Fifty Years Back, Then and Now

The other day I was driving my kids home from their respective daycare and preschool (thank goodness for their emotional growth, that they're still able to get out with tiny groups of other kids) when, in the mirror, I noticed an old Datsun Z car.

Maybe it was a 240Z or a 280Z, but I was pretty sure it wasn't a 260Z, as my experience with the older Z-cars has left me with a keen eye that can spot the funky back windows of those middle Z-ditions (I just made that up).

It got me thinking of my own old Japanese sports/muscle car, a wonderful tri-powered 1971 Datsun 240Z, the most beautiful regular-person car I could imagine as a kid. Here's a phone pic of a film pic of my erstwhile Patmobile:

I say "most beautiful regular-person car" because to my eye, the most beautiful cars are all from the same era (late 60s to early 70s), and only one is something a regular (see: not obscenely wealthy) person like me could afford to get as a 20 year old:

The Lamborghini Miura, Ferrari Dino, and the Ford GT (starring in a recent "Dad movie"), and the Datsun 240Z. While not as exotic, I don't think the Datsun is totally out of place there.

Anyway, the whole thing got me thinking of the fact the Z-car I saw was old, and about my own Patmobile specifically: it would be fifty(!!!) years old this year.

I saw a car that could be 50 years old. On the road, running and everything.

That got me thinking about when I started driving. Did I ever see a fifty year old car on the road, taking care of household chores and the like?

Well, a fifty year old car when I started driving looked like this:

And, no. I didn't really ever see regular-use coupes and the like from the mid 1940s rolling around. Car events, like the Hot August Nights shows in Sacramento, sure, you could see lovingly updated oldies.

But out getting groceries? Not in Citrus Heights.

Happy St. Patrick's Day, 2021

Wow, quarantine part two. Well, safer at home and all.

In the time after work ended and before I was going to pick up Cass, I brought a bottle of Jameson down to the comic shop in the building and a stack of tiny disposable cups left over from a party years ago. We opened it, and I proceeded to hand out tiny shots to any person who wanted, and the bottle was gone before I went home.

It was a celebration! It was also the best we could do under the circumstances.

Happy times!

Bad Idea Day

I was part of a frenzy!

Despite my cool-guy demeanor and generally beach-bum attire, I still nerd out on all sorts of weird stuff. Like language. Like, here I've been spending actual time trying to figure out how to alter a narrative and tweak it into the style of a different language in how their language reflects their thoughts... Um, so...

Imagine a regular story taking the approach of the English-language sentence "I've lost my car key(s)." Now, imagine the tweaks necessary to turn it into something like "Of car my key have been lost happened to me." Hard to imagine? Tell me about it. I know. I'm living it. Or trying this same exercise with sentences that come from languages that don't use tenses?

See? Nerding out...

I also kinda nerd out on comics. Not like the early to mid '90s, or even 2014 to 2017. In fact, the main company I nerded out for was sold to an investment firm, and the main bosses were asked to leave. Fans think the quality has gone down in the years since our own Stan Lee, Dinesh Shamdasani, was forced out.

Some things have been decent, but I can attest to this fact: "quality" may have gone down, but my excitement over the content and new stuff most definitely has. I refuse to blame the company, even if some things are obviously of different quality. I also don't await the new releases like a kid in September eagerly waiting for Christmas anymore.

But Dinesh and some of his buddies got together to create a new type of comic company. They would release only at most two books a month. They would only make a single cover. They would never release them digitally, and they would never collect them into trade-paperbacks. They also would refuse to distribute them using the main distributor, Diamond Distribution. This is like telling Ticketmaster to GFY.

They would allow comic shops the ability to apply to sell their books, and then hand pick the shops. They mandated that each shop needed to agree to their selling rules: ONLY ONE FIRST EDITION PER CUSTOMER and MUST SELL AT THE COVER PRCE FOR 30 DAYS.

They called the company Bad Idea Comics.

I asked one of my local shops if they were going to apply. It was on a day where I was actually talking to the owner of the store. He couldn't understand what I was telling him. Near the end of it, you could tell it was dawning on him..."Well, I guess that would create a kind of specific demand...but why would the artists agree to do it?" That was what he was focused on.

The artists they attracted are some of the most critically acclaimed workers in the field. They aren't the talented youngsters doing the forty-three Marvel comics each month, rather the older heads who win awards and are the standard by which we judge other work. Why would they agree to work for...what, NO money? SOME money?

Maybe being a part of something crazy appealed to them, I answered. To make a living in the comic industry is HARD. Matt Kindt, one of the premier writers in the industry today, writes something like 8 separate titles a month for different companies, all with different sets of rules, guidelines, and expectations for his submissions.

The next time I saw that owner, he told me he'd applied, and was waiting to hear back. The store, Pulp Fiction, hasn't been picked yet.

As gthe names of the stores began to trickle out, the online community of fanatics (of which I am a member) was freaking out. Will I be able to get one, comment after comment worried. Not me, never for a second. Which is honest. I live in the greater metro LA area. There would be at least one store within driving distance, and once the name dropped, I was sure I would be able to call them and get my name of the list.

It's like Chicago Blackhawks fandom: there are only an arena's worth of them, but they are batshit crazy for the team.

The first name I saw within driving distance was in Anaheim. I called and had myself put on the list. Then the pandemic hit and the May 2020 release date was wiped away. 

Time passed. More time passed. New release dates were announced. New titles were announced. Excitement grew. The online community, small as it is, was batshit crazy. Then: the day!

March 3rd: Bad Idea Day!

I went to pick Cass up early from pre-school. He was surprised and excited. I'd been explaining to him the concept for months, and he was excited to go, and I thought it could be a cool adventure we could do together: drive down to Orange County and get some special, limited comics. 

In the runup,  news was spreading that stores would be shorted about 50% of their orders. Panic spread through the community. Not me, but still. 

I thought, if I missed out...well...bummer, but at least it was something to be excited about (besides my kids and career and hobbies of novel writing, blogging, and painting). But...I live in LA metro, so, I just always assumed the books would make it here.

And they did. Pop Comics used to have two locations, but the downtown Anaheim store has since closed. I was heading to the warehouse district store. And the term "warehouse" only describes the district, not the 20 square foot shop with Bad Idea comics, other high end comic fare, and some statues for sale.

I love the place, but our Ronnybrook dairy-shilling tents were bigger than this comic "shop."

But I got my book:

ENIAC #1, written by Matt Kindt and penciled by Doug Braithwaite (the combo that gave us one of my favorite Dinesh-era Valiant series Divinity, about a black Soviet cosmonaut who returns with powers), is about a world where the Nagasaki bomb was dropped by the sentient-ENIAC computer, the first AI accidently created. It seems to have decided over the decades since to take over the world.

There is a second story, a so-called B-Side. The product is pretty stellar.

So, the Frenzy...

The online community is going crazy. First editions in some places are being hoarded by the owners. Some purchased their books and immediately put them up on Ebay for, in some cases, $800 (!!!). 

It was so nice to be a part of something crazy. Like driving across town when Pynchon's Bleeding Edge was released. 

I have no interest in selling my copy, not for eight-hundred bucks, or anything.

Happy March

Coming up on a year now...

Going for my first shot today, hopefully it works out, but seeing as how Long Beach's email server is inviting everyone, it may end up less than great.

Movies from 1991: A Sampling of 46 Films

This endeavor started when I realized that Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead will be 30 years old this summer. And later that day I realized that another one of my defining feelings of capital-S Summer was also turning 30 this year, Point Break. So I went to look for other movies that came out in 1991. 

The following list of movies is not exhaustive, obviously, as I chose films that meant things to me either at the time or since. 

Anyway, when I found the list of box office smashers for the year, I gawked that I'd ever forgotten. Here are the top three grossing films from 1991, to the tune of over 1.3 billion dollars:

Yeah, I remember those movies pretty well. Also on the top 10 list of money makers from 1991 were some of my favorite comedies from that year:

I think that I like the Addams Family sequel more, but I definitely saw both of these in the theater. City Slickers definitely, and this one is better than the sequel.

Also coming out in 1991 from each coast were commentaries on race relations:

Boyz N the Hood was an obvious landmark as I remember it, but I'm not sure when I first saw it; on a rental for sure late in 1991. New Jack City I first saw when we lived in Brooklyn, and the opening helicopter shot captured two buildings that I worked in in my time in NYC. An essay in the DVD insert shed light on the realities of growing up oppressed and how that would shade civic pride.

Next up were two sequels to movies I grew up loving and a third phenomena that I missed out on:

My dad took me to see Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure in the theater, and I wrote once about how that movie came out in 1989, but seems WAY more like a '90s film. And we watched the Police Squad television show when I was a kid, and the Naked Gun movies were just too good.

I wasn't a ninja turtle kid...I was a Murder She Wrote and Golden Girls weirdo. But I included it here because while I may not have seen it, you can't really explain the era at the cinema for kids without it.

The next two are the "Oliver Stone Category:"

I ordered them like this because The Doors came out in March and JFK came out in December, and nevertheless was on the top ten moneymakers for the year.

Doesn't this remind you, if you're the right age, of that special time when Kevin Costner was the biggest Hollywood star? Winning Oscars for acting and directing for Dances with Wolves, then starring in two of the biggest movies in '91 (Prince of Thieves and JFK)...Tin Cup is good...Waterworld less, and The Postman and Wyatt Earp, less still...But also Oliver Stone was an important and controversial filmmaker?

Anyway...next we have the Jewish Gangster genre:

Bugsy was the only one I saw on rental during this period, but these two felt connected in my head. It wasn't as exciting as Goodfellas, but that's not fair, since what gangster movie is? King of New York? Is that the only movie in contention? (Answers: None; and Yes)

Now we get to the good stuff: movies my brother and I watched all the time on HBO and remember very fondly:

While we may have seen Don't Tell Mom... and Point Break more often, we certainly watched these movies plenty from 1991 until 1996, and the same goes for the next three:

Those six movies are some of my favorite movies from any era, which is...unreasonable. I think I'll write a special post about each of these two trifecta. 

Now for the category of "This happened in 1991 also:"

I watched Slacker when we'd finally decided to move to Austin. I had already had on a regular rotation Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, which I love like crazy, and I had high hopes for Slacker. They were dashed. Slacker isn't bad, but it's more of a bunch of shit getting filmed that it is a movie.

Now here are three movies that I couldn't escape at different points in my life but that I've never seen:

I think I tried to watch Backdraft while living at Oceanaire, but might have been too inebriated to make it through, or maybe it was a combo of that and being in the post-fire PTSD time, when me and fire didn't get too well. Grand Canyon I was late to...and still haven't seen, but it seemed to me like Parenthood---big cast of actors I like. Someday I'll get to it. I'm still embarrassingly ignorant to what Prince of Tides is about, and I kinda like it like that. I am a fan Pat Conroy, so eventually I'll check it out.

Now comes a weird combo:

Even when it was released, Iremember Hudson Hawk being called "the worst movie of all time." That's what I remember, and I haven't watched it to make my own judgement (I'm willing to guess there are plenty worse films out there).

Barton Fink, on the other hand, I was late to. When I saw it on the list for 1991, I thought it was an interesting fact. I count myself as a fan of the Cohen Brothers, and I was secretly embarrassed that I hadn't seen it when I read through a list of the top CB movies. Having seen it in the last three years I came to a strange conclusion: I'm not sure I liked it as much as its part, like, the sum of the parts wasn't as grand as maybe I thought, or was expecting. Maybe I didn't like John Turturro's Barton, because the premise and circumstances are things that speak to me. Maybe I did like John Goodman's sociopath, but not how it fit into the story. My favorite part was Hal Holbrooke's Faulker-esque presence, and if your favorite part of a movie about a New Yorker trying not to suck and fail in early Hollywood is a sendup of an American writing legend...maybe that says more about me than the movie.

Next up are two iconic remakes, before remakes or reboots were filmmaking du jour:

I'm not sure I've seen either version of Cape Fear all the way through, but...eh, big year for Nick Nolte? Two things that I associate with this movie are the Simpsons Sideshow Bob/Cape Fear episode and the story that Spielberg was developing it, thought it was too violent, and traded the project to Scorsese for Schindler's List, something Marty have shelved.

This version of Father of the Bride was one of my favorite movies from the era, for some reason, but I think it's because Steve Martin's portrayal reminded me of my own father. My dad was more fun and easy going, but something about Steve Martin (in most roles, actually) generally makes me see my dad. Is that weird?

Here's another trio of zany (shitty?) comedies: 

Along with some Mel Brooks movie and the Naked Gun sequel, Hot Shots shows maybe the height of the spoof. My brother and I loved this movie, and I'm sure I haven't seen it for 25 years at least. King Ralph was another John Goodman vehicle, and one that my brother and I saw at the dollar theater. We instantly loved it, and that's due to John Goodman's charisma. And, who knows how it holds up. During a photoshoot a freak accident kills the entire royal family, and a long lost cousin Ralph, from Chicago, becomes the new sovereign. That may have been the only time we actually saw it. The Super was in the "Joe Pesci a-hole collection," and not one of the fun ones, like from Goodfellas or My Cousin Vinny. It's forgettable, but Dan and I watched it whenever it came on, or we ridiculed it mercilessly---I can't remember.

Two serious heavyweights:

And I mean "serious" as in subject matter, maybe. I saw Fried Green Tomatoes, but I don't remember anything really about it, besides Whistle Stop Cafe, maybe and two timelines...was cancer a part of the story? I don't think I've seen My Own Private Idaho, but I heard lots about it in 1991 and again recently as part of a Keanu-related Renaissance talk.

These next two my brother and I loved:

I think Dan turned me on to Ricochet, where John Lithgow is the badguy who fakes his own death and proceeds to methodically ruins Denzel's life. It was awesome for us as kids, and probably deserves a re-viewing soon.

The People Under the Stairs I think we watched a as rental from the general store/resort in Mill Creek at the Cabin. We rented it at a time when we most certainly did not regularly watch scary movies. Of course, apparently as I reminisce and write this, Dan and I loved it. It wasn't too scary for us.

Were we just kids liking everything that was remotely entertaining? Like most kids? That seems to make the most sense. King Ralph and Boyz N the Hood aren't really in the same ballpark, and we loved them both.

Anyway, the next six felt like icons to me as I compiled the list, and the first pair were what I seemed to lump into the sad/serious box:

My Girl seemed like an American Classic, when I saw it originally, and I hope it holds up. Regarding Henry was a serious movie that I loved like a comedy, and I'm not really sure why. My favorite movies at this time were either comedies or action movies, but I had a soft spot for certain (as I called them) serious movies (like Dead Poets Society and Regarding Henry).

And, here are two action/comedy types:

Hook, to me, having been released at Christmas, seemed like an event more than a regular movie. This was at the beginning of my family's connection to Disney, which strengthened the event feeling. And Rocketeer? Holy cow, Dan and I loved it. From Timothy Dalton's turn as a Nazi-sympathizing Brit actor, to the Feds and mobsters teaming up to kill Nazis, to the blimp explosion finale, we loved it. How did the guy, the main dude, the Rocketeer, not become a super star?

Next are two of the more important movies of the decade, coming out in 1991:

I think, like two trio-pictures of comedies earlier, that I'll need a separate piece about these two.

And we're almost done. When I started this I was shocked, and maybe if we pick any year we can find nearly fifty movies that we have a deep connection to, or fond memories of, or some piece of memorial ephemera that I can't dislodge from the consciousness. But this is where I am: Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead will turn 30 this summer, and something in my brain clicked. What other movies were stuck in a specific place in my understanding of the entertainment world?

And this is where I arrived.

These last two I had to end with:

The first one here, if you can't tell, is Star Trek VI, the one where the Klingon planet is nearly destroyed and the Klingons are facing possible extinction, or something. We as a family went to the cinema on Christmas Day to see it (for some reason)(maybe Hook was sold out) and I remember my cousin Liz, who must have been only 3 years old, being fully bored out of her skull, finally perking up at the very last second, when Kirk quotes Peter Pan: "Second star on the right, and straight on 'til morning."

Ernest Scared Stupid is the best of the Ernest movies (Ernest Goes to Jail may be funnier) and is way better than it needed to be. It's funny, it's scary, it has legitimately shocking moments, it has slow-burn jokes (Bulgarian miak?), and it was mostly safe for the kid set it was made for.

These two movies represent all of the good qualities we find in films, or at least the social connection we find while viewing movies. They were viewed with family, sharing time and laughing and enjoying the adventure. They have other similarities: they're both entries in larger oeuvres, and may be the best entries full-stop in each. I was never a Trekkie, but I enjoyed this movie like crazy, and it was my favorite Star Trek movie until...maybe still? I like Zack Quinto and Zoe Saldana, so that's cool...

Jim Varney was a treasure who wasn't ever fully appreciated.

Why is 1991 the year for me? Does it even matter? Had circumstances been different, would I have had a weird epiphany about some other year? Has this ever happened to you? I think I'll go look around at other years...maybe I'm just a cinephile who makes connections to dreck...

No, that's not it exactly: I was an impressionable kid who made impressionable kid connections to dreck. Some of these movies are great, though.

The power of art, baby!

Thinking About Ants

One of the nifty facts about the natural world that I like to share with the young people I (used to) see regularly is this: the biomass of humans is equal to the biomass of ants. The young people usually nod like they understand, but they mostly don't, so I enjoy my clarifications probably too much.

What that means, I say, is that if you put every human on Earth onto one side of a scale, and every ant on Earth onto the other side, they'd essentially be balanced. Oh, wow, they say.

What that also means is that, basically, there's a writhing pile of ants that's the same size as you crawling around out there somewhere.

And that get's their attention. Eyes wide, brain processing the information into horror film scenes I imagine...

But then I had an epiphany, a thinking breakthrough about ants in general, a realization that we've been thinking about them incorrectly for...ever?

I was watching a nature program with Cass or Corrie that focused on ants for a time, about how the drone/workers were out collecting food for the larvae back in the  nest. It was a petty regular activity for ants in general today, as there are very few (if any) non-super-social ants any more. The program's host made it a point to mention it's interesting that ants generally use their own energy to gather food for larvae that are not their own descendants, and this is rare in the animal world. 

We can all probably think of some examples, but really, we could exhaust that list pretty soon.

But these ants are gathering food for what amounts to their siblings. And, in a strange bit of dark irony, the larvae they are gathering food for will one day be gathering food for larvae that will one day grow to gather food for...and you get the picture. The majority of an ant colony are workers gathering food for larvae.

Some of the specimens will be soldiers, or other specialized workers, and even a new queen will be born...hatched...? The new queen will mature and eventually leave the nest, fly away to find a male, get impregnated and will found a new colony.

So...what?

My epiphany came during the program. We shouldn't focus on the oddity of the workers gathering food for larvae that aren't theirs, we need to focus on the many facets of the living organism of the Ant. 

But really: any single ant is essentially a body part of the queen, and Ants are, with the capital letter, in general, the expression of the will of the colony's queen. And that's a simple edict: get food.

The story of ants, or Ants, is the story of a queen and the nature of her autonomous limbs; the expression of Platonic Ant-dom is just a single queen. 

Do you have ants in your house? No...you have an infiltration of autonomous limbs of a queen ant. That's the proper view, that's the epiphany. That's the contextualized view of a specific and complex life form.

The real question may now be: How does this contextualized view of Ants affect our view and understanding of humanity?

The Difference a Year Makes

My phone shows me pictures from years past, like many other people's phones. This year I was reminded of last year's Valentines Day, when I snapped a picture of my new (at the time) two kids. Here's a collage of the two, almost a year apart:

But in the moment, I was reminded of a year ago.

A year ago...

No pandemic yet, my son was still diapered, my daughter was a tiny flesh blob...

Now we're still on lockdown, going on 11 months, the Boy confidently pees in the street whenever necessary, and Babygirl is a walking talking bosslady. 

The world is good. 

Except it's surely not. Society is still fraying (even though we won in November...well..."we"...), and the climate is still careening towards oblivion.

Well...life goes forward...