Podcasting, not podracing

Several months ago my very good friend Eeon asked me if I would like to join him and our very good friend Pete in podcasting on Cutthroat Island over at Canned Laser.  I was confused, because their first podcast was of Robocop, which is a good movie, and Cutthroat Island is, well, a bad movie.  But of course I agreed, because I knew it was going to be a chance to talk about movies with Eeon and Pete, who are pretty much my own personal Mike Nelson and Kevin Murphy.  Eeon is one of my favorite people in the entire world; he has a wonderful Midwestern sense of humor and tends to take jokes to absurd levels.  No one makes me laugh harder.

Pete, on the other hand, graduated before I got to Binghamton University and was therefor only known to me in myth and legend.  I seem to remember him being about seven feet tall. We reunited at Eeon's wedding and I was surprised that he remembered me, because I did not recognize him in a tuxedo and of mere mortal size. I have since found him to be a phenomenal storyteller, the familiar legends each time taking on a slightly more mythic quality each time they are retold.

So in mid December 2011, I went down to Eeon's house, where he and his wonderful wife Bridget gave me a leopard print snuggie to sleep under and let me drink their expensive whole-leaf tea. I don't think it's possible to love and respect Bridget anymore than I already do, after all, she allowed me to give the speech from Independence Day at her wedding, whereas most brides in my social circle seat me somewhere between the kid's table and the kitchen as punishment for daring to speak to their husbands with my brazen, hussy propositions of "hey, want to come over and watch Cowboy Bebop and eat a jumbo bag Ranch Doritoes?"



I didn't realize that podcasting about a movie would require us to watch the movie, let alone twice.  I hadn't seen Cutthroat Island since college and despite my teenage love for it, found this part to be excruciating. We riffed.  We made notes on yellow legal paper.  I quoted along with the film, astonished at my own geekiness.  I was having trouble remembering the name of the diner Eeon and I had lunch at earlier that afternoon, but I could remember whole chunks of dialogue from a film I hadn't seen in five years.

By now, it was nearly 11 p.m.  Bridget had gone to bed, and Pete was just setting up the recording equipment.  The first take started around midnight.  We talked for about 45 minutes.  We did a second take around 1 a.m.  When you listen to the podcast, you start to hear where we're getting punchy and silly, where our words slur together and we trip over our phrases.  Those are from that take.

At around 2 a.m, we finished and went to bed.  Because Pete was staying over too, I had to surrender the couch, (but not the Snuggie) and slept on the loveseat with my knees drawn up.  Around 3a.m, I heard audio and wondered if I'd fallen asleep in the middle of recording.  Nope, it was just Pete.  I asked him what the hell he was doing.  Editing, I guess.  I fell back asleep with my own voice echoing back at me.

I have a bleary memory of Bridget leaving.  I was glad when she came back, because she brought back bagels.  We all ate like zombies.  She went to the movies and we three, still in our pajamas, watched the rifftrax of The Star Wars Holiday Special, too exhausted to do anything but lie there and take it.  If the rifftrax had stopped dead, we would have just kept watching.  That's how tired we were.

And if I had the chance, I'd do it a hundred times more.  It was a great experience, talking film with two people who love movies and make me laugh, even at 2am when I am punchy and tired.  Hope you all enjoy listening to the podcast as much as I enjoyed recording it.

What's the Deal with Lexus Ads?

I've been home sick for three days now, which is a drag because I hate being sick and still live in the minimum-wage fear of being fired despite the fact that I have a great job where I am treated well and valued as an employee.

This is a new thing for me, and it occasionally manifests itself in utter terror and confusion.  "Wait, I can be home sick and not lose my job?  You mean the interim chair of the English department at SUNY Cobleskill won't intimidate my students by telling them I'm a bad teacher* and then try to take away my unemployment benefits when they fire me just shy of the point in my employment where they would be forced to hire me on a permanent basis, thus having to pay me a living wage?  What magical land of employment is this?"

Kenny Johnson: Does he or does
he not look like Vash the Stampede?

So in being unable to get off the couch due to  weakness brought on by being able to stomach little more than saltines and ginger ale, I've fallen back in love with Hulu (that, and watching my cats wrestle).  Ian and I have arranged our Netflix queue so that we always have something we both want to watch (we like sharing), so since I was home all alone, I could finally catch up on trash TV, like Law and Order: SVU (which was awful before Stabler left and is worse now) and Commander in Chief (which isn't great, but Geena Davis is beautiful and my hero and I would elect her President without second thought).  Hell, I could have watched Trigun if I wanted to, but Trigun always depresses me a bit, because it should be good and it just isn't.

Here's the thing about Hulu.  There are ads.  This is fine, I always mute advertising, but I noticed that they're usually ads for expensive things, like $200 phones or a Lexus.  I am watching free TV on an 8-year old laptop . . . are free TV watchers really the kind of people you. people at Lexus, think will buy a car that costs more to lease than they make in an entire year?   They can't even afford cable!  It just seems like taunting to me.



*I have had exactly one student in six years say I was a bad teacher.  Probably because he failed the class.  Also, I have a chili pepper next to my name on ratemyprofessor.com, which means I'm H-O-T.  This means more to me than a stack of good reports, because I am vain.  

Celebrity Fantasy: Special Panel Edition

My latest fantasy is the only one I have that takes place in my actual house, and it's a three-way.  You see, ever since Ian bought me a full-sized, fully functional replica of Tom Servo, I've been watching a TON of Mystery Science Theater 3000.  And this, along with my rantings about the sorry state of cinema, lead me back to Kevin Murphy's brilliant A Year at the Movies.  Because Jay Sherman is fictional, that leaves Kevin Murphy to be my favorite film critic.  Not only is he a genius, but he is also hysterical and has a strong midwestern common sense, which I can respect, probably because it's a foreign concept to me.  I believe that most movie critics are wimps paid off by the movie studios (how else can you explain Roger Ebert giving Daredevil "two thumbs up!") but Kevin Murphy is no one's man.  He also hated Rocky Horror Picture Show, which almost makes me want to marry him. 

The other participant in this little exercise is Geena Davis . . .  and they both come over to my house and I invite them in to sit on the couch, and because this is a fantasy, the arms aren't all clawed up from Bosco's constant climbing.  I offer them a drink and some spinach triangles and we get down the business of discussing film.  I want to hear Geena Davis speak on women in the media.  I want to hear some of Kevin's own rantings.  I want to add in my thesis and hear them both tell me how smart and perceptive I am for a 28 year old, the exact target audience for drivel like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and yet, how wisely I eschew the pop culture idiocy of my peers. 

We drink some coffee and take some pot-shots at Nathan Rabin.  Kevin gives me a high-five.  Geena Davis tells me I'm the smartest girl she's ever met and offers me a job at the Institute.  Because I want to feel smart.  I want to feel well-versed and intellectual and like someone cares about what I have to say . . . I guess that's the fantasy of every blogger.

As I mentioned earlier, I gave up swearing for Lent.  More on this here, but in addition to giving up cursing, I also gave up celeb gossip.  I had already given up TMZ (for the most part) as part of my New Years Resolution, but I was sitting there on Ash Wendsday, reading The Superficial and wondering how long I would last before I dropped my first f-bomb (6 hours) and I realized that here I was, ingesting something that was fundementally bad for me and a waste of my time.  Because really, what does it matter in my life what Lindsey Lohan had for lunch?

So I clicked out of the page, and haven't read any since.

Negativity breeds negativity.  When I was living in NYC, I was surrounded by newsstands and glossy gossip rags screaming about Nick and Jessica's divorce.  It actually depressed me--I got anxious just walking past a rack of magazines, the bold headlines of their impending marital doom made me really, really sad.  Not because I gave or ever have given a fig about Jessica Simpson.  I'm not even sure what a Nick Lachey is.  But the public airing of their dirty laundry made me sad for humanity, and I had to make a deliberate effort to look the other way.  And you know what?  It worked.

I'm doing this, partially, for Charlie Sheen.  And again, I don't care one way or another about Charlie Sheen; I've seen exactly one of his movies (The Three Musketeers) and watch Two and a Half Men only when I'm staying in NYC, it's 1AM, I can't sleep and it's either that or the Times Square traffic cam.  And as his spiral started downwards, I, like everyone else in America, watched in horrified fascination. 

But then I realized that I was a major part of his problem.  I had become one of the people who clicked on every news item, thus giving him the audience he sought.  I realized that I couldn't actively participate in a man's public suicide--it was sick and it was wrong and I'm glad to be rid of it.

I no longer read gossip headlines at the grocery store--instead, I look up recipes or *gasp* talk to my boyfriend.  The time I was wasting catching up on Heidi Montag is now spent writing or listening to records or writing letters to my friends.  My productivity has increased and I don't feel so bogged down with the ugliness of the world--because gossip is never nice, it's always judgemental and this world is too beautiful for the feuds on Teen Mom to fill it with poison.

This isn't to say I've given up celebs--but rather, I've switched my focus.  I look up old interviews with Walton Goggins because the way he creates his characters inspires me in my writing.  I read about Geena Davis' work at the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media because I think she's a rare breed of woman.  I try to find people who inspire me, not waste my time with their petty garbage.

If you had asked me, at 13, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said, "Geena Davis."  To a 13 year old girl, she was the most beautiful, most exciting, most wonderful woman I had ever seen, either in real life or on film (although my dad's friend Judy was a close second and remains, to this day, the funniest woman I have ever known).  I think I might love her more than Walton Goggins.



The author, generously, at 13



As a 13 year old girl with stringy brown hair, big round glasses and three beautiful sisters, two curly blondes and one with an enormous mane of Indian-dark, crimped, waist-length hair, I dreamed of one day being beautifiul--and when I saw Geena Davis for the first time as Mogan Adams in the catastrophic film flop Cutthroat Island, it was as though I had fallen in love. 

That was what I wanted to look like.  She was handsome, strong, she had big full lips and her tits weren't fake and huge.  When I later read an interview in the Parade magazine insert that came with the Sunday paper, I found out she was not only beautiful and talented, she belonged to MENSA and made her own clothes--as a bookworm, a beginning writer, fan of patterned leggings, (Lucca and I shared a proclivity for short boots) Star Wars geek and a general 6th grade weirdo, this spoke to me.  Not only did I want to look like Geena Davis, I wanted to be Geena Davis.  I wanted to be a pirate/ghost/journalist/bank robber/space bride/vampire.  I wanted to be an actress/genius/fashion designer with giant crimped hair and Jeff Goldblum/Matthew Modine/Alec Baldwin (when he was cute) on my arm.  I wanted the freedom to live out loud the way it seemed like she did.  Because she confessed (as I realized all actors do, only she didn't seem like she was lying) that she had been an awkward teenager, but she went to Hollywood and never gave up and became this beautiful goddess on my TV screen.  "It never occured to me to go home," I read over and over in that Parade interview.  "I just kept telling myself, "it's just around the next corner.""

I STILL fantasize about this

I grew into all of her movies.  My mom let me stay home from my dad's one friday night, got us a bag of mini Baby Ruths and Ranch Doritos and finally showed me Beetlejuice--it's one of my favorite memories of my mom (not like she's dead or anything, don't worry).  I played Cutthroat Island endlessly, endlessly with my friends Jess C. and Jess LP.  I was an still am an unabashed fan of this film, I don't care how cheesy and awful it is, and when I actually met Matthew Modine I would have told him this but I hadn't eaten that day and was concentrating more on not fainting when he kissed me on the cheek.

She wore fangs in Transylvania 6-500 because she was shy and wanted people to notice her, which is the exact reason I wear pink go-go boots or do silly MPDG things like give people Warren Zevon records when I can't get up the courage to tell them that I want to be friends. 



Also fantasized about being Geena Davis RIGHT HERE



When my stepdad left, I was so angry and hurt that for days after I got the news, all I could do was lay on the couch and watch Earth Girls are Easy on loop--my stepdad had, after all, left his wife and kids for a nurse he worked with, so Geena prancing in pink lingerie singing "The Ground You Walk On" after she's thrown him out and is destroying all of his stuff struck a deep, lingering chord with me (especially because I had stolen his record player and turned his first pressing of Abbey Road into a bowl).  I wanted Jeff Goldblum to drop out of the sky and take me away from the awful reality that I was ultimately disposable to someone who had entered my house seventeen years ago and expected me to absorb him into my life, when clearly I had no been absorbed into his. 



I nurtured this fantasy that Geena Davis was my real mom and she'd given me up because she didn't want me being a spoiled Hollywood brat and that one day she would come and get me and I could get out of Cobleskill, out of my crappy teaching job, out of a life that was rapidly falling to pieces.  I stared at myself in the mirror, looking for any traces of generic familiarity--after all, I didn't look like my mother, my father or my two full sisters (I do, however, bear an uncanny resemblance to my half sisters, although none of us look like our mother.)  If Geena Davis was my mom, it meant that I wasn't stuck in Cobleskill--I could get out from a town that was suffocating me and would swallow whole so many people I loved.  The best compliment I ever recieved was when my BFF Matthew told me I was a little pint-sized Geena Davis, that I did, actually, look a little bit like her.  (I do have a little freckle the same place she has a small beauty mark)

Lately my late 20's/out of grad school/out of work/no agent/no book Geena Davis worshipping has turned to the Emmy-winning, immediately cancelled Commander in Chief.  This was on during the terrible year I lived in NYC, and I used to flip back and forth between that and House.  I never got to finish the series, so I got it on Netflix and have spent the last two weeks lying on the couch in a combination of utter misery and utter fascination--because seeing her, handsome and powerful, her deep voice commanding and tender and a little bit haunted, makes me feel 13 again.  I am again that little girl, dancing around her room to Bryan Adams, imagining herself somewhere--anywhere--but my hometown hellhole.  On stage at Radio City Music Hall or the Winter Garden.  A sound stage in LA or on location off the coast of Thailand.  Because it's just around the next corner.  Whatever it is, it's not far from where I'm standing right now.  

Just around the next corner . . . .    

Oh, I think I'm in Love

It's official.  Geena Davis is the coolest person ever.