Retcon Punch: Prologue (NaNoWriMo09)
I’m trying this again. Please reinforce my fragile ego. I’m having tense issues, as in, I keep writing in present tense even though I’m pretty sure that’s a shitty idea.
Prologue
One Week From Today.
Superman’s head shatters.
The bullet breaks apart the Man of Steel’s plastic noggin and continues with velocity into the back wall of this shitty little closet, packed to the rafters with toys for grown men.
“Ike, come on out. Let’s do this face to face. I get that you’re scared.”
“I should be! You’re shooting at me!”
Ike hears a small distant thud, Sean’s pistol hitting the worn carpet of the darkened office cube farm outside the closet door. There’s a beat of silence.
Ike looks down at Veronica’s unconscious form, her body sprawled haphazardly over two large cases of Witchblade maquettes. There’s a large bump on her forehead and it’s shiny even in the closet’s near-darkness. He stares at the small of her back and the visible bit of her underpants. Her skin is so white, it glows.
“Ike? Don’t test me.”
It occurs to Ike that this was never supposed to happen—but then most of the time, when one is being shot at, it’s not supposed to be happening. Ike wishes he were at home in the crummy recliner he pulled out of his neighbor’s trash six years ago, settling his ass cheeks into the cushion’s familiar imprint for a night of Twilight Zone reruns. He has wished this same wish about seventy times over the course of the past fifteen minutes. It has yet to come true.
Instead, he’s here, and he’s shaking a little but it’s to be expected, because he can see through the bullet hole in the shitty little closet’s door and Sean is closer than Ike thought, arms extended forward into pudgy claws like Batman crawling out of the Batmobile in that full-page Frank Miller splash from Dark Knight Returns…
Ike opens the door.
Add comment November 2, 2009
Community
My wife isn’t sold at all on Community, the new sitcom on NBC Thursday nights starring Joel McHale and Chevy Chase. I’m not 100% sold either, but I think there’s enough THERE there to indicate potential.
Her big complaint, and it’s totally valid, is that the relationships between the characters essentially strain credibility to the point of breaking. This is especially true for the two “romantic” leads, Jeff (McHale) and Britta (Gillian Jacobs, to the immediate left of McHale above). It requires significant and constant suspension of disbelief to accept that these two would continue to enjoy the mildly flirtatious connection they share, especially since he’s at heart a barely likeable (if quite funny) jerk and she seems like a pretty traditional damaged, brittle (hence the name! oh, irony), closed-up single lady.
For that matter, all of the relationships and connections that provide the show’s central premise are pretty forced. It’s about a community college, or more specifically, a group of seven students at a community college who are brought together in the show’s first episode to form a Spanish study group that immediately studies absolutely no Spanish, instead descending into a mix between group therapy and random bonding.
Why would these people spend any time together past the first ten minutes of the first episode? The only reasonable answer is, “Because it’s a TV show,” and I think ultimately that’s going to have to suffice. The premise and plotting is such pure situation comedy that it’s jarring up against the night’s other series, which are also sitcoms but are able to disguise their plotting mechanics and any strained character connections by a more reasonable shared environment, the workplace.
1 comment September 25, 2009
Let’s Fix Big Brother
Regular readers know of my love for CBS’ Big Brother, a reality series airing every summer (and one ill-fated spring season) in which twelve “houseguests” are forced to live together in a house wired with something like eleventy billion little cameras. They have no contact with the outside world, no TV, no newspaper, no internet. Just each other, the cameras, their wireless microphones, and a game in which one of them will win $500,000.
Watching season 11 (airing this summer), it occurred to me that I’ve been watching this show for close to ten years. Yikes. I skipped the first season, when the viewers at home actually voted on their picks to leave the house each week; by season two, that power was exclusively in the hands of the guests themselves, making it a more Survivor-esque competition against warring personalities, brain powers, and athletic abilities.
Since then, I have loved the show—I love that I have a tasty mindless treat to look forward to every summer, when all my other favorite shows are usually on repeats. I love the compressed editing schedule that gives the producers as little time as possible to take reality and manufacture it into “reality,” although they still manage to manufacture plenty. I love that it’s almost completely about the game; there’s no exotic foreign locale, no race-to-the-finish around the globe, no dumb job to occupy the hours not spent drinking and fucking. For shitty TV, it’s remarkably pure.
I think it needs some work, though, as it faces its 12th season next summer, and growing competition from other reality competition shows. I doubt CBS or the show’s production company will be interested in making any changes whatsoever since it does just good enough in the ratings as it is, and is insanely cheap to produce, but here’s a few ideas.
Add comment September 14, 2009
The Pop Geek PopCast #9: I’m Afraid of Americans
New technology is a wonderful thing.
As I was lamenting the departure of Muxtape from this mortal coil (well, the COOL Muxtape, not whatever atrocity it has become), my pal Jeff pointed me toward TinyTape, which is essentially Muxtape with the legal complications (hopefully) ironed out. It’s about as great as an idiot-proof online playlist creator can be without incurring the wrath of the RIAA.
So here’s a Friday PopCast to get you through the day, focusing on this great nation of ours…well, at least this nation of MINE; I don’t know where you are. And I don’t know how great it is sometimes. But it’s mine, for sure. Ain’t no changing that.
Songs I like, carefully arranged, taking no more than twenty minutes of your time.
Add comment August 21, 2009
The (Terrible) Soundtrack Of Our Lives
So the other day, we had a doctor visit and got some terrific news (it’s a boy). It was the kind of moment you know you’ll always remember.
In a movie, it’s the kind of moment that would be accompanied by just the right musical track, to fit the tone of the overall film and perfectly express the emotions of the characters on the screen.
In real life, you’re stuck with horseshit lite radio. You don’t choose the songs; unfortunately, the songs choose you.
These are seriously the songs that I will now forever associate with one of the greatest moments of my life.
I’ll confess; I have a soft spot for ELO, and there’s some really aching chord changes in this one that get me going from a pop romantic perspective. But I do not want to think of a seventies schlock roller skating musical when I encounter my son.
I’m ashamed to say I once liked this song, but now when I hear it, I just want to punch Blunt in the privates. Really hard.
Not a bad song, just an awful version. Carrie Underwood does a shitty Chrissy Hynde impersonation while her band steals all the riffs from the Pretenders. Only the fiddler earns his paycheck. And how about that exploitative video? Way to use HIV in Africa to sell records, Carrie!
Next time, I’m bringing my own tape deck.
1 comment August 13, 2009
RIP John Hughes
I was a little too young to get wrapped up in the adolescent turmoil of John Hughes’ great run of 80s comedies, but I wanted to write a little bit about one movie of his that is embedded into my DNA.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is one of a handful of movies (Caddyshack and The Blues Brothers are the two other big ones that come to mind) that were central to the experience of growing up in the south suburbs of Chicago, not so much because they’re great movies (although I think they are), but because they’re great Chicago movies.
The idea of escaping high school during your senior year and experiencing everything great in a single fantastic day is alluring, but it’s even more so when the characters are experiencing things that are a twenty-minute drive from your own high school classroom. Personally I was way too much of a kiss-ass goody-two-shoes to play hooky and hit up a Cubs game, but I’m sure I had classmates who did just that…and even if they didn’t, we all certainly WANTED to most days.
That big dance sequence during the Von Steuben Day parade always gives me a little happy chill; it seems not just to capture a city I love very much, but to somehow capture its spirit and its people. Maybe I’m overromanticizing a major metropolitan burg, but can you imagine a fucking New Yorker or Angeleno stopping whatever they were doing on a workday to join a spontaneous dance party with complete strangers? I sure can’t.
I don’t know if the legions of random eighties Chicagoans depicted singing in the scene are extras or not, and I don’t care to know; they will forever be real folks to me, somehow coerced on a random Saturday morning by John Hughes to lip sync with the Beatles while that kid from Wargames danced on a float before them.
Again, I may be overromanticizing, but jesus H, it’s my blog and that’s what I want to do—Ferris Bueller to me has always been about an essentially Chicago spirit of playful rebellion and liberation. There is maybe no better feeling in the world than the first really warm days of spring in Chicago; that’s when this movie was set, and that’s part of the freedom it captures. The comedy of Chicago, from Second City to talk radio standbys like Steve Dahl and Jonathan Brandmeier, has always been about capturing the vibe of the smart-ass in the back of the room who gets to say whatever he wants and suffers no consequences, Bugs Bunny with f-bombs. That’s part of who Ferris is too. And the feeling of escape that results from Ferris and Cameron and Sloane escaping the dismal suburbs to find fun in the city—that sitting just on the fringe of your hometown was this place of endless activity, excitement, and the unexpected—that’s there in spades.
It’s not a movie I think about often, but when I do, it’s always with fondness. I love Ferris Bueller’s Day Off because I love Chicago, and to me, they’re one and the same. Thanks for that, John Hughes.
1 comment August 7, 2009
Teaser Thursday: His Pull
(yes, I know it’s supposed to be Teaser TUESDAY, but Thursday starts with a “T” as well and I want content and I want it NOW.)
This is the very early part of a short story I started a few weeks ago. It may become my submission for the next issue of Grok, I haven’t decided yet. Lemme know how it smells.
His Pull
He died the Sunday after Comic-Con.
That morning, they had gone out for a “legendary breakfast,” spending three hours in a greasy diner reading the Sunday LA Times and ordering half the menu.
They came home; she took a nap. He went into his man cave to sort out his purchases from the weekend before.
When she woke up, he was on the floor and not moving. The room spun and the phone felt like it was being held up by a plastic mannequin hand; she dialed 911 but she would never remember doing it; she got in an ambulance and the next thing she knew, it was “I’m sorry, there was nothing we could do,” goodbye baby and amen.
**
It was three weeks later, and Nora still lived in her own house as though it was a stranger’s.
She kept wiping down counters and washing dishes by hand after every meal, as though she expected the real owners to appear again at any moment. She’d never been much of a neat freak, but now every inch of her home was always immaculate.
The first night, after Alan died, she passed out in the bed they had shared, in her clothes, out of sheer exhaustion. She woke up the next afternoon and vomited. She hadn’t been back since.
The only room in the house where she could sleep was Alan’s man cave, so she dragged a giant comforter and pillow into it and folded herself upon the floor every evening. She found that while the rest of this place they had shared together belonged to them both, her dead husband’s shrine to nerditry only belonged to him. It held no attachment for her, reminded her of nothing but glancing over to him every night on the couch to find him buried neck-deep in a musty old comic book while she watched a shitty reality show and cracked wise.
If Ikea ever needed a catalog photo for a geek den paradise, they could easily use Alan’s man cave.
2 comments August 6, 2009
Tramps Like Me
On my way home from work the other night, I went to get dinner at Burger King; it was raining, and it took a while.
“Born to Run” came up on my iPod, part of the “BROOOOCE” playlist I’ve created to get me pumped for seeing the Boss in Tampa in a few weeks.
I sang the living shit out of that song in the car. I mean, I SLAUGHTERED it. I had it cranked up fucking LOUD, and I was doing that crazy car singing thing where you pretend you’re really on stage with a band, and you are the lead singer of that band, and fifty thousand eyes are upon you. And you have to ROCK or GO HOME. And so you ROCK, because you do not want to go home.
It occurred to me that I have probably heard “Born to Run” on average once a week since I was sixteen years old. Basically, more than half of my life has been spent in intimate knowledge of this song.
And yet, when it came on the other night, I turned it up and I was inside it, that anxious guitar solo firing me up all over again, like something new and fresh instead of something moldy and so 1975.
It’s amazing to me how much permanence a little piece of pop culture can have, and how even after hearing it at least 884 times, the 885th listen of a song can be even better than the first.
(By the way, SCOPE OUT THOSE HATS.)
Is there anything for YOU (a song, a movie, an episode of a TV show, an issue of a comic book, a page in a novel) that you can consume over and over and over, and it still GETS you?
2 comments August 5, 2009
Asshole Thursday: Jon Gosselin
On my Twitter account, I’ve begun celebrating what I call “#assholethursday,” dedicated to whatever or whoever I define as being an asshole. Yes, this is how I spend valuable moments of my day. No, you cannot shake my hand.
Today’s Asshole Thursday was devoted exclusively to Mr. Jon Gosselin, who I would rank as possibly America’s Biggest Asshole right now. Here’s some highlights from the celebration.
Just look at this fat fuck. http://trunc.it/150k9 8 kids, 3 girlfriends, 1 huge douchebag. #assholethursday
about 7 hours ago from TwitterGadget
Good question #assholethursday RT @jason1749 Did he have an asshole-consultant to help become the biggest d-bag in the shortest amt of time?
about 7 hours ago from TwitterGadget
Cunning plan. RT @jason1749 Maybe we can get Lou Dobbs to have Jon & Kate on his show and we can nuke it from orbit. #assholethursday
about 4 hours ago from TwitterGadget
“Jon says Kate’s books & speaking were based on their children & relationship, so he deserves a cut” http://trunc.it/14mhr #assholethursday
about 4 hours ago from TwitterGadget
Jon Gosselin is reportedly working on a deal to host a new reality TV show, “The Divorced Dads Club.” http://trunc.it/15eor #assholethursday
about 4 hours ago from TwitterGadget
"I’m single per se…I’m just a regular guy who just wants to have friendship and good times." http://trunc.it/14gtl #assholethursday
about 3 hours ago from TwitterGadget
Classy, Gosselin. Classy. http://trunc.it/14z2t #assholethursday
about 1 hour ago from TwitterGadget
one last #assholethursday tweet in honor of the Gosselins: The "iconic couch" is gone from their sickening show. http://trunc.it/14m53
2 minutes ago from TwitterGadget
And an early #fuckyoufriday to whoever actually uttered the words "iconic couch" in front of others. That person should hate him/herself.
less than a minute ago from TwitterGadget
Add comment July 30, 2009
