Some words of holiday advice:
1. You can survive your fucking annoying family. And if they piss you
off too much, just remember that one day they will be dead.
2. Don't drink and drive, 'cause that shit's for amateurs and assholes.
Stay at home to tie one on; why do you think Thanksgiving's an all-day
festival of football, parades, movies, dog shows and marathons of
classic TV reruns? It's a dazzling cathode ray cornucopia of stuff to
keep the wasted off the streets and at home, puking, fucking and
fighting right where they belong.
3. When seeing your old high school pals for what's probably the one
time you'll see them all year, do not comment on how fat and/or old they
look. That shit goes two ways, bunky...
4. If you must go to church during the holiday, make sure to go as
hungover and reeking of booze as possible, that way next year they'll
think twice before forcing you out of bed and into a place choked with
incense and festooned with pictures of Jesus looking at your ass.
5. If your family gathering has a kiddie table, make sure to sit there
and serve as a bad example to the next generation. Tell age-acceptable
off-color jokes and stories. Teach the kids the lyrics to "The Diarrhea
Song" (especially the version recorded by distaff punk/metal band Betty
Blowtorch) and have them sing it loudly halfway through the meal.
Introduce them to "pull my finger." In short, do your part to ensure
your status as the fave older relative from the start; that way the kids
won't feel so awkward in later years when they need somebody to take
them to get an abortion or bail them out of jail without their parents
being any the wiser. And believe me, they will pay back your "cool
relative" kindness somewhere down the line.
6. Always, ALWAYS eat the turkey's tail. It's the perfect amount of dark
meat, fat, and skin in one concentrated morsel and if slathered with
the right amount of gravy it's a thing of joy forever (well, at least
until it's digested and re-manifests itself as the next morning's
enormous post-Turkey Day turd).
7. The true bombardment of Christmas-themed TV commercials commences
right around Thanksgiving, so feel free to let loose with the Ribald
Songbird action and desecrate the classic Yuletide tunes that have
already been corrupted for TV adverts, only make them super dirty with
usages of words like "cocksucker," "shit," and "pussy fart." Since
you're gonna hear them a million times between now and the new year
anyway, you may as well have some fun with them.
8. If you have to suffer through the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade —
the Thanksgiving moment I dread most — don't try to be an asshole and
bring to your aging parents' attention the fact that it's nothing more
than a saccharine, three-hour commercial. They like it for the marching
bands, big-assed balloons, and celebs lip-synching, and do not give a
fuck about it's true purpose, so let them have their fun. And you can
always have something to look forward to, namely the hope that the guy
playing Santa at the end of the show will either be drunk or have a
visible hard-on.
9. If you're staying at your parents' house with a significant other,
try to remain as silent as possible if having sex under your folks'
roof. I don't know why, but the idea of their kids having sex, even us
grownup kids, seriously fucks with the heads of our progenitors. Then
again, maybe you should
fuck like monkeys on crack while at home...Aah, what the hell? Make 'em
remember how it's done! And if they bitch about it, remind them of all
the times they nagged you for grandkids and ask them if they forgot
where said grandkids come from. That'll shut the geezers up in no time.
10. If the friends and loved ones you miss most can't be there this
year, think of them fondly and rest assured that they're probably every
bit as miserable as you are.
And with that, Happy Thanksgiving, and may the pecans in grandma's
cookies actually be pecans and not roaches. (She doesn't see that well
anymore, you know.)
Thursday, November 24, 2022
HAPPY THANKSGIVING 2022
Thursday, November 17, 2022
DEALING WITH LOGISTICS AND THE ONGOING MENTAL STRAIN OF BEING IN THE PERPETUAL DIALYSIS CYCLE
Today's day off from dialysis was marked by taking care of some business via phone. I spent most of the morning on the phone with my insurance company, searching for nearby dental offices that take Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and I have it narrowed down to the dental facilities at NY Langone hospital. Unfortunately all I could get was their answering machine, but I persisted and eventually got through. With my initial questions answered, I now have to suss out when I can go in for a checkup. Probably not until sometime next month.
The rest of today was marked by some minor grocery shopping before I collapsed into light depression sleep. Being trapped in the cycle of dialysis has really been getting me down, as my life is controlled by my treatment schedule, with no deviations allowed, but better this than a slow death.
After the sleeping, I was given inspiration from a woman's account of meeting the god Shiva while on a mushroom trip. She said that her mushroom connection with Shiva allowed her to grasp that anything can be a prison if you allow yourself to be sucked into the negative realities, and that if she just let go maybe she could move forward in a way that she could be happy with. Her words have inspired me to try to strive to let go of the here and now of my situation and just ride through it. It's going to be difficult, but I must do it of simply go mad. Wish me luck.
Lastly, nurse/spirit of benevolence Shaunda has arranged for me to be in on next Friday's first shift so I can leave early for the weekend, as mom is postponing Thanksgiving until I am done with dialysis for the week. (Same for Christmas.) That means I will be up at 4am for a 5am pickup, with treatment starting at 6am. Oh, yay...
Saturday, November 12, 2022
CLERKS III (2022)
Art imitates life.
So,
I finally got around to watching CLERKS III (2022), a film that makes
it a score of 3 for 3 in the trilogy of CLERKS movies, by which I refer
to the continuing streak of quality. The trilogy is now complete, after a
sixteen-year gap between installments, and the characters still have
not exceeded their sell-by date.
Writer/director/actor Kevin
Smith mines his own experiences with having had a heart attack and
funnels them to the screen through the eternally assholish Randall (the
superb Jeff Anderson), who, upon surviving "the widowmaker," is hit with
a creative epiphany that spurs him to write and direct the story of his
and Dante's (Brian O'Halloran) experiences as video store and
convenience store clerks. It's all an excuse to recreate the making of
the first film, but what makes it sing are the emotional beats, of which
there are plenty. CLERKS III delivers hear-rending (pun intended) gut
punches while also depicting the heart attack ER experiences with 100%
accuracy, and I say that with authority because I have been there. No
lie, I teared-up several times during the the film, and I intend to
watch it again.
The always welcome return of Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith).
Hilariously
profane (as expected) and genuinely touching, this brings the humble
CLERKS story to a full-circle end, tying everything in the neatest of
bows. RECOMMENDED, though you absolutely have to have seen the previous
two installments, as it is loaded to the rafters with narrative
callbacks featuring situations and characters from CLERKS and CLERKS II.
THE FUN CONTINUES
My esophagus is fine, but a feature of my stomach’s entrance is not functioning properly and is not allowing food to pass into my belly. Instead it backs up and is pushed out, and the hiccuping is part of that.
Consequently, I have to go in for a manometry test on Thursday, December 1st, and that will entail a camera being shoved down my throat for a look around in my stomach while I am awake. Not fun, but we’re getting closer to a solution.
Wednesday, November 02, 2022
THE ONGOING FUN OF DIALYSIS AND ITS ATTENDENT CAR SERVICE TRIBULATIONS
Today was pretty much a shitshow across the board.
My car to dialysis is nearly an hour late. I called the dispatcher and they said it was a fuckup on the driver’s part. Another car was sent but no ETA could be given. I finally got picked up at 10:05, and the driver took different route “because traffic,” but we ended up stuck crawling on 3rd Avenue thanks to delivery truck gridlock. I didn't make it to the center until nearly 11, which meant that once I was prepped and the dialyzer was in action, my projected end time was for 2:40pm but it didn't end until nearly 3.
Along with my car being over an hour late for my morning pickup, the center was understaffed to a ridiculous degree. I have no idea why, but there were only four nurses to handle thirty patients, and I fell into the care of a visibly harried Tanya, as Shaunda was absent. She had several others to attend to before me, so my finish time would be close to 3pm. I endured the usual 3 hours and 49 minutes on the machine, and just before it was over I noticed goopy, coagulating blood on the mat below my fistula arm.
I did not call for assistance as my treatment time was about four minutes from the end, but when she saw the blood, Tanya felt terrible. As she took care of it and cleaned me up, she admitted to half-assing my prep, having forgotten to apply the gauze wadding the goes over the band-aids that comer the needle entry points before binding ahead of the dialyzer starting up. She been so harried by running around from patient to patient, she simply forgot. I told her it was not big deal, but the poor sweetheart was beside herself.
Then, once released, I ended up in the downstair lobby and called the car service to inquire about when my ride home would arrive. I was told ten minutes, but when twenty had elapsed, I called again and was once more told ten minutes. The car ended up being forty minutes late, and I was positioned in the front passenger seat because I yet again got stuck with a triple pickup. Those are always awful, as they take forever because they always take the other passengers deep into Crown Heights of Flatlands and I am always the last to get dropped off, but also, especially when ludicrously late like today, the car ends up encountering the start of rush hour traffic, and god help us if we have to take the highways or any of the major avenues in my area. Needless to say, we were subjected to slow-moving congestion, a state made all the worse by the fact that one of the two passengers behind me was strongly redolent of stale urine.
After dropping off the other passengers in Crown Heights, the driver made his way to my neck of the woods, but the queue of cars waiting to take the exit for Park Slope's 3rd and 4th Avenues was about a half-mile long, so he instead opted to drive to industrial Gowanus and make his way to my area. I'm glad he did because while on the way we passed a building on some street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues called "The Vulcan," and its black entrance was decorated with what to the untrained eye looked like filigree decoration, but I, a geek, immediately recognized it as the Vulcan font from STAR TREK. I have no idea what it said, as I do not read Vulcan or any other fictional language, but now I intend to eventually swing back over there and photograph it so I can use a guide to translate it. It likely just reads "the Vulcan," but I am curious to have a concrete answer...
Tuesday, November 01, 2022
RIDIN' IN THE JESUSMOBILE
Monday, October 31, 2022
31 DAYS OF HORROR 2022 - Day 31: THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA (1973)
Taking care of business.
"The Satanic Shite of Dracula," more like..
All good things must come to an end, and this film was one of the undeniable harbingers that Hammer's era of glory was well and truly over. As with the previous entry, gone are the atmospheric Gothic sets and fog-shrouded forests and cobblestone streets, instead swapped out for the modern (translation: cheaper) England, and with that loss the soul of Hammer bit the dust.
For his last turn as Hammer's Dracula, Christopher Lee is given a dire script in which an apparently suicidal Dracula presides over a Satanic cult while seeking to take out humanity via a super-powerful version of the bubonic plague whipped up by a biochemical engineer in his thrall. Peter Cushing's Van Helsing is along for the ride, but at this point its all a case of too little too late.
A rarity in one of these films: an Asian vampire of the European variety (as opposed to the Chinese jiāngshī, of hopping vampire)
THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA is as lifeless as its titular character and could easily be ignored altogether if not for its historical position as Lee's final outing in the role that made him an international star. An ignoble fate for the count, but it is what it is.
When you are bereft of ideas, it's time to break out the tiddies.
And
wwith that we close out this year's 31 DAYS OF HORROR essays. See you
next year and HAPPY HALLOW\WEEN, o my fellow Cine-Miscreants!
Sunday, October 30, 2022
31 DAYS OF HORROR 2022 - Day 30: ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948)
In
a nutshell: Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi) wants to give the enslaved
Frankenstein's Monster Glenn Strange) a more advanced brain, while
Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), aka the Wolf Man, seeks a cure for his
curse. Those goals bring the monsters into the path of legendary comedy
duo Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, and hijinx ensue.
I
gotta be honest. I never much cared for the films of Abbott and
Costello, seeing them mostly when they ran on WPIX Channel 11 on Sundays
when I was a kid, and I only review it now because I have been
repeatedly asked to do so for the past several years, so I'm just
getting it over with. In fact, the only cinematic comedy performers who
were already antiques by the time I discovered them that I genuinely
enjoyed were the Marx Brothers and Danny Kaye, by they are not germane
to this essay. A&C always came off to me as something my
grandparents might find funny, but I always hated Abbott treating
Costello in a manner that today is rightly considered bullying, plus
Abbott's characters were always assholes, so what was there to like?
Pairing two comedians whom I could not stand with monsters that I adored
was a recipe for disaster, but in watching this film again I earnestly
hoped that over four decades away from it would give me a fresh
perspective.
Nope.
If
anything, my resentment of the film has only deepened, as I found
little funny about it, and seeing the classic Universal monsters, once
legit figures of terror, reduced to laughingstocks was galling to this
57-year-old monster kid. Even with modern horror characters, it's always
a sign of over-saturation and a character/franchise being played-out
when a horror icon becomes used as a comedic McGuffin or as a punchline,
and in the case of this movie, we get three of the all-time greats
rendered into stoogery.
The Wolf Man emerges from the bathroom. Just imagine the kind of savage dump a werewolf would take.
It broke my heart to see these former titans of the gothic macabre being depicted as bad sitcom guest stars, with the Wolfman somewhat maintaining his dignity. His crashing through the castle window in pursuit of Dracula, thus possibly ensuring both of their dooms, was tone of the few elements in the film that really felt like something out of a classic Universal monster movie. The rest was a farce that, if I am being honest, has not aged particularly well, but that is okay if you are into that sort of thing.
A
brilliant visual gag and easily the funniest moment in the entire film.
If you seen the movie, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
However, the honest bottom line is that I am simply not the audience for this film that most others hail as a classic, a classic that I say has not aged well. I'm just glad this was made before the Creature fro the Black Lagoon made his debut, otherwise he too would have been dragged down with his forebears. I recommend this for Universal Monsters completists only.
Saturday, October 29, 2022
31 DAYS OF HORROR 2022 -Day 29: THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS (1962)
A cosmic event in the form of a meteor shower lights up the sky around the world, much to the initial delight of the billions of people who watch it proceed.
"There's beauty up above/That you'd better NOT take notice of..."
Unfortunately, what no one could have predicted was those who watched being permanently struck blind by the spectacle. Consequently, most of the world's population stumbles about blind, with only a handful of lucky people who were either asleep during the event or otherwise prevented from using their eyes. Simultaneous to this catastrophe, previously harmless extraterrestrial plants of the order Triffidus Celestus, commonly referred to as Triffids and found in abundance all over the planet, uprot themselves, having gained the power of mobility, and in no time mindless hordes of the damned things are traipsing all over the place. The Triffids, mindless but legion, wield a deadly poisonous stinger at the end of a whip-like tongue, and their favorite food is man. With most of humanity blind and helpless, the nations of the world find themselves suddenly transformed into a banquet for carnivorous alien plant life that stalks prey not by sight but sound, and the narrative follows the tribulations of a handful of survivors amid the most bizarre of an apocalypse.
Our main protagonist is Bill Masen (Howard Keel), a merchant naval officer who underwent eye surgery, just before the meteors began to fall, so his bandaged eyes miss the once in a lifetime show, leaving him one of the handful of sighted people in all of England.
After removing his bandages, he is horrified to see the state of the world, but he sets of in hope of finding other sighted individuals. He soon encounters Susan, a pre-teen girl who also has her sight, and he rescues her from being forcibly hauled off by some blind rando who likely seeks to enslave her as his personal human service dog (and possibly worse, if you get my drift). Masen and Susan form an unlikely pair but they are that that the other has, so their relationship becomes one of surrogate father-daughter survivors as they wander Triffid-infested Europe, facing many unspeakable horrors in the form of the killer plants and the utter collapse of human civilization.
There's also a B-plot involving a married pair of scientists (Kieron Moore and Janette Scott) wwho are doing research at a remote lighthouse.
Their marriage has clearly seen better days, as the two constantly and viciously bicker while the husband salves his issues with drink. They are suddenly forced to cut their petty bullshit and band together to survive when they find themselves at Ground Zero for a Triffid incursion. Having defeated one of the plants, they set about figuring out how to wipe them out en masse, but they soon find out the hard way that Triffids can regenerate...
international communications mostly being dead, and, particularly awful, a French chateau that was serving as a safe haven for the blind until it is taken over by escaped convicts who all have their sight. They immediately grab the female occupants and commence a drunken orgy with rape heavily implied. It's bad enough to be sexually assaulted, but to have it happen when blind and defenseless is just... (SHUDDER)
Forced to dance with convicts before the screaming starts...
Fortunately (?) an army of Triffids arrives and soon overruns the place as our heroes escape, taking sighted French lady Christine (Nicole Maurey), along for good measure, thus completing a ragtag family unit of sorts.
The
film is not without its flaws — such as the shonky Triffid puppets, but
their craptasticness kind of works in their favor and lends them an
undefined, otherworldly look and feel — but I have found it a compelling
watch since first seeing it during a weekend afternoon screening on
Secaucus, New Jersey's WWOR Channel 9, in the days before my mom got us
cable. I must have watched it something like ten times, always mulling
over the sheer terror of such an apocalyptic event and how human society
would simply go straight down the bowl were such a thing to actually
happen. That said, the film has been very hard to find on home video in a
decent print, often turning up in washed-out transfers, so keep your
eyes open for cable movie channels possibly airing it. It's a classic
that is absolutely worth your time, and it will likely scare the shit
out of the kiddies.
Friday, October 28, 2022
31 DAYS OF HORROR 2022 - Day 28: THE WOLF MAN (1941)
NOTE: Alas, due to the torturous realities of my apparently endles cycle of dialysis/recovery/repeat getting to me and bringing on a period of depression, I have been unable to concentrate on this year's round of essays as intended. Thus, I have t cheat again with a rerun of an older entry, but at least it's a solid one, arguably the Ground Zero of the werewolf movie as we now know it. Please forgive and bear with me as I soldier back to to normalcy. I promise that the last three of this year's entries will be original essays.
— The Management
- A protagonist that we cannot help but like and genuinely care about
- Ye olde superstitions and pagan magic colliding head-on with disbelief wrought by modern science and psychology
- Doomed romance
- The involvement of wise/creepy gypsies (Yeah, I know that "gypsy" is now considered an ethnic slur, but I use it here rather than "Romani" because most folks who know the stock type in stories of this nature may be unfamiliar with the accurate ethnic/cultural designation)
- Charms to ward off the curse that serve little or no purpose
- Ill omens that all point to werewolf-related awfulness
- Silver being the surefire way to kill a werewolf
- All of the "modern" characters firmly believing that the afflicted's claims of being cursed with werwolfism are indicators of grievous mental illness
- The protagonist's tragedy being compounded by his death inevitably being facilitated by a loved one
