It has been one year since Chinese Democracy came out. Do you remember where you were when everything changed?
This is your yearly reminder that everyone is supposed to watch Hannah And Her Sisters on Thanksgiving. You won’t be sorry.
A week ago I bought a rifle, I went to the store … I bought a rifle! I was gonna, you know, if they told me I had a tumor, I was gonna kill myself. The only thing that might’ve stopped me — might have — is that my parents would be devastated. I would have to shoot them also, first. And then I have an aunt and uncle … you know, it would’ve been a blood bath.
/Film - Nick Cage’s (supposed) Superman costume test for what would have been Tim Burton’s Superman Lives
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…
Yes, please.
(Update: It’s a fake, but honestly, who cares?)
This is where I’m going to be this weekend. I am going to eat so much cheese.
I might have done four shows with Kenny. He was mostly a Village guy. The Comedy Cellar, the Moon, the Other End, the Duplex. I worked primarily uptown, at Catch a Rising Star, where I was one of the house emcees (I replaced Bill Maher in 1982 when he killed on the Tonight Show, then moved to LA seemingly the next day), the Comic Strip and the Improv. I do remember one New Year’s Eve, maybe 1986, when there were at least eight of us crammed into Judy Orbach’s tiny apartment in the Village, playing Trivial Pursuit, smoking pot, drinking, and scream-laughing until 6 am. It was Judy (a wonderful singer), her boyfriend Chuck Montgomery (a guitar player at the Improv who later played the guy drinking at the bar when Madonna gets up and walks away in “Desperately Seeking Susan”), me, my eventual wife Adrianne Tolsch (the lead house emcee at Catch), Ober, Sue Kolinsky (the aforementioned better comic/girlfriend), Jon Hayman (one of the funniest offstage guys ever) and the then-broke Larry David.
Smoking pot and scream-laughing with Ken Ober and Larry David until 6 a.m on New Years Eve. I am envious of Bill Scheft’s decade. Maybe in 25 years, I’ll be reminiscing about the golden days of 2002, drinking Lowenbrau and playing video wrestling with President Gillin and Pulitzer Prize-winner A.J. Daulerio. (It seems unlikely.) The only way this story could be better would be the above paragraph were written the way I originally read it, and it was “Jerry” Orbach rather than “Judy.” No offense to Judy.
This is a 13-year-old Will Leitch, “acting” in a school play in the eighth grade. (This school play, in fact.) You can’t quite tell from the resolution, but I’m wearing a “Remote Control” T-shirt, which, in Mattoon, Illinois, in spring 1989, was just about the coolest thing anyone could wear. R.I.P., Ken Ober. Somewhere, the Stud Boy is crying.
I am certain I spent way too much time on this, but nonetheless, here it is: People who had a wretched decade. I’ll be reviewing the decade twice a week on Deadspin for the rest of the year, because I am just the kind of wistful idiot who cares about this stuff.
“I have a very attractive wife. When she is out with our two cute baby girls, she often receives free groceries, free fast food — the guy at Dunkin’ Donuts loves her — and free clothes. Frequently she does not realize she has the gifts (or stolen goods) until she is in the car, driving away. Is it ethical for her to keep these gifts, or must she return them (which may get the giver fired)? CHRIS ALTMAN, ATLANTA”
From The Ethicist this weekend.
So, some things that EVERYONE WHO READ THIS probably also thought already, that are so obvious, in no particular order:
1. Did Chris Altman of Atlanta make a bet with his wife that he could have her extreme attractiveness mentioned in the New York Times before the year was done? And what were the terms of this bet? Surely, Chris Altman’s wife agreed to any terms, chuckling to herself, thinking that there was no way she could lose such an outrageous bet. So… is Chris Altman’s wife now a virtual sex slave? Should we alert the Atlanta authorities, or should we wait a few days for Chris Altman to officially cancel the terms of the bet out of empathy, exhaustion, or a combination of both?
2. Were additional sexual acts, hours, or even days added on to the terms of the bet if Chris Altman could get the New York Times to also mention the cuteness of the daughters? And isn’t that kind of a gross thing to include in a sex-bet? I mean, they’re children for God’s sake. Leave them out of your gross suburban boredom sex bet, Altmans. Those little girls have a tough enough time already, what with their mother driving them around counting her donuts instead of paying attention to the road.
3. Everyone has made sex-bets before in their lives, right? Okay.
4. Why are there so many Chris Altmans, when I just want to find a picture of this one, posing with his wife, on Google, so that I might make up my own mind about her attractiveness and the likelihood that she could get so much free stuff from it that it becomes and ethical issue of national importance? I don’t have all day.
5. And, ultimately: how is Chris Altman’s wife staying so hot when she gets so much free fast food, including donuts, that it’s become an ethical issue of national importance? Does she give the donuts to the kids? Or, wait — does Chris Altman’s wife have an eating disorder? Oh my god, Chris Altman’s wife, the non-attentive driver currently living a life of perpetual sexual servitude somewhere in the greater Atlanta area, is totally probably bulimic! And also maybe fucking the Dunkin’ Donuts guy on the side. After all, he loves her.
Lindsay Robertson is really funny.
From Newsweek’s 12 Allegedly Funny People Who Aren’t, this is Gallagher, who is still touring.
This photo was taken last year, when Gallagher, like the Marquis de Sade himself, was locked in a watermelon-less room to protect the tender mores of Victorian society, thus forcing him, devoted to his art forever, to smash piles of his own feces. A solitary protest, a voice for the enduring human spirit that yearns to be free.
(Here’s hoping this is your only Quills reference today.)
The Great Grunge Hoax. (via katiebakes)
This is still one of my favorite stories. When I worked at the Times’ Web site in 2000, several staffers had that story photocopied and taped to the wall of their cubicles. “Swingin’ On The Flippety-Flop” = “Hanging Out.”
This photo of Jerome James is profoundly sad. It’s mean that they even made him pose for it.
So here’s the highlight of MY day. I write weekly episode reviews of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” for Vulture, and Sunday’s episode featured an angry stonemason who hates Derek Jeter. My favorite part was that he used statistical metrics to criticize Jeter’s defense, which of course drives Larry David insane. (He actually calls it “the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”) I pointed out in my review that this was “the rare mason familiar with advanced baseball defensive metrics.” The next morning, I received the following email:
Hey Will-
Someone just forwarded me your Curb review and I about had a fit when I saw you wrote it. I am a big time fan of Deadspin and of yours. It was crazy you brought me up and I just wanted to let you know that, yes, I am “the rare mason familiar with advanced baseball defensive metrics.” I had just read a bunch about SABR and UZR before the audition and I had to bring it up. I am not sure I buy it…it has Aaron Rowand as below average defensively and I disagree wholeheartedly. Anyway, for a nerd who checks Deadspin as often as I do it was really cool to read your article. I’ve read some of the baseball stat websites and they say stuff like “no actor would know abdthat stuff…Larry had to have thrown it to him.” Not true! Maybe not all actors worshipped Floyd Bannister and Han Solo equally as children but I did. Just wanted to say hello and keep up the great work. Looking forward to your book. Thanks again, Eric
The actor’s name is Eric Edelstein. (He also shows up as Angry Townsperson every once in a while on “Parks and Recreation”). Yep, I received a fan letter from a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” character. I would like one from Leon next.
dhk:
Oh my god, you guys…. just… I… no words…
Best thing on the internet today.
Happy Halloween, everybody. This man is my father.
Ten News Items About The Upcoming Book.
1. Sitting next to me as I type this is a huge brown envelope with edits back from Hyperion. They’re due in a week-and-a-half, which is good, because it’s going to take me a week to work up the nerve to open the package.
2. The book’s release date is May 4, 2010.
3. It is already on Amazon, but the title is wrong — I promise, promise it won’t be called “Nine Innings With Dad” — and the number of pages are wrong. (Unless the brown package says, “Destroy the last-third of this draft,” it’s going to be a lot more than 288 pages. Sorry.)
4. I can pretty much guarantee, unlike some people, that no readings will run out of books. Even if they only stock four books at each store.
5. In the most recent draft, the words “Rick Ankiel” are only used once, and “blogs” is only in there twice. I do have a whole chapter about this guy, though.
6. I need your help.
7. Yes, this is why I did this post in the first place.
8. Much of the book is about fatherhood and baseball, and I’d like to include a small addendum where regular human beings, people Just Like You!, have stories of their fathers and baseball included.
9. So, if you have any interest in being in the book (and I’ll, I dunno, give you a free book and a credit and a backrub and any cash I have lying around), email me your best Dad-baseball story — or any questions you might have - at will@deadspin.com. Length is whatever you want it to be. It can be funny or sad or gross or whatever.
10. Yes, looking through these will allow me to avoid opening the brown package. So thank you.
Movie Roundup: The book is turned in (mostly), and we’ll be back to our regular movie reviewing schedule soon. For now, a roundup of the movies I sneaked out to see when my editor and agent weren’t looking.
The House Of The Devil. In Chuck Klosterman’s new book Eating The Dinosaur, he has an essay about the admirable, terrifying insanity of the literal-minded. (The examples he gives are Ralph Nader, Werner Herzog and, perhaps inevitably, Rivers Cuomo.) He argues that we, irony-drenched mass culture consumers, cannot wrap our minds around such doggedly earnest characters; their inability to do anything with a wink makes it impossible for us to relate to them. I think I feel this way about Ti West, the director of not-really-a-horror-film The House Of The Devil. West has decided to make an early ’80s-era creeperfest that’s less an homage than a meticulous recreation. If you didn’t know this film came out this year, you would really think it is an early ’80s film: The film stock is grainy and washed, the hair is up and bouffanted, the full credits run and the pace is slow slow slow. He doesn’t want you to laugh at old grindhouse schlocks, though you’ll think you’re supposed to; he just wants to make one of his own. I’m not sure what the point of this is — I mean, congrats, you’ve successfully made a film outside the constructs of space and time. Yay? — but West is undeniably skilled, and when the mood finally breaks and the house finally becomes The Devil’s House, the gruesome (and bloody) payoff is worth the wait. West is going to do something outstanding someday, as soon as he figures out something to say. Grade: B.
The Informant! About four years ago, I ducked into a fake-Irish tourist trip pub in Times Square to avoid a sudden rainstorm. At 3 p.m., it was completely empty, except for a guy in the back of the bar, drinking water and playing darts by himself. It was Steven Soderbergh. I actually asked him what he was doing there. “Understanding the universe,” he said with a sigh, and turned back to his darts. If you’ve seen Schizopolis, you know how truly strange Soderbergh is, a man lost in his own brain and (mostly) paralyzingly self-critical. Steven Soderbergh is a man who wants to lose. His projects anymore are odd little thought puzzles he gives himself, puzzles he knows can’t be solved but can’t help trying, regardless. The Informant! is a film about a man who is disturbed, delusional and not all that smart … and Soderbergh makes him the increasingly unreliable narrator! We as an audience are as confused as Mark Whitacre, which is Soderbergh’s point, I think: The whole film seems to take place in Whitacre’s brain, putting ourselves inside, trying to figure out what the hell’s going on with this guy. We keep searching for hints from Whitacre’s narration, but they’re not there. This is a movie without an establishing shot. What a perverse, self-defeating way to make a film. This is all sounding negative, but it’s not meant to: You sense that Soderbergh is working his way through this while we watch; of all Soderbergh’s big-ticket movies, this is the one, I think, that’s the most spiritually akin to Schizopolis. This is a film about the impossibility of making sense out of why people do anything. It’s astounding that Soderbergh got Matt Damon to play around with him, and to commit to following this down the rabbit hole. I’m not sure The Informant! really works, but watching Soderbergh put strange Rube Goldberg contraptions in front of himself at every step never stops being fascinating. And then just when you’re ready to write this off as a large-budget academic exercise, Soderbergh and Damon punch you in the gut with a shockingly moving scene where the narrator and the person finally meet in the middle … and still can’t figure it out. Soderbergh clearly doesn’t care about his audience anymore, and this makes him fascinating, and a little dangerous. To himself, and others. Grade: B+.
A Serious Man. Even the best Coen brothers movies have a studied distance between the film and the filmmakers, which can be irritating but has a certain honesty to it. (These are, after all, movies.) That distance is obliterated in A Serious Man, which feels almost apocalyptically personal: This is about a man in a cold, dead universe that is out to destroy him. The movie is funny, sure, but never in the wink-wink way we’ve come to associate with the Coen brothers; it is bleak and unrelenting and pitch black in every possible way. The Coens throw themselves so deeply into this one — matters moral and philosophical and scatologic and mathematical, swirled and splattered all over the screen — that it’s difficult to nail down exactly what this movie is about other than Pain and Fear. Why do horrible things happen? How can everything go so wrong? Is there anybody out there watching out for us? The Coens don’t know the answers to these questions (obviously), but that they’re asking them, in such unsparing fashion, is the just about goddamned heroic. And the last shot is just devastating; I’m still shaken by it. This might be the Coen Brothers’ best film. I suspect they think so too. Even if you sense they can’t quite grasp what they’ve stumbled across here, and surely don’t want to. Grade: A.
Zombieland. A fun little romp, a mashup of “coming-of-age” and “zombie movie” that has enough of the latter to make up for the relative limpness of the former. (This film doesn’t really care about its characters, and I wish it didn’t try.) Everyone is clearly having a grand time, though, and it’s smarter and sharper than anyone could have reasonably expected. And if you can’t find a place in your heart for a movie that worships Bill Murray this intensely, and even gets him to wear the Ghostbusters outfit again, I’m not sure there’s much hope for you. Grade: B.
