Since the early 1980's, I have dressed for comfort in t-shirts that express my interests in bands, assorted media, you name it. Over the space of four decades, I have amassed quite the collection, and here are the ones currently in-house, most of which I have not worn in years.
Let's start with band tees:
NEXT: MONTY PYTHON
At this morning's dialysis weigh-in, I came in over my fluid weight again (not grossly so, but still...), so I looked into exactly how much fluid in kilos the limit of 32 ounces per day actually is in terms of visually understandable volume. 32 ounces per day is something like slightly less than two small glasses of water, barely enough to quench the average adult's thirst over the course of any given day. I can get away with a little more during the week, as 32 ounces is a general guideline and the actual amount for an individual can vary due to factors of height and weight, but whatever the case, 32 ounces is still an agonizingly small amount of fluid, especially for a person like me, who loves drinking water.
From now on, other than special occasions, I will restrict myself to water, unsweetened tea, or homemade lemonade (heavily diluted). Unless there's nothing else to drink or I'm at the movies, that means goodbye to sodas and other soft drinks. I will miss them, but if my fluid consumption must be so stringently limited, I will just keep my libation choices basic and mostly essential. And yes, tragically, soups count. Who know dialysis would turn me into a Fremen (only with my eyes remaining brown)?
Sometimes
I swear I must be a werewolf. My underbite, when I chose not to allow
my lower lip to hide it, resembles that of Lon Chaney Jr's in THE WOLF
MAN (1941), and when I shave any part of my body, hair aggressively
manifests overnight, and I spend the time until the next shave in a
scratchy state that feels like the onset of lycanthropic transformation.
Aaaaah-WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO...
Last night I had the craziest dream:
I was throwing a massive party at my mother's house in Connecticut, and all of my friends were there. Adult libations flowed freely, the air was thick with the waft of copious weed consumption, loud music played, and good vibes were all around. After a good mingle among the attendees, I took a break in the dining room and began to roll a huge blunt of the kind my old friend Gordon used to call a "scoober."
As I smoked the scoober, who should press his shirtless pecs against the window but Jason Momoa? I got up and let him into the house, only to discover that he was completely naked, except for being covered with runnels of crude oil. I did not ask why he was in such a state, and he suddenly presented me with a huge fish for me to cook later. That was nice, but considering that naked Jason Momoa was present, I had to find my dear friend Cheri and let her meet him. I made my way through the masses but could not find her.
While looking for Cheri, the party suddenly came to a halt as all ceased activity and formed a line to pay respects to a kid next door who was dying of cancer, and our coming to see him was to be considered as his pirate-themed "going away party." The kid's house was an artsy abode whose interior featured Escheresque stairways and angles that required full concentration and great physical dexterity to navigate.
I never made it to see the dying child, as I ran into Cheri and told her of the presence of naked Jason Momoa. I steered her in his direction, but that's where the dream ended and I awoke to face the day.
Thank you, Gabapentin, for another night of weird-assed dreaming!
Wednesday morning’s car service pickup to dialysis saw the return of the “Liquor Man,” and he was in quite a talkative state. He went on at length wondering how I can live in a neighborhood so “loaded with beautiful American women without your dick falling off.” (He lives in Brighton Beach, among “beautiful Russian women who will let you eat their ass.”) He also wondered how he would do if he printed up more of his calling card and stood in front of my building handing them out, but he was too far into his delusions to accept that the hot 20-somethings in Park Slope likely have zero interest in a fat, balding, flagrantly horny 50-year-old with a face like a bulldog‘s ass. This one-sided conversation lasted for the duration of the trip, and it was just plain sad.
Being a captive audience is never the way to start a treatment day, but it’s inescapable when your driver is fluent in English (a rarity for this car service), likes you, and thinks they have a sympathetic ear to whom they can vent about the grottier aspects of their ongoing horniness.
Never mind the bollocks.
Just made it through PISTOL (2022), Hulu's six-part adaptation of Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones's memoir, LONELY BOY, directed by Danny Boyle of TRAINSPOTTING renown, and as rock biopics go, it's among my favorites. The story of the rise and fall of the Sex Pistols has held me fascinated since it was happening — I first heard them as their disastrous U.S. tour was occurring, so sometime during 1978 — and I was glad to see that the generous 6-hour format allowed for as much of its tapestry as possible. The performances were spot-on, if the actors were all far too attractive to be visually convincing as the people they were portraying (short of starving them and then giving them a steady diet of fistfuls of amphetamines) and with some of them leaning into the legend of the band members' individual characters almost to the point of a live-action cartoon, and from top to bottom the soundtrack is just stellar.
I fully get that punk is not for everyone, especially not the first wave U.K. flavor, but it spoke to my disenfranchised soul at the time and still resonates with me today, so I heartily recommend it to those who can handle its bleakness. A feel-good story it ain't, and there is no happy ending, other than the fact that all of the original members are still alive. (Remember, Sid Vicious was a replacement for original bassist Glenn Matlock.) RECOMMENDED.
I can practically smell the patchouli.
Disney
STAR WARS continues to treat the franchise like a Play-Doh Fun Factory,
with OBI-WAN KENOBI being its latest cranked-out product. Kenobi was my
favorite character in the original film, and Ewan McGregor did a good
job bringing his younger iteration to life in the prequel trilogy, but
now Kenobi is back in what amounts to a pronounced case of ROGUE ONE
syndrome, basically yet another prequel that tragically shows how
creatively bankrupt those holding the reins are.
Stop
me if you've heard this one before: Obi-Wan Kenobi, now a hermit in the
wastes of Tattooine, is called out of seclusion to rescue a kidnapped
Princess Leia (age 10). We already know the guy hermited himself for
something like 20 years, until once more called back to action, and by
all accounts he kept the lowest of low profiles, with adventure not
being a part of his lifestyle at that time. The current story sees
agents of the Empire ruthlessly scouring the galaxy in search of
disparate Jedi to stamp out once and for all in the wake of Order 66, so
Kenobi works as what amounts to a sushi processor on Tattooine.
I
watched the first two chapters and it's all well-realized, but once
more it is nothing but a feast of 'Memberberries with little else to
offer other than immersive production values. I've said it before and
I'll say it again: the STAR WARS galaxy is vast, the very definition of
"far-flung," but we keep getting the same locations and situations and,
frankly, I am quite sick of it. Though not bad by any means, OBI-WAN
KENOBI did not excite me in the least, and when Episode 2 ended, I felt
like I watched it for no reason other than to comment on it. It was just
kind of...there. Honestly, I could bail now and feel that my life would
be in no way diminished by not continuing. I may wait and allow a bit
more to accrue before I continue, but I could also easily just walk
away. I mean, what's Kenobi, a space wizard, if he has to keep his
lightsaber and Force skills hidden? I'll tell you what. A bum.
This is no THE MANDALORIAN. Your mileage, however, may vary.
NOTE: This piece was originally published here ten years ago, on what was then the 30th anniversary. I re-post it in honor of the 45th.
Remember
when you were a little kid and your folks took you to the movies for
the first time? I can’t speak for everyone else out there, but I still
have clear memories of the first movie I saw in the theater, namely a
now obscure animated feature called GULLIVER’S TRAVELS BEYOND THE MOON. I
didn’t know at the time that it was a dubbed Japanese import, but I
will never forget the feeling of having the movie theater’s Stygian
blackness envelop me and remove me from the mundane world, placing me
firmly in the fantasy world the flickered onscreen. The largeness of the
space only accentuated my own three-year-old smallness in that big,
cushioned seat, and being utterly sucked in by the storytelling made me
feel a sense of magic and wonder unique to the movies for the first time
in my life.
For me, going to the movies was that most special of treats, and having
proven to my parents that I could be well-behaved and sit spellbound, I
went to a hell of a lot of flicks in those pre-VCR days, even
attractions that were distinctly not for kids (THE GODFATHER and SERPICO
immediately spring to mind).
My first favorite film was the lavish live action Disney version of 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (one of many influences that lead me to think of becoming a marine biologist, a field that I did not end up pursuing, but still study as an amateur to this day), eclipsed five years later by JAWS, and, yes, all those stories that you’ve heard about how it literally scared people off out of the oceans for years are absolutely the gospel truth (my mom tells me that after seeing Hitchcock’s PSYCHO in 1960 she was too terrified to take a shower if no one else was in the house for quite some time). Such was the power of cinema in the days before “films by committee.” But no movie-going experience before or since has utterly shaken me to the core as both a film fan and a human being as seeing the original STAR WARS on opening night in May of 1977, an event that occurred quite by accident.
My father had recently moved back to the New York area after nearly two years near Washington, D.C. (where I had visited him during the Bicentennial and we had seen the legendary INFRA-MAN as a first-run movie), and in one of our many vain attempts to foster any kind of real parent/child relationship we drove into Manhattan one evening, intent on seeing Woody Allen’s ANNIE HALL. When we arrived in the city, we were dismayed to find that every theater that had the movie was sold out for all shows that night and we were simply shit out of luck. We wandered about Times Square for some time, trying to figure out what to do next, when my dad spotted a movie poster outside the Astor Plaza for some film called STAR WARS. There were no people on line for it, and neither one of us was surprised by that since we’d never heard word one about it. Lacking anything better to do, my dad looked at me and said, “You want to give this a shot?” I said, “Why not?” and we entered the nearly deserted foyer. Once popcorn and sodas had been obtained, we took our seats among the roughly eighty people in the place. Soon the lights dimmed and we readied our selves for what would probably be another cheesy sci-fi potboiler (my parents may not have agreed on much, but neither of them ever forgave me for dragging them to see the horrendous Italian borefest WAR BETWEEN THE PLANETS). Assorted trailers came and went, and then the familiar signature tune and logo of 20th Century Fox pictures lit up the screen. Then the audio abruptly went silent and the screen went black, save for tiny blue letters that read, “A long time ago, in a galaxy, far, far away…”
Then BAM!
A blaring musical sting exploded out of the speakers, swiftly cohering into a lush orchestral arrangement, as the camera pulled back on a massive star field to reveal the words “Star Wars.”
As the title faded further into the distance, a text crawl like those found in the old Flash Gordon serial chapter plays that my father loved during his youth set the scene for the audience. Then a multi-engined spacecraft hauled ass over the camera, firing blast after blast behind it, clearly in an attempt to shake off some pursuing menace. As the embattled cruiser flew into the horizon, the pointed white tip of an obviously bigger vessel loomed into view, itself returning volley after volley at its fleeing prey. And the huge, wedge-shaped ship loomed further onto the screen, giving a clue as to its massive scale. And it kept coming.
And coming.
And coming.
How fucking big was the damned thing???
With hugeness like that on display, all I could think of was that this is what a space opera helmed by Cecil B. DeMille would have looked like. And my initial perception was not far from the mark at all; the audience was dropped smack dab into a fully- realized universe of space fantasy, dripping with all manner of indescribable aliens, creatures, robots, spaceships, heroes — both competent and otherwise — lightsaber-wielding warriors, mind-boggling state-of-the-art visual effects, and an asthmatic black-clad villain whose helmet made his head look like a big cock. All of which got capped off with the most spectacular space battle ever seen on film up to that time. In short, everything a lad just a month short of his twelfth birthday would want to see, with the exception of some luscious boobies (which we kinda got anyway since Princess Leia was obviously unencumbered during her stay on the Death Star, especially when she was soaking wet in the trash compactor). When the credits rolled, the entire audience stood and cheered like zealots at a revival meeting.
Without knowing it, we had become the first generation of STAR WARS cultists.
Upon reaching the outer lobby I purchased the movie program and pored over every minute detail of the photos that would soon become familiar across the globe, and as my dad and I drove back to his apartment in White Plains neither of us said a word. We were both simply too stunned by the experience. When I returned to school in Westport that Monday, I ranted and raved like a religious fanatic about STAR WARS, and my sixth grade schoolmates looked at me as though they were witnessing my utter mental breakdown. The saddest part was that there was no way for my wild tales to be proven until the film opened in town, something that didn’t happen for another month since this was the days long before multiplexes and saturation openings. But in the end I was proven right, and all of my adolescent contemporaries fell under the spell of STAR WARS and “drank the Kool Aid,” so to speak.
And the rest was history.
That’s my story, but please write in with your tale of seeing STAR WARS for the first time, especially if you saw it when it came out. It’s kind of hard to communicate what a kick in the ass that movie gave to the general public at the time, especially when trying to get it across to this current generation who are victims of George Lucas’ — and most of Hollywood’s, for that matter — creative bankruptcy.
