This Year's Rock Hall Nominees: My Thoughts

It's that time of year again, fellow Clevelanders. The time when the esteemed board members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announce their annual nominations for induction, causing elderly hippies with gray ponytails to write angry letters to the Plain Dealer's editorial page, complaining about any artist that doesn't fit their definition of what rock and roll is. (Namely: white men with guitars.)  This year's noms are a mixed bag  as usual. Here are my two cents:

Cyndi Lauper-An obvious shoo-in. She's leading the fan votes, and it's not hard to see why. As both a beloved pop icon and an LGBTQ+ ally, she's got this one in the bag.

Kate Bush- Another sure thing. It doesn't hurt that a certain hit Netflix hit series bumped up her popularity with younger generations. It's not often that a 37-year-old song hits number one on iTunes, but stranger things have happened. (Eh? Eh? See what I did there?) It would take an evil force greater than Vecna (or Jann Wenner) to keep her out.

A Tribe Called Quest- Can the Rock Hall kick it? Yes it can. And it should.

The White Stripes-Jack and Meg are certainly deserving, but are they ready? On the other hand, the Rock Hall has been pretty generous with newer artists getting in their first year of eligibility (see Foo Fighters and Eminem), so it's not unthinkable that they could get in. Also, if you're the type of person who calls Jack White "the goth John Mayer", then you are not allowed to vote.

Willie Nelson-If Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton can get in, why not Willie? The whole "is country rock?"debate is kind of silly, considering that we wouldn't have the latter without the former. The man is going to be 90 this year, so let him in. He's accomplished more while high than most people have while sober, and is possibly the only person to have ever smoked a joint on the roof of the White House. (OK, maybe Bill Clinton too.)

Soundgarden-Chris Cornell has been gone for over five years and what better way to honor his memory than with an induction? No snarky comments here. Just a sincere plea for the Rock Hall to pay tribute to one of rock's greatest voices.

Warren Zevon-Eligible since the '90s and just now being nominated for the first time, which would be a shameful black mark for the hall, if I thought they had any shame. More than worthy of inclusion, he deserves to be remembered as more than just a sample source for a shitty Kid Rock song.

Joy Division/New Order-This is the one nomination that I have an issue with, but not because I feel that either band is undeserving. I'm opposed to this one, because it implies that they are the same band, which is not the case.They are separate bands and as such, should have separate nominations. I guess according to the Rock Hall,'s logic, Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave should get in together. And speaking of which...

Rage Against the Machine and Iron Maiden-I think the hall should implement a new rule in which any band that has nominated at least five times and hasn't gotten in automatically gets inducted. RATM and Iron Maiden have both been nominated about a dozen times, which is ridiculous. Just fuckin' let 'em in!

Sheryl Crow, Missy Elliott, George Michael, The Spinners-Meh. Don't care about any of these acts. Wouldn't care either way if they got in or if they didn't.

 One last rant: what the hell do The B-52's have to do to even get a nomination? Thousands of bands have written songs about love, but only one has written a song about a rock lobster, so why aren't they in? 

"First Man" and the Stupidity of Outrage Culture

I saw the new Neil Armstrong biopic, First Man, this afternoon. It’s a fairly entertaining piece of Oscar bait with good performances from Ryan Gosling as Armstrong, Claire Foy as his wife Janet, and a solid supporting cast all around as well as some genuinely exciting moments and breathtaking visuals. It’s also overlong by at least 30 minutes and is hampered by the unfortunate use of handheld shaky-cam by cinematographer Linus Sandgren, who shot director Damien Chazelle’s previous film La La Land in a more classical style. I had to move to the way back of the theatre so that I didn’t get sick during the show. (Chazelle seems to be one of those directors like Paul Greengrass and Kathryn Bigelow who believe that any movie based on true historical events must be shot in a manner that gives its audience motion sickness. Having the camera swim around like a drunken fish apparently lends a sense of “realism” that classically-shot historical films don’t. I guess according to that logic, Lawrence of Arabia and Patton would be even better if the audience got vertigo while watching them. But that’s a different rant for a different time.)

As entertaining as First Man is, it also appears to be the hotbed of two of the stupidest controversies from opposite ends of our current political landscape. If you’re wondering to yourself how a biopic of the first man to ever walk on the moon could ever be controversial, then congratulations! You’re a sensible person who doesn’t read too much into things, unlike some of the overly outraged twits who are polluting America’s political discourse with triviality and nonsense.

On the right side of the equations, conservatives are outraged because the movie omits the iconic scene of Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (played by Corey Stoll) planting the American flag on the moon. Never mind the fact that the flag is still shown on the lunar module and images of it appear frequently throughout the film. (An earlier scene features one of Armstrong’s sons proudly raising the flag on the family porch.) Because one image of Americana does not appear in the film, that means it is clearly godless, anti-American commie propaganda. Even our clueless dunce of a current president felt the need to add his unwanted two cents: "It's unfortunate. It's almost like they're embarrassed at the achievement coming from America, I think it's a terrible thing. When you think of Neil Armstrong and when you think of the landing on the moon, you think about the American flag. For that reason, I wouldn't even want to watch the movie.”

That’s fine, Donnie. I’m sure all of the scientific and technical jargon used by the NASA scientists throughout the film would just make your tiny, peanut-sized brain hurt anyway. Also, all of the female characters keep their clothes on, which is completely at odds at your sleazy, prurient interests. Seriously though, when did blind flag worship become a prerequisite for loving your country? We’ve all undoubtedly seen that embarrassing picture of the imbecile-in-chief hugging the American flag like Linus from Peanuts cuddling his blankie. I’d be more impressed if he had as much respect for the Constitution as he did for a giant symbolic piece of cloth. To quote the late, great Molly Ivins: “I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps themselves up in the flag.”

If insufficient flag-waving is the movie’s biggest flaw for viewers on the right, then a lack of color and diversity is the biggest problem for viewers on the left, some of whom are incensed that the filmmakers had the nerve to make a movie about a white man’s accomplishments without addressing any social problems affecting minorities at the time. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody has called it a “right-wing fetish object” and The Mary Sue’s Kate Gardener writes that "I’m glad they decided against making it a story of American exceptionalism, but as with most historical films, they decide to focus mostly on white men." Umm…maybe because the historical events in question concerned mostly white men? The sad fact is that in the 1960s, NASA and other cultural institutions weren’t as well-integrated and ethnically diverse as they are now. To pretend otherwise and to add a token minority face where none existed would be to distort historical accuracy for the sake of cultural sensitivity.  

So there you have it, folks. First Man can’t simply be enjoyed as an entertaining biopic about one of America’s greatest heroes. It must be molded into fitting into our own personal political agendas. It’s not patriotic enough for some viewers and too jingoistic for others. It’s a right-wing screed and a liberal polemic. It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping! Meanwhile, in the real world, climate change is threatening to wipe out our very existence, Hurricane Michael had devastated much of the east coast, Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by extremists, and our country is being led by a shiftless dipshit of a president would rather suck up to pop stars than address any of the problems that are truly facing the country. Aren’t you glad you got upset over a movie?

Breaking Up with Books Is OK

As an avid reader, I try to make it a habit not to give up on a book. After all, some books are slow going at the start, only to gradually pick up momentum along the way and grow into a richly rewarding experience. I try to adhere to what I call "the 100-page" rule. If I read for 100 pages or more and nothing interesting happens, it's pretty much a given that nothing interesting is going to happen. There have been some exceptions to this rule, such as Stephen King's uncut edition of The Stand which had me going for about  half of its 1000+ pages, before I finally got overwhelmed by all of the endless characters and subplots and just straight-up quit. Every now and then, a book will compel me to read it from cover to cover, despite the fact that it's not really interesting me, just so I can say that I've read it.

Last week, I finished Ursula K. LeGuin's sci-fi magnum opus, The Dispossessed. 385 tedious and unrewarding pages later, I'm not sure why I did.

This may well be the most boring science fiction book every written, and one of the most boring books ever published in any genre. We follow our hero, the anarchist Shevek from birth to roughly age 40 as he attempts to broker peace between the poverty-stricken socialist government of the planet Annares and the wealthy, capitalistic society of the planet Urras. Along the way, he does a lot of exciting things like devise a complex mathematical theory, write a lot of papers, and talk endlessly about physics and political philosophy. (I know! Riveting, right?) And dear God, do LeGuin's characters love to talk. They go on and on, bloviating for paragraphs on end about religion and politics. (A warning to readers: any novel that is almost 400 pages long but has only 13 chapters is a big red flag.) There is an interesting moment toward the end of the novel where Shevek joins an uprising of labor workers on Urras that is violently suppressed by the government, but LeGuin, perhaps fearing her readers would get too much excitement out of this story, quickly steers the ship back to Boringville.

And after all this, what important lesson has Shevek the brilliant mathematician and anarchist learned? That both socialist and capitalist systems are inherently flawed! Wow. Thanks for that brilliant bit of insight. It's nothing I haven't heard from any undergrad poly-sci major between hits from a bong and repeated listenings of  Bob Marley's Legend.

I'm not trying to be mean. I wanted to like this book. I really did. I want to like the recently-deceased Ms. LeGuin, who seemed like a fairly cool, ass-kicking feminist writer. Maybe her other books are worth checking out, but I'm not in a rush to check any of them out anytime soon. Perhaps the problem is with me. I just don't care enough about physics or mathematics to want to read a novel about them. Maybe when I crack open a sci-fi novel, I expect an exciting story and exciting characters, not a pseudo-profound political screed puffed up with balloon juice. Perhaps this type of book is not for me. Perhaps, like a bad relationship, it's OK to cut your losses early on instead of feeling like you've just wasted your time.

"But, Eric," you think, "I saw on your Facebook page that you quoted a line from this book." Well, yes, that's true. I did like that line, and felt it had significance in the dangerous times we're currently living in. I liked some of the dialogue and writing, but the entire book, as a whole, just didn't do it for me. And if that upsets you, let me quote another great line from a beloved "classic" that I can't stand:

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

Thoughts and Prayers

Are you offended by something I wrote?
Well, I'm offended by the way that you vote
You can't stop blaming Hillary for Benghazi
So you pick the guy endorsed by a Nazi

Big orange clown in a ratty blonde wig
Charm of a serpent, class of a pig
We try to move on, but we just can't forget
This whole country's playing Russian roulette

But we're sending all our thoughts and prayers
It's just a nice way of saying that no one cares

30 million dollars from the NRA
How many more children have to pay?
Too many bodies in too few years
Blood money dries up a whole lot of tears

And you don't get to hide under your riches
And call protesting athletes "sons of bitches"
And you don't get to hide under your steeple
And call neo-Nazis "very fine people"

But we're sending all our thoughts and prayers
It's just a nice way of saying that no one cares

And I don't think it's too outrageous
To say we shouldn't put children in cages
And I don't think it's too much to say
We shouldn't take their mommy and daddy away

It doesn't make America great
To give in to anger and corruption and hate
You don't know why you feel so alone
So you blame somebody with a darker skin tone

But we're sending all our thoughts and prayers
It's just a nice way of saying that no one cares

(c) 2018 Kid Tripper Music. All rights reserved. (So don't steal it!)

I Won't Be a Good German

I don't remember exactly how old I was when I first become aware of who Donald Trump was. It was probably sometime when I was a kid in the late '80s, watching him being interviewed for Entertainment Tonight or some other fluff TV program. Even then, I sensed there was something shifty and untrustworthy about him. I learned a little more in my pre-teens when I read a collection of Bloom County comics entitled Happy Trails! in which creator Berkeley Breathed decided to send off Opus and friends with a story line in which Trump bought up the titular town which he intended to turn into parking lots. A few years earlier, the same strip ridiculed him by having him injured by a falling anchor from his yacht and transplanting his brain into the body of the insane Bill D. Cat. It was these early strips that cemented in my mind my early opinion of Trump as an obnoxious rich idiot from New York who owned a lot of crap and inexplicably managed to attract beautiful women. He was, by and large, a joke and a horse's ass and aside from a few cameo appearances in movies and TV shows --like Home Alone 2, which I thought was the funniest film of all time when I was twelve. Hey, give me a break. Your tastes weren't that refined back then, either.-- fairly easy to ignore. As long as he remained holed up in one of his towers in Manhattan and didn't intrude on my life in any way, he was completely insignificant to me. He was a clown and a buffoon and not worth giving a second though to.

I don't recall the exact moment when I started to actively hate him, but it was probably sometime around 2004, when his TV show The Apprentice first aired. I'm not a fan of reality TV, so I didn't watch any episodes, but I knew the premise well enough. A group of prospective employees perform menial tasks for him and throughout the course of a season, each one is fired until a winner is chosen and gets to be the Donald's personal apprentice. Each episode ended with him giving someone the ax and declaring, in his inimitable Queens accent, "You're fired".  It was pretty much the same premise as Survivor, but in a corporate office setting. I couldn't for the life of me understand why anyone would compete to work for such a megalomaniac asshole, and I still don't. I didn't see the appeal of a grotesquely rich prick abusing and humiliating those in a lower economic bracket each week. I imagine that firing employees at most jobs is a difficult task for the employer who has to do so, and that they struggle with the ethics of putting a human being out of work. Not so for the Donald. For him, it was a simple as ordering coffee at your local Starbucks. It was then that I realized that he was a complete sociopath with no empathy for his fellow man and no concern with anything other than his own greed and colossal ego. But again, he was someone I could ignore just by not watching his stupid TV program. I mean, it wasn't like he was ever going to be elected President of the United States or anything like that, right?

Fast forward to present day. The man who was once just an annoying TV star is now the leader of the free world. And how does he represent his country on the world stage? By alienating our allies and appeasing our enemies. By calling benign Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau "weak and dishonest" and praising murderous North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un as "strong" and " a good negotiator". (I guess negotiations are pretty easy when all you have to do is kill those who oppose your policies). By separating immigrant children from their parents and caging them up like animals. (Whether they're here legally or not, no child deserves to be treated that way. I wouldn't treat a dog that way, much less a human child.) And the ones who support this kind of behavior are the same ones who have the gall to call themselves "pro-life Christians" and not see a single trace of irony in those words. And if you call them out on it, they'll bring up Benghazi or Hillary's e-mails or how "Obummer" was gonna take all their precious, precious guns away (which is something he never actually did, nor was he ever intending to do). They can't find any way to defend their president because they know he's indefensible, so they just bring up the ones who aren't currently in charge, because that's the only ammunition they have.

"But, Eric", you think, "why do you have to be so negative? Why can't you focus on all the good that is happening? Why can't you just keep singing and dancing at the Kit-Kat Klub, and ignore that silly little  man with the thin mustache? He's not affecting you personally in any way. Why can't you just be a good German and keep on having a good time?"

Because these are dire times we're living in and I refuse to stay silent. I refuse to be complacent  when I see cruelty and injustice all around me. I refuse to normalize the abnormal. I refuse to believe that just because something doesn't affect me on a personal level that it's not worth speaking out against.

I refuse to be a good German.

Depression Doesn't Discriminate

If the recent suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain have taught us anything, it's that depression doesn't discriminate and that immense wealth and fame are not miracle cures for the demons that are living in some people's minds. Depression doesn't care if you have millions of dollars in your bank account or if you have close to nothing. It doesn't care if you've been on hundreds of magazine covers or if nobody even knows that you exist. It doesn't care if you're a high-profile celebrity or a Wal-Mart greeter, a beloved chef or a fry cook at McDonald's. It sinks its hooks into everyone it can get, and nobody is immune. If anything positive has come from these sad news stories, it's the knowledge that anybody who is suffering is not alone and that we can all learn how to help one another.

I realize these are pretty dark times we live in. The world sometimes seems like an overturned porta-john at the county fair. This country's current commander-in-chief is a sub-literate dunce and petty tyrant who beclowns the office of the presidency on a daily basis. His appalling behavior at the G-7 Summit is just the latest in a long list of embarrassing incidents that makes us looks worse in the eyes of our nation's allies. (I mean, seriously. How do you manage to piss off Canada?)  Immigrant children are being taken away from their parents and placed in cages like dogs. Teenagers who survived a horrible mass shooting are being harassed by gun-worshipers who feel the need to own weapons of warfare to fill some void in their lives. Everything seems like the Bizarro version of how it should be. 

But, as terrible as things may seem, just try to hold on. Seek peace and comfort in what you enjoy. Talk a walk through the Metroparks, ride your bike, write a song, read a book. Binge-watch your favorite show, if that's what makes you happy. But don't forget to take your meds or see your doctor also. Life can be shitty, but it can also be great, too. Stay strong, stay healthy, and most importantly, stay alive. And if you need help, go here: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/ or call 1-800-273-8255. You matter. 

Broke

When you're broke
Every paycheck's a joke
And you're trying hard not to choke
On your frustrations

When you're bored
Simply because you can't afford
To go out to a show anymore
Because of your situation

Then it might be time to make a new plan
Might be time to become a brand new man

When you're afraid
You sell everything that you've made
You don't get enough when you're paid
And you know your boss doesn't like you

You've got chills
Everything goes to your bills
Don't have enough for the pills
You need to get you through

So you beg, borrow, and steal
It's such an ugly way to feel

Maybe next week
Maybe next year
You tell yourself
As you pour another beer

Starting tomorrow
Everything will be all right
You tell yourself
As you turn in for the night

When you're broke
Regretting the words that you spoke
Filling your lungs up with smoke
As another drink pounds your liver

When you're alone
Knowing she won't pick up the phone
Knowing you're out on your own
And you can't bring yourself to forgive her

Guess you just can't read the clues
Can't see that you're yesterday's news

You wait in vain
For her to pick up
You curse her name
As you pour another cup

You stew in rage
As you watch TV
Get angry when you think about
The way it ought to be

Clouds will disappear
Everything will be sunny
You'll get a better job
And make a lot more money

She'll come crawling back
You'll have a brand new friend
You tell yourself these things
As you give up once again

When you're broke
Wondering why you woke up today
You don't know
You just don't know

Winter In Cleveland

"Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does a damn thing about it."-Attributed to Mark Twain, but probably said by somebody else.

Last week, I visited my parents in Sandusky when I was on vacation from work. At one point, my mom noticed that something seemed to be bothering me and asked what was wrong.

"It's just my depression," I said. "It tends to come and go."

"Oh," she said. "What are you depressed about?"

I didn't know how to respond. Because most of the time, there is no reason. Depression is something that doesn't have a particular cause or a motivation. It just exists, like the weather. Asking someone why they're depressed is like asking why it's raining outside. And like the weather in Cleveland, it changes every day. Some days are filled with sunshine and beauty. Others are like a torrential downpour with no shelter anywhere to be found. You can't really stop it. Sure, I take antidepressants and try to maintain a good sense of humor and positive outlook, but it's not something that can ever really go away. It will always be a part of me. Maybe it's because I was bullied as a child. Maybe it's because my love life has seen more wreckage than the Daytona 500. Maybe it's because I tend to fall in love with all the wrong people and take it too hard when my heart gets broken. Maybe it's the fact that I've been in the same retail job for over a decade and feel like I'm not not really going anywhere in life. I don't know. Speculating as to why I'm this way or trying to pinpoint the cause of it is fairly useless. It's just something I carry with me, like an invisible weight hanging on me that I can't take off. The election of President Fascist Cheeto certainly doesn't help matters any. It's hard to keep a sunny outlook when your civil liberties are slowly being eroded every single day. It's easy to feel powerless and pessimistic, especially in such dark times. You just have to keep moving on, like a snowplow digging through the blizzard.

You can't stop the rain or the snow from falling. All you can do is navigate through it the best you can and hope it passes soon. Just be careful and drive slow.

I'm sorry that this post is so melancholy. I promise some more happy ones will be coming. I'll end this with a quote from the great singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, in response to a concertgoer who kept asking why he wasn't playing more happy songs.

"Lady, these are the happy songs. You don't wanna hear the sad ones."

Buried Treasure: Sorcerer

Note: this entry is the first of a new experiment that I'm trying out: a semi-regular series of blog posts in which I try to shed light on certain aspects of popular culture (movies, albums, TV shows, etc.) that I feel have been unfairly overlooked or underappreciated by the general public. My first entry takes a look at a forgotten thriller from the 1970s that had the misfortune of being overshadowed by a more popular summer release.

Sometimes, timing is everything.

In 1977, William Friedkin was one of the hottest directors in Hollywood. His landmark action thriller The French Connection cleaned up at the 1972 Academy Awards ceremony, taking home five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. Two years later, Friedkin followed that up with an even bigger success, the horror classic The Exorcist, which broke box office records and became a cultural touchstone that is widely considered to be one of the scariest movies ever made. The future was wide open and the popular director had the leverage to make any film he wanted. He set his sights on a remake of The Wages of Fear, a 1953 thriller from French director Henri-Georges Clouzot, about a group of four men faced with the difficult task of driving trucks filled with nitroglycerin through the dangerous mountain roads of South America. One false move on unsteady terrain could lead to instant death. The result is a film that is deeply cynical and horrifying, a brutal indictment of a corporate system that exploits the desperate and the poor, complete with a darkly ironic gut punch of an ending. It would seem to be the perfect film to be remade for the 1970s, an era when directors such as Friedkin, Sidney Lumet, Roman Polanski, and Martin Scorsese were making films that reflected the malaise of the post-Watergate years. Friedkin's remake, entitled Sorcerer, was set to open in the summer of 1977 and would undoubtedly be another hit that would be embraced by critics and audiences alike.

Or so it seemed. Unfortunately for Friedkin, a new kind of movie had been released in the spring of that year that had captured the hearts and minds of moviegoers: a little film called Star Wars. The tastes of the general public had shifted from gritty realism to escapist fantasy, and offered a different type of viewing experience. While Star Wars had clearly defined heroes and villains, Sorcerer offered a quartet of morally ambiguous anti-heroes with criminal backgrounds. While Luke Skywalker and his friends were guided through life with a mystical Force, the protagonists of Friedkin's film face one hardship after another and make it through only with dogged perseverance. While Star Wars has a happy ending in which evil is defeated and the heroes triumph, Sorcerer ends on a downbeat note, in which the efforts of the main characters appear to have been all for nothing. It's not hard to see why the American public might have rejected a dark, unnerving thriller in favor a comforting fantasy. Critics were also hard on the film and the director for having the nerve to remake a foreign classic. (Compare that criticism to today's film industry, where nearly every hit film from another country is remade for American audiences.) Another source of confusion was the movie's title (the name of the truck driven by Roy Scheider's character), and audiences who assumed that the director of The Exorcist had another supernatural chiller prepared for them were in for a big surprise.
All of these helped contribute to the movie's poor box office and lukewarm critical reception, which is a shame, because Sorcerer is a masterful work that is definitely worth a second look.

Like its predecessor, this movie is centered around a group of broke, desperate men who are hired by an oil company in a small South American town to drive the aforementioned nitroglycerin-stocked trucks. But while the backgrounds of the characters in the original film remain unknown, Friedkin and screenwriter Walon Green spend the first 45 minutes setting up the origins of our anti-heroes. Nilo (Francisco Rabal) is a contract killer from Vera Cruz. Kassem (Amidou) is a Palestinian terrorist on the run after a bombing in Jerusalem. Victor (Bruno Cremer) is a French banking official facing indictment for embezzlement and haunted by his partner's suicide. Jackie (Roy Scheider) is a New Jersey gangster in hiding after killing a priest who turned out to be the brother of a rival mob boss. All of them have fled to a small South American village to escape their pasts and have taken on this deadly, nearly suicidal task out of desperation. Much like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, this is the story of corrupt, untrustworthy men whose desire for wealth eventually brings about their undoing.

Like his idol Alfred Hitchcock, Friedkin is a master of generating suspense. One particularly brilliant set piece features Jackie and Nilo attempting to drive their truck over a rickety suspension bridge during a rainstorm, with Kassem and Victor following behind in their own vehicle. The frustration and terror felt by each men is made palpably real by each actor's performance and by Friedkin's skillful direction. Another beautifully-shot sequence features Jackie driving his truck through a desert landscape as surreal and alien as any of the outer space worlds from George Lucas's sci-fi epic. It is during this scene that Jackie struggles to maintain his sanity as guilt and fear begin to overwhelm him, and Scheider's performance may be one of the high points of his career. The movie ends on a brutally ironic note where, without giving too much away, Jackie learns that while he may be finished with his past, his past isn't necessarily finished with him.

Like many films that have initially crashed and burned at the box office, Sorcerer has had a critical re-evaluation over the past few decades, and is now considered a forgotten classic of the 1970s. The movie's fans include filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, who named it one of his twelve favorite movies of all time, and author Stephen King, who called it one of his go-to video rentals. Friedkin himself calls it the best movie he has ever made. After having only been available in heavily butchered versions, an official cut of the film approved by Friedkin was released on Blu-ray in 2014 by Warner Home Video and is well worth seeking out. Disappointingly, it features no commentary or any other special features, but it does feature a booklet containing an excerpt from the director's autobiography, The Friedkin Connection, which sheds a lot of insight on the making of the film and is definitely worth a read. Fans of this uncompromisingly bleak work of '70s cinema can rejoice that this lost film has been found again.

This Blog Kills Fascists

Today, I went out the Capitol Theatre to see the movie Silence and afterwards, I headed to one of my favorite coffee shops where I bought a copy of the Plain Dealer. After a few minutes of flipping through the paper on this historically tragic day, I decided to turn my attention to the copy of Stephen King's Firestarter that I had also brought along. It was the less horrifying option. To quote Network's Howard Beale: "I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everyone knows things are bad."

Many of you probably saw the horror movie footage that was the inauguration of Donald Trump as America's 45th President. I couldn't bring myself to do so. I cannot bear to even fathom the notion of that man as the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth. I refuse to accept or acknowledge the Presidency of a bigoted, thin-skinned, hot-tempered, fascistic, misogynistic bully who has the maturity and temperament of a spoiled child (which is essentially what he is). Trump isn't the leader of the free world. He's a loudmouthed frat boy who's had too much to drink and tries to pick a fight with the toughest guy at the bar. In most cases, however, the toughest guy at the bar doesn't have access to nuclear weapons that will blow the rest of us to smithereens. Nor will I respect the Vice Presidency of the rabidly homophobic Mike Pence, whose assaults on the LGBT community (including his support for cruel and ineffective "conversion therapy" and the passing of Indiana's discriminatory Religious Freedoms Restorations Act) should have every citizen concerned. Nor do I respect the appointment of a white supremacist like Steve Bannon as his presidental advisor or the viciously racist Jeff Sessions as his pick for Attorney General. Or any of the other embarrassing criminals, reprobates, and all-around sleazeballs that Trump has invited to slither their way into positions of powers that they don't deserve and will abuse in order to fit their twisted, hateful agendas. There really was no reason to release a sequel to Independence Day last year. Those aliens couldn't destroy the White House any worse than Trump and his cabinet are already doing.

Today, I read that the Trump Administration is already planning to cut funding for the National Endowment of the Arts, which scares me, but doesn't surprise me in the least. After all, the first step to fascism is to take away the voices of dissent. The weapons that Trump fears the most aren't the semi-automatics being stockpiled by angry white men preparing for their imaginary showdown with the government that they irrationally hate and fear. It's the words of those who would dare speak out against him and expose him as the fraud that he is. It's the voices of the oppressed, the angry, the bullied, the ones who have had enough of his bullshit and aren't going to go down without a fight. The most dangerous weapons in the world aren't the ones covered by the Second Amendment. They're the ones covered by the First Amendment.

On behalf of artists everywhere, I urge everyone to fight back the best way they know how: with their art. Write a poem. Sing a song. Write a story or a play. Paint a picture. Sculpt a bust. Draw a cartoon. Write a blog post like this one. Make a film. Every piece of art you make is a raised middle finger to Trump and his odious administration. Every creative gesture is a "fuck you" to a dumb and uncultured society that would allow someone so hateful to occupy the most powerful political office in the country. They can cut our funding, but they won't cut off our words. They won't tell us to shut up. They can mock us by calling us "crybabies" and "special snowflakes", but you know what you get when a have a million snowflakes?

An avalanche. And we're coming to pull a landslide on those motherfuckers.

The Post-Holiday Blues

They're taking down the lights and cardboard snowflakes
They're boxing up the angels and the stars
They're stripping the trees naked and dumping them on curbs
Like drunks falling asleep outside of bars

You say this year things are gonna be different
You know they're probably gonna be the same
You think of somebody you love but cannot have
And once again your heart is filled with shame

You remember those cold nights of years gone by
Braving through the fury and the storm
On your way to make love to someone special
Your body heat the only thing keeping you warm

It's been three years ago this winter
You haven't been with anyone since then
One fine day she called you up and broke your heart
But you'd do anything to have her back again

Outside your window snow is piling up
You look outside and see it falling fast
You tell yourself you won't waste another year
You tell yourself this one will be the last

You tell yourself tomorrow will be different
As you walk to the fridge and get another beer
Someday everything is gonna be just perfect
Maybe next week
Maybe next year

2016: The Year in Review

It was the worst of times, it was...well, there's really no other way to end that sentence.

History will remember 2016 as one of the most embarassing years in recent memory. It began with a bunch of armed lunatics holding up a bird sanctuary in Oregon in order to protest...something (Obama?) and ended with the most horrifying two words in the English language: "President-Elect Trump". A gorilla was shot by the staff of the Cincinnati Zoo and everybody on your Facebook feed turned into a fucking expert on both parenting and animal behavior. Everywhere we went, society crumbled all around us, but we were too busy with our noses in our phones playing Pokemon Go to notice. The "Bernie or Bust" and pro-Hillary crowd were too busy fighting with each other instead of coming together to unite against the real threat, which is why we now have a presidential cabinet that resembles a rogue's gallery of supervillains that would put the Suicide Squad to shame. In retrospect, it's probably a good thing that the revival of The X-Files fizzled out when it did. After all, what government conspiracies could Mulder and Scully uncover that would be more sinister than anything that President-Elect Dumkopf has in mind? When it comes to pure horror, an orange-hued narcissist in the Oval Office trumps any monster that Chris Carter and his writing staff could come up with. (Pun definitely intended in this case.)

Death was a selfish bastard, too. While we lost several wonderful celebrities this year --David Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen, Alan Rickman, Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds, Muhhamed Ali, John Glenn, Garry Shandling, George Michael, and Arnold Palmer, among many others-- the ones that hit the hardest were the people that we knew personally. Seems like everybody I know suffered a personal loss this year. At least two broke my heart. I lost a close friend and co-worker earlier this March, and my workplace feels like an entirely different place, almost like a ghost town. I like everyone else well enough (one of my best friends even works there now), but it just isn't quite the same. A friend of mine also recently lost her little sister, who was the best friend of my niece, and it affected my family greatly too. It was a harsh reminder of how precious and fleeting life is, and to always appreciate the ones you love. Death does not always announce itself. Sometimes it just shows up uninvited when you least expect it.

My heart continued to play tricks on me and tried steering me toward disaster yet again. I won't go into full detail, but I will say that I suffered a severe emotional conflict (and near-breakdown) this past year brought on by a bad romantic situation that could easily have been avoided if I had not given in to feelings that I knew were a mistake. Sometimes your heart say yes while your brain is saying no. Listen to your brain. It knows what's good for you. "Your heart wants what it wants" goes the saying. Maybe that true, but sometimes your heart can't always get what it wants. And in many cases, it shouldn't.

This was the year that the Dover Players closed their doors at the Old Town Hall in North Olmsted. Whether we'll continue in a new location remains to be seen, but we seem to be on hiatus for now. It was a bittersweet farewell to a wonderful group of friends and creative individuals, all of whom made the past near-decade of my life fun and memorable. I don't exaggerate when I say that some of closest friendships and happiest memories were made within that group. I will still continue to act and perform in some capacity and will still see my friends from there on a semi-regular basis. To quote the Decemberists, "I was made for the stage". You can't keep a performer down.

2016 did have some good things going for it. The Cavs won the NBA playoffs and brough a championship to this city for the first time in 52 years. My parents celebrated their 50th anniversary with a fun family camping trip at Lake Hope in southern Ohio. One of my best friends now works alongside me at Half Price Books and she seems to be loving it. (A sweet romance has also blossomed between her another co-worker.) All in all, there have been a few roses growing up through the manure patch that was this past year. Success and happiness still elude me (and Miss Right is nowhere to be found for the time being), but I remain optimistic. I'm working on steadily improving myself and taking more risks. I recently played guitar and sang at an open-mic night and had a great time. I'm making Er-Bear great again. I look forward to seeing what 2017 has in store and if we survive past January 20th, I think we'll be all right.

Bully-In-Chief

They called me retard.

They called me fat boy.

They called me faggot.

They broke my school supplies, tripped me in the hallways, pinned me down and farted on me, gave me headlocks and Indian burns. They made fun of me for my weight, my shyness, my lack of interest in sports or anything they cared about. They found out my phone number and tortured me with prank phone calls. They goaded me into fights, knowing that I was weaker than they were and would easily kick my ass. They sent me home in tears, making me feel like something less than human. I hated them and often fantasized about killing them. After I got off the bus, I would get the BB gun that I had gotten for Christmas a few years before and shoot at plastic two-liter pop bottles in my backyard, pretending they were my classmates. To this day, I am grateful that I did not have access to real firearms.

I carried that anger and humilation with me for years, plotting revenge fantasies that I knew probably weren't ever going to happen. It's no exaggeration to say that being bullied as a kid has shaped me into who I am as an adult. I still suffer from severe depression and anxiety issues. I am frequently concerned about what others think of me and am always nervous about being confronted. My sense of humor and happy exterior are sometimes the armor that I need to wear for when the pain becomes too great. Behind this goofy, sarcastic front lies a heart that's breakable and nerves that fray far too easily. Though I'm relatively happy these days, there are times when I'm on the verge of tears and it's all I can do to keep from breaking down. Medication helps, as does support from family and friends, as well as exercise and keeping busy. Anything to take my mind away from the darkness that I've carried with me since I was a boy, when one of my classmates randomly beat the shit out of me on the playground for no apparent reason. I was hurt and angry, but mostly, I was confused. Why had he singled me out for abuse? I had done nothing to hurt him. I continued to be a target of his abuse for years afterward, to the extent that I had to switch schools. I later learned that he lived a life of poverty and came from a broken home, but at that point, I didn't care anymore. Fuck him. He didn't have any right to take it out on me, no matter how bad his upbringing was. He later went to prison for burglary, and I didn't have one lick of sympathy for him. I hoped he was getting his ass kicked every single day by hardened criminals, the way that he had done to me years before. It served him right.

I was reminded of that bully and all of the other ones who harrassed me as a child this past year, when I saw Donald Trump campaigning to be President. In Trump, I saw all of the traits of those assholes all over again: mean-spiritedness, narcissism, arrogance, pettiness, and a lack of empathy toward anybody that they viewed to be inferior. I was reminded of them when he mocked a reporter with a physical disablility. I was reminded of them when he bragged that he could shoot anyone on the streets of New York City and not get arrested. I was reminded of them when he talked about grabbing women by their "pussies" and all of the other disgusting misogynistic comments that spew out of his landfill mouth. I'm reminded of them when I hear horror stories of his supporters spraying anti-Semitic graffiti in public parks or stealing hijabs from the heads of Muslim women. I think of them when I hear stories of him appointing Steve Bannon, an admitted White Nationalist, into a position of power in the White House.

Trump's America is a place for bullies. His election is a triumph for every racist, bigoted, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, ableist cretin who feels that they have the right to feel superior to any other human being on the planet. It empowers every lowlife who carries prejudice and hatred for others in his heart and makes them feel better to make someone else feels worse. And like all bullies, Trump is a thin-skinned coward at heart. This is a man who has the nerve to offend everyone in his path, but can't handle a little ribbing from Saturday Night Live or a heartfelt message of optimism from the cast of  Hamilton. Anyone who can't handle criticism is not qualified for the office of the Presidency. How is he going to handle threats from ISIS if being spoofed by Alec Baldwin throws him into a rage?

Nevertheless, I haven't given up hope that maybe Trump will change for the better. People can change. Earlier this year, I received a message on Facebook from one of my former bullies. He was very apologetic for what he had done, and seemed genuinely remorseful for the way he had treated me over twenty years ago. I did something I thought I would never do: I forgave him. I did so because I was tired of letting anger and resentment consume me. What he and his friends did was not OK and it did shape my life in negative ways, but I was tired of hating him and planning unlikely revenges. It was obviously difficult for him to reach out to me, knowing the shame and guilt he carried inside. And plus, his father had recently passed away, so I wasn't going to add a "fuck you" on top of that as well. We'll probably never be friends, but at least we're no longer enemies.

Who knows? Maybe Trump will learn the error of his ways and change his tune, making America safe for the poor and the downtrodden, and every persecuted minority in the nation will no longer have to feel angry or afraid. Sure, the guy is seventy years old, but it's never too late to change. Maybe when he's in his nineties, he's finally have his act together.

Listening to the Aliens

It has now been exactly one week since we received the news of President-Elect Baby Hands' win and I'm not feeling any better than I did before. The election of our tax-dodging, pussy-grabbing, Klan-approved sex offender of a new world leader coupled with the death of one of my heroes, the wonderful Leonard Cohen, has made this past week a pretty difficult one. For someone who suffers from severe depression and anxiety disorder, every day can be a struggle, and these next four years will be even more of an uphill battle. Not even Kate McKinnon's stirring performance of "Hallelujah" on last weekend's SNL can kill these blues. But I'm trying to remain positive and as long as my heart still beats, I'm not going to give up hope that we can fight to make things better.

Everybody has a moment when they hit rock bottom. Waking up in a strange place is a good indication that you have a drinking problem and those chest pains you're feeling might be telling you that it's a good idea to lose some weight. Perhaps that's what's going on with the country right now. We've reached our moment of clarity. Maybe the election of a sleazy fascist billionaire is the kick in the ass that we need to wake us up from our complacency and ask us how it got this far. It's no secret that there's a severe divide in this country between the progressive left and the working-class right, but how can we make things better? Trump's victory is the culmination of eight years of resentment from angry white men, enraged that "their" country was being changed in ways they didn't approve of during the Obama years, which in turn, were a reaction by progressive voters to the failures of the George W. Bush administration. "Well, at least it can't possibly get any worse than Bush," we lefties thought back in 2008. Boy, were we wrong. As disastrous a President as he was, I cannot recall a single thing he ever said or did that filled me with as much horror or revulsion as the bile that spews forth from President-Elect Joffrey's mouth on a daily basis. That may be Trump's greatest achievement of all: making W. look classy in comparison.

Trump's election looks to be one of the symptoms of a disease that's been plaguing this nation all this time: a lack of compassion and understanding of our fellow humans. Maybe instead of fighting with each other, we should try to communicate with one another. Earlier this week, I went to see the movie Arrival, in which Amy Adams plays a linguistics professor assigned to communicate with a group of aliens who have mysteriously come to Earth. Toward the end of the film, the Chinese government misunderstands a message from the aliens as a threat and begins to make plans to attack them. It's up to Adams to convince them otherwise, that they need to listen to what the aliens are actually saying in order to avoid conflict. That's a lesson that we all need. To be more empathetic and caring to each other instead of jumping to violence and hatred as an automatic reaction. Maybe that's what we need to learn in order to prevent another Trump administration from ever happening again.

And if not, then maybe the aliens will let us hitch a ride with them to their home planet. We could all use a change of scene.

Mourning In America

"I've seen the future, brother. It is murder" -Leonard Cohen.

America has spoken. Or maybe it was 'merica. Donald Trump has been elected 45th President of the United States.

I woke up on the morning of Wednesday, November 9th with an intense feeling of anxiety and nausea, the way I usually feel when I have a hangover, only I hadn't been drinking the night before. I had stayed up until midnight to view the results of the election and things weren't looking pretty. Trump had been beating Hillary Clinton significantly in most states and things seemed to be at a stalemate. I popped in a DVD of The Walking Dead and when I finished it at 2 am, the results still hadn't changed. I went to bed depressed but optimistic. Surely, the American public would not elect a candidate who had never been endorsed by a major U.S. newspaper (but did recieve the endorsement of the official newspaper of the Ku Klux Klan). Clearly, they wouldn't select a man who had never received an endorsement from any of the five living former (and soon-to-be former) U.S. Presidents. Clearly, the American public would not entrust the highest political office in the land to a huckster, a buffoon, a vulgarian, a carny, a con artist with a bad haircut and contempt for everyone around him, especially the ones foolish enough to vote for him.

Maybe I wasn't cynical enough. Maybe I have too much faith in humanity or the voting public. Maybe I just see the good in everyone too much, because I thought we were better than that. I thought we were better than hate, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and rape culture. But I guess I was wrong, because when I turned on my TV first thing in the morning, the words "President-Elect Trump" flashed on my screen, making me angrier and sadder than I've been in a long time. Because I am legitimately frightened for the future of my country. Donald Fucking Trump is the new President. "President Trump". Ugh. That might be funny if it wasn't so scary. I will never refer to him as that. He is not my President.

My hatred of Trump has nothing to do with politics, either. There have been several conservative and Republican candidates whose views I have disagreed with, but I still respected them as human beings. The thought of someone like John McCain or Mitt Romney in the White House didn't fill me with anxiety and dread, in the same way that an unhinged lunatic like Trump does. (Although the idea of Caribou Barbie ascending to the throne should anything happen to poor McCain while in office certainly did.) Because this is not about politics. It's not about left or right, liberal or conservative. It's about simple human decency. As a former bullied child, I cannot support any man who says the kind of hateful crap that spews out of his overflowing toilet of a mouth and who has the maturity and temperament of a spoiled 13-year-old boy. This is a man who has displayed time after time a pathological need to humiliate and abuse others, as viewers of his loathesome TV series The Apprentice can attest. And like all bullies, Trump can dish it out, but he can't take it. He'll talk trash about anyone and everyone who displeases him, but has a hissy fit on Twitter if Alec Baldwin makes fun of him a few too many times on Saturday Night Live. If a silly sketch comedy show can get under his skin, how is he going to be able to handle threats from our nation's enemies? This is not the temperament of a man that we want in the White House with the nuclear access codes when Russia starts playing hardball.

By electing a man like Trump, we have to ask ourselves what kind of example we're setting for future generations. How can we expect our children to have compassion for those who are different from them when their President is a man who has mocked a physically handicapped reporter? How can we expect them to be honest and play by the rules when Trump brags about not paying his taxes for 20 years? How can we teach our sons to respect women and our daughters that they're worthy of respect if they follow the example of a man who calls women he finds unattractive "fat pigs" and brags about being able to grab them by their genitals?

To my religious friends and family members who voted for Trump solely on the "pro-life" platform, because they can't vote for a "baby-killer" like Hillary, let me ask this: How can you possibly consider it more of a mortal sin to elect a candidate who is pro-choice than casting your vote for a man who is facing trial for raping a 13-year-old girl? I'm also curious to find out what traits of Trump's you think Jesus Christ would approve of. His greed and obscene wealth? Your copy of the Bible must be missing that whole part about "Render unto Caesar" and the passage where Christ drives the money lenders out of his temple. Maybe his philandering and multiple affairs? That would seem to contradict those commandments against committing adultery and coveting your neighbors' wives. And it's hard to expect him to "turn the other cheek" when he routinely flies off the handle and reaches for his Twitter feed at the slightest hint of dissent or criticism of him. If Trump were any Biblical character, he'd be the innkeeper who tells Joseph and Mary to keep right on moving. Ain't gonna be no freeloaders staying at the Trump Tower, even if they are expecting the son of God to arrive any minute now.

To my gun enthusiast friends who voted for him because he says he'll protect their Second Amendment rights, let me ask: How do you feel about him violating the First Amendment? This is a man who has repeatedly threatened to punish and imprison those who criticize him. If you support the Constitution, then you have to support every bit of it, not just the amendments that you agree with. You'll still be allowed to keep your guns. In fact, you'll probably need them when President Trump starts World War Three and North Korea comes knocking at your door. You might also need to use your AK-47 to hunt squirrels and rabbits to survive on when your food stamps and Medicare get cut off. The lower middle-class voters who put Trump into office are going to be in for a big surprise when they learn that a billionaire who declared bankruptcy four times doesn't give two shits about their interests.

Some people I know and love voted for Trump. I'm not angry or upset with them so much as I'm just disappointed. Because they couldn't see past religion and politics to the man within. Because they're white, heterosexual, middle-class, cisgender, Christian American citizens and aren't really going to be affected much by Trump and his policies. Having a viciously anti-gay governor like Mike Pence as Vice President or an admitted white supremacist like Steve Bannon as a political advisor won't hurt them, because they're not the ones who are going to be suffering. Their votes weren't cast in hatred so much as in indifference and apathy. I doubt that any of them really harbor any particular hatred for minorities, immigrants, and LGBT people. It's just that they don't seem to care that much. People can change, though. Even my very conservative mother is disgusted by Trump and couldn't bring herself to vote for him, opting instead for a write-in vote for John McCain. It might not have helped very much, but at least she doesn't have President-Elect Bozo's victory on her conscience.

I don't know if I'll ever have kids. But if I do, I will teach them to be kind and selfless, to put others before themselves, to have compassion to those who are different, and to do everything they can to make the world a better place--which is the complete opposite of everything that Trump and his ilk stand for. All the wealth and power in the world can't buy human deceny or a soul. I began this post with a quote from one of my heroes and I'll end it with a quote from another one.

"God damn it, my babies. You've got to be kind" - Kurt Vonnegut

Heard Ya Missed Me. Well, I'm Back.

Folks, I apologize for the long gaps between posts. When I began this blog earlier in the year, I thought I'd be able to add one new post every few days. I was feeling pretty confident and ambituious. But to quote John Lennon, "life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans." I thought for certain that I'd be able to keep exercising the noggin and cranking out new material on a regular basis, but it's pretty tough to do when you've got a full-time job, play rehearsals, and other commitments taking up your time. Depression and anxiety are huge factors as well and have kept me complacent and apathetic for far too long. This year, another negative feeling reared its ugly head: grief. The sudden and unexpected loss of a close friend this past March hit me like a ton a bricks and led me further down the depression spiral. Suddenly, my thoughts on the new episodes of The X-Files and my feud with a bigoted cartoonist didn't seem as important.

I'm hoping to break out of this rut sometime soon. I promise new posts are coming. I'm sorry it's taken so long for the clouds to lift, but the sunlight will breaking through again one of these days. Stay posted, and I'll be ready to join you again with new book and film reviews, pithy thoughts, and angry rants shortly. Oh, and if any you go to see the movie Vaxxed, I will hunt you down and knock some sense into you with a Wiffleball bat. Take care.

Correspondence with a Cretin or: The World's Worst Editorial Cartoonist

A few weeks ago, there was an incident at my workplace in which, having to relieve myself but finding the men's room occupied, I used the women's room instead. I didn't think much of it at the time, since our restrooms are essentially unisex, with your basic toilet/sink/changing table combo and the only differences between the two being the artwork on the walls. There is nothing about the two restrooms that characterize either of them as being necessarily "male" or "female". So my fellows employees and I (and some of our customers) generally think nothing about using either one interchangably. Thinking nothing of it, I entered the women's room, did my business, and was leaving when I saw an elderly woman glaring at me and muttering under her breath. "The sign says women's room...he just used the women's room...gross...disgusting." She continued to stare at me and I could overhear her talking to her husband under her breath about how they should tell somebody. I was tempted to say, "Oh, for fuck's sake, lady. Grow the fuck up," but managed to restrain myself. After several tense minutes, the woman and her husband finally left the store, but not before saying to one of my co-workers that I shouldn't work at a bookstore, since I obviously don't know how to read. The joke's on her, though. We're hanging up the "unisex" bathroom signs this week!

Thinking about the incident, I wondered if she was a supporter of the South Dakota potty police and other degenerates who seem to have an unhealthy obsession with the bathroom habits of people that they've never even met. She might almost certainly be a fan of A.F. Branco, my candidate for the worst editorial cartoonist of all time. Actually, I don't know if he's the worst, but he's certainly the most disgusting. His type of humor is the kind you would find scrawled on the restroom walls of white supremacist rallies, the kind of hateful drivel that appeals only to those with the maturity and sophistication of sub-literate third-graders. He's the perfect cartoonist for the Donald Trump crowd: mean-spirited, peurile, bigoted, and unburdened by unpleasant concepts like "shame" and "human empathy". He's Archie Bunker with a box of Crayolas and Big Chief tablets, only even more vile and offensive, if that's humanly possible.

Until this past Saturday, one of my favorite websites was the site for the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, or AAEC, for short. (www.editorialcartoonists.com). The site is a mixed bag of cartoonists: some funny and insightful, others not as much. As with any collection of different cartoonists, there's going to a wide variety of issues and opinions that are contrary to the ones that you believe. That goes with the territory. It's no secret that I'm a more left-leaning kind of person, so cartoons with a conservative slant are going to annoy me. And I have no problem with that. Everyone is entitled to his or her own personal beliefs and opinions and they have the right to express them as such. Fair enough. But when those views cross the line into bigotry and hate speech, that's when I draw the line (no pun intended). On Saturday, I had just gotten off an eight-hour shift at work and was exhausted. I was in the mood to surf the web a little bit before taking a nap and went over the AAEC page. The first few were all fairly benign and then I got to Branco's: a nasty, bigoted piece of work that implied that transgender people were all sexual predators who wanted to molest children in public restrooms. I refuse to sully my page with this ugly cartoon, but you can see in the Saturday archives of the link that I've provided. Feel free to find a nice fluffy pillow to punch or scream into first, because if you have any sense of decency, you will not be in a good mood after seeing it.

Naturally, I was disgusted by this horrible cartoon. I had seen Branco's work before and it was the usual conservative blathering: Obama is the antichrist, Hillary and Bernie are Commies, blah, blah, blah. This went beyond the pale. This was the degradation and slandering of an entire group of people for a cheap laugh. I couldn't believe that the usually-respectable AAEC would allow such kind of hate speech on their site, especially toward a group of people who have enough difficulties to deal with in life without being further stigmatized by an unfunny hack. When LGBT teens are committing suicide at an alarming rate, this kind of humor stops being funny very quickly. I contacted the president of AAEC and asked him to drop Branco from their webpage. I got no response, so I contacted Branco himself. I told him that his cartoon was disgusting and unfunny, and that it promoted hateful stereotypes that could result in violence toward trans people and felt that he owed the LGBT community and apology. This was his response:

"Sorry, but your diseased leftist warped way way (sic) of thinking has created more victims of opportunity and is infringing on peoples (sic) basic privacy. If you have a vagina, use the women's room, if you have a penis use the Men's room - it's that simple. I don't buy your self- righteous garbled selective compassion, that you allow for only those who fall into your agenda driven lunacy. "

It was exactly the type of response I would expect from someone who makes a living by dehumanizing people they don't know. Apparently, compassion and empathy for your fellow man are examples of "agenda driven lunacy". Also, I was quite annoyed to be called a "diseased leftist", as I had just had a check-up and had gotten a clean bill of health from my doctor. This was my reply:

"Your reaction is hilarious, and about as civil and mature as I expect from a hack who tears others down for a cheap joke. I would rather be a "diseased leftist" with compassion for oppressed minorities than a hateful bully who relies on cheap stereotypes and generalizations to hurt others. Trans people have to deal with enough bullshit on a daily basis without further stigmatization from unfunny cartoonists who will never win a Pulitzer Prize."

 I went on a little further, but you get the point. His only response to that one was a smiley-face emoji, which I actually thought was kind of funny. That doesn't change the fact that I think he's a loathesome asshole whose cartoons are the artistic equivalent of toxic waste. Art can and should be used to enlighten, entertain, and enrich people's lives instead of destroying it. I'm not saying that art shouldn't be offensive or that it shouldn't challenge our beliefs, but I am saying that there's a big difference between taking down powerful people and organizations and picking on the powerless. Art can be a powerful weapon, but like other weapons, it should be used carefully and responsibly, and not to harm innocent people. Taking cheap shots at those who are already stigmatized on a daily basis is the complete opposite of courage. It's a cowardly act that diminishes both artist and subject. It says "I am no better than this. I am not a mature adult, but an obnoxious, petty child. I am limited in my heart and in my imagination." Fuck A.F. Branco and anyone else who thinks like him. Fuck bullies in general. Maybe I should've said nothing and let it go, but dammit all, sometimes you've got to do something. Sometimes, instead of ignoring something wrong, you've got to say something, even if it seems like it won't matter in the long run. Just one stand against hatred, ignorance, bigotry, and stupidity makes all the difference. The best artists are the ones who use their powers for good instead of evil. Their work will last forever, long after the art of the A.F. Brancos of the world have rotted away in a landfill for all eternity.

I Wanted To Believe (Part 2)

 

 

Following the cancellation of  The X-Files, I began to view my history with the series the way I viewed an unsuccessful romantic relationship. The memories of the early years were magical and gratifying, but thinking of the later years brought forward feelings of melancholy and regret that things didn't end on a better note. By the time the second movie, I Want to Believe, hit theatres in the summer of 2008, I wasn't exactly excited. The show had ended six years earlier and I was still skeptical that it would offer anything fresh and new. The hope that it would get better was still there, and even though I wasn't the devoted follower that I had been years earlier, I still went to see it out of a sense of obligation, the way that a lapsed Catholic will sometimes still attend Christmas Mass. Once again, the movie was a big disappointment and I felt like Charlie Brown having the football pulled away from him by Lucy. I wasn't the only one who felt this way. The response from the American public was a collective shrug and the movie died a slow death at the box office, unable to compete with blockbusters like Iron Man and The Dark Knight. The movie's title said it all. I wanted to believe, but I couldn't. Chris Carter had let me down again.

When rumors of a TV reunion started floating through the internet, I had those mixed feelings of hope and skepticism again. My brain kept saying no, but my heart said yes. When the rumors were confirmed by Chris Carter, David Duchovny, and Gillian Anderson, I actually began to feel a little excited. Surely, Carter would get it right this time. It had been eight years since the last movie and fourteen years since the original finale. That was enough time for him to cook up some fresh, original ideas and to move the series in a bold new direction. The premiere of the new mini-series was going to be, if not mind-blowing, at least a rich, solid, satisfying episode of television, one that would provide me with the ecstatic rush that I felt when I was an adolescent. January 24th couldn't get here soon enough. I tuned in that night and was annoyed by the NFL post-game show that was delaying the episode. Shut up, Terry Bradshaw! Nobody cares about your stupid football crap. Mulder and Scully are coming back! The Fox clock ticked off the time until the premiere aired and I was certain to be blown away. The return of The X-Files was coming in 5,4,3,2...

The premiere aired and, suffice it to say, it did not blow me away. The title of the episode was "My Struggle", which is the title of Hitler's Mein Kampf translated into English, but was also an accurate description of my experience watching it. As the story unfolded, I started to get the same sinking feeling that I had when I went to see The Phantom Menace in the theatre. I kept telling myself that it was going to get better if I just stuck with it, but that was not to be.

Where to begin? Everything about the episode was one huge cliché composed entirely of recycled bits of the series' ongoing mythology. The teaser begins with the alleged UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, a tired old chestnut that needs to be retired from the entire sci-fi genre as soon as possible. Then, we flash forward to present-day Washington D.C., where Scully is still a medical doctor and Mulder is...I dunno. Retired or something. The show never really explains what he's been up to for the last decade and a half. The show then awkwardly drops in references to 2016 America, such as a clip of President Obama appearing on Jimmy Kimmell and a catty put-down of Bill O'Reilly. (Though even that seems dated. O'Reilly hasn't really been relevant in least ten years.) That dis is delivered by Tad O'Malley, a stereotypical far-right conspiracy theorist of the Glenn Beck/Alex Jones variety, played by a badly miscast Joel McHale, who somehow manages to convince Mulder that everything he believes is a lie. This is just plain sloppy writing that makes Mulder look like a dope. His unshaking belief in extraterrestrial life is going to be swayed by a third-rate wannabe Fox News host?

O'Malley then takes the two agents to visit Sveta, a young alien abductee who has been impregnated several times. There's also a UFO hidden away in a secret airplane hangar and a meeting with a mysterious informant who is (surprise!) the very same doctor who was at Roswell in '47 in the teaser, which begs the question, how fucking old is this guy? He seems about 30 in the teaser, which would make him roughly 98 or 99 when he and Mulder have their little chat. The episode ends with Mulder spouting a bunch of expository dialogue about a global conspiracy to dupe the U.S. public so that they can be easily manipulated while a montage of stock footage of 20th-Century American history plays. Also, the military is called in and blows up the UFO in a raid in order to destroy evidence. And the Cigarette Smoking Man is back, though I'm at a loss to explain how he survived getting blown up by a rocket at the end of the original season finale. It's good to see old Smokey again, but all this ret-conning is getting ridiculous. I wanted to shout, like Annie Wilkes in Misery, "He didn't get out of the cock-a-doody pueblo!"

Another problem with the premiere is that it highlights all of Chris Carter's worst tendencies as writer: his overuse of voice-over narration and long exposition-filled monologues in which a character rambles on explaining away what's happening instead of trusting the audience to figure it out for themselves. Show, don't tell. Film and TV are visual mediums and that don't require somebody explaining to the audience what's going on all the time. And yes, I've heard the argument that he needed to introduce new viewers to the series and welcome back old fans with foggy memories to understand what's going on. However, it is possible to  re-boot a popular sci-fi series without having to recap every single thing that's gone before, as the success of Mad Max: Fury Road and Star Wars: The Force Awakens have proven. The premiere was just plain boring, and boredom is not an emotion one should have while watching The X-Files.

But to quote Al Pacino in The Godfather: Part III, just when I think I'm out they pull me back in. Episode two, "Founder's Mutation", was a significant improvement over its predecessor and a reminder of just how great the show could be at times. Ostensibly a monster-of-the-week story about a sinister doctor performing strange experiments on preganant women, the episode is a good example of the show finally pushing the series' mythology in an exciting new directions and exploring the complex relationship between Mulder and Scully. It's scary, original, and most importantly, filled with real human emotion. Despite the references to Edward Snowden and Obamacare, this is a show that seems like it could have aired back in 1995, which is about the biggest compliment I can give. It's not perfect, but at least it looks and feels like a real X-Files episode and not just a lame re-hash. It's a rich feast instead of microwaved leftovers. I can't tell what the rest of the mini-series will bring, but I remain optimistic. The Scully in me says that it might suck, but the Mulder in me still believes that the truth is out there.

I Wanted To Believe (Part 1)

I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe so much.

I wanted to believe that the new reboot of The X-Files was going to be every bit as great as the show I fell in love with as a lonely small town teenager in the mid-'90s. I wanted to believe that the series would hit the same high points that left me breathless at the end of each episode and have me thirsting for the following week's installment. I wanted to believe that the passion and energy that Chris Carter's writing once had was going to return with a vengeance and that the new episodes would capture my heart and imagination in the same way that the series did during my adolescence, that it would give me the intoxicating rush that truly great entertainment can provide. I wanted it so much to be the way that it was before. After watching last night's premiere of the limited six-episode run, I am disappointed to say that my hopes have been dashed yet again.

I remember when the show first aired and I didn't quite get into it at first. I heard it was this funky weird sci-fi show that was on TV, but had read mixed reviews of it that didn't seem very promising, so I ignored it during that first season. By the time season two rolled around, it had started getting better reviews, so I decided I'd check out a few episodes. The first one I saw was kind of a disappointment. It was one entitled "Ascension", which I didn't realize was the second half of a two-parter, so the story didn't really make any sense to me at the time. It was the second one I saw that got me hooked, though. The title of the episode, according to the newspaper TV schedule, was "Blood" and I knew nothing about it, other than that it was a word that promised horror and violence. I retreated to my bedroom later that night and watched it on the crappy hand-me-own black-and-white TV I inherited from my older brother. The episode unfolded and I was quickly drawn into the story of ordinary residents of a small town going on bizarre killing sprees after receiving creepy subliminal messages on their electronic devices. I was blown away (no pun intended). Here was an hour of television that was scary, original, imaginative, and exciting. There was no turning back after that point. I was an X-Files junkie and like most junkies, I tried to keep my addiction a secret. For some reason, I didn't want anyone else in my family to know I was a fan. I don't know why, exactly. I mean, I'm sure they already knew I was pretty geeky at this point and didn't know why my secret love of a brilliant TV series would make them think any lesser of me. My secrecy didn't last long though and it wasn't long before I "came out" as a huge X-Files nerd.

My obsession with the show lasted for most of my teenage years. I devoured the episodes, and purchased magazines, comic books, trading cards, and T-shirts devoted to the ongoing adventures of true believer Fox Mulder and his skeptical partner Dana Scully. I even sculpted a clay bust of the Flukeman (the giant worm man from season two's classic "The Host", still its greatest monster-of-the-week episode, in my humble opinion) in my sophomore art class, but forgot to hollow out the head, so it was super-heavy. Its exact whereabouts remain unknown, but it's rumored to be collecting dust somewhere at my parents' house.

The X-Files was the perfect show for an awkward introverted teenage outcast. Here was a program that proved that not only could geeks be cool, they could be downright sexy. And for someone who had a hard time making friends and getting through school without being teased at least once, what better motto was there than "Trust No One"? The paranoia and anxiety that Fox Mulder dealt with on a weekly basis mirrored my own paranoia and anxiety, although his were concerning a massive global conspiracy regarding extraterrestrial life, while mine were about surviving until the end of the day without getting made fun of or slammed into a locker. His villains were shady government officials, shape-shifting alien bounty hunters, and liver-eating mutant serial killers. Mine were condescending preppy douchebags, assholes jocks, and unsympathetic teachers. It wasn't hard to relate to a protagonist who felt that the world was conspiring against him.

Seasons two through four were the glory years, when the show seemed to be firing on all cylinders. Sure, there were a few clunker episodes here and there, but they were few and far between.  The writing, directing, acting, and special effects were all top-notch and my passion grew. I became a devoted congregant to the church of The X-Files and regularly attended service every Friday night at 9 pm (and then later, Sunday at 9pm). I would become irritated if I had to miss a show due to a Boy Scout camping trip or some bullshit school function. Fuck tying knots! Mulder and Scully are chasing monsters! I would always make my family members promise to tape episodes that I had missed, which they rarely ever did, and on the rare occasions that they did so, would whine about stupid it was. I didn't care, though. I was a fanatic and nothing was going to change that. Then season five rolled around.

Something about season five was...off. It wasn't bad exactly, but the episodes didn't leave me with the giddy high feeling that previous ones did. It was during that season that I noticed the writing was starting to slip a little. Cracks and inconsistencies were showing in the show's already complicated overarching mythology. One problem was the dissatisfaction I had with the previous season's finale. It ended with Dana Scully solemnly declaring before a senate committee hearing that Agent Mulder had recently killed himself, before cutting to the end credits. I knew that was bullshit. There was no way they were going to kill off their main star and I had read that David Duchovny was contractually committed for a few more seasons, so I knew something was up. During summer vacation that year, I guessed what the secret plot twist was going to be and sure enough, when the two-part fifth season premiere began, I found my instincts had been confirmed. It was at that moment that I realized that the show could no longer surprise me. I still turned in to catch the "monster-of-the-week" episodes, but the mythology had lost me at that point. What was one intriguing and provocative was now convoluted and silly. What the hell did corn and killer bees have to do with alien invasions?

I dutifully watched the first feature film (The X-Files: Fight the Future) and trudged on for the next two seasons, mostly out of a sense of obligation and a hope that things would return to how they were before, but my heart was no longer in it. My faith was lapsed. By the time Duchovny left at the end of season seven, I could see red flags ahead, warning me that the show was going to turn from mediocre to awful. My worst suspicions were confirmed during season eight, when Duchovny was replaced by Robert Patrick and the show descended into outright silliness. (This is no disrespect to Patrick, who is a good actor, but wasn't given an interesting role to play and had the thankless task of replacing such a memorable character.) By season's end, I gave up entirely on the show. I wasn't alone. Cinefantastique critic Paula Vitaris (the Pauline Kael of X-Files reviewers) also bailed after panning nearly every episode of the season and expressed her opinion that Carter's heart didn't appear to be in the show anymore. I didn't even bother with season nine, the last before the reboot, only turning in to watch the long-awaited finale "The Truth". The truth was that the show that I had once loved was now a joke, and the episode itself was two hours of exposition essentially recapping the entire series up to that point. I was heartbroken. I consoled myself with the knowledge that the first few seasons were readily available on DVD and that I could revisit the glory years over and over again. After all, season four did end with Scully saying that Mulder was dead and that seems like a nice alternative way to reimagine the series. Just pretend that it ended in tragedy and ignore the years after that when it all went downhill.

TO BE CONTINUED (cue whistling theme music).

Book Review: "Perfidia" by James Ellroy

(Note: this review is an expansion of a "staff pick" that I had written for the Half Price Books website nearly a year ago. The limit for the text was 200 words and with my diarrhea of the mind, I ended up vastly surpassing that. Here's the full, expanded review that has not been published until now.)

       The novels of James Ellroy are rich feasts of pulp fiction and his latest work, Perfidia, is no exception. Set on the brink of America's entry into World War II, this densely-plotted thriller is the first in a brand new series of prequels to the author's popular "L.A. Quartet" and "American Underworld" novels. This "Second L.A. Quartet" follows the early years of many of the characters from those wroks and the result is a richly entertaining read that will satisfy fans of hard-boiled crime fiction and vintage film-noir.

      Perfidia begins with the horrific murder of a Japanese family on the eve of the Pearl Harbor attacks, an incident that sets into motion a chain of events that lead up to an elaborate conspiracy involving racial warfare, eugenics, Communist activists, shady real estate dealings, and sinister plastic surgery procedures. That description barely scrapes the surface of Ellroy's labyrinthine plotting, and those who aren't paying close attention may find the novel to be a bit confusing and convoluted. Ellroy is an artist who works on a large canvas and the book's multitudes of storylines and characters can be a little overwhelming at times. Those who stick with it will be richly rewarded, however. Fans of the original novels in particular will be delighted to see some failiar characters making a return, such as Kay Lake, the femme fatale of The Black Dahlia who appears here on an assignment to infiltrate a radical subversive group and the corrupt Dudley Smith, an ex-IRA enforcer eager to pin the massacre on a convenient suspect and cover up his own crooked agenda. The most interesting character in the novel is the conflicted Dr. Hideo Ashida, a Japanese-American chemist for the LAPD  with his own secrets to hide who quickly becomes an outcast when racial tensions begin to mount. Ellroy has fun introducing real-life historical figures into the mix as well, including Bette Davis, Eleanor Roosevelt, and a young naval officer named John F. Kennedy.

      Because Perfidia is a prequel, it does curb the story's suspense quite a bit. Knowing that many of the characters will appear in the other books and aren't in any serious threat of being killed prevents it from reaching the most nail-biting moments of the other works. Ellroy's blunt language and uncompromising depictions of graphic violence and sexuality may also turn off more sensitive readers. These are minor flaws, however, in an otherwise engaging and satisfying crime epic that will leave fans of the genre hungry for more.