Roger O Green

The Now Vs. Then Meme

One of those Sunday Stealing memes that would have been far more onerous had I compared now with 20 years ago, rather than 10

Then: August 1999

1. Age: 46

2. Romantic Status: newly married 3 months

3. Occupation: librarian, working downtown

4. Fun night out: usually go out to eat

5. My BFFs: Karen, Mark, Norman

6. I spent way too much time: watching sports on TV

7. I spent not enough time: reading books

8. I wanted to be when I grew up: a minister or a lawyer

9. Biggest concern: money

10. What my biggest concern should have been: time

11. Where did I live: in the house that Carol purchased in 1992

12. Dumbest thing I did that year: pretend that I was really cool with Carol going off to Scotland with her friend Jeanne a couple months after we were married. I missed her terribly AND I was still getting used to the house. She still might have gone, but my nonchalance gave her false info.

13. If I could go back now and talk to myself I would say: you’ll do OK.

Now: August 2009

1. Age: 56

2. Romantic Status: married

3. Occupation: librarian, working in soulless Corporate Woods

4. Fun night out: say what?

5. My BFFs: Karen, Mark, Norman

6. I spend way too much time: on the computer

7. I spend not enough time: reading books

8. I want to be when I grow up: I don’t want to grow up

9. Biggest concern: time for myself

10. What my biggest concern should be: how easily I sunburn now and taking more precautions re: that.

11. Where do I live: in a house Carol and I bought in 2000

12. Dumbest thing I have done this year: knocking down a small beehive in Lydia’s playhouse. Even though she was about 20 feet away, she ended up getting stung in the back of the neck by the bee/wasp/hornet. Then I got to listen to her ask, repeatedly, why it attacked her rather than me; the answer, of course, is that it would hurt me more if it stung her.

13. What I think I would say to myself in 10 years: you made it, more or less.

Summary:

1. What do I miss most from 1999: time

2. What do I miss least from 1999: uncertainty

3. What have I accomplished in 10 years that I am most proud of: staying married

4. What have I NOT accomplished in 10 years that I wish I had: that damn world peace; SO elusive.
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One of the truly awful world events in my lifetime was the plane bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. Over a dozen of the victims had ties with the Albany, NY area where I live. But as Demeur lays out, the one convicted participant might very well have got out on appeal. The release of Megrahi by Scotland may have been more pragmatic than compassionate.
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From Steve Bissette:
If you are or ever have been a fan of the work of writer Steve Perry of Time Spirits, Thundercats and Silverhawks – not to be confused with either the prolific and popular sf writer or the rock star — and you can afford to help a man on his last legs, please, do so.

Despite the best efforts of myself and others, Steve is in dire straits at this very moment, suffering terminal cancer and lack of any support, and sorely in need of any help that can be sent his way.
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Two journalists died this past week. Don Hewitt ran the Kennedy-Nixon debate, dubbed Walter Cronkite and created 60 Minutes. He wussed out over a tobacco story, but no one’s perfect.

My mom said if you have nothing good to say about someone, say nothing. Robert Novak: NOTHING.
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Go here August 28 at 9:00AM ET and every Friday through September for a chance to get a Free Real Chocolate coupon for your favorite Mars product.

ROG

MOVIE REVIEW: 500 Days of Summer

I took off from work on Thursday, in part so I could complete the split movie date thing my wife and I do. She saw 500 Days of Summer a couple weeks back and thoroughly enjoyed it. I…well, three days in, I’m still running it through my head.

The movie has been described as a romantic comedy; this would be a stretch. Certainly the guy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is interested in romance. But the woman of his dreams (Zooey Deschanel) just doesn’t believe in that stuff.

500 Days (Variety and Roger Ebert aren’t using the parentheses around 500, so I’ll opt out too) evokes a lot of other movies. Evokes them pretty well too, though perhaps too much “on the nose.”

There”s a scene that uses a Hall and Oates song that is clearly inspired by a scene in a John Hughes movie. The song title from the Hughes film even appear in the lyrics of the H&O tune. On the other hand, I enjoyed it – a lot, actually – for what it was.

Likewise, there seems to be an homage to the movies of Woody Allen from the 1970s. But not only did the split screen work, it was quite reminiscent of my real life.

Finally, it is stated that the female in the movie totally misreads the ending of The Graduate, and it is actually that final scene on the bus, complete with the Bookends Theme by Simon & Garfunkel, that, in retrospect, 500 Days pivots on.

It just feels that all of these elements plus the cute-at-first-but-eventually-annoying time shift dynamic didn’t always feel like the same film, as though it were being made by a guy stitching a bunch of music videos together. Yet through it all, it did speak truthfully, it played fair, the characters were believable, even though the female lead was (intentionally) less than accessible. There was no deus ex machina.

Read Roger Ebert’s four-star review:
Some say they’re annoyed by the way it begins on Day 488 or whatever and then jumps around, providing utterly unhelpful data labels: “Day 1,” “Day 249.” Movies are supposed to reassure us that events unfold in an orderly procession. But Tom remembers his love, Summer, as a series of joys and bafflements. What kind of woman likes you perfectly sincerely and has no one else in her life but is not interested in ever getting married?

Then look at the less than favorable one from Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal:
Marc Webb’s bright bauble of a boy-meets-girl comedy is a rueful tribute to the wisdom of hindsight (if you want to be philosophical); an elaborate exercise in deconstruction (if you want to be trendy), a postmodern mishmash (if you want to be uncharitable), a cautionary tale about the perils of projection (if you want to be psychological) or, if you want to be as clinical as the film finally decides to be, an exhaustive and exhausting dissection of a relationship that was never all that promising in the first place.

Thing is, I totally agree. With BOTH of them. A blogger who seemed to like it called it “treacherously twee.” So go see the movie. If you’re like 88% of the critics, you’ll enjoy the film. But if you don’t, I’d understand that too.

ROG

Boycott QUESTIONS

Need someone to swipe from. Jaquandor posed a similar, and more expanded query. Mine is more reductivist:
Do you boycott an artist (musician, actor, writer) because you find that person’s politics abhorrent – racist, a birther, Holocaust denier? This assumes that the work itself is not abhorrent. Actually remember going to see The Green Berets, starring John Wayne and David Janssen in the day, even though I wasn’t a big Wayne fan. Additionally, I knew I’d hate the politics of the film, and I did, but I found it instructive to have seen it. But, no, I see movies by Gary Sinese. I listen to Wagner. I don’t buy Ted Nugent music, but then I NEVER bought Ted Nugent music.

Do you support an artist who is the subject of a boycott or other negative action? Heck, yeah. When Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks spoke the truth about George W. Bush in March 2003, just before the US invasion of Iraq, and took a lot of heat, immediately, I ran out to the local Rite Aid and bought the Dixie Chicks’ then-current album. Likewise, when Linda Ronstadt said something complimentary about Michael Moore and subsequently had some difficulties, I ended up buying her box set from Amazon. This is not that I might not have purchased them eventually anyway, but certainly the events specifically prompted the purchases.

ROG

Autumn of 1988

After eight and a half years, I left my job at FantaCo in mid-November 1988. Leafing through some old journals, I was surprised – actually shocked – to see that I had actually planned to leave a full year earlier. I made a point making sure that people were trained to take on the the tasks I did, with the mail order especially, before I left so that owner Tom Skulan wouldn’t be left in a lurch.

It was odd. I was making more money at the end than I had ever made up to that time, plus paid health insurance, something Tom was providing only to himself and me, though others could get coverage on their own dime; I don’t recall anyone taking advantage of that offer, since they were all pretty young and weren’t making that much.

The problem is that I was making money from all the horror stuff we were selling, and more importantly, producing. My old buddy Steve Bissette is currently delineating the Gore Shriek history (and selling some artwork of the period. In some way, it was almost passing the torch to Steve. I was involved in the Chronicles and the like, while Steve was present for the very first Gore Shriek in June of 1988. It was the comic books, not the horror stuff, that drew me to FantaCo, but I balanced the checkbook, and it was the horror stuff that kept FantaCo going month after month.

So I quit. I wasn’t angry, just burned out. I suspected Tom felt angry and betrayed, and a couple of people confirmed this. I felt bad that he felt that way, but I couldn’t see any real options.

As it turned out, on Thanksgiving Day, I got a call from a guy I knew telling me that our mutual good friend Nancy Sharlet was dying of cancer. I met her when we both worked together at the Schenectady Arts Council in 1978. I started on March 1. March 7 was my birthday; not knowing me well, but wanting to acknowledge the day, she got me this little S.W.A.T. truck, which I have to this day.

The GREAT thing about being unemployed was that I could spend lots of time in the hospital with her, nearly every day for about a month, before her mother came up from Tennessee to tend to her in her last days. She died on January 1, 1989.

After the funeral, I never saw her kids, Jocelyn and Jeffrey, again. I assume they went to live with their father, Robert, whom I did not know well.

I was watching Jon Stewart a couple weeks ago. His guest was a guy named Jeff Sharlet, who is the author of The Family: Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. Could this be the Jeffrey Sharlet, the six-year-old I played SORRY with when he was six? I found this 2004 interview, and the answer is clearly yes.

“I grew up in what seemed like a mostly Catholic town in upstate New York.” Check. “My father is Jewish.” Check. “My mother, with whom I lived, had been raised in a very unusual Pentecostal home.” Jeffrey and his sister Jocelyn lived with their mother; her religion was a bit unclear. “Her mother, a very poor Tennessean”. Check. “She [his grandmother] raised my mother to be interested in everything.” Double check. “Going to other people’s churches and temples, gathering stories — in my family, that was just how you did religion.” Check, and the reason I was unclear about Nancy’s religion.

I wrote to Jeff, but he didn’t write back, which is OK. I do wonder how his sister is, though.

August Ramblin’

Tuesday night, I couldn’t sleep, so I got up to use the computer. I was startled by my wife entering the room – the fan drowned out any noise she made – and we decided to go downstairs to watch the NBC show The Office. We got through the March 19 episode where [SPOILER WARNING] Michael Scott quits Dunder Mifflin [end of warning]. This got me thinking about spoilers. There was a review of some sci-fi TV show, now on DVD, and the reviewer mentioned a significant character development. A commenter complained that he hadn’t seen the season yet, as he was waiting to watch it all on the DVD; the reviewer apologized. So what IS the rule for spoilers these days for a TV show or movie? Is it three months after the DVD comes out? What if the DVD NEVER comes out?

We’re now down to the last series we watch together. First we saw Scrubs, because we had all the episodes recorded. Then we got through 30 Rock; saw the season finale just last week, then a couple December shows in rerun that we’d missed when the DVR got fried in a late autumn lightning storm. I know what happens on The Office – chances are I read it in someone’s blog – but I have no expectation that the plot points remain a secret, though, in fact, my wife does not know, so DON’T TELL HER.

Since JEOPARDY! is in reruns, I’d decided to tape the Regis Who Wants to Be a Millionaire primetime episodes. A much better game with the 15-, 30- and 45-second clock. Of course, I saw the Patricia Heaton math meltdown; she really psyched herself out that she couldn’t get the answer to this question: “If a Euro is worth $1.50, five Euros is worth what?” Her choices are A.) 30 quarters, B.) 50 dimes, C.) 70 nickels, and D.) 90 pennies.
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I’m reading the New Yorker for August 7 online this week, when I come across this: It’s big news in France and Germany that Willy DeVille, a founder of the band Mink DeVille, died yesterday in New York. The death of the director, producer, and screenwriter John Hughes is unmentioned in the major newspapers there. Nothing travels worse than the local rites of adolescence.
I totally missed that story. I wasn’t a huge fan of the band, but I do own some Mink DeVille on vinyl.
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Yesterday, someone in my office was talking about the “famous” Doobie Brothers episodes of the show What’s Happening; I had no idea what he was talking about. But it was easy to find clips here and here and even each of the whole episodes on Hulu here and here. I DID see the series from time to time, but it was not appointment television for me.

Someone commented on why the show didn’t pick a black artist instead. I was instantly reminded of a 1977 Warner Brothers Loss Leader called Cook Book, “focusing on Warner’s black acts.” The only predominantly white act on the record was the Doobie Brothers. The song on the album was the same as the song on the What’s Happening episode of the same time frame, “Takin’ It to the Streets.” The Michael McDonald version of the group must have had some cred.
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From the July 7, 2009 Fortune magazine comes this review of the book Cooperstown Confidential, by Zev Chafets. It addreses the inconsistencies in the process of getting into the Hall of Fame. Reviewer Daniel Okrent writes:
Sure, numbers count — RBIs, ERAs, etc. — but Chafets demonstrates that cronyism, prejudice, and financial self-interest play a huge part as well.

He addresses a variety of factors that have influenced the people who make (and unmake and remake and unremake) the rules. In 2009, in the looming shadows cast by Clemens and Bonds, the rule that matters most is No. 5, the one about character. It’s been used to keep out witnesses to gambling (Joe Jackson) and gamblers themselves (Pete Rose) but has somehow not been applied to cheaters (Gaylord Perry), racists (Cap Anson), sociopaths (Lefty Grove), and cheating racist sociopaths (Ty Cobb). Nor to a quantity of drunks, drug users, and other lowlifes that could fill the reservation book at Hazelden.

About those druggies: Most people who follow baseball closely suspect that a large share of Hall members from the ’70s and ’80s got their games up with the help of amphetamines. But Chafets has turned up evidence that steroids go back as far as the 1950s.

I guess it solidified my sense that the hysteria over the latest revelation from the (supposedly secret) list of 2003 users of substances that would become banned in 2004 just doesn’t disturb me as much as it does others.
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And now, a message from movie maker Tyler Perry:
I’m back from Vegas and had a great time at the Hoodies, but I gotta give a quick WARNING to all my Facebookers, Twitters and TylerPerry board members: I’m so pissed right now!

I’m sitting in my den writing, minding my own business, when I get an email from my staff saying that someone put an ad up on Craigslist saying that I was casting a movie in L.A., and in order to be considered for this (FAKE) Tyler Perry movie, you have to join their club for $29.95. THAT IS A LIE, don’t fall for it. These folks are trying to rip you off. I hate for people to prey on people’s dreams and hopes. Why don’t people get a job and stop trying to steal folks’ hard-earned money….Ugh, that makes me mad; let me breathe.

Okay listen my dear folks, if anyone asks you to pay in order to do an audition or pay a fee to join a club to put you in a movie, please don’t fall for it. That’s not how it works in this business. It’s free to audition for any film. I’m calling my lawyers about these THIEVES! You’re my best help here, so please do me a favor and send this out to all your followers and friends.

Thanks,
TP

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ROG