Stay Down Here Where You Belong

Hail to the King (Baggot), Baby

2017-08-02T21:43:00.002-07:00

I love silent films and I especially love learning about the heady days of early Hollywood. I've only seen one King Baggot film, his 1913 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde film that I reviewed thus:

"The transformation is done via dissolve. I was reminded of Boudu Saved From Drowning when Hyde crashes a party."

Pauline Kael I am not, however I did enjoy this film and jotted down that quick note about it after viewing it.

More than his performance, I've always been intrigued by King Baggot because of his bizarre name. He was fairly big in the early days, but I only recently learned the rest of his story. He was both an actor and director, but both jobs dried up once talkies were introduced. Despite being stage trained and having a great voice, as with most of the silent stars he was no longer employable and was brushed aside for fresher, younger talent. His raging alcoholism probably didn't help any, and he died divorced, broke and alone in 1948 after suffering several strokes.

I went to Calvary Cemetery in East LA to pay my respects to the icons buried there, and the first grave I wanted to visit was Baggot's. I was not able to find any information online as to where he was buried, and when I went to the main office to ask where he was it actually took awhile to locate him because he wasn't easy to find in their computer. They did eventually locate him and after a minor hunt I was able to locate his grave. Interestingly, there is a blacked out name right next to his, and part of me wonders if that was intended for his wife before they had a bitter divorce.

As you can tell from my previous entries, I don't update this blog very much. Hell, my last post was some dumb shit about a Pavlok that I decided not to get last year. I'm posting this because there are zero pictures of King Baggot's grave online, and it's a shame for someone who was as big as he was, no matter how brief that stardom was, to be forgotten. So here it is, King Baggot's grave. Also, go to YouTube and check out his Jekyll and Hyde movie. It's a hoot.

Why I Decided Not to Shock My Bad Habits Away

2016-07-06T10:18:00.001-07:00

There's a lovely product on the market called Pavlok. You strap it on your wrist like a watch and every time you perform a habit that you want to break, you push a button and you'll either feel an annoying buzz, or a full-on electric shock. Because I'm a big fan of bizarre self help shit, I figured I'd give it a shot and placed an order for one a couple of weeks ago.

Now, had my Pavlok been delivered in a timely fashion, I may be wearing it right now, happily shocking the living shit out of myself every time I nibbled on a Dorito or piece of bread. Instead, and this is death for a product of this ilk, I had to deal with a longer-than-expected delay. And because of this I had time to, you know, think about whether or not I wanted to physically hurt myself over and over again with their product. I had also been reminded that I could do the same thing with a simple rubber band, which looks less fancy than a Pavlok but is more easily attainable, and slightly cheaper than the $200 price tag that a Pavlok fetches.

I also had the opportunity to watch a clip of Pavlok creator Maneesh Sethi getting his asshole ripped apart like pulled pork on an episode of Shark Tank, a show that's so repulsive to me that I'd never watch it unless the clip involved something that I spent money on (or Bulletball). The weirdest thing about Sethi's Shark Tank fiasco is that this guy actually promoted his appearance on the Pavlok mailing list that I found myself on. I get that there's no such thing as bad publicity, but I mean, one of the Shark Tank assholes actually yelled at him to "get the fuck out," and professional douchebag Mark Cuban called him a "con man." That's not really encouraging to people who have already given you money for said product.

Anyhow, the refund was processed and is presumably back in my bank account. I will still pursue bizarro self help products to break my habits, improve my health, engender longer, firmer erections, and give my life the quality it deserves. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to down a glass of fake food before starting my day.

5 Ways I Lost 50 Pounds in 5 Months (Don't do this)

2015-10-05T17:54:00.000-07:00

Last time I mentioned that I lost 50 pounds a few years ago. I gained 40 of them back, but that's not the point. I'm sure a number of you are curious about my weight loss secrets, and I'm always of the mind that "you gotta give the public what they want." So without further ado, here is what I did to lose 50 pounds in 5 months!

(Note: DO NOT DO THIS. I cannot stress this enough. This was idiotic and while a couple of these points may be practical, points #2 and #4 were borderline psychotic. Once again, if you do what I did, you're a goddamn fool.)

1. I drank a shitload of coffee

Coffee is the ultimate appetite suppressant, and best of all gives you the jittery energy to go out and face your day. I typically drank two cups before I worked out and then another cup or two later in the day. A big reason why I never eat breakfast is because with coffee, I don't need to. Even though I woke up at 5, coffee ensured that I wouldn't be hungry until at least noon. It truly is a magical drink of the gods. Really, I have no idea how the hell Balzac was able to stay fat while allegedly drinking 50 cups of coffee every day.

2. I starved myself

I consumed 1,200 calories at most every day. If I went over, I ate even less the following day. When I got really hungry, I took a nap. If I couldn't sleep, I'd drink a glass of water. The crazy thing is that this didn't lead to me eating better, because I would still eat Chick-fil-A sandwiches and whatnot. You wouldn't believe the kind of garbage you can eat that will technically fall until the 1,200 mark.

3. I logged every calorie I consumed into MyFitnessPal

MyFitnessPal is a wonderful calorie-logging app that I used religiously to log every last calorie I consumed. It also has a feature to log in exercise and calories burned off. This was one of the biggest things that kept me in check during my diet, because the numbers would be staring me in the face every single day, and whether or not I ate depended on how close I was to the magic 1,200. Logging calories is a serious pain in the ass, but guess what? So's being fat.

4. I did the elliptical machine every single day without missing a day

Cranking the resistance up to the max, every single morning I went to the gym and used the elliptical machine for 70 minutes. According to the calorie counter, I typically burned off 900 calories every day. Keep in mind, I was doing this at the same time that I was consuming under 1,200 calories a day. The way my mind worked at this time was that the elliptical machine was taking away the calories consumed from whatever meal I logged in the previous day. I would imagine that number disappearing with every ten-minute stretch on the machine. Sometimes I would get light headed. Sometimes my chest would hurt and I'd feel like either puking or passing out. I still did it because goddamn it I was determined to lose weight, health be damned.

5. I weighed myself every week, sometimes every day

It's usually not recommended that you weigh yourself too frequently, because your body weight changes due to a variety of factors, and the scale is not an accurate sign of your body fat percentage. Still, my goal at this time was weight loss, plain and simple, and if the number on the scale went down, I felt like I was making progress. If I plateaued, or if the number somehow went up, it kept me in check and forced me to work harder (i.e. starve myself more and nearly kill myself with cardio).

So after doing all this and hitting the magic goal number on the scale, I was ready to bask in the kudos and soak in all the compliments on how great I looked now that I lost all that weight. Instead, I had people asking me if I was sick, if I was OK, and what was going on. People were legitimately concerned because THIS ISN'T NORMAL. I looked gaunt, and here's the kicker, I still had a gut. Sure, I was thinner and could fit into clothes that I used to wear when I was in my early 20s, but I looked like shit. I didn't lift a single weight during those five months, and I undoubtedly lost a lot of muscle during this period. Also, as I've already mentioned, I gained back nearly every pound I lost.

Moral of the story? It's not hard to lose a lot of weight, but if you do it stupidly, it will have been all for nothing. Don't do what I did.

How I Became a Fat Ass in 5 Steps

2015-10-04T22:12:00.000-07:00

Sorry, this isn't going to be as exciting as some superhero origin story. I wasn't bitten by a manatee, nor was I inspired to eat by a bag of potato chips crashing through my window at night. No, my transformation from a scrawny dude with a gut to a full-on fatass was a much longer process, and happened so slowly that I felt like a casual smack user waking up and discovering that I was an addict.

First off, from puberty on, I have always had a gut. My arms and legs were scrawny, but I still had a little bulbous bag of fat protruding under my chest. I never even noticed until one time I was at my friend's house and he decided that we should work out. I took my shirt off and him and his asshole brother both started laughing at my gut, immediately giving me a complex (I got revenge by not becoming an alcoholic and just in general being more successful in life. FUCK YOU, BUDDY). From puberty to my mid-twenties, I'd had pretty much the same overall shape. Thin arms and legs and a gut of varying sizes. It was never really anything for me to take notice of, since my clothing never hugged it and my pant size stayed in the 32" range. Then, all of a sudden, a perfect storm of events happened:

1. I became a library tech, and spent most of my time at work sitting down.

If you work in a library it's almost by design that as you move up the ladder and get paid more you start having to do less moving around. That in combination with continuous birthday pot lucks, candy jars, and other button-bursting bullshit leads one down the path of expanded waists and fuller faces.

2. I stopped walking to places and relied more on driving.

I used to love going for walks. For a while it was by necessity because if I needed to go to a video store I couldn't always depend on a ride there, but when I got a car I started getting lazy. Why spend half an hour on a walk when I can get the movie in ten minutes? Sadly, my reliance on a car instead of my feet also took away an activity that felt meditative most of the time and kept me in generally good health.

3. I spent hours upon hours on the internet, in addition to the hours I spent watching movies.

I used to brag about not watching TV, all the while being planted firmly on my ass clicking away on a keyboard. If I turned on the TV at all, it was to pop in a movie, one of the arts I'm the most passionate about. So after a work day of sitting down, I would sit in my car to drive home, only to come in and sit on a chair to go online, or sit on my bed to watch a movie. Seriously, it's like I was picking hobbies that would specifically limit the amount of movement I had to do. Hell, I love writing, and that activity only requires the slightest finger movements.

4. I felt less guilt, and in fact took a degree of pride in, being able to eat an entire bag of chips.

Instead of feeling some justified shame that I could finish an entire jumbo-sized bag of Doritos in one sitting, I pounded my chest in pride about it. Look at how talented I am at mashing up and swallowing large amount of cheese flavored corn! Hey, it was a weird time in my life. Doritos were like corn angels that used my tongue as a water slide down my throat, leaving a cheesy film in their paths. I can't stress enough how much I fucking love those chips.

5. I stopped going to clubs entirely, which was my only form of exercise at that point.

My favorite dance clubs in LA stopped existing, and I started feeling a tad on the old side for it. I'll still go out every now and then, but my enthusiasm has tapered off considerably. If I'm going to be perfectly honest here, being in a relationship did take away some of my desire to hit up mediocre night spots where the primary purpose was meeting people for either sex, love, or both. It's like pulling teeth to get me to go to the few good night spots I know about just because I'm so out of the loop that I feel like an outsider there. Plus I don't drink anymore. So there went the one exercise I was sure to do at least once a week, but usually twice.

So for a few years I started eating more crap, and the majority of my time was either sitting in a car, sitting at a desk, sitting in front of a computer, or sitting in front of a TV. At that point my ass started taking on a Persistence of Time quality as it dangled loosely off the sides of my seat. Ok, maybe it never got that bad, but the point remains: I got fat and gross. Hell, you could hear my goddamn breathing, need I say more? My girlfriend and I started dieting, and by starving myself and exercising like a madman I was able to drop 50 pounds. Granted, I gained almost all of it back in the span of a couple years, but that's life for you. Being fat is no fun, especially if you're not into Hawaiian shirts and your body's all out of proportion. Some people can wear a suit of fat well, but I'm not one of those people since my body takes on a Weeble-esque appearance. I'm not as fat as I once was, but similar to my constant battles with trying to learn French and Spanish, the fat battle rages on.

Jesus Christ what a delay

2015-02-13T08:29:00.000-08:00

Has it really been this long since I've posted my snotty review of Moonrise Kingdom? I watched it again several months ago and boy, was I ever wrong on that one. The stuff that didn't click the first time around finally did upon a second viewing, and I found myself laughing more than I did in the theater. Now I'd put this one right above Bottle Rocket in my ranking, with Grand Budapest falling between it and Rushmore.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, it's been a long time since I've posted anything. When I look at the list of years along the side of this blog, I see a diminishing excitement for writing, until it petered out completely the last few years. Blogs operate more as personal journals than anything else, and I suppose there was a lot going on in my life that I just didn't feel like writing about. I wrote a novel for NaNoWriMo, but it was a private project and one that I'm not sure will ever be edited into anything substantial.

To be perfectly honest, I don't know why I'm posting this, or if I'll continue to post, or what. I just decided to revisit this blog and was surprised at the anger in the last post. So I guess just to clarify, I was wrong about Moonrise Kingdom. It was a really good film.

Oh, and maybe I'll start updating some more.

FUCK Moonrise Kingdom

2012-06-18T08:59:00.001-07:00

You know a movie's bad when, after watching it, you re-watch the director's previous films that you loved just to see if you were wrong all along about them. That's what I did this weekend, with Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and the Royal Tenenbaums. Thankfully, those movies are still great, and I'm still left scratching my head about what the hell went wrong with Wes Anderson. Apparently, I'm the only one...this movie's making a ton of money (for this type of film) and is one of his best reviewed films. Everyone's calling it one of his best films, some assholes are even saying it's his best film since the Royal Tenenbaums. To that I say both "no" and "are you fucking shitting me?" This movie is, by far, the worst movie Wes Anderson has ever made. Worse than his last live-action stinker, the Darjeeling Limited.

First of all, none of these characters are memorable or even sympathetic, with the lone exception being the Bruce Willis character. The lead, a little asshole of a boy who basically ruins everyone's life by running away from Margot Tenenbaum-lite, is a total shit who's unlikable from start to finish. And don't give me that crap about Max Fischer and Royal Tenenbaum being assholes. Yes, they were undeniably assholes. You know what else? They paid the price for their hubris. Both ended up working shit jobs and being brought low before they can redeem themselves. There was ZERO redemption in this movie, just a couple of irritating, frowny hipster tweens expecting the world to bend to their will because no one understands them and they're in love. To quote Patrick Swayze in Ghost, what a crock of shit.

Anderson also follows his favorite theme of remarkably gifted children, but offers no real background for it, nor any reason why it matters. Fischer was gifted at everything, but it was compensation for being a barber's son, plus his grades were shit. The Tenenbaum children were talented as compensation for having a shit father with no tact. Margot-lite in Moonrise is....a reader. She's also "troubled." She also hates her parents, her mom especially. Asshole hipster boy is an orphan, which is the cheapest way to build sympathy for a protagonist. Oh, he's also a great painter and great at "roughing it." How does that painting add to his character? It doesn't. It was just fucking thrown in there because Wes Anderson likes gifted children.

There's also a scene that's so jarringly out of place, it's like Wes hired Todd Solondz as a guest director. It's the scene where asshole hipster boy and Margot-lite are making out, with tongues touched and everything, and asshole hipster boy gets a handful of tit. Now, I know that directors typically put themselves in their movies, but as soon as I saw this scene, it because blindingly obvious that it's function is as a Wes Anderson/Roman Coppola masturbation fantasy. Misunderstood but talented hip boy meets a troubled "sexy" girl who's into obscure 60s French pop music (I love Francoise Hardy, but don't you dare throw that reference in my face and use "it's from my aunt who lives in France!" as your excuse to name-drop) and has a super-cool secret dance party on the beach? How is this not the masturbation fantasy of two hipster douchebag writers?

The biggest crime of this movie, however, isn't just that it fails as a romance. It's that it's not funny. I'm probably the last person alive who got into Wes Anderson specifically because his movies are funny as fuck, and not because they look pretty. When I see his movies, I WANT TO LAUGH. There were as many laughs in this piece of shit as there are in The Sorrow and the Pity. There were things that I know were supposed to be funny, like the Margot-lite paper-mache head, and Edward Norton being all wacky, and the oh-so-hilarious gigantic tree house, but it all fell flat. The only thing that made me crack a smile was when asshole hipster boy's "father" is called about him running away, and the "father" says that he's not going to take him back. That kind of dark humor briefly brings you back to the glory days of his early films, but then it immediately goes back into the serious business of "love conquers all."

And don't give me that shit about "oh, you just don't like romances." BULLSHIT. I like well-made movies that pay off and earn it at the end. Amelie is one of my top 10 favorite films, as is Casablanca. I'm one of the few guys out there who liked Titanic. Also, fuck it, I liked My Best Friend's Wedding, even though my friends hear me bring that up as an example almost as much as I use Sleepers when playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

This movie sucks cock, and makes me yearn for the days when Wes had Owen Wilson as his collaborator. Bring that shit back, Wes. PLEASE.

Fuck it, here's my ranking of Wes Anderson films, because why the hell not?

1) Fantastic Mr. Fox
2) The Royal Tenenbaums
3) Rushmore
4) Bottle Rocket
5) The Life Aquatic
6) The Darjeeling Limited
7) Moonrise Kingdom

Things I've Learned From Dieting

2012-05-18T12:59:00.000-07:00

Two years ago, I lost 35 pounds in 4 months. After getting my MA, that was the thing I was most proud of being able to do that year, and I still talk about it the way Al Bundy talks about scoring four touchdowns in a single game. However, having to read damn near twenty books for my MA took its toll, and I finally stopped going to the gym and giving a shit about my weight, and worked on my project. I never got back into the workout groove, and gained around 20 of those pounds back since then. Sure, I fiddled with strength training a bit, and made half assed attempts to go back to the gym, but it was never as serious as it was then.

My girlfriend is in a weight loss competition with some coworkers, and both to support her and get rid of my gut, I've decided to get back into the weight loss groove. I'm about two weeks into it and have already lost six pounds, so I figured I'd share some things about dieting that I've experienced.

You have to weigh yourself.

This was the biggest thing that kept me from actually doing something about my weight. At some point, I was afraid to step on a scale and face reality. I knew I was gaining weight, but just couldn't get myself to see exactly how much. When I finally did, I was happy that it wasn't as bad as I was at my fattest, but it was still too much. Right now I weigh myself everyday (every week is probably best, but I don't care) and it's a great way to keep myself in check and prevent myself from gorging.

If you're strictly talking about losing weight, then calorie counting is the only thing that never fails.

I always hear all kinds of bullshit about what you need to do, what you need to check, what foods to cut out, blah blah blah in order to lose weight. It's all crap. People hate doing it, but if you're strictly trying to lose weight rather than having a balanced diet or some shit, just focus on calorie counting. That's it. That's really, truly, all there is to it. Eat fewer calories than you take in. It's the "buy low, sell high" of weight loss. For instance, the first week of my diet I had a spaghetti plate from an Italian restaurant and a bacon cheeseburger from Outback Steakhouse, and because each fell under the calories I was allowed for that day, I was fine. Sign up with MyFitnessPal and it'll set up how many calories you're allowed per day. As long as you're under the allowed calories per day, you will lose weight. To quote George Zimmer, I guarantee it.

The second day is the worst.

I don't know why it is, but the second day of your diet is the most excruciating to go through. Pretty much nothing satisfies your hunger, and you want to gorge on everything in sight. You hate life and you hate your stomach and you hate this stupid fucking diet. Then, the next day...it's gone. I haven't bothered to research this, but I think it's because on the first day of a diet, your body is still unsure about why you're taking in fewer calories than you usually do, and sees it as some kind of odd freak occurrence. The next day, because your body hates change and actively forces you to go back to what was normal, it creates resistance and tries to trick you into cheating. You basically have to tell your body "fuck you, THIS is the new normal" for it to calm that funky shit down. This actually applies to all change, I think, including changing your attitude.

The elliptical machine is the best machine to use to burn the most calories in the shortest amount of time.

Again, this is if you purely want to burn calories and don't give a rat's ass about anything else. I spend 65 minutes on the elliptical machine everyday and burn around 1,000 calories each time. Tell me another machine that gives you those results.

Turkey and chicken are magic meats.

Extremely low in calories and delicious. In fact, one of the more surprising things that you find out when dieting is that meats in general aren't as bad for you calories-wise as you'd think. Steaks are pretty low, too. However, to get the most bang for your buck, you can't beat chicken and turkey.

Servings sizes are typically bullshit.

One of the most frustrating things about calorie counting is when you start discovering all the sneaky-ass tricks that the food industry plays when it comes to calories. If you take a brick of Top Ramen and check the calories on the back, it says 190. Hey, that's not too bad. Then you see the serving size, and it's half a brick. What the fuck? Who the hell eats half a brick of Top Ramen? I remember being horrified when I saw that one of those Mexican fruit pies was 500 calories (nothing slightly bigger than your fist should ever have that many calories), but I actually respect the fact that they weren't bullshitting you about it by saying that it was for "half a pie" or some shit. Hey, assholes at Top Ramen, your brick is 380 calories. Cut the crap and just label it correctly. You'll see this same shit on "fun sized" bags of chips, where it's like 2 servings per bag. Who the hell has ever shared a fun sized bag of chips? No one. Fuck you, food industry.

It's best if you view weight loss as a game you can win.

People are always looking for ways to win at games, and weight loss should be the same. One way that I'll cheat is by working out heavily at the gym, which causes the amount of calories I'm allowed per day to shoot up nearly double. I could get a large-sized fast food meal right now and not even feel guilty about it, because I've worked out enough to where my allowed calories per day is higher than whatever the calorie count of that meal would be. Also, if I'm going to get fast food, I can walk for it and keep a pedometer on hand to count the calories I burn on the way.

You have to be OK with being hungry.

At least for a couple of days. You find out that, at a certain point, the hunger passes. When this starts happening, you also get filled by eating less, which may be your stomach shrinking or some other kind of malarky. Know that this is going to happen, and everything will be fine.

The 5 Worst NBA Team Names

2012-05-11T10:28:00.001-07:00

It's tricky naming a professional sports team. It has to be catchy, sound right when you say it, and represent where the team resides. The teams below have names that are either completely out of synch with their location, or just poorly thought out to begin with.

The Los Angeles Lakers

I'm going to start off with my favorite team, the Lakers. The name used to make sense, when they were in Minneapolis, but now that they're in a city with probably the weakest "lake" out of any major city, it doesn't go. Also, the name itself was never really that great: lakes are nice, serene, placid, and not at all indicative of the fast-paced excitement of basketball. However, considering how the "slowtime" Lakers have been playing as of late, maybe it is appropriate after all.

The Orlando Magic

Some fantasy elements can work in a team name, I'm not going to deny that. But why the fuck are you going to go with spells and whimsy? I get it...Disney World is there, it's the Magic Kingdom, ha ha very clever. It's still a stupid name considering that magic is widely associated with people pulling absurdly long socks out of their sleeves, guessing cards, and boring adults at children's parties.

The Oklahoma City Thunder

The saddest thing about this one is that the team used to have a really cool name. The Seattle SuperSonics had a nice alliterative ring to it, plus it sounded exciting. Now that they relocated, they opted to change the name to the Thunder, which just sounds fucking boring. It's all sound and fury, causing no really damage and just trying to scare you. Might as well be The Oklahoma Guy That Creeps Up Behind You and Goes "BOO!"

The Washington Wizards

This is how political correctness can kill a team name. They used to have the awesome name The Washington Bullets, but because of gun violence they decided that they didn't want that name anymore and opted to go with the absolute gayest alternative they could find. They went from something that can kill you to something associated with little boys and old men, neither of which typically can ball. Also, they have by far the shittiest logo in the NBA. Just take a look at this fucking thing:

The Utah Jazz

This right here is the biggest, best example I can think of of a team desperately needing to change their name once they switch cities. They used to be the New Orleans Jazz, which is both cool and made sense. Then, for whatever reason, after moving to the absolute whitest fucking state in the union, they kept the name. I keep trying to come up with an exaggerated example of a team having a woefully inappropriate name, but even at the most extreme I can't think of anything as ridiculous as the words "Utah" and "Jazz" being put together. Unfortunately, because the team has been consistently good, they're stuck with that name and it'll likely never be changed.

The Godzilla Showa Series, Some Thoughts

2012-05-08T06:28:00.001-07:00

I just finished completing the Showa series of Godzilla films. For those who don’t know, the Showa series consists of the Godzilla films made before the 1984 “reboot” The Return of Godzilla, or Godzilla 1985 as it’s known in the States. There’s 15 of these movies, and it was great watching them in chronological order to see when things first started popping up, like Godzilla turning good (Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster) and when the series started going downhill (Son of Godzilla). I’ve always loved Godzilla, and unlike a lot of Godzilla fans, I have only seen the Showa films, since these were the ones being aired on marathons when I was growing up, and the ones I purchased as budget VHS sets when they came out. To celebrate this series, I’m going to throw down some lists. Enjoy!

The 5 Best Godzilla Films (excluding the first one)

King Kong vs Godzilla

Ditch the shitty American version and seek out the original Japanese film. The American film is mangled beyond recognition, and the original stands out as a great satire.

Mothra Vs Godzilla

The final battle between Mothra and Godzilla isn’t that great, but everything else about this film is. Probably the best-looking Godzilla film in the series, and the fantasy elements of Mothra mix well with the brute monster mayhem of Godzilla.

Godzilla vs Hedorah

A Godzilla “art” film. This one’s great because Hedorah is actually a threat, and you see people suffering because of him. There’s fun random animation thrown in between scenes, and when Hedorah starts sucking smoke from the factories, it’s disturbing. The ending kinda lags, but this is a shockingly good film for late in the series.

Monster Zero

This film is a lot of fun, and Nick Adams is terrific as your typical hard-nosed 60s spaceman. The aliens are deliciously dickish and look great as well, plus you have Godzilla and Rodan teaming up to battle King Ghidorah.

Godzilla vs the Sea Monster

I mainly like this one because of how well it ties together both Godzilla and Mothra’s stories near the end, and how Godzilla is used as a weapon again the villains. The Red Bamboo kidnapping people from Infant Island and using them as slaves is nice and disturbing, and even though Ebirah’s just a giant shrimp, he also has personality.

The Worst Godzilla Film: Godzilla vs. Megalon

When I watched this movie I really wanted to be objective about it, since everyone pegs this as the worst Godzilla film. That reputation is well-deserved. In addition to the film just being an overall piece of shit, the most egregious thing about it is that it seems to serve only as a masked pilot for The Jet Jaguar Show, a shitty Ultraman rip off. However, I liked how Megalon looks, almost in spite of how horrible everything else about this movie is.

The 6 Biggest WTF Moments in the Showa Godzilla Series

(Dishonorable Mention) Godzilla Raids Again: The Racist American Dubbing

The dubbing of this film is so shockingly bad, I almost expected the voice actor to say “I rikey vely much!” at some point.

Monster Zero: Godzilla dances a victory jig.

Godzilla vs Hedorah: Godzilla can fly now, and looks like a shrimp.

Godzilla vs Gigan: Godzilla and Anguilas talk to each other (in English).

Godzilla vs Megalon: Godzilla’s awesome new tail slide into Megalon.

Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla: Godzilla transforms himself into a gigantic magnet, which is only slightly less retarded than that issue of Spider-Man where he all of a sudden has powers of “chest expansion” to break some chains.

Terror of Mechagodzilla: Robot Katsura’s exposed breasts during an operation. That one I REALLY wasn’t expecting.

Down the Rabbit Hole with Thai Pop Spectacular

2012-05-03T06:26:00.001-07:00

As a music fan, there's something special about discovering a new genre that you never knew about before, but instantly fall in love with. My own music tastes have been mainly relegated to foreign variations on typical American rock and pop sounds, with the biggest instance of this being the French ye-ye and pop scene in the 60s. My Mt Rushmore of this genre (Serge Gainsbourg, Michel Polnareff, Francoise Hardy, and Jacques Dutronc) are four of the best musicians I've heard in any genre, but when you get right down to it, their music, while brilliant, still works within the confines of Western rock and pop. At its essence, there's nothing much different from it aside from the language they're singing in. It makes sense that I would embrace it, as a fan of the 60s sound and the French language.

Once I got into French pop, I started seeking out other Foreign variants on rock and pop, but nothing ever took hold of me the way French pop did. I loved the Cambodian Rocks compilations, as well as the GS I Love You discs, but each new disc I found seemed to be following the same "garage rock but in X language" style. I never went down the rabbit hole with any of these genres, and my interest stopped with whatever disc I bought. The closest I ever got to looking for more was when I bought a Bollywood soundtrack comp, but I never really fell in love with that genre.

A few years ago my girlfriend and I went to a music store in LA (Amoeba, for those who live here), and I spotted a CD called Thai Pop Spectacular. I was intrigued by the cover featuring two Thai women in short blue skirts and a purple background, and in the lower lefthand corner it said "1960s-1980s." I flipped it over to see the track list/description, and instead was greeted by a smiling Thai woman holding some objected between her fingers. Hmmm. The CD gave me nothing to go by aside from the cover art and "1960s-1980s", but I figured that I'd say "fuck it" and gamble on it. It wouldn't be the first or last time I bought something that potentially sucked on a whim.

When we got home I popped it in and was greeted by the intro, "Welcome to Thailand," which is a somewhat obnoxious clip from a TV show where some very broken English is being spoken. Then, after those :46 seconds are over, track two and the album proper started...holy shit. The first song, Roob Lor Thom Pai kicks off with a slow, sexy beat and surf guitar riff. The singing, which may be off-putting to some, appealed to me in that this was clearly not mimicking Western singing. I remember thinking that, even if this was the only good track on the album, it was still worth the money I spent on it. The following song, Mae Kha Som Tum, solidified my love of this album and the genre. It's more Western, but fuck is it great. It has a great guitar hook and almost sounds like something you'd hear in a spy movie. And yes, this one also had a "sexy" beat to it. It's almost impossible to follow up the one-two punch of those opening tracks, but the next song, Lung Dee Kee Mao, was also really good, and had that unique beat that was starting to appeal to me, but almost straight-jacketed in a pop sound. The next song, Fawn Ngeo by Johnny Guitar, was a great instrumental that sounded both very familiar yet very foreign.

The fifth song, Kwuan Tai Duew Luk Puen, was a kick to the teeth and one of the best foreign pop songs I've ever heard, period. It's a fast-paced disco song and just stomps your ass all over the place. So far on this disc, I had heard three of the best songs I'd heard in years, and even though nothing else on the album came close to matching those three, it was more than enough to win me over.

The music seemed to get progressively "foreign," but still accessible. Songs like Tid Lom Ta Lai and Gao Guek were fun and enjoyable, and then you'd get hit with something like Sao Dok Kum Tai by Pumpuang Duanjan, which is a slow, beautiful ballad. There was so much variety in this album, with it seeming to hop genres and sounds at a whim, that it did something to me that hasn't happened since I first bought a France Gall CD...it made me passionate about the genre.

This is more of a biography than a review, but I recommend Thai Pop Spectacular to anyone with an interest in foreign music. It's more accessible than the Molam discs put out by the same label, but still sounds different enough from what you'll typically hear in a foreign pop compilation that anyone who wants to get their feet wet with Thai pop should start here. There's a sequel to this disc that's also really good, but this one still holds a special spot in my heart.

Break Out the Bread! A Review of The Incredible Melting Man

2012-04-27T16:15:00.000-07:00

The Incredible Melting Man (1977)

Directed by William Sachs

The Incredible Melting Man is considered one of the worst films ever made, and has been trashed repeatedly since it was released. "Bad" is always subjective, and the question that needs to be brought up when discussing any film is, "were you entertained?" With that in mind, I have come to praise the unfairly maligned Melting Man, and in my heart of hearts, I consider this one of the most fun horror films I've ever seen.

The Incredible Melting Man is one of those films, like The Fly and Robocop, that doesn't fuck around and is pretty much entertaining from start to finish, with very little lagging. It starts out in space, with three astronauts going to Saturn. A blast of radiation kills two of them, but somehow the third person, Steve West, survives. He gets back to Earth somehow and when he wakes up in a hospital he finds that his hands are blood red and appear to be melting. When he yanks off his head bandages and looks in the mirror he discovers that his face is similarly disfigured, and decides that the best course of action is to chase his nurse down the street and devour half of her face. Meanwhile, Dr. Ted Nelson, while examining the nurse's corpse, discovers that it's emitting some radiation, and that he better go find his melting friend as soon as possible before more people get hurt.

We find out that the reason why Steve's been snacking on people is because his skin is melting away, and in order to survive and slow the melting process he needs to keep devouring more flesh. The film turns into a melting manhunt, with Steve eating people and Ted, along with General Michael Perry, one step behind, finding dead bodies and gooey parts of Steve scattered all over. The film's climax takes place at a power plant, with Steve climbing to the top like a melty human King Kong, and Ted pleading with him to surrender. Ted slips and falls over a railing, but manages to hold on with one hand. Appealing to their friendship, Ted convinces Steve to pull him up with his gooey, dripping hand. Afterward a couple of cops show up and start yelling at Steve, and Ted, telling the cops not to shoot, is then shot in the face. Steve loses his shit and kills the two cops, but only after being shot several times on his charge down. Now that business is taken care of, Steve moseys over to the side of a building, falls down, and slowly starts to melt away, shown in loving detail. Morning breaks and a janitor arrives listening to a news report. The news report states that another mission to Saturn is about to take place, and the annoyed janitor fetches a shovel and pan and scoops Steve up and dumps him into a trash can.

This film has an odd mix of horror and humor, and the reason for that is executive meddling. It started life as a comedy, but the producers, convinced that a straight horror film would make more money, had the director cut the comedy scenes and insert more horror scenes. This is presumably responsible for the only scene in this film that's a drag...the one of the married couple coming home and the woman chopping off Steve's arm. There's no reason for this scene to exist, and it drags on with a shot of the woman lying on the floor in hysterics. Meanwhile, some of the funny scenes that remain are delightful. I loved the bickering geezers in the car and thought that their scene was very sweet (until they were eaten). Also, the janitor looking downright pissy about having to shovel up Steve's melted remains was a great ending and is sure to put a smile on your face. The comedy that wasn't intentional is the atrocious acting, but the badness of it is brilliant in its own way and keeps you entertained during exposition scenes that would typically drag.

There's no "monster hidden by shadows" or much "leaving horror to the imagination" in this film. Nope. The money's in the melting man, and you're going to see a lot of him in this film (in broad daylight, even). This is one of those rare films where you see the monster as much or even more than the leads, and his gooey, dripping appearance is courtesy of the brilliant makeup artist Rick Baker. In fact, what we see here is sadly only a taste of what he had in mind. Initially, he had stages of melting prepared, where you would see Steve going from scarred and semi-melted to more melted and then finally to the dripping bag of flesh that we're treated to throughout the film. Apparently the actor portraying the melted man was being difficult during his makeup sessions, so some of the stages were ditched, while the ones that were allegedly filmed sadly hit the cutting room floor, along with the comedy scenes. But what we're left with is fantastically disgusting. Steve's just dripping all over the place, with puddles of human goo acting as a breadcrumb trail for Ted, in addition to finding shit like Steve's ear stuck onto some branches. Also, for a man who's melting away and dying, Steve seems remarkably sprite and energetic. He's downright jaunty going through the woods on his killing spree, running and prancing about with more energy than the normal characters in this film.

There's just no other way to put it: The Incredible Melting Man is fucking awesome. I loved this movie and would highly recommend it to everyone reading this post, especially if you have an interest in "melt movies," that disgusting sub-genre of body horror where, obviously, bodies melting are a key plot development. One final bit of trivia is that this movie was the inspiration for the disgusting melting man that makes an appearance in Robocop.

Recommended for people who like melt movies and brief geezer romance scenes.

Son of Godzilla: When Things Started Going Wrong

2012-04-26T09:58:00.005-07:00

I've been on a Godzilla kick as of late and have been watching these movies in chronological order. So far, it's been great, and while I knew that the series was going to start going downhill, I had yet to encounter a Godzilla film that I could stand back and say, "wow, now THAT was a piece of shit." Which brings me to Son of Godzilla. Son of Godzilla stands as the first bad Godzilla film, and the first sign that the franchise was going downhill. While I didn't notice any stock footage, there were other things that stood out and killed my enjoyment of this film. They are:

Godzilla's weak. He looks more like a muppet and is more loving in this film. For the first time in the franchise, Godzilla isn't scary at all. He looks downright adorable at times.

The villains suck. Even that fucking giant shrimp from Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster at least had some kind of story and a background. People knew he existed, feared him, and took precautionary measures when having to get around him. I don't care what their names are, "giant spider" and "giant praying mantis" just aren't good characters when they randomly fly in and out of scenes and have little build-up. I don't care if that girl's journal mentions the giant spider before he shows up, it's still weak and doesn't build any kind of anticipation for his appearance. Sure, they look good and the suitmation on them is fantastic, but why should I care about them when no one on the island seems to view them as anything other than an inconvenience?

This is yet another fucking movie where Godzilla is either defeated or nearly defeated by bukkake. I'm sorry, I mean having an insect squirt a sticky white web/silk all over him.

The human story in this one is embarrassingly shitty. I'm not going to pretend that it was all that great in the previous films, especially Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster, but at least you knew what the motivations were and could at least get somewhat invested in these characters. This film was a major instance of the screenwriter just phoning this shit in. How the fuck will freezing an island solve world hunger? Just temperature control in general? BULLSHIT! I know "solving world hunger" is supposed to make these scientists "noble," but their performances were dull enough that I didn't care about them or their stupid little experiments.

The island girl sucks, and her romance with the reporter is cheap and retarded. It's about as believable as that stupid movie where that guy from Friends and Salma Hayek fall in love and get married. And this is going to be the pig in me talking, but could Toho at least have given her a skimpier bikini to swim in? Fuck, the wardrobe for the boy in Godzilla vs. Megalon is more revealing than what this island woman wears.

Minira isn't too bad, but his theme song ruins everything. When he battles a monster and you hear that music, you just can't take the fight seriously. You know it's going to be wacky and cute, and therefore, you CAN'T get invested in it. The filmmakers are just daring you to care about the outcome of the battle at that point.

The Godzilla/Minira training scene isn't that bad. I can live with it. Unlike everything else in this piece of shit film, at least there's some character development going on here.

I know Godzilla monsters have tough skin, but a newborn Minira getting poked and prodded by two preying mantises and escaping without a scratch on him really pushes it, especially considering how doughy and soft he looks.

The final battle between Godzilla and the spider is slooooooooooooooow. Godzilla just stands there while the spider squirts all over him and Minira freaks out. Why Godzilla didn't just keep unloading his firebreath on that fuck is a mystery, because that's how he finally defeats it.

The "don't worry, Godzilla's gonna live and be OK!" ending infuriated me, as did "hey look, our rescue ship is actually a submarine!" I don't know why the submarine bit pissed me off, but it just seemed like yet another lame bit thrown into the mix.

I absolutely dread watching Godzilla's Revenge, because if I remember correctly, it's even worse than this one, even if Minira is working as an alter-ego for the main character or some shit. Now keep in mind, I don't hate Minira, and I get that the films are being dumbed down for kids. My main problem is that everything about this film was so lazy that I couldn't stay invested in anything that was happening, and having Godzilla's main villains being random-ass bugs makes it even worse because you're robbed of a potentially cool back story for the villain. And yes, the human story does matter in these films, because a Godzilla film is typically 1/3 Godzilla and 2/3 everything-that-leads-to-Godzilla. Just give me a little fucking context for these giant monster battles, please. That's the bare minimum you can do.

Roland Saint-Laurent Vs. The Spanish Language, Take 27

2011-10-07T10:26:00.000-07:00

Spanish has always been a language that has confounded and tormented me. Throughout my life, it’s always been there, creeping on me and laughing in my face. My dad’s Mexican, with English as his second language. Half of my family is Mexican and speaks Spanish, with a large number of them completely monolingual in Spanish. For whatever reason, none of them ever saw fit to speak to me exclusively in Spanish, at least to the point where I’d gain some basic, rudimentary understanding of the language. Therefore, when I took my first Spanish class in high school, I was diving in fresh, the same as the Chinese kids who were in there. The only things I retained from that class were a stupid rhyme we did to practice vowels, the alphabet, some numbers, and the memory of seeing my alcoholic Spanish teacher pouring a clear liquid from one container into his bottle of orange juice.

The next time I took Spanish was a couple years later at a community college. It was a summer class and was four hours per day, due to the shortened schedule. Aside from learning the basics in that class, one of the biggest memories I have is how immature everyone was there. The students seemed to be in that middle period, where they still have that high school attitude but are transitioning into college douchebags. In addition to hearing a rock en español Smiths cover, my biggest memory is of doing my final presentation on lucha libre and showing a clip from a Santo movie as a demonstration of Mexican wrestling excellence.

All this time I was still kind of half-assing it. I took Spanish 2 during another semester, and that’s when I really started learning the language. I like to think of this as the peak of my Spanish learning life, because not only was I learning more of the structure of the language, but I was also trying really hard at this point, and even had small conversations with coworkers. I was rocking some flashcards, writing translations to ridiculous sentences I could think up, and was basically ramming information into my head. Most of what I maintained was from those classes and that period of time, and a lot of it stuck with me, even when I abandoned Spanish and plunged head-on into French.

The last proper Spanish class I took was probably ten years ago, but in the time since then I’ve listened to audio courses and have done some independent learning. I can understand a decent amount of spoken Spanish, but if I didn’t stop, I don’t have any doubt that I’d be fluent by now. I don’t regret learning French, but I do regret not at least making a consistent, daily effort to learn at least one new thing in Spanish every day. Those days would add up and I’d be in a much better position than I am now.

My goal is to be fluent by the end of next year. Even if it doesn’t happen, just trying for it leaves me in a better position than I’m in now with the language. Right now I’m watching a ton of El Chavo shows because 1) it kicks ass, and 2) it’s Spanish for Spanish speakers and I’m actively trying to understand it because I want to get more of the jokes. I’ve also been listening to the Michel Thomas programs and transcribing the sentences by hand, which has helped me retain them a hell of a lot better than just listening to them. I’m not really interested in going over the grammar books again, but there are a bunch of constructions that I forgot, and I’ll be consulting my Idiots Guide to Intermediate Spanish to brush up on them, especially the conditional and subjunctive. I’m also going to read for pleasure and not try to stop and define every single word. Because I already read the books and know the plots, I’m going to read the Harry Potter series in Spanish. They were an impulse buy years ago, and I’m glad I still have them. Finally, I’m going to read, and re-read, and re-read again my all-time favorite language learning book, Breaking Out of Beginner’s Spanish. This book is so great that I wish there was a version for French and every other language I’m interested in.

Can I be fluent by the end of next year, or will I puss out again? Stay tuned!

The Library is Dying

2011-09-27T19:38:00.000-07:00

I haven’t posted much here lately about libraries (or much of anything else, to be honest), but some major things have been happening due to the city’s budget being a black hole and services being chopped left and right. Though I’ve stayed fairly optimistic about the matter, I’ve heard that things have gotten to the point that a substantial number of full-time employees are going to get the axe, mainly due to their benefits and higher salaries. If my understanding of matters is correct, that means that part-timers such as myself will be able to keep our jobs, but will more than likely have to take on more responsibilities as resources continue to be stretched thin.

I have tried to be realistic about this instead of bitching about how unfair it is and how the city doesn’t care about the library. If the city doesn’t have money, then there’s really not a whole lot that can be done. At one point the library was a hair away from being outsourced to a private company, which would have meant everyone re-applying for their jobs, more than likely with massive pay cuts. As a city library, there was also the possibility of it being incorporated into the county system, which would definitely have meant people having to take pay cuts (I worked for the county at one point and know how much they pay). That was avoided as well, but the solution we ended up with, the library still being operated by the city but with huge numbers of people losing their jobs, is not really that much better than the other two options. Basically the library had their choice of three terrible options, and either one that they would have picked would have screwed people over.

This may have been avoided, though, if people either knew about it or cared. As employees we were told to keep our mouths shut, since telling patrons about our situation would have been “unethical” and grounds for termination. Thus, the people who in all likelihood could have prevented the library’s budget from getting hacked to shreds, the patrons, were left in the dark about it all, while the library went understaffed and staff members became overworked in the rare occasions that they were called in. They were left to wonder why service at the library got so bad so fast, why desk staff hardly ever got up to help them out, why they were told to do everything themselves, and why policy changes were never followed consistently by staff.

I have not worked at the library for over a month now. Other staff members have had to take on second jobs because they’re not getting the income they need to pay the bills. I even heard a rumor that my boss, the head of the current library that I work at, has also put in applications at other libraries. At my previous branch, we were frequently under the threat of libraries being closed due to budget issues, but at the last minute people like the Friends of the Library would swoop in and save the day. Right now, that’s not something likely to happen.

The people who know me personally know the situation I’m talking about. Anyone else who has come here, either from an outside link or from reading my book, is just as oblivious about my library as our patrons are. I’m writing this not to try to convince people to save my library, but to let people know that libraries as expendable now, and likely to lose funding when a crisis hits. If you use your library or care about libraries, support them. Check out some books, make some donations. With Netflix jacking up their prices, you can always find good new and old movies at your library, typically for free. If you like your local library, tell people and encourage them to go. Let your representatives know that the library is important to you and not easily disposed of. There are real people that will be affected by this, from my friends losing their jobs, to low budget and homeless patrons losing the chance to look for work via our internet service or just escape from reality for a few hours by reading a book for free, not to mention the kids who will no longer have a storytime program to go to. My library may be falling apart, but that doesn’t mean that yours has to as well.

Welcome to Thailand!

2011-09-25T23:49:00.000-07:00

In a way that hasn’t happened since I first picked up a France Gall CD and discovered the world of French pop, I have fallen head over heels in love with a new style from another country, but one not as familiar and vastly more difficult to understand. I am officially in love with Thai pop music.

I don’t pretend to know anything about Thai music, only the rudimentary bits that I’ve picked up from online research and reading the liner notes of the CDs I’ve purchased. Unlike French pop, which should be immediately accessible to people who can get past the retarded notion of not wanting to listen to something sung in a foreign language, the Thai pop CDs I’ve purchased definitely have their own unique sound, and the singing does take some getting used to, as it includes yodeling and vocal inflections that you just don’t get in Western music.

As it is, I feel like an asshole referring to it all as “Thai pop,” which I mainly do as a convenient shorthand. Most of what I’ve been listening to is I believe called Luk Thung, and is a mixture of Thai country music styles with American soundtracks and country music. But then when I do further research, I also see some of this stuff referred to as Thai pop, so I don’t feel as bad anymore. Whatever it’s called, the hipper record labels like Sublime Frequencies and Soundway Records have released albums of this stuff, and it has an exotic beauty that’s both hard to describe and even harder for me to resist.

Because of how enthralled I am with this music, I plan on reviewing some of these albums in the future. But for reference, here’s a list of available collections of Thai pop/Luk Thung albums. You should be able to get some of them on Amazon or at your local hip record stores. Brief comments are provided for albums I’ve heard enough to have an opinion on:

Thai Pop Spectacular This is the first Thai pop album I purchased, and the opening track “Roob Lor Thom Pai” by Buppah Saichol is one of the sexiest fucking songs I’ve heard in recent memory. There’s a generous helping of comedy on this album, but songs like the opener, the Onuma Singsiri track that immediately follows, and Chailai Chaiyata’s “Kwuan Tai Duew Luk Puen” make this album an essential purchase.

Siamese Soul - Thai Pop Spectacular 2 A worthy sequel. It took me slightly more time to get into it, but it’s a fantastic album and leaves me hoping Sublime Frequencies puts out a third part sometime soon. The closing track by Ubon Pattana reminds me a lot of the Velvet Underground’s first album.

The Sounds of Siam, Leftfield Luk Thang, Jazz & Malam in Thailand Though I started off with Thai Pop Spectacular and still consider that an excellent disc to start with, this one is much more consistent, has less comedy, and is pretty much incredible the whole way through. Also, it spans more genres and gives you a broader view of Thai music, but with those Western influences we all know and love. You may want to start with this one. Like the poster for Citizen Kane says, “It’s Fantastic!”

Thai Funk Zudrangma Vol 1 & 2 Limited edition CDs that I’ve so far only heard a couple of tracks from, but goddamn are those tracks great. Looking forward to diving into this set soon.

Luk Thung! The Roots of Thai Funk From the same series as the above, this one’s pretty incredible...at least from what I’ve heard so far. I lucked out and got this for a measly $10 at Ameba. It was a used copy, so I guess the buyer wasn’t as impressed by Thai music as I am. I’m most anxious to hear this one next, as the songs I heard rocked my socks off. Too bad the bamboo packaging makes it impossible to put in any CD cabinet you may have.

Thai? Dai! The Heavier Side of the Luk Thung Underground I’ve only heard part of a track from this collection, and it was a riff from Black Sabbath’s Iron Man. Holy shit! If this is a heavy metal variant on Thai music it’s going to make for an interesting listening experience, to say the least.

Shadow Music of Thailand If I remember correctly, shadow music is a genre of Thai music that was heavily influenced by instrumental rock bands. I hope there’s some singing on this collection, but as long as the music’s good and it doesn’t sound too Western, I’ll be happy.

Thai Beat a Go-Go Vol 1-3 I heard these years ago, and while they were enjoyable, they did seem to lean heavily on cover versions of hit songs, and the sound was much more Western than either of the Thai Pop Spectacular CDs or The Sounds of Siam. I’m going to go through these again, and now that my ears are more refined, I’m hoping that they’re more Thai than I remember them being.

Molam: Thai Country Groove From Isan 1 & 2 I own vol. 2 and I had a hell of a time getting into it. Unlike the other CDs I’ve heard, I remember this one being VERY Thai and much more folk than the other volumes. Much like the Thai Pop a Go-Go series, I’m going to re-listen to it along with the first volume and see what I missed the first time around. I briefly listened to one of the tracks from it and it was a lot more rockin’ than I remembered.

Radio Thailand Transmissions from the Tropical Kingdom: I don’t know much about this series, but I believe this these “Radio” discs are put out by Sublime Frequencies and are recordings of actual radio broadcasts, complete with DJs and commercials. I’ll definitely be listening to this one, but my listening preferences for entire songs without filler put this one low on my priority list.

WTF, Roger Ebert?

2011-09-16T12:44:00.000-07:00

When I was a teen, I loved the comic book Spawn. So, in 1997, I was excited as fuck to see the film. As I watched it, every ounce of enthusiasm and joy started falling away, and I was shocked at the horrendous piece of shit I just witnessed. The special effects were pretty neat at the time, but I was mainly angry at the obnoxious, unfunny performance of John Leguizamo as the Violator. But I was a teenager then. Maybe now I’ll be less-harsh on it, with lower expectations and coming to it without loving the comic as much as I did. After all, I read Roger Ebert’s review of it, and he gave it his famous “thumbs up.” He called it “an experimental art film.” He praised Leguizamo’s “brilliant comic timing.” He called Spawn “an extraordinary superhero.” So high is his praise, in fact, that this is how he ends his review:

“So the way to view the movie, I think, is to consider the story as the frame--necessary, but upstaged by what it contains, which in this case is some of the most impressive effects I've seen. The disciplines blend into one another: Animation, makeup, costuming, process shots, morphing. They create a place and a look as specific as the places evoked in such films as ``Metropolis'' and ``Blade Runner.'' As a visual experience, ``Spawn'' is unforgettable.”

Wow. That’s some pretty high praise right there. Could I have been wrong? I typically respect Ebert’s reviews, so I checked it out from my library and watched it again.

Nope. It still sucks, and not even in a “I can understand how someone could really like this” way. No, it sucks in a “this is a horrible fucking movie that is impossible to like” way. And the special effects look really fucking bad, though I guess in 97 they might have looked amazing. But seriously...comparing it to Metropolis and Blade Runner? What the fuck? I don’t understand at all why Ebert loved this movie so much, since the plot and acting are fucking terrible. And Leguizamo’s “comic timing” is being overbearing, obnoxious, in-your-face, and making fart jokes. Ebert typically WOULD NOT let this degree of plot and acting slide for any other film. I just don’t fucking get it.

Ebert gave Spawn *** 1/2. That’s half a star shy of PERFECT. To compare, the following films in similar genres are not as good as Spawn, going by Ebert’s rating system:

The Matrix ***
LOTR Fellowship of the Ring ***
LOTR The Two Towers ***
(Only LOTR Return of the King is as good as Spawn, with *** 1/2.)
District 9 ***
Captain America ***
Iron Man ***
Batman **
Batman Returns **
Batman Forever ** 1/2 (no fucking way is the worst Batman film the best one in the original series)
Batman & Robin **
Thor * 1/2
Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan ***
Star Trek (2009) ** 1/2
X-Men ** 1/2
X2: X-Men United ***
X-Men First Class **1/2
Blade ***
Spider-Man **1/2
Brazil ** (I had to include this because WHAT THE FUCK, EBERT??????)
Superman Returns **

All of these films, by any sane viewer, are better than Spawn. Yes, even the shitty Batman movies. In fact, The Matrix, the LOTR trilogy, Iron Man, Batman, Star Trek II, X2, Brazil, and Spider-Man are undeniable classics in this fantasy/adventure genre.

Ebert also gave Cars 2 a ***1/2 rating. I just don’t get it.

Defending Annie Hall: Or, Clearing up the 50th Academy Awards for Nerds

2011-03-04T16:05:00.001-08:00

Annie Hall was, and is, a better film than Star Wars. This is coming from someone who just “likes” Annie Hall. In terms of enjoyment, I have to say that when I sit down and want to just watch a movie for fun, I’d probably pick Star Wars over Annie Hall because Star Wars is well-done mindless fun. I’d also prefer to relax watching Spider-Man over Citizen Kane, but there’s really no argument over which of those two is the “better” film. Fans tend to ruin fun things, though. A fun space adventure has turned into a weird Ayn Rand-esque cult, even though the entire series consists of two and a half great adventure films, and three and a half unbearable pieces of shit (the half and half is Return of the Jedi, of course). Because of the fanatical attachment that fans have with Star Wars, and because of it’s undeniable influence on pop culture and film, nerds snarl indignantly when they discover that Woody Allen’s romantic comedy Annie Hall beat out their beloved Star Wars for best picture during the 50th Academy Awards. Are you fucking serious?

First of all, this isn’t some bullshit like Dances With Wolves beating Goodfellas. If we were to go back, look at both films and “redo” who wins the Oscar, Annie Hall still wins, easily. In terns of science fiction, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind wins, and it wasn’t even fucking nominated! See, the thing that a lot of tards have a hard time understanding is that there are certain core aspects of a film that determine whether or not it’s a great film. Among the most important are the script, the direction, and the acting. Let’s do a rundown of each, shall we?

The Script

It has been well-established by now that George Lucas lifted pretty much the entire story for Star Wars from such sources as the Hidden Fortress, Dune, and Flash Gordon series. But that’s fine, as long as the dialog is memorable. Star Wars, and every other film in this series, has some of the most cringe-inducing dialog known to film, including such winners as the following:

Darth Vader: I've been waiting for you, Obi-Wan. We meet again, at last. The circle is now complete. When I left you, I was but the learner; now *I* am the master.
Obi-Wan: Only a master of evil, Darth.
[lightsabers clash]

Sure, there’s a few memorable lines, but come on. Is anyone honestly going to say that the writing in this fucking movie is award-winning? It’s also been noted that much of the success of Star Wars came from other people meddling with it and demanding changes. When Lucas got total control over his films, he produced the prequels.

The writing in Annie Hall is smart as fuck, something that grown ups tend to like. There’s smart jokes (“Sylvia Plath - interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality), dumb jokes (the scene with the lobster) and, of course, sex jokes. Most actors would kill to be in a Woody Allen film, and much of his reputation is based on how clever his dialog is. As for the plot, the disjoined story telling was ridiculously inventive and influential for its time, something that few mainstream films had the balls to do. The next huge film to do something like this again was Pulp Fiction.

For the final word on George Lucas as a writer, here’s something Harrison Ford said to George Lucas after going over his dialog: “George, you can write this shit, but you can’t say it.”

The Direction

A lot of what made Star Wars great was the contributions from other people, contributions that did get recognition by the Academy. John Williams’ amazing score contributed so much to the film that it easily beat out his main competition...John Williams’ score for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Star Wars also won for sound mixing, art direction, visual effects, and film editing, all categories that this film excelled in. Hell, if anything it got robbed for not even being nominated for best cinematography, but that’s neither here nor there. Star Wars is a movie you experience, and many of the key players in that experience did get the recognition they deserved. Lucas did a competent job directing the film, but still, a lot of those memorable scenes were taken from other sources. Those amazing space battles were taken from WW2 footage of dogfights. Much of the pageantry surrounding the Storm Troopers and Darth Vader were taken from Triumph of the Will. The lightsaber battles from samurai fights. Now, discrediting this would be like saying that Quentin Tarantino never deserved an award for his film, but we all know that Quentin actually knows how to work with actors, write a script, and come up with multiple creative ways to film a scene. Lucas’ previous film, American Graffiti, was a hit because of a script that he didn’t write, and his first film, THX 1138, was a boring, cold failure that hardly anyone likes. George Lucas as a director peaked with Star Wars, and really, what made that film so good was how outsiders tampered with his vision and used it as a springboard to be creative.

Woody Allen is a fucking movie-making machine, pumping out films every goddamn year. He’s done slapstick, romantic comedies, and dramas, and they all have that distinct Woody Allen stamp on them. You know when you’re watching a film of his, because his voice is that distinct. A lot of what’s great about his films comes from the writing, but his direction has always been top-notch as well. It might not be as exciting and flashy as Star Wars, but for what he sets out to achieve in his films, it works beautifully. There’s an intimacy you get with his films, and what makes Annie Hall so great is how he constantly involves the audience as being a part of what’s going on. The disjointed structure of the film also arguably turns the viewer into a character of sorts in this film, almost like Allen’s therapist. It’s ambitious, funny, and created the modern romantic comedy. And it’s a Woody Allen film.

The Acting

Star Wars has two good actors in it, and a great villain whose performance boils down to walking around like a scary man and having his lines overdubbed to sound menacing. Alec Guinness did a great job as Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Harrison Ford was fantastic as Han Solo. Everyone else? FUCKING CARDBOARD. Another great Harrison Ford knock against this goddamn franchise was when, during an interview, he was asked if he’d ever play Han Solo again and he flat-out said “no,” but said he’d play Indiana Jones again in a heartbeat. Pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?

As for Annie Hall, yeah yeah yeah, Woody Allen only plays one character, but so do most actors, and it works in this film. Diane Keaton did such a good job in this film that she’s been destined to play the same goddamn character in every movie since. Actors love working with Woody, and he gets some damn fine performances from everyone, from the main cast to the supporting players. Much of what makes Annie Hall work has to do with how the characters interact with each other, and with the audience. Comedy’s a tough thing to pull off, and only good actors can do clever dialog. Overall, the people in Annie Hall seem real. You can relate to what’s going on, and their characterization is strong enough that, while there are some neat tricks with the timeline and random cute gimmicks going on, nothing seems superfluous. It all fits. Give these characters wooden actors and the whole fucking thing crumbles apart.

In conclusion, I’d like to state once again that I really liked the first two Star Wars films, and think that Jedi had potential to be as good. Those first two films are masterpieces of escapism, only surpassed by Peter Jackson’s excellent work on the Lord of the Rings films. But Annie Hall was the better film. Better written, better acted, better directed, and arguably just as influential. And I don’t care how many “Woody Allen is a pervert!!! LOL” arguments you make, nothing he’s ever done, either in film or in his personal life, has ever been as bad as the fucking Star Wars prequels.

The end.

My Short Life as a Hot Dog Vender

2011-02-28T13:10:00.000-08:00

After the routine of going to school ended for me in 1998, I was hit with the realization that it was time to get a job. That prospect scared the shit out of me, but I went ahead and started putting in applications. I only remember a few places that I applied to at the time, but to give you an idea as to what was going through my head, one of them was Del Taco, another was one of those video stores that they used to have in various supermarkets (not a small wall of movies and a counter, but a full-on video store within the store, only slightly smaller than a stand-alone), and another was Hollywood Video. The last place I remember applying to was Wienerschnitzel. Unlike most people I know, I love eating at this place and have never once considered it anything other than delicious. The location I applied to was fairly close to my house, but was in a rather shady area. It was located next to the Home Depot and the Spearmint Rhino strip joint. Across the street were another couple of strip joints, one proudly proclaiming that it was an “Adult Book Store” (a girl in a creative writing fiction class that I took the next year worked at this strip joint, and I was shocked at how unexaggerated she looked). I was interviewed by the owner, who was a fat, gray-haired man that owned classic cars. Much to my surprised, I got a call shortly after the interview and was offered the job. I would be starting on a Sunday and then work various nights throughout the week. I was thrilled.

Before starting on this grand adventure I was given a purple t-shirt, a visor, and a videotape that was supposed to train me on the basics. The video was filled with “humor” and had an actor playing an asshole and the other actor playing a dimwit. I’m assuming this was done to make the training part simplified to such an extent that even an idiot could understand it. It was actually pretty charming in its own condescending way. When I started my first shift I was greeted by a woman who was going to start training me. She appeared to be in her late 20’s/early 30’s and constantly talked about certain things “selling like hotcakes.” She showed me how to wash the pots and pans in the back, where things were located in the gigantic freezer, and how to make the chili.

To make the chili, you grab a giant pot and unload a can of “chili sauce” into it. You then grab the frozen unsold hamburger patties from the previous night and start cutting them up with a large flat blade. Dump the old meat into the pot, add some water, and then stir the living shit out of it. Once everything is mixed together you place a sheet of plastic wrap over the top and drag it into the freezer. Surprisingly, this did not kill my appetite for their chili.

The scariest thing that I had to do, and I believe I only did it two times, was dumping out the hot fry oil. We had to carry the container over to the dumpster outside and tip it over to start pouring the oil into the dumpster, without getting burned by either the bottom of the container or by any of the oil potentially splashing on you. This was the only aspect of the job that terrified me, because I’m a pussy when it comes to getting burned by hot oil.

On my first day I got hit with the afternoon rush, and had to make over twenty chili dogs for a single customer. Since I was just learning how to do this shit, it was a pain in the ass. During the rush I remember dropping the tongs and not having the time to wash them due to the rush. The chili dogs were easy to make, and it took a short amount of time to learn the ropes of caramelizing buns, cooking burger patties, and preparing the chili. In those brief moments when it wasn’t busy I was told to make a few extra chili dogs and leave them wrapped and sitting under a heat lamp. Also, there was an area above the grill which was filled with steam to keep the hotdogs and hamburger patties hot. This steam burned my hand almost everytime I had to reach into it. At the end of my shift, because of how hectic the pace got, I accidentally spilled chili on my thumb and scalded the shit out of it. It was shockingly painful and I had to spend the next several hours at home with my thumb soaking in a cup of cold milk. So went my first day at my new job.

The next few days at work were less frantic but still unappealing. There was another manager who came in and was incredibly rude to me. She had a Deliverance face and breasts so large that it looked like she stuffed two footballs under her shirt. In fact, one skeezy guy called me over when this woman went to the back and said “she’s got big tits, huh?” That encounter was my first interaction with a patron, and 13 years later I have to say that very little has changed. That night ended with me seeing a mouse hauling ass between the seats, and I finally decided that I didn’t want to be there anymore. I asked the rude woman if it were at all possible to change my shift to mornings or afternoons, and her response was something along the line of, “you were hired to work nights, and if you don’t want to work nights, then tough.”

The cherry on top of it all was on another day when I bent down to grab a tray of buns and the back of my pants just ripped open in front of two female coworkers, one of them being the nice woman who trained me and the other being a classless girl with a face riddled with zits. Prior to this happening the zitty girl was doing a happy dance because she had the weekend off and her boyfriend was coming over to bang her. I was told to just go home for the rest of my shift and come in the next day. After three short weeks at this place, I decided that the world of fast food wasn’t for me. Maybe it was because I was a lightweight, but the job just defeated me. I called in and told the manager that I was quitting. After the expected “why are you leaving us?” conversation I was told to come in a couple days later to pick up my check from the owner and drop off my shirt and visor.

When I went in the owner went about everything like it was your average, everyday occurrence, which it was. He barely said a word to me and just wrote out my check, which turned out to be a pain in the ass to cash because it was a personal check and I had to go to some random Asian bank to get it cashed. The zitty girl who was so excited about getting boned gave me one of the meanest looks I’ve ever seen and let me know that because of me quitting she now had to work my weekend shift. I left Wienerschnitzel feeling a little relieved but at the same time disappointed that it took under a month to break me. It would be another month or so before I got a much better but also short-lived job at the post office, sorting packages by zipcode. It was seasonal work, so I didn’t feel like such a failure when that job ended.

I don’t know what happened to anyone who worked at this place after I left, but it’s gone now. A few years ago it was converted into a Starbucks, which for some reason seems out of place in this location. I looked up the owner online a bit ago, and found absolutely nothing. I’m guessing he’s no longer in the hotdog business and is content driving his classic cars and cheating on his wife. I, on the other hand, have not worked in fast food ever since, but I still eat at Wienerschnitzel on occasion and love it, despite knowing better.

A Partial Victory!

2011-02-09T19:54:00.001-08:00

Awhile back (actually May 13, 2008) I wrote a blog post asking people to go to the Turner Classic Movies website and vote for five unavailable Tennessee Williams film adaptations to be released on DVD. After voting for them over and over again, I gave up hope and resigned myself to taping showings of these films once they aired on TCM. I have seen all five movies now, and have enjoyed them to varying extents (even a shitty Williams film can’t be too bad due to his dialog), but I honestly haven’t thought about these films since getting my own copies to watch. Imagine my surprise when I went on Amazon to look up Tennessee Williams stuff and found out that two of these films were FINALLY available on DVD! That’s right, the 1961 adaptation of Summer & Smoke and Sidney Lumet’s gloriously trashy Last of the Mobile Hot Shots are now available to purchase, each being released last year. I placed my order today and am waiting with baited breath to crack these bad boys open.

Summer & Smoke was released by some company called Olive Films, and is in widescreen format. No extras are included and the cover art kinda blows, but who gives a shit? You can own it now! All of the flowery dialog and sticky sexuality is back! As for Last of the Mobile Hot Shots, this was released via that new “on demand” thing that I’ve seen on Amazon, where basically they don’t make a copy of the film until it’s ordered. Even though the price is pretty steep ($27 new, but I got mine for $13 used), it’s a fantastic idea for these kind of obscure films. Seriously, hardly anyone even knows this movie exists, but there is money to be made by catering to film snobs or those with ultra-obscure tastes by doing it on demand. I’m fucking thrilled that I can now own a copy of a movie that I’d probably never get a copy of otherwise.

By the way, when I wrote my last blog I hadn’t seen Last of the Mobile Hot Shots and had no idea why it was rated X. After watching it I can now say that the X rating is due to seeing a black lady’s tit, some cross dressing, and the implication that a white woman is going to have sex with a black man. Pretty fucking weak shit for an X rating, but that’s how things worked back then. Bring this film to the MPAA now and it’d get a PG-13 rating at most. Regardless, I really liked this movie, and have incorporated a quote from it into my love life (the line “we’re going to make that bed beg for mercy” or something to that extent).

Unfortunately, The 1950 version of The Glass Menagerie, Period of Adjustment, and Boom! are still unavailable. To that I have to say...you’ve gotta be shitting me. It’s Tennessee William’s 100th birthday this year, for Christ’s sake! Release the goddamn films on DVD already. MAKE THIS HAPPEN.

6 Reasons Why Kindergarten Was Fucking Awesome

2011-01-28T09:16:00.000-08:00

School life seems to go through a U-shaped development...or rather, a backwards J. Elementary school is typically the best time you're going to have in your free, public school education, junior high is a nightmare world of goblins and hormones, and high school is when things either improve or at least aren't as shitty as they were in junior high. With that in mind, I'm going to write this under the assumption that your peak enjoyment of school starts right off the bat in Kindergarten, and here are my reasons:

1. You can piss in your pants and it’s still OK.

This is the last time you will ever get away with peeing in your pants in school. Granted, other kids will laugh at you, but teachers will give you a little more leeway than they would in, say, 3rd grade. There's still the assumption that school is a new experience, and therefore accidents will happen. If you've been at it for a few years and you're still pissing in your pants, you're going to get some concerned looks and possibly a trip to the school shrink. Full disclosure: I never peed my pants in school, but a classmate did and we all got a good laugh out of it.

2. You get to watch cartoons of tall tales like Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed.

American folktales are part of our heritage, and it is your duty as an American child to know who Pecos Bill, John Henry, and all these other people are. Well, not really, but teachers think you should know, and Disney cartoons of these figures were a staple of my Kindergarten experience because these figures are “important” and this therefore the cartoons were "educational". You also get to watch shit like "Ben and Me," which taught me the valuable lesson that if you're small and have little power, all of your ideas will be stolen by someone bigger with more influence.

3. Your teachers won’t scold you for scribbling when you’re coloring something. In fact, in some instances scribbling is encouraged.

The shrill cries of "STAY INSIDE THE LINES!!!" are less shrill at this point in your education, since teachers rightfully see you as barely able to walk without knocking things over, let alone hold a crayon straight.

4. Expectations in kindergarten are so ridiculously low that this is the only point in your educational life where it’s impossible to fuck up and be held back.

Everything you learn is so basic that you've already gone over it numerous times on Sesame Street. The main point of kindergarten, especially for those who never went to preschool, is to get kids adjusted to being away from home for several hours at a time, and getting used to the routine that's going to dominate the remainder of their lives. Also, the fun to work ratio is ridiculously skewed to the "fun" side, and that will change exponentially with each grade they move up.

5. Almost every new thing you get introduced to is amazing.

I remember nearly bursting with excitement the first time I saw a cornucopia, or a diorama. We read books like How the Spider Saved Halloween and they were awesome. People came to class in costumes to teach us neat shit about history. We even had a guy dressed up as an Indian come in and tell us about corn and shit. All the things that become "lame" as you age are mind-blowing when you're a kid.

6. If you have a really cool book filled with pictures of dinosaurs, you automatically become cool by default.

OK, so this one's a bit specific, but it still holds. I had a big dinosaur book that I brought to school one time. It was thick and had a ton of pictures of dinosaurs. As soon as I opened it up, it was like the Popularity Fairy sprinkled its dust on me, because people gravitated towards me to look at the book and became friends. This teaches you a lesson that you keep for the remainder of your life, for better or worse: owning nice things makes you a more important person. The first kid who had Super Mario Bros 3 suddenly had more friends wanting to go to his house. This creates happy little capitalists who high-five each other over their iPads and brag over the superiority of their cars. Wait a minute...maybe this isn't such a great thing about kindergarten. But still, my dinosaur book is better than yours.

2010

2010-12-30T13:01:00.000-08:00

One of my biggest pet peeves is that, every single time that the year starts coming to an end, I hear a bunch of people saying “I can’t wait until this shitty year is over.” Even though I’m sure it’s happened in the past, I can’t remember a time when a friend celebrated how great their year was, and how they’re looking forward to the new year not as wiping away the previous shitty year, but as continuing all the good stuff that happened in the passing year. Sure, things happened this year that were “unfortunate,” to put it lightly, but all in all, 2010 was a great year. At least, it was for me.

I try not to do this, but blogs are primarily a public diary of sorts. I have typically chosen not to use mine as such, but I’m going to make an exception for this. Here’s a rundown of why this year was great for me:

The year started with my dad turning 80. Even though his mind isn’t as sharp as it used to be, he’s still surprisingly active for a man of his age. His birthday party this year also gave me a chance to introduce my girlfriend Nelissa to pretty much everyone on my dad’s side of the family.

I came to the conclusion that Library Science wasn’t something I want to major in, and quit the SJSU MLIS program. This is big because the library has always been my safety net, and walking away from this is going to force me out of my comfort zone.

I was finally able to pay off my student loans. For the first time in seven years, I am completely debt-free. That debt kept me chained to my job because I was terrified of not being able to pay it off. There is really no way to adequately express just how fucking magnificent it felt to write the check that took it all away.

This was my final year in the CSUF Linguistics program. Shockingly, I was able to do a project on a subject that I love (language evolution), and I worked with someone who formulated, along with her colleagues at UCLA, a theory on language development that finally made perfect sense to me. I was able to do a paper that I was proud of, and that I feel can be backed up by evidence. I am more proud of this project than any other thing I have ever worked on, and when I go over it again, I’m surprised that I was able to do it. Plus, I passed the Comprehensive Exam and ended my MA program with straight As. The following week, I drove to work and was having a really bad day, and when I got there I discovered that my coworkers threw me a surprise graduation party.

I beat Mario Galaxy and Tetris!

The Lakers won championship again this year, this time against the Celtics. This victory was made so much sweeter in light of Paul Pierce’s “we ain’t coming back to LA” comments.

An interesting chain of small events happened that lead to something big. First, Scott’s wife Diana posted a link on Facebook to some site called “Far Beyond the Stars”. The article that was linked was called “27 Reasons Why You Should Never Have a Job.” I read it before I went to work and it planted a seed in my head that just kept growing. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew for a fact that I didn’t want to have a job anymore. In fact, when people would ask me what kind of job I was going to look for now that I graduated, I began telling people, “I don’t want a job anymore,” and I was dead serious about that. I told this to Scott during my work shift, and throughout the day we bounced around the idea of starting a publishing company. A few weeks later I was co-founder of a small business, and in a few months we have been more successful than I could have anticipated. I feel like there is a very real chance that, if it continues doing well, I could eventually live my dream of not having a job. This is very exciting to me, and it all started with a Facebook link. The lesson? Embrace the random.

In similar news, I was finally able to get some books published on Nook. At this moment, my combined personal eBook sales are doing well enough that, if I were laid off from work, I would be OK.

This year Nelissa and I decided to try to lose some weight. Before being sidetracked by my comp exam and project, I lost 35 pounds in around four months. Unfortunately I got lazy after I graduated and gained back close to 20 pounds, but now I know for a fact that I can lose it again. I’m still thinner now than I was the same time last year. That’s an accomplishment.

My entire life I’ve bought shitty, low-grade computers because I didn’t have the money for a good one. This year I upgraded to an iMac with a 27 inch screen, and I love owning a quality computer for the first time in my life.

On a similar note, I finally got rid of my old Wing phone and upgraded to the MyTouch 4g. This is my first Android smartphone, and I love it.

I finally went to Bombay Beach and saw all the old wreckage, and we also took another trip to Salvation Mountain (then Joshua Tree, Palm Springs, Cabazon, and Morongo). Best of all, Nelissa and I took our best road trip yet, driving to Colville, Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, and San Francisco all in the same trip. I came to the conclusion that, when there’s sun out, Washington may be the prettiest state I’ve seen.

I finally went to a Lakers game. It was against the Suns, and even though they lost, it was a lot of fun and something that I definitely want to do again.

I compiled every single library-related blog I’ve written into a book, and asked Scott to publish it as a free book on the iBookstore. It has been downloaded over 7,000 times and at its peak hit #2 on the free bestseller list. Also, all of the written reviews on the page have been positive.

So there you go. 2010 was a fantastic year, and set the bar high for me. I hope I can raise the bar even higher in 2011.

Alt Rock SmackDown! The Pixies Vs. Nirvana

2010-10-12T10:19:00.000-07:00

Kurt Cobain always wore his influences on his sleeve, and one of the most famous bands that he loved was The Pixies. In fact, Cobain has stated that Smells Like Teen Spirit was his attempt at making a Pixies song, and we all know how well that worked out for him. As a huge fan of both bands, I’m going to pit them against each other for no other reason than to jerk off over music I love. I’m just going to focus on their studio albums, since both released four albums each and it makes it easier to compare the two. While Incesticide is a b-side and outtakes collection and should therefore be pitted against The Pixies Complete “B” Sides album, I’m still going to treat it like a normal album, since it did spawn at least one big MTV hit, which is a pretty rare thing for an album of this type to do, and because it keeps the 4x4 format that I wanted. Sadly, this also means skipping The Pixies’ ep Come on Pilgrim, but it’ll have to do.

Surfer Rose vs. Bleach

As a fan of neat coincidences, both albums (if you count the CD issue of Bleach) have 13 songs each. Anyhow, aside from how great Nirvana’s debut is, Surfer Rose is an undeniable classic. It’s got some of The Pixies’ most famous songs (Where Is My Mind? Gigantic, Vamos, River Euphrates), and the entire album is what I like to call “a fun-filled romp.” What I particularly like is the little snippets of conversation and false starts included. It makes the album seem almost like The Beach Boys Party! Bleach is a really good album, but is a darker affair altogether. The most famous song from Bleach is About a Girl, though my favorites would be their first single Love Buzz and Floyd the Barber. While Surfer Rosa is a fun album, Bleach is full of metal-inspired sludge rock. And while I love their brand of sludge rock, there’s no fucking way it’s a better album. Plus The Pixies were just a stronger band all around, and their debut routinely beats the shit out of the best offerings by many other bands. And if I add Come on Pilgrim to the CD version like the Brits do, it’s no contest.

Advantage: The Pixies

Doolittle vs. Nevermind

Ah fuck. Once I started devising how I was going to pit these albums against each other, I knew that this would be the hardest one to do. While Doolittle isn’t my favorite Pixies album, it has by far the largest number of classic songs on it. In fact, if I just eliminate I Bleed from the line up, it has six of the best Pixies songs in a row. Thankfully, aside from Gouge Away, the album gets much weaker after those songs. La La Love You is perhaps the worst song The Pixies ever recorded, Silver and Hey are boring shit, and Crackety Jones just seems like Pixies-lite. Meanwhile, Nevermind has only one boring track; the album closer Something in the Way. If you remove that song, every single song on Nevermind is brilliant. That’s fucking unheard of. Yes, the second half of the album is just as great as the first half, even though the album is front-loaded with all the hits. I’ve particularly loved Drain You and On a Plain, but there you go. With one exception, Nevermind is a perfect album.

Advantage: Nirvana

Bossanova vs. Incesticide

I have never, ever liked Bossanova, and as someone who passionately loves The Pixies, believe me, I’ve tried. The song has only a couple songs that rock my ass off: the opening instrumental Cecilia Ann and the far too brief Allison. I like Velouria as well, and in the context of the rest of the album, it sounds like a classic. Rock Music sounds like one of those Gwar songs where Beefcake the Mighty has lead vocals. Shit like Dig for Fire and All Over The World just aren’t that great, and the majority of the album never rises above “meh” levels, even if Havalina is kinda pretty. Incesticide is a really interesting, since it’s got both sludgy Nirvana (Aero Zeppelin) and poppy Nirvana (Been a Son), as well as some interesting covers (TWO Vaselines songs! And a Devo cover!) The album as a whole is entertaining, because there’s also songs where it seems like the band is just fucking around. Seriously, what the hell is up with Beeswax? It also has a surprising number of classics for a b-sides/outtakes album, such as Sliver, Been a Son, and Aneurysm. Therefore, this was an easy choice for me, since I get more joy listening to Incesticide than Bossanova.

Advantage: Nirvana

Trompe le Monde vs. In Utero

Oh Trompe le Monde. Why do music critics hate you so much? This was the CD that made me a Pixies fan, so it holds a special spot in my heart. It’s also my favorite album of theirs, since I really enjoy the sound they were going for on it, and the opening track (Trompe Le Monde) is an amazing way to kick off the album. Add to that Planet of Sound, Alec Eiffel, an amazing cover of Head On, U-Mass, Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons, and Lovely Day, which sounds like they stole the guitar from Generation X’s Dancing With Myself and made a Pixies song with it, and you have one of the best “last albums” of all time. In Utero is more iffy. The only songs that I love from this album are Serve the Servants, Scentless Apprentice, Radio Friendly Unit Shifter, All Apologies, and maybe Milk It. Heart-Shaped Box was by far their worst hit, since the whole thing just sounds like a stretched-out intro. Dumb seemed like Polly all over again, just not as good, and Rape Me is a song so stupid that I want to yank Kurt out of his grave and punch him in the face for writing it. So we have my favorite Pixies album against the worst Nirvana album. I think you know where this is going.

Advantage: The Pixies

For this smackdown it doesn’t appear that there’s a winner, since they’re both going two for two. When I compare their worst albums (Bossanova vs. In Utero), Nirvana comes out ahead. This is also the case when I compare their best albums (Trompe le Monde vs. Nevermind). However, the first two Pixies albums are cumulatively better (just barely) than the first two Nirvana albums, and the same goes for their last two albums. If you discard the album format entirely and just pit the songs against each other, then I think that The Pixies were a much stronger band throughout their short run. In fact, when I added my favorites songs of each band to a playlist, Nirvana had 27 and The Pixies had 31. So by a measly four songs, we have a winner.

The Winner: The Pixies

Tune in next time for Jangle Pop SmachDown: REM vs. The Smiths!

Failure Walk With Me: How I Learned to Love and Hate Twin Peaks

2010-10-07T10:21:00.000-07:00

Last night I finally finished watching Twin Peaks, and I have to say that the entire experience was both fantastic and depressing. I didn’t watch the show when it first aired (and since I was 10 at the time, I probably wouldn’t have liked it), and when I became a huge fan of David Lynch in my teens, the show wasn’t readily available for me to watch. However, even though I never saw it in it’s initial run, I was always aware of what it was. Without seeing an episode, I knew that it was a murder-mystery about the death of some teenager named Laura Palmer, that it took place in a small town, that “damn fine pie” and “damn fine coffee” were somehow the catch phrases of the show, that there was someone named The Log Lady in it, and that it was weird. That’s all I knew and cared to know about the show when it first came on. Years later during my Lynch phase, I rented the VHS of his follow-up series “On The Air,” which I was only able to finish one episode of before turning the damn thing off. All that I remember from that show was a floating pair of scissors and Hatchet-Face from Cry Baby being in the cast. Since that show was a product of the Frost/Lynch team that did Twin Peaks, I can’t say that I had much of a desire to seek out the show.

I eventually found a VHS of the pilot on sale at some store and decided to give it a go. Unless pretty much everyone who loves the show, the pilot did nothing for me. It was the international pilot, by the way, which ended with Bob yelling some shit, and the dwarf dancing in the red room. What bugged me the most about the pilot was how shitty the acting was with most of the cast, the worst offender being Dana Ashbrook as Bobby. That, and the ending just pissed me off. I never bothered watching that tape again, and once again my potential interest in the show died off.

I’ve recently become a fan of TV again, and I love the idea of long story arcs. So I figured I would give the show a chance, with my more mature and forgiving tastes accepting the limits of what can and can’t be done on a TV show. I watched the original TV pilot, and my complaints still stood. A lot of the acting was shitty, and some of the characters, such as Andy and Audrey, were just flat-out annoying. However, I wanted to keep watching, because I heard that it was supposed to be great. When I watched the next two episodes, I was hooked. I don’t know if the following two episodes were “better” than the pilot, or if I just knew what to expect, but everything started to click for me. The second episode was such a punch that I still can’t believe this show was such a hit (for a time). The disgusting sleaziness of One-Eyed Jacks and the famous ending with the red room and dancing dwarf convinced me that I was watching something special, an anomaly in TV that may never be duplicated. Oh, about the red room...this is an instance of where a scene that didn’t work for me in one format worked in another. When it was tacked onto the international pilot, it felt like retarded bullshit that was just chucked in for the sake of being weird. In the second episode, it somehow fit. I know that it was filmed specifically for the international pilot and not the second episode, but it still worked better here.

After a few more episodes, I became a huge fan of this show. I started to love the characters, the story was great, and more importantly, I wanted my friends to watch it. This is always a sign that you’re watching something special. The only thing that damped my excited was that I knew all the baggage that came with this show. Through reading about it over the years, I knew who the killer was and that the show apparently goes downhill after the reveal. I stayed positive throughout though. It was great entertainment, and I started to like the characters enough that I was more than willing to watch them in whatever non-Laura Palmer plots they wind up in. The show was that good.

I haven’t discussed the characters yet, but I’ll just briefly state that Agent Dale Cooper is one of my favorite TV creations. He’s clean-cut in a way that isn’t retarded, and his excitement and wonder at the novelty of this small town is charming without being condescending. The Horne brothers were also far more entertaining than they had any right to be, and I fucking loved the obsession with food. Audrey eventually grew on me, and her transformation after what happened to her during her own investigation was fairly depressing, but it did a great job of making her less annoying than she was in those early episodes.

When I saw the episode where the killer was revealed, I was shocked. People bitched about how it was revealed, but in Lynch’s world, it made sense. It wasn’t so much who the killer was, it was how that information was revealed. I’m trying to keep this as spoiler-free as possible, so I’m not going to say who it is. However, the reveal is shown through one of the creepiest scenes I’ve ever seen in any format. It’s not so much that the scene is violent (and it has to stand as one of the most violent things to ever air on TV), it’s the combination of that violence with sadness and insanity, along with Lynch’s directorial tricks that make the scene longer and more devastating than I expected. I don’t remember how long the scene actually was, but fuck did it seem like a long time, and not in a bad way. It was one of those few times where my mouth fell open in shock, and I just looked blankly at the screen. It was that fucking good. The follow-up episode, where the killer is finally caught, was also pretty good, but not nearly as much as the previous episode. End the show there, and it would be remembered as one of the greatest shows of the 90s, if not of all time.

But of course, that didn’t happen. In the following episodes, there are a number of plots that are either boring (Cooper under investigation for crossing the border, James shacks up with some random lady) or insultingly retarded (eyepatch lady has superpowers and thinks she’s a teen, Andy keeps worrying about his “sperms,” there’s a kid that they think is a devil, blah blah blah). It was a chore watching the rest of the series, and I started dreading each new disc that came in (I was Netflxing the show). The humor was embarrassingly bad slapsticky shit that hasn’t been funny since the Three Stooges nailed that shit years ago. The focus shifted to plots no one could possibly give a shit about, Cooper started being moved to the background, and the whole thing just seemed to lose focus and fall apart. I have never seen anything go from brilliant to godawful so fast. It would be like Dylan following Highway 61 Revisited with several variations on Self Portrait. If I had never seen the show and just ran across these episodes while flipping through channels, my immediate thought would be “what is this bullshit?” and then laugh at it. Then change the channel.

However, as the show started coming to a close, things unexpectedly turned interesting. There was a new Cooper plot, and while the villain wasn’t handled as well as he should have been, it was at least interesting. At the very last possible minute, the show reminded viewers why people talked about it so much in the first place. The beauty pageant plot was dull, but it ended on the right note, and the climax leading to the final episode was pretty well done. And then Lynch came in and directed the final episode, and hooooooooly shit. Twin Peaks set the bar for this kind of thing, but the last episode of Twin Peaks takes the cake for being the strangest hour of television ever aired, even more so than any of the previous episodes. I will fully admit that half of it was nothing more than Lynch jacking off and showing his sperm-encrusted sock to the viewer, but my God was it great. This episode firmly established Twin Peaks as a place where things are definitely not right, where evil exists and hides in the woods. Though the show was struggling to find its way after the Laura Palmer plot was resolved, I feel that the last episode set the stage for stories that focused more on the creepiness of the town and less on moronic slapstick. I was legitimately surprised, and saddened, that after hating half of the second season, the final episode left me wanting more.

I haven’t seen the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, but my understanding is that it’s a prequel to the show (in a way) and doesn’t resolve any of the cliff-hangers in the last episode. I guess they don’t really need to be resolved, but still. It’s a shame that the show got so bad while trying to find it’s footing again, because now it seems to be known mainly for disappointing viewers and jumping the shark rather than for reaching the heights that it did early on. The most surprising thing about this show isn’t the strangeness of it, it’s the fact that for a brief moment, mainstream TV viewers were addicted to a TV show co-created by the guy who made Eraserhead and Blue Velvet. Now that’s more mind-boggling than a backwards-forwards-talking dwarf and giant kickin’ it with the dead in a red room.

Now You Can Get REALLY Intimate With Your Kindles

2010-09-17T08:49:00.000-07:00

Awhile back I published a little eBook collection of library blogs on Apple's iBookstore, and the response has been a hell of a lot better than I ever expected it to be. However, owners of the biggest eBook reader on the market, Amazon's Kindle, may be feeling left out and unloved. Well guess what? It's time to break out the candles and champagne, because my eBook, A Series of Frustrated Outbursts by a Fake Librarian, is now available on Kindle! And because you can download a Kindle reader on many different devices, such as CrackBerry phones or phones with Android, you no longer have to feel left out! (Unless you own a Nook, that is. Fuck the Nook. I've never seen a eBook reader so unfriendly to independent publishers)

And it still has the same shitty cover art!

Because of how weird the set-up is on Amazon, I cannot offer this book for free on it. Strangely, other people can, but if you're just some random person wanting to give shit away for free, it's not allowed. There is some good news for cash-strapped owners of expensive electronics: this book is available for the shockingly affordable price of just .99 cents! That's right, for LESS than a buck you get roughly an hour (depending on your reading speed) of a book that one reviewer raves is "pretty entertaining for the most part." Still not convinced? Another reader proclaims "...it wasn't that bad. I chuckled a few times." Shouldn't you be clicking your way to euphoria RIGHT NOW???

Note: As I stated in my previous plug for this book, it contains no new material, aside from an introduction. Every blog contained in it can be found here. This book is really just for people who have never read my blog or for those people who are so anal about their blog reading that they want everything in one place. I count myself in the second category, since I copy and pasted every single blog about the Left Behind books from the Slacktavist website onto a Word file for easy reading. Plus, I like pretending that I'm a real author.

Another note: if you're really, REALLY dead-set against paying for the book or don't have a device with either the iBookstore or Kindle apps, send me a message and I'll send you a free copy in .doc format. In the meantime, I'm going to figure out some way to get this book posted somewhere for downloading. If and when the book goes up somewhere, I'll post the link here.

A Review of Library Positions (That I’ve Worked)

2010-09-14T10:03:00.000-07:00

Page

The typical “entry-level” position for people wanting to work in libraries is that of Library Page. A lot of hardened library folks look back on this position with a smile on their faces, because it is by far the simplest and least bullshit-ridden position you could possibly have at a library. Your basic duties as a page are simple, but vary from library to library. The thing they all have in common is shelving, which means that anytime you’re at a public library and see some sad-looking fella shoving a cart of books through the stacks, you’re probably looking at a page. Through sheer osmosis, the pages become more intimately familiar with the collection and Dewey system than anyone else in the library, since the whole point of their job is keeping things in order. The absolute best part of being a page is not having to deal with major library problems. In fact, at some libraries you are specifically forbidden from helping people, even if they’re looking for a book that you have on your cart. Goddamn I miss being a page sometimes.

However, there are a few major downsides to being a page. The first is the pay. As the second-lowest wrung on the library ladder (volunteers are the lowest), you are paid the least. Another problem is that after several months, the job becomes mind-numbingly tedious. There’s a reason why, at a certain point, previously energetic pages start taking on the appearance of cattle, with sad expressions just begging to be put out of their misery. Another problem is that there are many other little tasks that you’re required to do as a page that you never find out about until you’re asked to do them. There are typically jobs such as picking up garbage on the floor and even in front of the library, moving around surprisingly heavy boxes of crap, wearing costumes for library events, mopping the floor if someone spills a drink or food, mopping the floor if someone craps or pees on it, climbing on the roof to hang promotional signs, etc. A lot of the time your job as a page is being a janitor that also happens to shelve books.

Final Verdict: If the pay was raised, this would be an awesome position. I cannot stress enough how desirable cleaning crap off the floor is to having someone threaten to stab you because you cut off their computer time, or throw things at you because of a fine. Also, if you’re a bookworm, there is nothing better than constantly being up in the collection from the start of your shift to the end. Finally, there is a very peaceful and, dare I say it, zen-like quality to those early morning shifts, when you’re shoving a cart of books through a quiet library with the sun shining through the windows. That is how I prefer to remember it.

Aide/Clerk

This position can potentially be the scariest. It’s a rung higher than the page, so you’re paid more, but depending on which library system you work for, the difference in pay can either be awesome (a $4 increase) or pathetic (a $1 increase). This position is usually filled by former pages wanting to work their way up, but I have also found out that a lot of places let applicants jump straight into this position without needing previous work as a page. This, of course, infuriates a lot of pages who get passed over for this position, but human resources could really give less than a shit about the pages. Anyhow, the main job of an aide/clerk is checking out books to people and dealing with all of the pleasantness that this entails. There are, as always, a lot of smaller side jobs as well, such as mending damaged books, pulling books off the shelves to fill requests, shipping them out to other libraries, and other shit work which is less shitty than what you’re asked to do as a page. On the plus side , you get to meet a lot of your library’s patrons. Some people may ask, “how the fuck could that be a plus?” but the simple fact is that most of the people who come into the library are very nice and just want to have something good to read, or a good movie to watch. The conversations are typically pleasant and do a lot to kill the tedium of the job. In fact, since customer service is your job at this point, a patron can talk you up for 15 minutes, and if you’re enjoying it, this is a great way of killing time that would otherwise be used checking in books or dealing with another, possibly angry patron. And your supervisor can’t really say shit to you, since you’re supposed to be providing good customer service. Well, they CAN scold you if you’re clearly just bullshitting with a friend, but you at least have the option of defending it as customer service.

As can be predicted, the major, MAJOR downside to this position is that you are the person who gets yelled at if a patron has a fine, or overdue books, or a lost book. I am not kidding about this. If you work as an aide/clerk long enough, at some point someone will yell at you about this stuff, and question your competence. Of course it’s not your fault that they have fines, but the anger has to be directed somewhere, and since you’re the messenger, you’re the one who’s going to get it. When it starts getting out of hand you always have the option of calling up your supervisor, since they’re the ones who have the final say in these matters, but it still sucks ass having to deal with these yelling fits. It actually does get easier the more often you deal with it, and you learn some neat ways of delivering the bad news and defusing some of the anger, but no one likes to be a punching bag, and when you work this position, you’re the one person at the library who gets punched the most.

Final Verdict: This is the position where you really start feeling like you’re part of the library, and you start sharing your battle stories with coworkers. Being a page is a solitary position, but as an aide/clerk you’re typically at the circulation desk with another person. There’s also some kind of strange, unspoken sense of superiority that you get in this position. The reason for this is that you’re handling money, your dealing with the public, and you’ve already typically paid your dues as a page. Therefore, folks in this position get the snobbish delight of looking down on the pages, even though they’d switch jobs in a heartbeat the moment someone starts screaming at them about fines. Also, for you horny bastards out there, you get to talk to a lot of attractive patrons. Not that you’ll end up dating them or anything, but it’s better than having to dodge someone’s farts while shelving books on the bottom row of a crowded aisle.

Extra-Help Library Assistant

This is an awesome position if you can get it. I got it years ago but had to give it up when I started working more hours at my current library. Basically, this is an entry into the world of reference work. It’s an on-call position where, if you’re available, you can go to whatever library needs you, work the information desk, and then not have to deal with whatever major problems the library has once you leave. You get paid surprisingly well and have to do only the basic duties of a library assistant. More likely than not, you’ll just be looking up books for people and dealing with getting people on computers. Sometimes, you’ll have to do minor jobs like pull books of the shelves for requests, or maybe enter some random shit into a computer. There is absolutely nothing about this job that is too difficult. And if a patron starts flipping out on you, you can stare at them blank-faced and just tell them that you don’t usually work there, and direct their complaints to someone else. It’s all the joys of working reference with none of the commitments!

On the down side, you only get work when you’re needed, so you can’t go out and buy a home working this job. Also, while being called to work at a variety of libraries sounds nice initially, it’s a pain in the ass to have to deal with finding some of the more obscure branches that you get called to, let alone where you have to park. Unless you’re familiar with the system, you might get sent to some shady areas that you didn’t know were shady until you’ve already parked your car. Also, and this is a major downside; you’re fresh meat and aren’t familiar with some of the crazies that you may have to deal with. Believe me, once you work reference long enough, you learn how to treat certain people so they don’t start flipping out for bizarre reasons. But aside from the risk of someone stabbing you with a pen because you’re new and don’t know that they’re unstable, it’s a great position!

Final Verdict: This was a great position when I worked it. However, the instability of when you get to work makes this position less than desirable when you have bills to pay. However, if it’s open and you have the time to swing it, it’s a great introduction to reference work. I met some interesting people and got to find out how difference library systems worked, and that was always a plus. And like I said, no commitments!

Library Technician

This is my current position. I’m basically a fake librarian, since what I do is what people assume all librarians do. I look up books for people, I answer reference questions, I assist with computer issues, you get the idea. Library assistants are also fake librarians, but depending on where you’re working, your duties will differ. For example, library assistants in LA County typically have to do work schedules for the pages and aides/clerks, while the assistant at my job schedules class visits for schools. Library techs, on the other hand, don’t do any of that as far as I know. From what I can gather, the main focus of this job is to do “librarian stuff” without having to go to all the big meetings or deal with administrative bullshit. I really, really like that barrier, since the last thing I want to do is get involved in library politics. At least with this job, you can stay ignorant about everything else going on and just concentrate on your job.

The nice thing about this job is that your interactions with the public are usually friendly. The way library folk tend to view things, you’d think that every day was a disaster, but the fact of the matter is that around 80% of your day is positive, if not downright dull. There’s also some shitwork that you don’t have to do, and you have the pleasure of calling on another person to do it instead. Plus you don’t deal with fines. I cannot stress enough how much of a plus that is.

The downside to this position is that you directly encounter and are forced to deal with the more extreme and bizarre problems at the library, such as people masturbating at the computers, fist fights, people complaining about how another person smells, etc. Probably this biggest problem that you’ll have to deal with is the inconsistent and ever-changing policies regarding what you can and can’t do in the library. Food will not be allowed, then it will be allowed, then only food bought in our vending machines will be allowed, then all food will be allowed again, and on and on. A woman will take her shirt off and use a computer wearing only a bra, and that’s not allowed, but a man will come in wearing a leather vest and no shirt, and that’s allowed. Then there’s the problem with people assuming that you know everything, and screaming at you because they can’t find their kids, the same ones they actively ignored for over an hour while checking their email and Facebook updates.

Final Verdict: I get paid ridiculously well for this position, and I’m very happy with it. Like I’ve said, there are negative aspects of it, but those only take up part of your day. Depending on how high up the library food chain you’re looking to go, this is a great job to try for. Just be aware that you don’t get any practice being a supervisor or anything like that. If you don’t want that, and just want a job that pays you well to do librarian stuff without having to do pain in the ass administrative duties or scheduling, this is a great job. Plus everyone will just call you a librarian anyway, and the only people who’ll get annoyed by that are those who went to school for it.