the book is closed on American literature, I seriously think this is a dark horse candidate for the Great American Novel. Why would the book be closed on American literature, you ask? Superflu, that's why.

Something In The Night

2010-01-04T01:25:00.003-05:00

"When you listen to Bruce's music, you aren't a loser. You are a character in an epic poem... about losers."
-Jon Stewart

For years my favorite song has been "The Promise," by Bruce Springsteen. Originally written in the late 70s and probably intended for Darkness on the Edge of Town, it was finally commercially released in 1999 on the CD 18 Tracks, a sampler of the four-disc boxed set Tracks. The official lyrics, as presented on brucespringsteen.net, are as follows:

Johnny works in a factory and Billy works downtown
Terry works in a rock and roll band
Lookin' for that million-dollar sound
I got a little job down in Darlington
But some nights I don't go
Some nights I go to the drive-in, or some nights I stay home
I followed that dream just like those guys do up on the screen
And I drive a Challenger down Route 9 through the dead ends and all the bad scenes
And when the promise was broken, I cashed in a few of my dreams

Well now I built that Challenger by myself
But I needed money and so I sold it
I lived a secret I should'a kept to myself
But I got drunk one night and I told it
All my life I fought this fight
The fight that no man can never win
Every day it just gets harder to live
This dream I'm believing in
Thunder Road, oh baby you were so right
Thunder Road there's something dyin' on the highway tonight

I won big once and I hit the coast
But somehow I paid the big cost
Inside I felt like I was carryin' the broken spirits
Of all the other ones who lost
When the promise is broken you go on living
But it steals something from down in your soul
Like when the truth is spoken and it don't make no difference
Something in your heart goes cold
I followed that dream through the southwestern flats
That dead ends in two-bit bars
And when the promise was broken I was far away from home
Sleepin' in the back seat of a borrowed car
Thunder Road, for the lost lovers and all the fixed games
Thunder Road, for the tires rushing by in the rain
Thunder Road, Billy and me we'd always say
Thunder Road, we were gonna take it all and throw it all away

The 18 Tracks version is a bit different from the above lyrics, and is the version of the song I fell in love with upon hearing it around a decade ago, though this version (which I found while doing some brief research on this post) is pretty good as well, and closer to the official lyrics. If nothing else it highlights the differences between the Bruce of 1977 and the Bruce of 1999.

ANYWAY, like I said, this song has been my favorite song since pretty much the first time I heard it, way back when. But for the life of me I've never been able to clearly explain why. The best I could ever come up with was that Bruce Springsteen is my favorite singer/songwriter ever, and "The Promise" is among his Bruce Spingsteen-iest songs...

(Time out. My computer, Awesome-Rocketship Johnston, is doing something totally weird right now. There's a Function, or Fn, key on the bottom left-hand corner of my keyboard which, when pressed in conjunction with the Page Up key raises the volume, with Page Down lowers the volume, and with End mutes or unmutes the sound entirely. I have various versions of "The Promise" playing as I write this and occasionally the sound will volume will increase. When I go to turn it down, pressing Fn and Page Down lowers the volume AND it causes the contents of my Clipboard- which is currently holding the lyrics of "The Promise"- to paste into the Windows Notepad document I am writing this post in. A few minutes ago, the 1977 version of the song got particularly wall of sound-y and I didn't want to wake anyone else in the house- a thoroughly ridiculous concern, mind you, as my father is half-deaf and my mother could sleep through a carpet bombing- so I lowered the volume significantly and ended up pasting the lyrics in about twenty times. I have no idea why this is happening. It has never happened before. This is only the latest of Awesome-Rocketship's strange behavior this evening- it also deleted my iTunes Library from the iTunes program without actually deleting any of the songs from the hard drive, which was annoying but not nearly as annoying, I realize, as it could have been. It bothers me to no end when technology doesn't work properly, but it bothers me even more when it works in ways it was not intended. I feel like that brings it one step closer to actual sentience, which of course brings it one step closer to world domination. If this keeps up I'm going to smash the thing with a hammer and blog with a typewriter from now on. Time in.)

... but that was a sort of smart-assy non-answer. "Bruce Springsteen-iest" isn't a legitimate adjective (though Michael Chabon used the term "Springsteenian" in the intro to Gentlemen of the Road, which made me feel a little better, but not a whole lot, because Gentlemen of the Road is Chabon's worst book*), and even if it was, it's kind of useless in an answer. It's like being asked to define a word and using the word in the definition. You can't really do it, or at least you shouldn't.

But the other night, whilst driving home from Courtney's, I heard "The Promise" as I drove over the Verrazano Bridge. It came up in iPod Beeblebrox's shuffle, and as always I listened, but that night I listened particularly hard. Driving alone late at night is arguably the best time to listen to Bruce's music. As I rolled through the toll plaza, I considered the lyrics, and realized, finally, what I loved about the song, and what made it my favorite:

"The Promise" is meta-music. Unlike most of Bruce's songs it's not about love or sorrow or loss or partying or America or dying or pain or sex or the Queen of the Supermarket. Instead, it's a song about the rest of his songs. The characters and locales are all from other numbers: there's a Billy in "Wild Billy's Circus Story," "Rockaway the Days," "Cautious Man," "Galveston Bay," and others; Johnny is from "Incident on 57th Street" and "Johnny 99" and "Shut Out the Light"; Terry appears in "Backstreets" and "Zero & Blind Terry"; Thunder Road is from... well, "Thunder Road."

"The Promise" is Bruce looking at the universe he created and considering what it's like, and entering it to experience it. It's like when Vonnegut put himself in Slaughterhouse-Five or when Grant Morrison showed up in the last few issues of Animal Man. It's Bruce, whose work has been critiqued and analyzed and interpreted and misinterpreted as much as that of any contemporary artist, becoming his own critic, his own interpreter. It's Bruce, whose public image hinges at least partially on a sense that he is an average American, considering his own oeuvre, looking at himself intellectually as well as emotionally. It is, in effect and with great- dare I say brilliant- subtlety, a song by Bruce Springsteen about what it's like to be in a song by Bruce Springsteen.

Or something.

Ch-RIST, I need to go bed...

* Which means it's still pretty fucking great.

The Year In Humor 2009

2010-01-01T11:05:00.003-05:00

Welcome to 2010, folks. If the late great Roy Scheider is to be believed, this is The Year We Make Contact, but before we do that, let's take a look back on the previous year's wittiest and wackiest, shall we?

The Top 12 One-Liners

1. "To fail at life so early is really depressing." -Lou B, re: a fat homeless kid in the subway

2. "Why not just say it tastes like human flesh or a national tragedy?" -Paul re: "Staten Island Landfill" ice cream

3. "I stayed with that show like a terrible marriage." -Michelle, re: The X-Files

4. "It's not like it's a gateway cock." -Joe, re: my & Tom's reluctance to eat a piece of cake shaped like the male genitalia

5. "What about Desperation & Misery?" -Jen, re: me and Lou B trying to come up with Stephen King-related nicknames for purposes of picking up women

6. "That's really impressive, man. I mean, I've turned down sex before, but only because I didn't have the money." Me, after hearing a story about how a friend spent his evening... or, more accurately, chose to not spend his evening.

7. "Being in a relationship is a lot like Dance Dance Revolution. You have to hit the right button at the right time. There's no one move that's always right... also, I am terrible at Dance Dance Revolution." -Devon

8. "There's only two couples in that picture who have never broken up: Jules & Fran, and me & you." -me, to Tom, re: a certain photograph

9. "That's like hearing the Kremlin bought the Yankees." -my dad, re: Disney buying Marvel Comics

10. "Did you forget your tampons?" -Vin, to me, as I rummaged through my bag

11. "I like cough medicine. It's the closest I ever get to doing shots." -me

12. "There you go. Always looking on the bright side. THAT'S the Brendan Johnston I know!" -Tom

The Top 12 Exchanges

1. "He didn't have a plan, he just got an idea."
"What do you think a plan is?!" -Jen & me re: Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back.

2. "Why does Chris watch 'The Bachelor'?"
"Because he's a lady." -me & my sister Alicia re: her husband

3. "The party mix smells like smoke."
"That's because this party's on FIRE!" -Vinny & Tom, re: party mix

4. "What's with the deep voice?"
" 'What's with the deep voice?' That's how he talks. What's with your little girl voice?!" - Tom & Vin's nephew John (age 7) and his mother Sue, re: my voice

5. "If I exert myself for like 25 seconds, I'm winded."
(Long pause)
"Man, I feel sorry for Michelle." -Tom, then Vin

6. "What are you looking for?"
"A food list... not unlike a menu." -Tom, then Vin
7. "Doesn't this always happen on Friday occasionally?"
"...... yes. Yes, this always happens occasionally." -my boss & I

8. "People who are Jets fans AND Mets fans, that's what I don't get."
"Well they rhyme."
"Yeah, but they're not the 'Jetropolitans.' " -me, Tom, Vin

9. "Oh man. My gloves don't match. That's embarassing."
"Don't worry babe, no one'll notice... least of all you." -me, then Courtney

10. "It's possible I was drunk at the time."
"Nah, it was like ten AM on a Saturday."
".... it's possible I was drunk at the time." - Vin, me, then Vin again

11. "Hold on, let me take my beard off your underwear."
"Man, if I had a nickel...!" - me then Devon during SantaCon prep

12. "Elijah Wood was like my first big celebrity crush."
"Did you see the Lord of the Rings movies?"
"He's like a little Smurf in that. That's not attractive." -Courtney, me, then Courtney again

Happy New Year, Liquid Americans!