Another month

• Things to do
1. Have the day off on Christmas

• Music
1. Complete my Beatles collection
1. Yellow Submarine (songtrack)

• Friends
1. Hang out with Tim at least once every two months.

• Things to do
1. Travel on an airplane
2. Sky dive
3. Sing karaoke in front of strangers
4. Vocally and vehemently express anger to a person I'm angry at.
5. Dress up on Halloween.
6. Distribute candy to Trick or Treaters.

• Movies
1. Watch everything I own that I have yet to watch on DVD
1. The X-Files Season 1

Go mini-golfing with Theresa. (Friends #5)
Travel on an airplane (Things to Do #16)--Scheduled for November
Sky dive (Things to do #17)--Scheduled for November
Buy a good digital camera (Things to do #39)

Ketchup Post

1. Hang out with Chris The Great at least once every two months. (in progress 2007-06-29)
2. Hang out with Tim at least once every two months. (in progress 2007-06-29)
3. Finish Twin Peaks with Miles and Toni. DONE
4. Find a well-paying job with benefits. DONE
5. Get lost. DONE
6. Organize and catalog my books DONE
7. Read the next five books recommended to me
1. Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five (Read 2007-06)
2. Tori Amos: Tori Amos Piece By Piece (Recommended by Ashley)
   

Catching up

Friends #2: Hang out with Tim every 2 months. I fell off this wagon, but we hung out on May 15.

Things to do #7: Graduate college. Done and done.

Things to do #30: Dress down when it's not appropriate. Shorts, a black wife beater, and flip flops under my graduation gown, bitchez.

Things to do 13: Anonymously donate $100 to a charity. Done.
Things to do 41: Tip 50% to a deserving waiter/waitress
Movies #2: A Better Place watched

Catchin' up with the list

Things to do #8: Save $2000. Also, I'm going to keep saving. Real life is fun!

Movies #1: Watched the following: Baghdad Bob, Belle and Sebastian: Fans Only, Morrissey: Oye Esteban, Morrissey: Who Put the M in Manchester, The Muppet Show: Season 1, The Smiths: The Complete Picture, Uncle Saddam.

Movies#2: Watched The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy.

Another catch-all

Still working on the list. Just not writing individual entries.

I asked a girl on a date. (Things to do #5)
Had a 20-minute conversation with someone I just met (at my cousin's son's baptism last weekend) (Things to do #24)
Watched Seinfeld Seasons 5 and 6 (Movies #1)
Watched two recommended movies (Hoodwinked and Little Miss Sunshine) (Movies #9)
Heard an album recommended to me (Damien Rice's 9) (Music #7)

Catch-all update

Hung out with Timbo (1-12-07)

Applied for Survivor. (1-15-07)

Saved an entire paycheck (and a big one at that) (January 2007)

Viewed a couple of DVDs. (January)

Smell ya later.

Catch-all

I hung out with Chris the Great (as well as some other friends) at a bowling alley (Friends #1).

Coincidentally, I went bowling (Things to do #3).

I handwrote a letter to my friend Belinda (Things to do #12).

I watched several of my DVDs--Blue Velvet, The Producers, and Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas (Movies #1 and #2).

I ran a mile in less than seven minutes

Boom shakka lakka lakka boom.

A symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom

I have a large number of older David Lynch movies I have to get around to watching, especially to build excitement for the rare chance that I may actually get to see his new piece, Inland Empire. I've seen most of them, but it's been so long that I really have no memory whatsoever. The only film I can remember from start to finish is Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Today I started my Lynch extravaganza, and I plan to continue it over my break.

Wild At Heart is among Lynch's more linear pieces, and this is probably because it's based on a novel (Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula by Barry Gifford). There tends to be a pattern to Lynch's work: if it springs entirely from his mind, it is an iconic and often wholly incomprehensible Lynch piece (see: Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, among others). When the work is based on another piece--whether it be a real-life occurrence or a novel--it is easier to follow, yet still marked with Lynch's fingerprints (see also: The Straight Story, The Elephant Man).

And boy, are his fingerprints all over this one. Anybody who has watched multiple Lynch pictures will know that there are recurring motifs--images or sounds that intrigue the director. Fire is one of those things, and it plays a huge role in the picture. Not only is fire an essential part of the story (it is the demise of one key character), but it appears interstitially during jump cuts. Lynch is, perhaps, best known for his use of fire in Twin Peaks and its subsequent film adaptation, Fire Walk With Me. More common in the auteur's repertoire is the use of slow motion. It only appears to be used in two establishing shots of a junky apartment in New Orleans, but it adds the unsettling, dreamlike Lynch quality to the scenes. Other familiar elements appear as well (the yellow lines passing on the road, a'la Lost Highway, for instance), but in Wild At Heart, unlike, say, Mulholland Drive, they are not used to tell the story.

The essential Lynchian theme is the collision of idyllic, dreamlike Americana contrasted starkly with either brutal violence or brazen sexuality. This film has plenty of those collisions. Much to the delight of all the women in the crowd, Nicholas Cage performs Elvis Presley's ballad "Love Me," sandwiched between a barfight and an intense lovemaking session with his girlfriend. A brutal skull-crushing is underscored by Angelo Badalamenti's 1950's-esque dream pop.

The most incomprehensible (and yet the least Lynchesque) element of the film is the allusion to The Wizard of Oz. I've very infrequently seen Lynch reference other films within his own work. Certainly, he pays due to famous starlets of the golden age of cinema, but other narratives seem to have been off-limits. However, The Wizard of Oz is all over this piece. Lula (played by Laura Dern) references her homicidal mother as the Wicked Witch. Lula recalls her mother's cackle as her father was murdered. She sees an eerie, broom-riding specter following her car. In the end, Lula even vanquishes her mother's influence by tossing water onto a photograph of her (which shortly thereafter disappears, steaming). After a particularly brutal scene of sexuality involving Willem Dafoe's character Bobby Peru, Lula clicks the heels of her red slippers, almost in a cry to return to a place she could be comfortable. When that reprieve doesn't come, she slumps into a ball in the motel room. It is almost as if Lula lives her life in the fantasy world of Oz in an attempt to come to terms with all of the terrible things that had happened to her. In the end, it is only fitting that she is saved by the Good Witch.

Wild At Heart is not mindless entertainment, obviously, but it is an interesting film, and it stands up to aimless analysis. The film was made during the production run of Twin Peaks, and it's interesting to see so many cast members in roles so different from their television personae (Grace Zabriski, David Patrick Kelly, Fenn, Jack Nance, Sheryl Lee, and Frances Bay all make appearances).. In addition, there are some truly disturbing (Defoe) and moving (Dern, as well as Peaks' Fenn) performances that are entirely worth making this film part of your collection. So do it already.

Take a tit in each hand and let nature take its course

Going through my DVD collection, I stumbled across an old chestnut that I picked up for $5.50 at Wal Mart because I vaguely remembered watching a comedy about a train crashing on Comedy Central back before their original programming was such a large part of their line-up. I had discovered a number of movies on Comedy Central that rank among my favorite comedies of all time today. Airheads is a silly and inconsequential bit of fluff that I'm glad to say has lodged its way into my collection. Better Off Dead, which used to play ad nauseum, recently ranked number 3 on my personal top twenty-five comedies of all time list.

The movie I remembered was, obviously, Silver Streak. I'm typically a sucker for anything Gene Wilder, and Silver Streak is no exception. This is the first time I've seen the movie in full, and it didn't quite live up to my expectations. But how could it? Gene Wilder! Richard Prior! A murder mystery! A train! Hearing the premise on the back of the box made me think of Hitchcock's near-perfect thriller, Strangers on a Train. They even wanted me to think it! Here, listen:

"In this wild comedy adventure, rail passenger George Caldwell (Gene Wilder) finds that a romantic escapade with a sultry secretary (Jill Clayburgh) puts him in the middle of a Hitchcockian murder plot."

Hitchcockian. Nice. Sorry to say, the only way this plot could be considered Hitchcockian was if Hitchcock had been bashed in the head with a billy club and became partially mentally retarded. But then, I don't watch my Gene Wilder movies for the intrigue. I watch them for the wit.

There is nothing extremely brilliant about Silver Streak. It seems to be one of those movies that makes up for its lack of quality with its breadth of talent. There is a charisma about Gene Wilder that makes even the lamest comedies worth watching. Yes, See No Evil Hear No Evil, I'm looking in your direction. Richard Prior is consistently funny, even when he doesn't seem to be trying. There's a Steppin Fetchit routine that just knocked my socks off. It's a shame that neither of these comedians is working today (one's in some sort of retirement, the other is in some sort of coffin).

One of my favorite parts of the movie, upon first watching, probably wasn't meant to be funny. There is a scene at the beginning in which the female lead hits on Gene Wilder unsolicited, coming on in a way that is so unbelievably strong that you really believe she thought to herself, "There is something about that man and his untameable Jew-fro mane that just makes me want to SEX that." There's definitely a chemistry between the two actors, which is nice to see in something like a late seventies comedy caper (and would be nice to see in modern romances).

Another funny part--although it's funny to the detriment of the picture--is the cop logic. Most movies have some level of blurred reality when it comes to police work, but Silver Streak may have the most bizarre moments of all. Cops will pull their gun on almost anybody, and this is evidenced throughout. This is no surprise, and it occurs in almost every movie ever made. Real cops just don't pull their guns unless they see a weapon. I think that's the rule. Anyway, after arresting George (Gene Wilder) under suspicion of murder, the police clear his name. Then, they GIVE HIM A GUN AND A BOX OF LIVE AMMUNITION. They armed a civilian and drove him to a firefight. Not only that, but they left him unprotected. All of the other police wear body armor as they approach the villain, but George is left in his fashionable sweater and a pair of nice slacks.

Minor problems, really, and one can appreciate a level of banality in a movie that includes a shuckin' and jivin' Gene Wilder in blackface. Catch it if it's on television, but pass on the buy unless you're a die-hard Gene Wilder fan, as Richard Pryor doesn't even enter until the halfway point.

I will leave you with my favorite quote from the movie, which will become my insult-of-choice assuming I can wrap my head around it enough to memorize it. "You stupid, ignorant, son-of-a-bitch dumb bastard!" Uh...take it easy, killer. Stay loose.

Quick, man! Cling tenaciously to my buttocks!

In the continued effort to view every DVD on my shelf, I had a The Ren and Stimpy Show marathon today. I've been meaning to watch this box set since Halloween ended, but every time I tried to pop the first disc of Seasons Three and a Half-ish, I fell asleep. Finals week was the perfect time to sit down and watch DVDs, because I don't study and I literally had nothing to do for days at a time.

You know those shows that you loved when you were little, and you rewatch it on DVD and realize that it IS good, but for entirely different reasons than you had thought years in the past? Pee-wee's Playhouse is one of them. Ren and Stimpy is not. In fact, it doesn't hold up particularly well for me at all. The humor is silly, but not my kind of silly. I also threw up in my mouth a little bit when the titular pets choked down steaming glasses of skunk milk.

There are good moments, of course. Gilbert Gottfried and Rosie O'Donnell provide great guest voices that I didn't catch as "guest voices" the first time. Every episode had one or two laugh-out-loud moments. I am in love with the episode "House of Next Tuesday," which plays on the various classic cartoons involving the House of Tomorrow, which I also love. However, all in all it falls flat for me. I can see kids today loving this, even with the glut of Cartoon Network and NickToons originals currently on television. Something tells me that they'd be able to tell the marked quality difference between this and, say, Thugaboo.

A lot of to-do is made about John K.'s eviction from the show, and it was a travesty. However, I can see no marked decline in quality from the first box set to the second. John K. was revolutionary in his animation and in his twisted premises, but Bob Camp and the rest continue that tradition equally well. The animation is beautiful, and the inventiveness the animators have in creating expressions for the characters is the best since the golden years of Warner Bros. cartoons, and remains unrivaled by anything since.

Ren and Stimpy is not really suited for marathon viewing. If you buy the box sets, I would recommend popping it in on for an episode or two on a Saturday night, sandwiched between The Adventures of Pete and Pete episodes while you wait for Are You Afraid of the Dark? to hit DVD.

Neglect, etc.

I haven't stopped doing things on this list, but I have stopped posting about them. Deal.

I completed "Friends #6," which was to play board games with friends. Over Thanksgiving, my pal Brad came home from Ohio, and we went over to our friend Chris's to play. I have discovered the joy of Euro-games.

I dressed up for no reason, wearing a shirt and tie to a day's worth of classes. Done and done.

I rediscovered "reading for pleasure," and I have to say that it was far earlier than I had intended. I figured it would wait until after I graduated school and cooled down from my English-major-reading fervor. However, I made friends with a little monster called "Seminar in Drama," where we've been reading modern drama. I was moved by classics like "Our Town" and puzzled by modern plays like "The Birthday Party" and "Buried Child." Either way, I enjoyed the hell out of it. I ate them up. I discovered I could enjoy reading even when I had to do it for class--assuming the reading was worth my time.

Write a short story...I did one better, but I'm still going to count it. I wrote a novel. And no, I won't post it, because it's not swell.

Writing a poem every week. I'm sure that I've been slacking, but I've found that I can't force myself to write a poem. Sometimes it comes to me and sometimes it doesn't. I think, though, I've averaged about a poem per week. Just Monday I wrote two good ones. The real test will be keeping it up through times when I'm not in a poetry class.

I'm halfway done with the completion of my Beatles collection. I received "Yellow Submarine" for my birthday. Now I only have one disc to go--the "songtrack" to Yellow Submarine--to finish that puppy off for good.

Finally, I spent my birthday (observed) with my family playing Trivial Pursuit. My parents, my brother, my sister, and her manfriend. That's it. Move along.

Aside from the dubiousness of the poetry task, I have officially failed my first task. It has been over two months since I've seen Chris the Great or Tim. I'll have to get on it--I have a winter break coming up in a little over a week. Here's hoping.

A poem?

The intention of this poem was not to be "good." It's a freewriting exercise from my poetry course. The professor would read a random line from a poem, and we would react. As we were righting, he'd randomly select another line and it would have to move our poem along.

down in the alley
he saw what you did
despicable
degrading
dirty
and the look in his eyes alone
was worth the price of admission to you
and as the other finished reaping the bounty
of forbidden fruit
he burned like a roman candle
superhot behind a trash bin. then,
like some horrible dream come true
he produced a box cutter
from inside his sock and
stalked forward, irate and rambling,
his spittle staining the back of your neck as he
approached.
the joy in your revenge
faded like twilight in November
you didn't remember pain
but you remembered cold
and later, wet
the movies are wrong about stabbings
the real pain comes later with infection
and even after infection subsides
the pain is going nowhere
fast.

Haikus: the lazy way

I feel like I'm not really "writing a new poem every week" when I write haikus, but Japanese people write haikus so screw yourself. My poetry class is coming up again this week (after a 2-week hiatus), so I'll have something real next week.

sacco's eating figs
why is sacco eating figs?
is she eating figs?

Freddy vs. Jason vs. Spoodles: A Date With Destiny

I'm finally killing Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees once and for all this afternoon: I'm finishing my month-long horror-movie marathon. What kind of content will this site have once I'm done? Hell if I know.

Wes Craven's New Nightmare is the final movie in the Nightmare series proper, and what a fitting send-off it is. The film takes the tired Elm Street formula and turns it on its head, creating one of the scariest films in the franchise (second only to the original).

The conceit of this film is that we are now in the REAL world. The actress who played Nancy in the first and third installments is back, but this time she is playing the actress who played Nancy. Robert England (nee Freddy Krueger) appears in the flesh, as does director Wes Craven. Nancy...er...Heather is haunted by dreams (not to mention creepy phone calls) that Freddy has become real. The reasoning is well thought out (at least for a movie that involves multiple impalings).

Freddy is back--kind of--although it's not the same Freddy we've come to know and loathe in the five prior sequels. This Freddy doesn't have time for quips, video games, or pizza pies. Garbed in a new, black trenchcoat, he's all business, and he's scary as hell. Given the new level of gravitas in this film, I'm reasonably satisfied despite the minimal amount of gore and death.

Sure, one man is slashed across the chest. And another is given the same treatment as Nancy's friend in the first film. But the only really inventive sequence isn't actually a kill at all. Heather's child is attempting to cross the freeway in a surprisingly-well-filmed and intense scene, and Freddy dangles the boy above cars in front of his frightened mother's eyes.

That's right. For the first time, Krueger does what he was meant to do: he haunts and attempts to kill a child. While child actors have a tendency to virtually suck the life out of any movie in a hurry (see: The Lost World: Jurassic Park; The Phantom Menace; The Mummy Returns, etc.), New Nightmare remains unscathed and actually benefits from the talent of its creepy little bugger. Of course, this is partially due to the kid in question: precocious Full House smartass and Kindergarten Cop know-it-all Miko Hughes. Boys have a penis and girls have a ba-gina indeed, Miko.

New Nightmare is a more-than-fitting end to the Elm Street series, and it's a shame that some schlub goalie is about to make Freddy Krueger his bitch.

We have had many epic battles in our time--Tyson vs. Holyfield; Brown vs. the Board of Education--but none were quite so gloriously bloody as Jason vs. Freddy, the ultimate horror clash (until they find a way to work Michael Myers in there). Freddy has been dormant for four years because everybody has forgotten about him, so he culls Jason Voorhees from the depths of hell in order to wreak chaos and inspire fear on Elm Street until we have approximately forty-too-many words of exposition without any blood splatter.

As a film, Vs. is not exactly high art (even by the standards of the ten Fridays and seven Nightmares). The last ten minutes of this film alone contains more blood and gore than any of the predecessors' entire movies. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Really, Freddy vs. Jason is the best of both worlds. You have the brute-strength slaughters of the inimitable Mr. Voorhees, but you also get the creepy, dreamlike maulings of our man Krueger. In other words, if you're tired of somebody's face being eaten by a giant, pot-smoking caterpillar, you won't have to wait long for somebody to get stabbed in the torso fifteen times and folded in half by a cot.

There are a couple of "OH YEAH!" moments in the film, and they all belong exclusively to Jason. What can I say? I'm a gore fella. Weirdly, I think I enjoy the Nightmare series more as a whole, but there's no number of shitty one-liners that can have the same effect as the strong, silent type shoving a flaming machete through your chest with naught but the flick of a wrist. Anyway, Jason gets a fair number of said machete-slayings (as well as the aforementioned "stabbing a guy fifteen times and closing the cot on him"), but he gets to do some other cool stuff. He breaks a guy's neck so fast that the head seems to spin 720 degrees. And of course, no good Jason movie would be complete without somebody literally being chopped in half.

Blah blah blah. It's all unimportant, because the final half hour becomes the promised main event. The spawn of Satan versus the killer from Crystal Lake. Freddy vs. Jason. I've never seen a movie offer up so much gratuitous blood and sinew. Ever. Each of the characters gets hacked and slashed at least thirty times, and the flesh is flyin'. If you don't like spoilers, look away now: Freddy gets his ass handed to him by Jason. OR DOES HE? Well, yeah. He really does. Unless Freddy is going to kill you with his winking, disembodied head, Jason wins by means of retaining some of his limbs.

Thanks to everyone for reading. Thanks to Freddy Krueger for putting the "laughter" in "slaughter," and thanks to Jason Voorhees for putting the "machete" in "pretty much everybody."

Not long now

They've come up with more "definitive" ways to kill Freddy Krueger than dwarves under Snow White's dominion. If you are not afraid of Freddy, he will be OBLITERATED! If you love Freddy, he will be OBLITERATED! If you finally put Freddy's remains to rest, he will be OBLITERATED! If you show him his reflection, he will be OBLITERATED! It doesn't exactly add a whole lot of credibility to the series. Jason Voorhees was only obliterated once. The rest of the time he just got axed in the forehead, and we all know how easy it is to survive that.

Yet somehow, despite the fact that he is finally defeated in a final showdown (of finality) at the end of every movie, he manages to come back for more. He's been jumping from host to host. He's been reincarnated via fire-pissing dog. And then there was the Dream Child.

In A Nightmare On Elm Street, Part 5: The Dream Child, Freddy is born again via the various bodily oozes of our surviving characters from its predecessor, The Dream Master. We see him emerge from his mother's womb a scarred and disfigured demon child (the doctor's understandable first words: "Holy shit!"). And then he haunts the dreams of The Dream Master's unborn fetus.

Babies apparently sleep and dream for eighteen hours of the day (at least in the terrifying mind of Wes Craven), and this allows for the interesting tangent that the Dream Master can dream when she's awake. There are moments that you're uncertain: is this a dream or is this reality? And then you realize that the "dreams" are the ones that include Freddy Krueger turning into a superhero or a chef ("Bon appetit, bitch!"). Much of a stretch? Well, yeah.

There are some decent kills, although not enough for my tastes. One character is made into a motorcycle-human hybrid and fuel-injected until Freddy can harvest his soul. Another is force-fed until her stomach explodes. The coolest part of the movie isn't actually a kill, but Freddy is stabbed right through the mouth with a pool skimmer.

Then, of course, he is OBLITERATED forever or until the next year when New Line wants another couple bucks out of the deal.

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare! Wow! There's no way he can make it out of this one alive!

Wait...of course he can. Jason [went] to Hell but he made it out in due time to slaughter some astronauts and enter mortal combat with our wrinkly lord and savior, Freddy himself. So of course Freddy will never actually die.

A touch of class: Freddy's Dead begins with a famous Nietzsche quote ("Do you know the terror of he who falls asleep? To the toes he is very terrified, Because the ground gives the way under him, And the dream begins..."), followed by a famous Freddy quote ("Welcome to Prime Time, bitch!").

I'm pretty sure that killing Freddy for good was for the best. The kills in this film were pretty lame. One boy is trounced in a video game Freddy is playing with his "power-glove." With Freddy, the sky is the limit: he can kill anybody however he'd like. It's a shame that he did it in such cheesy ways.

Still, there's some good stuff. One character falls through the atmosphere and lands on a bed of spikes (which have been placed there Road-Runner-style by a mischievous Krueger). Freddy taunts a deaf kid by stealing his hearing aid and giving it back to him with all new modifications. Let's just say the deaf guy's noggin isn't long for this world.

And then there's the 3D. It's really poorly done. Where Friday the 13th Part 3 had its share of incredible sequences--harpoons going towards the camera, eyeballs popping out, the works--the extent of this 3D involves some animated demons flying around and causing a ruckus. Great.

This really does feel like the final chapter of a saga. Characters return from the past--Johnny Depp makes a surprise appearance. Also, there's an incredible Freddy montage that runs over the end credits. I'm two movies away from finishing the saga for real. Stay tuned for Wes Craven's New Nightmare and Freddy Vs. Jason, the culmination of the last month of my life.

A haiku 4 u

My buddy Sacco's MySpace name is "Sacco!!!1!!1", inspiring this glorious haiku.

the name is sacco
and there are ones between the
exclamation points