Fright Night

A talisman of my childhood and a representation of it at the same time. Fright Night has a callow dipshit love the late-night host of horror movies on local TV; then the callow dipshit flips out when two wafting men move in next door--because when two men live together at night next door they bring sinister elements of menace and contagion to your suburban idyll.

When I saw this again--as an adult--maybe five years ago, I was gobsmacked: I'd remembered it as a rompy paean to latenight movie madness turning into a quite good kid-against-the-vampire-evil picture--with real loss!--but it was actually a meditation on Gay Dudes Living Next to You. This is a film where the Gay Subtext is actually drawn so clearly and so thoroughly that it very nearly becomes just the text.

The vampires recruit both the girlfriend and the best friend. The elder with his big swinging cross and his fine robes proves little help, if any. This really isn't subtle at all.

The rewatch beyond the gobsmack didn't do much for me. Something like what John Carpenter once called 'taking a tour of your living room'. I found myself thinking

yeah, it's all here...movies are artifice and sometimes cheesy but still influence us/lives...gay dudes walk among us, sometimes you get let down, sometimes people come through for you, heavy shit changes everything, even if you're okay on the far side.

These are trite messages, all of them. I knew that five years ago. Growing up gay is trite, dirt-common and dull, and loving the movies is as controversial as liking food, and sharing those things that are cool with your child? that's just flat square. Or so do scaly aging eyes see. I did not always look through such eyes. I don't look through them now, either--Richard Hugo once said¹

Is this corny? Okay, it's corny. But so what? All great art has some corn in it.

Fright Night is not great art. It has some corn in it. But it has sincerity and generosity, it tries hard to be good without being humorless, and there's a lot of talent, a lot of craft snuck into the genre exercise.²

My dad is dead. He was gay, and he loved movies. It was because of him that I saw Fright Night: he picked it out, put it on, played it. A child celebrated it, an angry depressive sneered at it, and now I nearly cherish it. It was because of my dad that I watched locally hosted horror movies on TV. It is because of him that I understand that the gays next door--or the otherwise different anywhere--pose no threat and deserve no fear or loathing. I loved my dad. This movie Fright Night reminds me of him.

¹ From memory. In his lovely The Real West Marginal Way.
² Mostly speaking of the cast here.

everyone is here

When I was a kid, every kid had seen Poltergeist. We had only three moments to our horripilated appreciation.

1. ghastly grinning man all in black
   
2. "they're heeeeere"
3. a man and a mirror, idly, then intently, then desperately picking and digging at his own skin, pulling his face roughly, pulling his face off

Not sure how this movie got its hold on the entire country: kids on the playground shared "they're heeere" not just with each other but with the entire culture in 1982. What is sure is that this movie bridges the gap between my first two--it's the secret world bursting into ours, it's the evil in us spilling out, manifest and unavoidable forever.

all this doom

all this doom
OR
god damn these vampires
AKA
happy death men

Manhattan, Kansas, 1984. Crematia Mortem on channel 41 out of Kansas City. I'm watching something sunbaked, vaguely Italian with reddish browns and clay. Oppression.

Slow. Doom. I'm tucked into the far corner of the room, in bed for a change, not sleeping on my beanbag chair, beside the bed, 'way closer to the TV. I want to be far away from this.

After years, all I really remembered was blood-in-milk-cartons, walking down smalltown streets, and an image of horror--more than horror, an image of dread--consisting of a woman huddled, hugging her knees and screaming in a room's corner, as...something pushes the walls in, not caving them in, just dimpling them somehow, closing in on her. Literal depiction of those things behind the walls coming after you? Helpless soul-scathing scream I can still hear. This entire town is vampires; and now so am I.

Crematia Mortem I've written about before. Cute microinterview here. All praise to dB for figuring out what movie I was half-assedly describing.

serpent-skinned

When I was a kid, my dad ran movie theatres. Since he was was a whiz at cheapo promotions, I got to witness things like Scrap the Caddy night, where, in honor of a double feature of Any Which Way You Can and Every Which Way but Loose, people got to whack at a junkyard Cadillac with a sledgehammer. Since I was a hammy little boy, and easily pressed into service, I got to stand around downtown Lawrence wearing one of my dad's many masks, handing out flyers. Since he was an alcoholic, he got transferred/demoted/moved around a lot. After his stint managing the Varsity, he spent some time at the drive-in. I didn't make it out there very much--it was way the hell out of town, and my clanking blue Schwinn with the clouds on the chain guard wasn't great for my chubby legs on a long jaunt. I remember getting screamed at for whining that I couldn't keep up one muggy summer afternoon; probably the last time I tried to get out there by bike.

But when I did make it out past the edge of town, there was always something awesome going on. I could barely swing the sledgehammer, but I gave the Caddy a couple feeble thumps. I thrilled to Megaforce, and sat gape-jawed at Escape from New York--so agape that the next day I went to Woolworth's downtown, bought a pirate's plastic eyepatch, and wore it for a week or so, until the headaches got too crippling. A bully named Chad--absolute scourge of my year in second grade--shoved me off a light-speed merry-go-round. Deft, I managed to get my hands completely behind me so that I could absorb the impact with my face; neither the first nor last time my face would be home to the mud & the blood & the tears.

Sitting on the grey gravel staring at the screen in cooling air. A lot of moments got under my skin--maybe none so much as this one, from Alien ripoff Galaxy of Terror:

Shards moving beneath the surface, body invaded and turning against you. Anything even close to this revolts and disturbs me to this day.

(The movie is remembered--more or less--now only for a giant-worm-humps-a-woman's-clothes-off-and-then-to-death scene that you can look up for yourself. Even as a larva, I remember being nonplussed. My favorite Alien ripoff: George R. R. Martin's Haviland Tuf story, "The Plague Star".)

resume the resume

Great moment from another media outlet failing to question an agent moving into a front office.

Riley, 66, has more than two decades of NBA experience as an executive, scout or coach with Milwaukee, Vancouver, Dallas and Golden State.

You know, model franchises.

Why bother worrying about this seemingly lateral career move? I dunno, but it seems like a junior-grade version of our nation's seemingly insatiable appetite for setting the wolves to guard the henhouse.

Okay, I won't actually just phone this one in. Besides the gratuitous diss of the general manager, we find the following unquestioned glinting gems:

"Plus, no one knows talent and understands contracts like the agents."

Now...that's not an unreasonable thing for Warrior Dorell Wright to say. A player needs to believe in his agent's understanding of contracts and talent in exactly the way a defendant needs to believe in his lawyer's understanding of the law and commitment to the case.

But it's absurd for anybody else to hew to this line. The purpose of an agent is to extract maximum possible compensation for his client. Period. This means that a correcter version of the above would be something like:

Nobody knows overstating talent and understands exploiting contract loopholes like an agent.

It's an adversarial system, by design and by practice, and expecting a specialist on one side to make a seamless transition to the other side is about as sensical as promoting your shotblocking center to point guard. Expect to see former clients signed to slightly head-scratching contracts.

From former UCLA coach Jim Harrick:

He was a B student with an A character, rather than an A student with B character.

I guess it would be out of character for the Warriors to shoot for an A student with A character. And I guess it would be out of character for the SF Chronicle to ask any of these crushingly obvious questions.

sayonara

As of today, FreeDarko is shutting down. There's a big final post--I had a (small, angry) hand in it--so make double-sure you head over there and help Haverford College's finest get the ship-on-fire finale they've earned.

--Fat

sloppy and stupid: Bill Simmons needs an editor

Far be it from me to suggest that ESPN front-dude Bill Simmons is far beyond driven the vagaries of the editorial process, but his latest cut-&-paste from his Twitter feed, supplemented with occasional bits that by now must just be Word macros

Uh-oh, I think I just exploded the Blazers Edge message board.

is even more error-ridden & unreadable than usual. Sure, it's not quite as bad as his 10,000 words on middle-aged dudes riding low in Vegas, but it's a rough, rough read.

The lede is his patented semi-controversial move that fails for me b/c it's just plain too easy to shrug and say "no, not really".

We'll remember this as The Best NBA Regular Season Ever.

But, then, maybe 150 words later, he's already given up on his hook (because it was stupid?):

It feels like one of those seasons like 2007 when there just wasn't a most valuable player, so we had to talk ourselves into someone. ... I hate those seasons.

And then we're back to standard-issue recycling and lazy, lazy writing choices.

a USSR-like villain in the MoHeatos

I am, apparently, the only person who finds Rocky IV references played out.

Why not open his arena for Miami playoff games and have "Miami Hate" Viewing parties?

Sure, why not? Why not start capitalizing Viewing?

they evolved into a semi-juggernaut

Semi-juggernaut. Possibly Peter King is ghosting Simmons now? Anyway a semi-juggernaut is what you use to assault a quasi-ziggurat.

and the other owner said, "Screw the money, trade me your best player for a second-round pick, we'd have this exchange:

Is there a reason there's no closing quote here? I had to read this twice to parse it and believe me, I don't want to read Simmons columns twice.

Owner: What do you mean? You have to have someone good."

Well, at least there's no opening quote here. Guess it all evens out.

Simmons is underrated as a stylist.

But it's basketball: a sport in which five guys have to mesh the right way (a process that often defies statistics), and also, they have to collectively give a crap about the sport and each other.

Yup. It's official: starting a sentence with a conjunction; introducing a dependent clause with a colon; then introducing a new independent clause with another conjunction, which contains a pronominal reference to something in the dependent clause--Bill Simmons is either parodying Peter King or being ghostwritten by the man. And I concluded that before reading the couple hundred words about fantasy baseball--Bill Simmons on the NBA: where fantasy baseball happens.

They need to expand the NBA Awards Process beyond MVP, Rookie of the Year, etc. and hand out additional awards.

"They" need to expand the ESPN copy editing Process. Christ. I would have been fired from my entry-level copywriting gig if I turned in copy like this.

The Mokeski: Given annually to the league's best white American player.

You know...if I had to name an NBA award after a great white American player...from the 80s...I might not go straight for Mokeski. None of the other award names are jokes--Erving for most exciting player, Petrovic for best Euro--so why go for a punchline on one and only one of these? Christ, it's not even that good a punchline.

Some end-of-sentence punctuation choices by your man, Bill Simmons:

???
?????????
!!!!
!?!?!?
!!!

Underrated as a stylist.

And my favorite bit of rhetoric ever:

We're headed towards a lockout because NBA "character actors" should be paid like what they are -- character actors -- and because the dopey owners need to be saved from themselves.

Yes, billionaires must be saved from themselves. Good point.

In Hollywood, you don't pay "character actors" like Mike Miller or Travis Outlaw $30-35 million to appear in your next five movies. Why? Because it's bad business!!!

Right. Hollywood: where good business practices reign o'er all. Why is this guy still working?

--Fat, annoyed

(I don't have the energy to figure out the capitalization after a colon inconsistency in this column. Here's just one inconsistency, for the record.)

I have an idea to save the Warriors: You know how his Knicks experience exposed Mike D'Antoni as the Mike Martz of the NFL?
Anyway, I stand by my stance when the 'Melo trade happened: you always trade coins for paper in the NBA.

FreeDarko RIP

Ed note: This is my original FreeDarko final post. Shoals' call had been for one paragraph, so I went long-winded, and he broke it in a place I misliked at the time. He was probably right, though, and in the end, I'm more unhappy with the piece I wrote than I was at the time with his edit.

I remember when we shared a vision, you and I.
--the Mountain Goats, "Estate Sale Sign", All Eternals Deck, 2011

I'm not even sure I should be here. I'll bellow about having been a fellow traveller, but in point of fact I contributed exactly one piece to the FreeDarko oeuvre, and it came at an end-stage moment, when the site qua site could probably best have been described as "moribund" (neither dissing nor dismissing the many triumphs of Yago Colas). I know it is neither appropriate nor accurate to bemoan the shutdown frozen loss of the site: young men with free time become married men whose musings need to turn into words that can be exchanged for cash money, and I do not begrudge that (of the men, anyway: the world yet must answer for its wrongs). I do not begrudge it and yet I fear that the FreeDarko content (superstructure)--spread out into the wider world, perhaps not even tendrils anymore, perhaps just diffuse, atomized...vibes--will suffer from not having a hub (base). The smart and wise components of FreeDarko are in the world, to be sure, and sure they comprise a genre won't be lost. My fear is that without a locus and emblem, the genre'll end up more marginalized and largely forgotten power pop, rather than here-vital, there-misappropriated punk. There's no retreat or surrender. The future will always hold a space for making a detailed and passionate case for interpretation and analysis beyond brute wins/losses, for arguing that these athletic exhibitions can mean on levels biographical and historical, for championing engagement beyond jingoism, for all the intelligence and joy, all the ferocity and levity, the in-group pandering and the friendly winking, for strident insistence and patient hints and for, maybe most of all, celebrating overlooked wonders in the face of the oppressive hegemonic dullardry that constitutes most public talking-and-thinking-about-sports. There will always, always (now) be a space for FreeDarko. But there are things only happen on the playground and never in the marketplace. That's why I'm frankly angry and sad about the closing off of the FreeDarko site as a venue for FreeDarko work. Maybe I shouldn't be here on this day, but this is a funeral, and you can't ask me to act like it isn't.

--Fat Contradiction, townsman of a stiller town

it's not my imagination

"A gentleman carries a pocketknife."
--Chris Collision Fat Contradiction, talking to one of the three cops it took to pull him over in Shasta County, late 2010

Not sure when it started, but I've had a knife in my back pocket for years upon years. (We'll pass over in silence those awkward years where, like a common Rush fan, I had a Leatherman & a flashlight on my belt all day every day.) Many of these years, it's been one or another Swiss Army knife. They're ubiquitous, not terribly expensive, and seem a little classier than your Gerber or your Benchmade.

As someone, then, with such extensive experience with blades, their use, care, and meaning, I feel uniquely qualified to solve this massive problem: the loss of the toothpick/tweezer.

Do not ever take the toothpick or tweezer out of the toothpick or tweezer slot.

Hope it helps!

what do you mean I never write about the NBA anymore?

(There are many O many ways to emerge from a dogmatic slumber.)