It’s Weird When You Suddenly See the Ass of Someone That You Know
Our good friend Randall Park has unveiled the latest installment of his American crime saga THE FOOD, and is thus blowing up the charts on Channel 101.
Episode Recap: THE FOOD guys go from slinging cocaine-infused Chinese dishes to spending their time in the same place as 1 out of every 100 Americans — IN JAIL. A plan is formulated to escape. Will it succeed? This episode is special because it also features a buffalo shot of our good friend Matt. It’s weird to suddenly see the ass of someone that you know. It’s not something you can unsee. And it guarantees that your next face-to-face meeting will be awkward.
THE FOOD, EPISODE 3: Much better than THE GODFATHER, EPISODE 3. Believe it!
Holy Crap, This Book: American Gods by Neil Gaiman — it’s got me and is not letting go. I am a full eight years late to this party, but this read is fun and haunting and creepy like a good roadside attraction for the gods should be. Plus the story makes its way through The House on the Rock, a known hangout of the elder gods.
I would rather read this book than eat, sleep, and play Fallout 3. It’s got me.
Locating Child Molesters: There’s an App For That.
Ok, there really is an app for everything. You know me: Before I go anywhere I like to know whether there are people there that might molest me. Yes, I am no longer a child. But I have boyish good looks AND a tendency to trust strangers with vans — I don’t want to take any chances.
Enter Offender Locator for the iPhone. Give it your location and it will tell you where nearby sex offenders are hiding. See all those red pins on the map? If you go within fifty feet of any of them you WILL be molested. You have been warned.
This application is kind of neat and an excellent way to feed your paranoia. Also I love how the app icon depicts child molesters as rosy-cheeked, thick-eyebrowed villains just waiting to molest YOU:
The company also makes a cool app for the PC that shows you where the molesters are in glorious 3D:
Hint: They’re by the burned-out tenements on the outskirts of town. Though please note that the Dick Cheney-esque motherf’er (upper right) can be found uptown in a condo full of Jonas Bros. posters and rubber ball gags.
You Have 72 Hours Before The Dog Gets It
So in only 72 hours, our good friend Dave and his hard working team put together a film for the 72 Hour Film Shootout Competition. The result — Time’s [Not] Up, watch it here — was an excellent, character-driven piece of storytelling. And guess what? It won Best Story, Best Editing, Best Direction, and Best Goddamn Film!
This is not surprising. All the elements came together in this thing. The story established itself quickly, the characters were endearing, interesting, and well-painted. PART OF THIS WAS SHOT IN THE LA SUBWAY. What have you ever seen shot in the LA subway? “Speed”, but there they had to build a set and crash it. Things aren’t shot in the LA subway because it’s hard to shoot in the LA subway. But our friend has bollocks, so they shot in the goddamn subway.
Congratulations, Team Head On. This was a great piece of work and deserves all the kudos it is getting.
I’m getting sushi today.
We Are Having a Bromance Now, Did You Know?
Obama Invites Gates, Arresting Officer to the White House: Interesting move, Mr. Obama. But how are you going to get these two guys together to hug it out like men?
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sgt. James Crowley hangs up the phone, turns to his wife: “Honey, guess what? That was the President. He wants me to come up to the White House — I get to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom!”
Also in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. hangs up the phone, turns to his wife: “It was Obama. He invited me to the White House. Yup, he even asked me to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom.”
Awwwwww yeah.
I Love Too Much
That Weird Third Thing: I saw Eastbound and Down again in its entirety with some pals. I can’t get enough of that show — I love it too much.
God has proved His divinity and existence, because HBO has renewed it for another season. As a species, we don’t deserve this.
Eastbound and Down has a lot of great examples of That Weird Third Thing. This is a concept in writing that we’re always looking for. When you’re devising a story you often come to a point when you need to make a choice: A guy lives or he dies. The dog is found or he remains lost. They find the treasure or they lose it — you can choose between two easy options that are obvious to both you and the audience.
But what you are really after is That Weird Third Thing: The guy doesn’t live or die — he was already dead. Or he was a robot. Or he was a unicorn. The dog isn’t lost or found — the thing on the LOST PET poster is actually a furry. Or he was a robot. Or a unicorn. Instead of choosing the obvious, we want to find that weird third thing that no one was expecting — but makes total sense once it’s discovered. We want the surprise that fit the puzzle all along.
In 30 Rock this is touched upon in the episode where Jack is trying to find his true father (“Mama Mia”):
“Either he’ll walk away or you’ll suddenly have a father and it’ll be great — there isn’t some weird third thing that’s going to happen.”
Of course, there is a weird third thing that happens. The weird third thing always happens on 30 Rock — as it should in anything that’s written well.
There’s a great weird third thing that happens in Eastbound and Down. In the show there’s a pitch-off. And it’s set up so that either Kenny Powers is going to strike this guy out, or history is going to repeat itself and this guy will knock a homer off his pitch.
But of course neither of those things happens. That weird third thing strikes again.
Ignominious Defeat
When an animal dies in nature, that death serves a purpose. A gazelle is tackled by a cheetah so that its body can serve as food for a beautiful, noble animal: The pinnacle of the evolution of a land-based predator.
In turn that beautiful, noble animal will someday collapse, be eaten by insects and worms which will fuel the grasses of the savannah. The cycle of life continues its purpose.
But we humans have crafted a society in which people die in ignominious, pointless ways. For instance, Gizmodo gets it absolutely right with its article titled Perspective on the iPhone Suicide: Guy Died Over a Fucking Phone:
“Let’s step back from the iPhone leak suicide for a minute and just think about the basics of what happened. A phone was lost. A guy was tortured. A guy killed himself or something. Over a fucking phone.”
You should read the article but I’ll give you the gist for now: A worker for Foxconn (the Chinese manufacturers of iPhones) lost one of the prototypes. Or it was stolen. No one knows. Anyway, the security folks at the company decided to interrogate/torture/toss his apartment looking for it. This drove the guy to jump off a building.
Over a phone.
What good came out of this guy’s death? Not much. But the more complex our society becomes, and the more stupid, inane crap we get ourselves into, the more often these ignominious deaths will occur.
I’m thinking of the poor guy that got trampled to death at Walmart so that people could get cheap DVD players. The guy who died falling into a vat of molten chocolate. The teenage girl who killed herself over MySpace.
It’s bizarre to look at a Walmart, a giant vat of chocolate, or a social networking site and think, “This is where somebody’s life will end.” But there it is.
Hey, I don’t mean to be a downer. It’s important to recognize that people also die in noble ways. Men died so we could go to the moon. People are up to great adventures, and sometimes those adventures end tragically.
But the question is, do we really need phones and cheap DVD players that badly?
Where’s My Tip, Because You Just Got Served
Four Letter Words: Love him or hate him, Gordon Ramsay is brilliant with food. I’m now addicted to his tee vee show The F-Word on BBC Channel 4.
I’ve been describing this as Top Gear with food instead of cars. It’s a pastiche of cooking challenges — a bit of Hell’s Kitchen mixed with Throwdown with Bobby Flay — as well as celebrity interviews, cooking instruction, and various adventures in raising livestock in one’s backyard.
It’s also a really interesting peek into another culture. British culture is vastly different from America in all the little details. Not just terminology like “Christmas lunch” and “Sunday lunch”, but in their methodology and world view. I wish I could back that up with real anecdotal evidence, but it’s something I’m still studying.
Vassup: Saw Brüno with my mates tonight. At last check, Rotten Tomatoes rates it 69% Fresh, which sounds fair. I feel like 69% of the bits hit their target; the remaining 31% felt like filler. Whereas Borat was smashmouth comedy from front to back, Brüno needed time to accelerate. It was the scripted stuff — the stuff that wasn’t out there looking for trouble — that fell flat.
Still a good movie, but I feel like making fun of red state America can only go so far. You want state of the art comedy? EASTBOUND AND DOWN.
So I did end up buying that Grizzly Bear album that iTunes suggested. So perhaps part of me is a hipster. Nothing wrong with that I suppose.
If an album contains a song that exemplifies an emotional quality that I like, I buy it. Sometimes when I listen to a song it feels like an echo of a writing project I’m working on — like it belongs in that project’s “soundtrack”. Then it’s a no-brainer to buy it.
So this album is Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest. The song is “Two Weeks”. Its tone, its quality, even its lyrics fit into a project I’m working on right now. So there it is: I had to have it.
My Work in Print
Year Zero
Available from Samuel French and Amazon.com
Cowboy Versus Samurai
Available from Samuel French and Amazon.comFor a complete list of books containing my work, please click here.
