Stupid Shit My Roommates Have Done (1 of 3)

My Cousin the Revolutionary, Female Roommate #1 and I are in the living room when who should walk in but a big, fat roach. We scream like little girls for awhile (this is back when roaches in my New York City apartment still seemed like a big deal), but eventually we get the thing cornered.

So the roach is halfway under some object and halfway exposed. Because its head is in a dark place, this roach believes itself to be completely safe. It is, in short, in a perfect position for us to do some roach crushing.

As the owner of the apartment, the oldest and the most level-headed, I am in charge of Operation Roach Crush. I send MCTR to fetch an appropriate roach-crushing object while I keep a careful eye on the roach and Female Roommate #1 stands on a piece of furniture.

After a long moment while I keep a careful eye on our visitor, what should come flying in to my field of vision but a CD Case - not a jewel box even, but a soft CD case. The type of object you would feel free to give to your one-year-old because it has no sharp edges of any kind and could not possibly do any damage to anything.

Out of all the objects of moveable size within my apartment, this is the one my cousin has selected to kill our intruder.

The CD case lands directly on the position of the trespassing roach, alerting it to our position, scattering it to the dark corners of my apartment where we have no hope of reaching it and, predictably, doing no damage to it whatsoever.

'Tis the Season

It's finally summer, and in New York, that means it's five different seasons at once.

First of all, it's the hot season.

In San Antonio, heat and humidity meet you like a wall as soon as you get out of the airport, and I will maintain every day until my dying day that the heat in Texas is a lot worse than the heat here.

But San Antonio has a cooling infrastructure (central air, ceiling fans) that for whatever reason doesn't exist in The City. There's just better internal air movement down there.

As a result, and I noticed this for the first time the other week while helping my cousin the revolutionary in to his new place, I no longer even notice when I'm pouring sweat.


Second, it's smell season.

It doesn't stink in Texas for the simple reason that there are no people walking around on the streets down there unless they are walking to their car. People mean waste and waste means smell.

I've never found the stench unbearable, but I know people, even people who grew up here (Vickyheart comes to mind) who just can't take it anymore and occasionally have to run off to live in New Jersey or something equally absurd.

Third, it is roach season.

Roaches freak me out a lot less than they did when I first move to the city, but they're definitely the worst of the five things listed here.

I crushed my first roach of the summer on a subway platform this morning. The worst I've seen was on a turkey leg outside the construction on the west side of the Port Authority Bus Terminal.


My last roommate would flee the room and sometimes the whole apartment if she thought she even heard a roach.

Roaches are a good reason to keep a clean place. Mice are more manageable. I'm sort of hoping they come back now that I have a cat, but so far they've been too smart.

Fourth, it's real estate season. Everyone but everyone, from the cute little red-haired girl who lived down the street to My Cousin the Revolutionary to my friend Gigi, who is overjoyed to finally be escaping Jersey.

New Yorkers love love love talking real estate. This Park Slope Reader guide to Park Slope blogs [PDF] has four categories: food, real estate, literary arts and kids. That's my neighborhoods priorities in a nutshell.

By the way, if you are interested in a two-bedroom in a small building in Prospect Heights for about $2000 a month, and you are cool, my email address is on the top right there.


Finally, it's tourist season. Even in Texas, people always assumed I was a New Yorker even when I wasn't, but it didn't take long for me to be able to spot the visitors on any subway platform, public park or street corner.

It takes maybe three months to understand comprehensively how to move in this city (layout, busses, rush hour, etc.), so the easiest spots to pick out tourists are sidewalks and subways.

They have to talk a lot about how to get where they're going, travel in groups that always look similar to each other, often seem travel weary because they don't tend to find the time to just sit down, and have a mildly annoying habit of just stopping in awkward places that make it difficult to walk around them.

Tourists also look different from New Yorkers, who are slimmer then most Americans just because we walk everywhere.

I don't want to sound anti-tourist because I know it's an important part of the city and brings in money, but if I am anti-tourist, I come by it honestly.

I grew up in the King William District of San Antonio, a big tourist destination for a big tourist city, and I lived in a front bedroom facing the street. Tour busses came by every hour or so. As I result, I spent my entire childhood paranoid behind closed bedroom shades.

I realize New York must sound pretty bad, infested as it is by heat, smells, roaches and tourists. The fact is, New York is always gorgeous as long as it's not obscenely cold. There is no place I'd rather be.

Random Access Culture

Alternate Title:
Schoolhouse Rock [Slash] The World as We Know It

About eight months ago, I was hanging out with some of my cousin the revolutionary's friends when the conversation turned to Schoolhouse Rock.

"Have you watched them?" Codename Judy asked a friend. "They're musicals about things like conjunctions, or how a bill becomes a law. They're really funny. You should take a look."

I realized that Codename Judy was talking about YouTube.

Now, my cousin graduated this month, three years after I graduated. In demographic terms, that makes us both upstanding members of Generation Y, but, in college terms, that puts my cousin and his friends about a generation away from me. Which is to say, MCTR spent the majority of his college years in a post-YouTube world, and I spent the majority of mine in a pre-YouTube world.


A sociological rule of thumb is that technology invented before you were a certain age is commonplace and to be taken for granted, technology invented in your adult life is kind of cool and something you may be able to make a living at, and technology invented later in your life is foreign, alien, not to be trusted and certainly not worth understanding.

I had one of my post-take-it-for-granted moments during this conversation.

Schoolhouse Rock is plausibly timeless in that it's catchy or educational no matter when you watch it, but ultimately it's a very iconic relic of the 1970s.

Up until now that meant that you had to either live through the '70s or go out of your way to watch Schoolhouse Rock. Now, you can watch it any time. Go ahead. It's right here.


Of course, it's not just Schoolhouse Rock. For the first time in history, we can experience the detritus (or at least the recorded television detritus) of any previous culture at any time. Which would mean I just went a long way to demonstrate a very simple point if it weren't for this fact's odd and far-reaching implications.


Like We Even Needed Another Victory For Postmodernism

I took a U.S. television history course at my high-pedigree school and we had a section on post-modernism.

For those of you who haven't been to college (or who have been to college but somehow avoided the idea of post-modernism, presumably by taking a lot of bio classes), postmodernism is the idea that in the present day, there is somehow so much information that we can't reliably run down a definition of anything. Or that there's so much change in the modern day that in a way you can't expect anything to go unchanged. Or it's a breakdown between the signifier and the signified. Or it's something else.

There's a million definitions of postmodernism (which is one of the most post-modern things about it, as my professor was fond of saying without irony). In television history, it's significant because no two people ever have the same experience with television, so there's no common understanding of what it is, or what it means, or its history.


Obviously, YouTube has some important implications here beyond the citizen journalism stuff you can go explore somewhere else, because for the first time we can access these obscure or outdated things whenever we want.

It's a direction television has been moving towards for awhile (rise of DVRs, etc.) I don't want to go in to it too much because there is, by definition, no end to how far you can take the idea of an increasingly postmodern world.


Culture as a Tap and Not a Resevoir

If everyone can access different aspects of culture at any time, maybe we need to think about culture differently, as more of a utility and less as a resource.

Take jokes. In the past, if someone (a comedian, say) made a reference to something, you either got it or you didn't. Humor was time and culture sensitive.


It still is, but now, if we hear a reference we don't understand, we can just google it. We might not get a joke quick enough to laugh, but we may get it the next time.

Take, for example, John McCain's comment (in a blogger conference call, significantly) that his Republican primary opponent Mitch Romney’s immigration plan might be to “get out his small-varmint gun and drive those Guatemalans off his yard."

I was watching Stephanopoulos, and a panelist pointed out that the brilliance of that comment was that in referenced no less than two Romney campaign flaps in addition to his the actual point about immigration, leading everyone who talks about the comment to also explain those references in full and so spend a lot more time talking about Romney's problems than McCain had to.

Remember how I was talking last week about how eidetic memory is the ultimate modern superpower? Maybe we don't really need it.


In the imminent future when all Americans can google whatever they want from their personal cell phones, what's the point of retaining information at all? Information changes all the time. What the best schools have already learned is that they need to teach understanding, techniques for learning, and a way to evaluate the relative value information much more than they need to convey the information itself.

It's one difference I also notice between my generation and older ones. We seem to have an almost instinctual understanding of the kind of information on the internet.

It isn't instinct, of course, it's experience - we search casually all the time - but I'm so conditioned to it that it's strange to watch my parents look for information without the internet. It's like another world - a world before google. [via Absurd Notions]


Brangelina: Another Drawback to Random Access

Another weird thing is that there's also a leak factor here. Random access means that bullshit information is written right next to good information, and that characteristic holds true just as well for culture as it does for computers.


Example: around when Teti lambasted me for not knowing offhand the definition of DRM, I just some stupid idea that I ought to be reading the big blogs. Anyway, as a New Yorker, I decided one of the significant ones was Gawker.

Anyway, after a few months, I just had to give Gawker up. I had been trying to figure out why I knew more celebrity gossip than I had at any previous time in my life, and I realized as I clicked back through whatever the hell was going on with Lindsay Lohan at the time that Gawker was probably why.

I was never trying to seek out information on celebrity marriages. I was casually following some series of references and it just happened to me. I still feel like I can't get away from it - I know that Brad is having trouble with Angelina. It's just that this useless, waste of time information is sandwiched next to the good information, like the copy of The Economist next to US Weekly at a newsstand.


I Am Next to You

Okay, I'm coming up on my last point, and it involves a little geography lesson.


Manhattan is an island. Horizontal space is limited. This means that, where in a city like San Antonio, we would build out in to ever-expanding borders, in New York everyone built up.

As a result, New York has always had a lot of people living in a geographically small space that was easy to get around. This led to a thriving regional specialty in all things niche.

Let's say that one in 1,000 people is interested in anime in 1995. In San Antonio (pop. 1,000,000), that's 1,000 people spread all over the city. In New York (pop. 8,000,000), there's not only 7,000 more people interested in anime, they are in a much smaller geographical area, and it's much easier for them to get to an anime store.

So when I came to New York for one of the first times to visit my friend Josh, he introduced me to a bunch of anime that it turned out was really interesting, and which I never would have heard about if it wasn't for my trip to the city.


By concentrating a large market on an island, New York allowed specialty vendors to thrive - which helped increase interest, which spurred the sellers, etc.

Result: New York has consistently been one of the few places in the world where you can pretty much buy anything at any price. And, more than that, it concentrated a community of like-minded people in to a space where they had greater access to each other.

The point is that the internet has lowered our barriers to entry to particular cultures or interests to just time and search capabilities. The niche thrives on the internet. We can find support for a particular cause, like-minded people or markets for niche products almost without any effort.

Random Access ribbles
Whenever I get to the end of one of my Big, Long Essays That Take Forever to Write I feel like I've taken a lot of trouble to explain something very simple.


There would be no way to give this kind of an explanation without the internet - just look at the number of links in this post alone. I'd still be thinking about these things, but the reason I like this medium so much is that I don't have to explain all my references, ideas and examples completely because I can just link to the appropriate information.

In a way (and once again, this is by no means a new idea) this means that we each have access to an entirely new medium to express ourselves. But it also means that there is no end to the depths of the trivial we can explore (for example, after this I fully intend to write about either Manu Ginobili, the weather or my cat.)

It would be one thing if I were spurring the country to a new national debate, but I suspect no one reads these things, but Johnny took his blog, arguably just a series of rants on National Ice-cream Day, and turned it in to a job at The Daily Show, so maybe there's hope for me yet.

Maybe I should send Gawker a resume...

Three Movies in Three Weeks: A Multitude of Sins Part 3

In which I achieve personal glory at the last minute, and including a small note about actors

It turns out I love to abuse actors. I never really knew for sure because before, I just got to watch actors take abuse, but now, after being the director and having the power to abuse them myself, I understand the true depth of my thesbimasocism.

Let me explain.

Because it took me awhile to commit to the script of "Sins" I ended up using, and because I had "Mary" coming up for later in the month, I had to shoot most of what I shot for "Sins" on the coldest weekend of March.

Because of continuity and a couple of other factors (like I really wanted this one actress' midriff in the dream sequence) every single one of my actors found themselves working outside in the cold without a coat for a significant amount of time, like enough that nobody would be surprised if they had ended up getting a cough.

Now, you'll remember that my first surprise upon my first day as a no-crew, no-budget movie director was that being a director isn't all that tough. It is, at its root, just another set skill.

My second surprise was that people took me seriously, or at least seriously enough to do what I asked.

Why were my actors willing to stand in the cold for me? What did I really have to offer them? Why do people sacrifice themselves just to make a movie? And, more importantly, why do I feel such a sick instinct to take advantage of that?

Maybe it's just a test of how bad they want it. I've acted before (better than my acting in this, even), and I decided it wasn't the best way to break in to the film business. In fact, I decided it was an idiotic way to try to break in to the film business.

Actors rarely work, almost never get paid, and have to do probably the most creative work of anyone on a film set under circumstances that are trying for everybody.

On the other hand, they don't have to know how to coil cable, they don't have to carry four 12-bank PAR light frames up six flights of stairs, they don't have to deal with the stalled car or the trash or the locals. They don't have the toughest jobs on a film set, but they do end up with a lot of the glory.

Basically, an actor has to want it. I just like to know how much.

In any case, I discovered I loved making my actors stand in the cold. I was never abusive, I was never unreasonable, and I always made sure they could put on their coats as often as possible and tried to keep them at least warm enough to talk and think, but once I needed those cameras to roll, those actors had better be ready to freeze their asses off and look like they were enjoying it.

I couldn't tell you why, but my actors put up with the cold, and me, and they made a great movie. Vaughn got the worst of it, the poor kid - in his first movie and dressed like a cowboy for two straight weeks on the streets of New York. The day after we finished shooting he cut his hair short and started dressing like Jon Voight at the end of the movie.

The way the audience film works, you get a month to do the thing from start to finish. With all the other shit I had going on, I ended up cutting that particular deadline preeety close. For example, there are a few story-critical shots, like the flight from Houston to New York, that I shot maybe three hours before the screening.

In fact, I finished editing "Sins" about a half-hour before the show. By then, I had My Cousin the Revolutionary with me, and we frantically outputted it to DVD and made it to the show minutes after they started. I handed off my DVD to the projectionist and took a seat in the theater.

At some point, I realized that fifty other human beings were going to see a film that up until then had been screened only by me and a man who still thought Trotsky may have had the right idea. It was then that I started to get nervous. Not too much - I was sitting next to Vaughn, for one thing, and I didn't want to freak him out by freaking out, if nothing else - but just a tad nervous.

Audience films screen right at the end, so we had to get through the whole program first. Finally, Jay and Victor introduce my movie. They say roll the movie. The movie rolls.

There is no picture.

At this point, I do not panic. I was late getting to the theater so we didn't have a chance to make sure the DVD played, they had to switch over from the DV tape, and I had sort of expected this in a worst-case scenario kind of way.

They try a couple of different things. Still, we hear the opening lines of my movie, but see no picture. The crowd, many of whom came to see Vaughn in his screen debut, is becoming restless.

I quickly and quietly make my way towards the projection room. Victor calls me out from the front of the theater as I stand at the back door and asks me if I have a backup version of my film. I bashfully admit that I don't. I slip out.

In the theater, Victor, a stand-up veteran, is covering for us with the crowd despite still being in a completely darkened theater. Thank god for Victor.

Jay and I are in the projection room. It's like we're behind the Wizard's curtain. The projectionist is running around, trying the various DVD players. There's a loose wire somewhere, but she doesn't have time to run it down. I know the DVD is working because we can see it on a TV in the booth, it just isn't making it out to the theater. At some point, we get picture but no sound.

I can't really do anything but watch and wait while this turns in to the longest period of dead air in First Sundays history.

I only think the words "abject failure" once, when Jay proposes pushing my film back two days to the special Tuesday show we're having for the fifth anniversary. The projectionist says she's close. We wait. Finally, sound and picture play in the theater.

I return to the theater. My movie is playing on the screen, meeting my only real goal for this project.

My movie is funny. My editing is weird, but it's sort of an underskilled and twisted version of the cartoony style I was originally going for, and it's also funny, so I decide I'm okay with that. Some of my shots are hokey, but it's a comedy and that's why I can get away with that. My directing had actually improved by the second half of shooting as I'd gotten more comfortable with Vaughn and learned how to use the camera and watch the acting at the same time.

People like the movie. People laugh. I kept my credits short, but people clap all the way through and more. It's more than I could ever ask for.

Jay and Victor call us down and ask us questions. Vaughn says "it was certainly educational." I explain to everyone about how cold the actors were.

We go to the after party. At each successive First Sundays after party, I feel like more and more of a hero. The world of New York short film and internet video is small and largely trivial, but for one night each month, the people in it are not quite sure if I might not be some sort of a big deal. It's not much, but it's mine, and although I can't resist taking it with a grain of salt, I also can't resist soaking it up like a sponge.

The biggest upward trend at these after parties is how many people want to talk to me. At this last party, coming off my heroic no-budget, no-crew, in the cold, strong-narrative film-making experience, enough people want to talk to me that for close to an hour, I do not have a chance to get myself a much-needed drink.

Finally, I retreat to the upstairs bar in the hopes of a beer and perhaps a moment's quiet. There, I run in to Victor, who introduces me to the bartender, who, it turns out, is also an actress. I talk to the bartender, but I also get my drink.

There is more to this story - of not singing Yellow Submarine, of becoming inebriated, and of falling asleep during Korean monster movies, but I prefer to leave it here. Me, drink in hand, living in the glory that only deeply personal achievement before the devoted public of an extremely limited world can grant me.

Saints Win!

Saints Win! The Times-Picayune called it a historic victory, and it certainly felt that way here. This was the Saints' first season playing in the Superdome, the devastated stadium that had served as a defacto refugee center after the storm, and there had been a lot of talk of the Saints' never coming back at all. But damn did it feel like victory last night.

My Cousin the Revolutionary, Drew and I had been carpeting a family's house all day, and we decided to watch the game at a place near where we're staying in the Garden District.

First we went to a place in the circle that turned out to be full of white hipsters, all full of ironic interest in the game. We hung around, watched the first half of the game and had what I would call "enough" drinks, but I think we all felt a little dirty. One woman there was actually rooting for the Eagles.


At the half, we walked back to a daiquiri place that looked pretty hopping before. Now, Drew and MCTR grew up in Atlanta, and they're basically half black, kind of like how Clinton was America's first black president. However, from the outside, we all look very, very white. In this point, at this bar, we were alone.

Thing is, this is exactly what we'd been looking for. Drew, who'd been following the team since that first kick off in the Superdome, said he wanted to root for the Saints "more than I've ever rooted for any team in my life." This daquiri place was full of really excited, really loud, really Southern people who really wanted the Saints to win.


Once it was clear that we were happy to be there, and we were perfectly comfortable being the only white people in an all-black bar, and that WE really wanted the Saints to win, too, people got used to us really quick.

Most everyone there was having a good time with their own friends, but a lot of people came up and talked to us briefly. Although not everyone was great at explaining it, the message I got was that everyone was very happy we'd chosen to be the only white people in an all-black bar and to root for their team.

You remember before that I mentioned we'd had "enough" drinks. Of course you realize we kept drinking. As Drew and I should have learned when 20 minutes and some Hurricanes at Pat O'Brien's had gotten us drunk for all of Friday night, the frozen daquiri is a deceptive drink.

It's sweet and cold, and although it tastes alcoholic, you almost can't bring yourself to believe that it is. I feel I should also point out, and I say this in the full knowledge that many if not all of the people I drank daquiris with last night could beat me up, but outside of the Gulf Coast, the daquiri is a girl's drink.


We started with a daquiri each, but they really taste better if you mix the flavors, and in any case, once the game looked to be both dramatic and in our favor, and once they barred the doors to new arrivals but kept the bar open, and especially once a guy dropped a Grant for a couple of gallons of frozen goodness and our glasses stopped ever getting close to empty, any alcohol accounting system we may have instinctively had in place broke down decisively.

There is no way to explain the joy in that bar as it became clear that we were going to win, except to say that every daquiri joint in New Orleans must have felt the same way. We yelled, we jumped up and down, we gave everyone high fives, and then we left the bar, happy, inconceivably drunk, and still carrying one to go cup each of sweet, cold danger.


We yelled at strangers and passing cars for awhile, briefly walked in the direction of the French Quarter, thought better of it and staggered back in the direction of the guest house where we were staying.

At some point it became clear that I was the sober one, or at least that MCTR was the drunk one and Drew was too happy to be of much help to anybody. MCTR kept saying "Rich, how did I get this drunk?," although the question had been asked and answered several times before.

I spent the rest of the night with my hands on my cousin's shoulders, literally steering him back to the hotel. Somehow, we all made it back to our beds, where we each fell immediately to sleep and slept soundly until this morning. I woke up early, Drew woke up really happy, and Joe woke up drunk (his first words were "Rich, how did you let me get this drunk?", a telling variation of the form.)

It was a great night.

Where I Am Right Now

So the movie went very well. People thought it was funny, everyone was happy, and I got good and drunk afterwards. I am already talking with people about what's next. I myself do not know.

Right now at this very moment I am in New Orleans, La., sitting on the deck of a guest house and enjoying my first internet since last week (it doesn't quite reach up to our room).

I am staying with My Cousin the Revolutionary and our dear friend Drew. We are here to do volunteer work and to eat, and so far we're doing better at the first than the second.

Most recently, as far as the first category, I mastered the fine art of wrestling a forty-pound machine in to pulling eight layers of linoleum off a recovering house's floor. I was very virile and impressive.

As far as the second category, we are striking out. The trouble is that by the time we get back to our room, peel off our sweaty, dirty and disgusting clothes, shower, and formulate a plan for dinner, most anywhere we'd want to eat has been closed.

That should brings me to a wider point - New Orleans is a crippled city. The protest I linked to earlier was over a wave of murders (some drug-related, some out of desperation) that has been the recent talk of the city, but there's much more than that.

So much has to be rebuilt, many services aren't being supplied, and, most debilitatingly, half the population has yet to return, and may never return. That's part of why so many less businesses are open and the restaurants close at eight.

It's frightening and angering to think of how easy it was to prevent this disaster and how little is being done to help New Orleans to come back.

I will be back in Brooklyn next week. I'm sure I'll have more to say then.

Perfectly Legitimate

The other month, My Cousin The Revolutionary and I, after many months of walking up and down Smith St., decided to walk up Court St., which runs parallel to Smith but is one block further away from our apartment. We had never done this before.

They call it New York because you can be a block away and effectively be in a different neighborhood, and so our Court St. experiment ended up showing MCTR and I how we choose to approach a new neighborhood in New York.


Maybe because we come from the same genetic stock, and maybe just because our moms are more alike than different (we say they are "the same kind of crazy"), MCTR and I have very similar approaches to new neighborhoods. Also, because our approaches are so similair, we got to see ourselves take in a new neighborhood by watching each other. Two points of interest:

ONE: A major indicator of the success or failure of the neighborhood was the ratio of white people we saw to non-white people we saw.

This is simple enough to explain. I'm from San Antonio (58% Hispanic of any race, 32% non-Hispanic White) and MCTR is from Atlanta (61% Black, 33% White), and I'd say we're most comfortable being in the racial minority but not so much that we feel like we've stepped on the set of Catch a Fire.

Also, and speaking only for myself, let me say right now that there is nothing creepier than an all-white neighborhood. What sort of factors coincide to bring a neighborhood to all-whiteness? Nothing I want to be a part of.

For its part, Court St. did very well on White / non-White balance.


TWO: As we were already idlying along Court St. anyway, MCTR and I decided we might as well pretend we were looking for something to eat. We examined several different places in turn, discussed each of them, and dismissed them half-heartedly. Then we were talking about something else entirely when we got to a small (small enough I can't find it on google) family-owned-type Mexican place with a couple of tables outside.

We were already halfway through the door when I realized that this was where we were eating, and we hadn't even needed to discuss it. We hadn't even really thought about it. This was so much our kind of place that even though we'd never seen it or the surrounding neighborhood ever before, we had acted like this is where we had been walking this whole time. It was, in retrospect, a little creepy.

Okay, so we liked Court St. Why? Why were we so comfortable there? What do these two things, the constant checking for racial balance, the second-nature restaurant, have in common? And what was it about MCTR and me that made us behave so strangely, so non-chalantly, at exactly the same time in exactly the same way?

I've been thinking about it, and I think I have at least half an answer. Could be our generation, could be our families or just our being Americans, but whatever it is, MCTR and I both place a great importance on legitimacy.


Nothing gets to us more than something pretending to be something else, like an expensive restaurant with crap food, or a crazy friend who doesn't admit to herself that she's not crazy.

We are the kind of guys who would wear a jacket and tie to a restaurant, but only if we know we could go back to the same place next week wearing a T-shirt and jeans and feel just as comfortable.

We come as we are, we work hard, and that's all we want from anyone or anything else. That's why MCTR was the best roommate I ever had, and I was prolly his. We were open and up-front with each other, and smart enough to understand the whole even when the other of us could only explain the parts.

To me, an all-white or totally non-white neighborhood feels artificial, manufactured. A family Mexican restaurant with a couple of tables out front is not trying to be anything it isn't.

We were right about the restaurant, of course - it was good food, there was plenty of it and it wasn't very expensive. It was honest, straight-forward, family- or community-recipe food.

It was what we were looking for.

ribble's rainy day

It rained today in New York City and it reminded me of the day we went to Dinosaur Barbecue and it rained so hard the IRT was flooded out.


It was me, My Cousin the Revolutionary, Marmo, and another friend who I haven't decided whether to codename Beta or Charlie (your vote counts!) It took a little doing, but we managed to catch a cab, and as we headed down Broadway we passed hundreds of people on the street trying to hail our car.

"I feel like I'm in a zombie movie," I said.

"Whaddaya mean,"* said Marmo (not a fan of zombie movies).

"I feel like all these people are going to run at the cab going 'Gwar!'"

Then after the girls got out we agreed to share the cab with a very nice couple from Ohio.




* I'm paraphrasing here. Marmo is actually very well-dictioned.

Production Diary: First Day Wrapped

I'm looking at my blog, and the last entry as of today is "Production Diary: Day 1," and I'm thinking "yeah, that looks about right."

A film production is a big deal. It does not stop. Often I have been in a position, like firewatching G+E equipment from a phone booth in the rain, that I could not physically escape for hours at a time. I've spent about as many waking hours with my cousin the revolutionary in the past day as I did in the month before that - and he lives with me. During the time I was at home, I wasn't functional enough to do dishes. Blogging was out of the question.


That said, a lot has happened to me in the past month. I knew coming in to this production that it would be a life-changing experience, because I have done few enough productions that they have all been life-changing experiences. For example, I now have a career in film. That's a big deal.

So there's a lot to talk about. There are a few things I'll probably post date, but I've essentially just led another life and returned to this one, and a life reappraisal is an inherently free-association thing. In summary, watch this space.

Production Diary: Day 9

This is the day I was two hours late.

For the first week, week and a half of this shoot, our parking situation was in a terrible state. The night the day I was two hours late there was this whole issue with parking the trucks on this dock and I ended up getting back home after 11:00 because I was making sure some other drivers were squared away. The next day, we were shooting in the park, and I was looking at maybe four or five hours of sleep.

Waking up is usually okay for me if before I go to sleep I say to myself "okay, I have to get up at this-and-this time, I'll be asleep for this-and-this many hours." I get in trouble if 1) I am too tired to do the math that lets me know when I need to wake up or 2) I feel I could never reasonably be expected to actually wake up at that time.


That night I set the alarm on my phone, but I didn't put it out of reach, and some time after the alarm rang but before I woke up I managed to turn the alarm off and return to sleep. I woke up well rested and on top of my phone, which was ringing. It was a call from our very level-headed, very long-suffering 2nd AD, who was wondering where the hell I was.

My cousin the revolutionary says there are two first rules of film: 1) eat when food is presented to you; and 1) know your lines and be on time. I've worked as a producer (although I'm not what you might call "qualified" to do so.) I know the importance of rule 1). I knew that this was the first time I really had a decent chance at being fired.

I worked my ass off that day. I'd worked my ass off every day of the shoot before then, but that day all eyes were on me because even though we were short staffed and even though there were a lot of people who hadn't been working as hard as me, it was still a very real possibility that I was going home that night for good. At one point I took a broom and swept six blocks of 5th Avenue. That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about.

I think a lot of people spoke up for me. I don't know for sure. At the end of the day the Line Producer took me aside and said "Do this every day and you can keep working on this film. Fair?" Yup.

Looking back, this was the turning point in the film for me. This day was the day I let a lot of bullshit go and just worked my ass off to stay on that film.

Whatever I was before, from Day 9 on I was a professional PA. It took about three days before I knew everyone knew I was a pro. I did my job, I did my best not to do other peoples' jobs, I didn't complain, I probably talked too much on the walky and always will, but I was good at my job and nothing made me happier than never getting too worried about being fired ever again.

Production Diary: Pre-Production Day 2

My production life is so different from my regular life that there's almost no way to compare them. My waking hours are different, my clothes are different because nothing can destroy clothes like a production, I go to different places, vehicles handle differently, I meet new people and my old friends disappear.

Fantasy of the day: After learning more and more about the limitations of this truck, I started thinking about the London Knowledge and how the guys studying for it studied the layout of the city from their vespas. For a moment I have a clear image of myself, ripping through New York City on a vespa.

Oddly gratifying moment of the day: I am trying to engage my ride along in conversation by telling him how hard it is to turn on to McDonald. He seems a little dissinterested until I say "Have you seen The French Connection?"

Without missing a beat and with what can only be described as unbridled enthusiasm, he says "We're going there?!"

Surreal moment of the day:
I get off the train in Carrol Gardens and think "Wait, is this neighborhood still here?"

Today was also the day I realized that while I was enjoying my sunglasses, I had completely lost my regular glasses. This is what you call a big-small problem. Here is me calling my overworked cousin trying to convince him to get my spare set of glasses from my apartment and bring them to me:

ME (in a frenzy): Cousin, the sun sets in an hour, and I'm starting to get really worried about turning in to a pumpkin with this sunglasses thing.
MY COUSIN THE REVOLUTIONARY: What the hell are you talking about?

Post note: they were stuck behind the seat of the truck.

My Cousin the Revolutionary Has a Blog

My Cousin the Revolutionary has a new blog! He claims the only way to get him to update is if I keep linking to it, so, unfortunately, this will be the end of my using my frequent references to him to link to other revolutionaries that I feel he would endorse. However, it does gives me my an opportunity to brag about those links. I've listed the lot below.

My cousin, who is also my roommate, earned his epithet primarily because of his involvement with the NYU Tuition Reform campaign. In the parlance of our apartment, NYU tuition reform and related activities are referred to as "the revolution," as in "I'm having dinner with Ava and then I've got the revolution from 9:00 to around 10:30."

My cousin is also a good bit more left-leaning than I am - I am a Democrat with a robust enthusiasm for capitalism - which would lead to some very interesting discussions around the apartment. These would usually end in my saying "Well, why don't we just organize the proletariat against the bourgeois masses?!"

So that was also a factor.

There's a tongue-in-cheek element here (my cousin would not actually like to fuck tha police), but I'd feel safe saying all the links I've connected to my cousin are things he endorses, at least in sentiment, right down to the orange juice.

Do you like what my cousin's about? No? You're probably right. Go to his blog and brow beat him until he's forced to respond. I know I will.

And cuz? You're welcome.

Fuck tha Police
Wake Up Walmart
My Cousin's Current Blog
ABC News Interns
Mao Zedong
Utopia
Gil Scott-Heron (Best Known for "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised")
My Cousin's Former Blog, for his digital journalism class at NYU
Permanent Revolution
Washington Square News article on NYU's Tuition Reform Action Committee-Organized Town Hall meeting
Napoleon I of France
Orange Juice is Good for You
Karl Marx
NYU Tuition Reform Campaign official website

What You’ll Need to be the Driving P.A. on an Indie Shoot in New York City

This weekend I worked as a production assistant on an HD video project directed by Full Stealth (link via Speedrail). This was a fun shoot; F.S. is one of the most enthusiastic and optimistic people I know, possibly the most high-energy person alive, and the director sets the tone for the shoot. We also had an exceptionally enthusiastic and talented cast and crew. For my part, I was a fairly competent production assistant.

Do you, too, want to be a fairly competent P.A.? Here's what you'll need:

A Valid Driver’s License
Both Full Stealth and my friend Victor, the main producer on the shoot, had let their driving licenses lapse (because who needs a driver’s license in New York City, right?) As a result, my major responsibility on this shoot was driving the van.

Maps
To be consulted before, rather than after, leaving the last location. In New York, there’s a tricky issue in which avenues run North and which run South. I prefer to figure it out before I get rolling. I like to carry Streetwise Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Sunglasses

Sunscreen

The Not-For-Tourist Guide to New York City
When I wasn't driving, I was a regular P.A. NFT was invaluable in finding a liquor store on a Sunday when the director and the band had to have some Petron for a shot (I mistakenly got him Citron instead, but he made do.)


Love for your Mirrors
I kept trying to check my blind spot through the rear windows despite the fact that cargo vans do not have rear windows.

A Ride Along
This is a person who's job is to ride in the passenger's seat, be a sounding board on my opinion about the route I'm taking and the actions of the driver in front of me, and help me parallel park. Indispensable, and surprisingly easy to talk to - I could give you a run-down on the careers of at least three ride-alongs from this shoot alone.

Two to Seven Dirty Words
I don't usually curse like anything but the most mild-mannered of sailors, but driving this van in Manhattan I was cursing at a level I usually reserve for Spurs games.

Because of how the New York is laid out, there is almost always someone pulling in to my lane. Saturday night, I dreamed I was in the van, surrounded by a sea of taxi cabs.

Sunday night, I dreamed I was parking.

A MetroCard
Driving made me realize that New York is a walking city. I’d known it before, but looking up the middle of an avenue at the beautiful canyon of buildings had made me suspect otherwise. Now I know that when I'm driving in New York, I can’t look at the scenery because I’m too busy waiting for someone to swerve in to my lane.

Respect
Actors’ jobs are harder than I thought. Facing a 6:00 a.m. call, I was considering the merits of picking up a copy of Backstage and heading for a cattle call. Acting seems easier than heavy lifting.

Not necessarily so. Film actors have to do the same thing 16 times in a row. You could argue that this is easy when the task is reliving the death of your dog to produce a simulation of the emotion of sadness, but you can't argue that it's easy when it's rocking out to a song (headbang injuries) or even climbing a flight of stairs in heels. That takes endurance.


A Sense of Responsibility, Not Liability
There is a fine line between asking for the information I need to do the job and being a whiny bitch. Producers are busy; the problem they assign to me is not the only one they have to solve. I can ask them the best way to get something done, but I learned there was about a five-minute limit to each discussion.

The worst thing a P.A. can do is to not act responsibly - show up late or high, crash the van, shit like that. But if you have a P.A. who is complaining that he can't do things when he can and who's not willing to be liable for his assigned problems, then he's just as useless.

Working knowledge of The A-Team
I'm happy to declare that A-Team is now a verb. It means to pull a van over in a place where parking is impossible, put on the hazard lights, have every available crew member load equipment in through all available doors, pick up a ride along (generally the assistant cameraman with the camera on his lap) and speed off in to traffic.

I know I found myself whistling the theme song, and I’m sure I heard Full Stealth doing it, too. Later, we decided that if we were the A-Team he would be Hannibal, Speedrail would be Murdoch and I would be Mr. T.

No Outstanding Warrants For Your Arrest
I had one very specific moment of paranoia on this shoot. I was standing just inside the Astor Place subway station with a walky and a beautiful young actress. My job was to cue the actress to walk up the stairs.

Suddenly, I felt like I recognized everyone coming down the steps of the subway but I couldn't place them. It took me a minute to realize that this was because everyone coming down the steps was trying to figure out who I was. I normally pride myself in blending in to my surroundings, but a walky and a beautiful actress make a man pretty interesting to passers-by.

Humility
To be a production assistant is to be a small cog in a medium-sized machine. It had been awhile since I had worked on a shoot that I hadn’t produced myself, and the biggest difference was that I did not always know what was going on.

The job of a P.A. is to solve problems, but because real understanding of what’s happening on a set is limited to the director, the producers and key crew members like the director of photography, it is often impossible to understand whether these problems are important.


At one point, I got back from parking the van and a producer told me that the D.P. had left his bag, which contained all the tape stock, in the van.

Because I am not what you would call a prodigy at parking, the van was two long avenue blocks away, where I had found a safe spot next to the cross walk. I hurried to the van with an image of the entire crew standing around, tapping their feet, awaiting this tape stock.

I found the bag, hurried back, rushed in to the studio, announced (rather loudly) "tape stock," and was immediately sushed by a room full of people who were happily making do with the remainder of the tape that had been left in the camera from the day before. Hi. My friends call me schmuck.

Another time I went on an errand to buy a smoke machine. I was not in any deliberate rush, but I took a cab back with a producer's consent and casually walked in with the smoke machine just before the next shoot was going to start. I was, quite to my surprise, the hero of the hour.

A Book
For fire watch. I'm reading the Fall '04 McSweeney's.

A Dotted Line
To be a fairly competent P.A., you must be willing to do the one thing that you don't want to do. For example, my cousin the revolutionary once put on an NYPD T-shirt and diverted traffic away from a shoot in Chinatown, which, by the way, is illegal.

One woman demanded his badge, then threatened to report him to the real cops. He just powered through it. In the rain.

My least-favorite thing to do on a film is returns. I hope I'm not outing anybody here, but it's a common indy film practice to buy something that we need, usually as set dressing, and return it after a shoot to save money.

I hate interacting with service people at all, and I hate asking for things from them even more, but I was the one driving the van, so of course I was asked to do returns.


I'm not going to talk about doing returns for this shoot, but I will tell you a story that I'm pretty sure has just hit the statute of limitations.

We once bought a bunch of sheets to rig a giant screen on a stage. The next day, I had to return the screen to a large store that will remain nameless.

I stood in line, I told them the sheets didn't look right on my bed, and I gave them back. I was asked about the industrial-level dust and filth that the sheets had collected from the stage. I said "my bedroom is really dirty." They took the sheets back, but you can see why this sort of thing leaves a bad feeling in my mouth.

Have the line you won't cross, but make sure it's a dotted line.

A Life (For Purpose of Flashing Before Your Eyes)
At one point I could have hit a family of three (man, woman, tram) while pulling across traffic in to a gas station. One of the producers was in the passenger's seat, a nice woman with her own company and everything, and she yelled “look out!” It was like a parody of a potential traffic accident. I had plenty of time, I slowed down, and I didn't come anywhere close to hitting anyone, but I won't be asking that woman for a driving job.

A Sense of Scale
Because I haven’t done that many of them, each shoot is still a life-changing experience for me. It's nearly impossible to explain to someone who has not spent the day working on a shoot what that day's shoot was like. If you watch Truffaut's Day for Night and Apocalypse Now at the same time, maybe you can come close.

A Couch
For collapsing after three days of this. I have a working theory that any finite amount of stress is okay if I know how many days of it to expect. I'll get to test it soon: I'm driving a grip truck for an indy feature, six-day weeks for one month, starting in just a few weeks.

Drew is Coming

My cousin the revolutionary and I have a very dear friend named Drew. For the last five months he's been living in Ghana (!) as part of some NYU program, and he's now in London making his slow way back to the States. He'll be in New York in early June, and we couldn't be more thrilled. Also, he recently said he loved me like a plate of spaghetti.

Because Drew is such an amazing kid, because his way of speaking and thinking are so distinctive, and because he's been gone so long, I've kept a mental catalogue of the things that I've encountered that could come close to being Drew.

I can't explain Drew to the rest of the world, but if you look at this stuff, then meet Drew, you will say "oh, yeah, that makes sense." It is my attempt to explain Drew through cultural triangulation.

Also like Drew, it is all very funny.

Ask a Ninja (my favorite is Ninja Omnibus)
Doogtoons' Nick and Haig
Overcompensating webcomic by Jeffrey Rowland
Comedian Dane Cook

Speaking of food

This past Friday my friend Marmo took me to Dinosaur barbecue way, way up by 131 St. in between a highway and a bunch of warehouses.

Now, barbecue is as Texan as Tex-Mex, like how lasagna is as British as chicken tikka masala. I've never gone on a quest for good BBQ in New York for the same reason my friend Apple's mom told her never to buy a reuben West of the Mississippi - good barbecue outside of Texas, the South, and Cincinnati, Ohio (for pork ribs) just seemed like a contradiction in terms. I went in to this place with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Dino BBQ ended up blowing my weekend because nothing else I did could ever live up to it. Marmo and I split a full rack and did not speak from the moment the food arrived until the last rib bone, stripped of its meat like an ambitious model, was taken from our greasy fingers.

I described the feeling as better than sex, but Marmo pointed out that I'd said the same thing about finishing my script a week before. Maybe it just felt like coming home again. In any case, after that I didn't feel like leaving the house for three days.

My problem, then, was that my cousin the revolutionary is himself a Southerner, and I feel that he needs to experience Dinosaur BBQ as well. But I couldn't bring myself to go back there for another month - I mean, I've seen "The Itis".

Finally, MCTR and I decided that we would take our good friend Drew there upon his triumphant return from Ghana in June. Nothing says America like high fat, high cholesterol food.

Three Short Posts About Film

(Yet another bonus link above!)

This Short Post: The Brooklyn Underground Film Festival
Last week, I took a look at the Brooklyn Underground Film Festival at the Brooklyn Lyceum. I went to two nights of shorts and one night of Japanese ridiculousness.

The main appeal to Brooklyn Underground is that it turns out it's a block and a half from my house. I once had a punk band in my living room, and it was a lot like that.

The other appeal was shorts. I like watching shorts at film festivals because not a lot of people watch shorts; I get to see films very few others have seen. It's one of the same reasons I screen films for the First Sundays film festival. Plus, if a short is terrible, at least it's over soon.


After watching hours of bad shorts for First Sundays, I was impressed by Brooklyn Underground putting up a shorts program that was about 1/3 amazing, 1/3 meh and only 1/3 bullshit.

My favorites were Brad Neely's animated short "Washington" (scroll down for the SXSW film festival trailer), a British short documentary called Fountain of Youth, and Just 2 Guyz from the Lonely Island guys (Lonely Island is a great way to kill time at work if you already know you'll be working somewhere else in the summer.) If the Bush Administration Was Your Roommate would also play well at First Sundays.

Brooklyn Underground also had a raging party Friday night. Now some jerks (like my cousin the revolutionary) skipped the films and just showed up to the party.

That plus the fact that you could hear the party quite clearly from the back sections all through the second half of the shorts program convinced my mate that Brooklyn Underground was more about the scene than the cinema.

It was also telling that they scheduled a music showcase in Williamsburg in the middle of their Saturday features.

But I don't want to be a whiny bitch. It's tempting to take the film festival down my block for granted. I had great fun, and it was a clear that a lot of work went in to the fourth (!) year of Brooklyn Underground. I am all for more culture in my neighborhood, puzzling as it may be.

Thanks, Program Director Josh Koury. Thanks, Brooklyn Underground Film Festival. I was well rewarded for my three-block round-trip walk.

ribble discovers Gorillaz

This weekend I watched my first Gorillaz videos , and they kinda blew my mind.

This all started when everyone made a big huge deal about Gorillaz coming to the Apollo a week or so ago.

My cousin the revolutionary has played a lot of Demon Days around the apartment, and it's worked my way on to the very short list of albums that I listen to regularly. I would have seen the show, but
1) It sold out a billion different times
2) It was $70
3) I don't really care about music
4) Speedrail pointed out that it was just going to be some guys singing behind a screen with a bunch of cartoons

Actually I guess I was never going to see the show.


But that last point got me interested in the Gorillaz videos. If the show consisted of a bunch of cartoons, why not just watch the cartoons and save my money for the metaphorical two hookers and an eight ball?

I had never taken the time or effort to understand what it meant that Gorillaz was a virtual band (see point 3). So my first stop was, of course, the Wikipedia entry.

The first thing that got my attention was that the creative force behind Gorillaz was Jamie Hewlett of Tank Girl and Damon Albarn of Blur. Both of these guys had work I loved but America never really got behind, and I'd pretty much given up hope it ever would.

There are plenty of second chances in public life. Just as everyone from Zombie College ended up in Futurama, just as the Howie Mandel Show became Deal or No Deal, just like Steve Guttenberg eventually found his place in ... Wait. What the hell do you mean they're making a new Police Academy movie?!? Jesus Christ! I thought the worst was over!

The characters and backstories are well done technically and consistent in tone between the music and the visuals. Hewlett and Albarn created a deep, rich world for Gorillaz, both online and offline. Check out Kong Studios here.

ribble's Quest: Day 4

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I had a scary film weekend.

Sunday I started screening submissions for First Sundays, a film festival that shows short comedy films every first Sunday at the Pioneer Theater on the Lower East Side.

After being forewarned by First Sundays co-producer and extremely nice guy Jay Stern that a lot of what I was going to see would be very, very bad, I was just happy nothing I watched was truly unwatchable. What scared me was how easy it was to make a bad film.

The main problems these submitted films had were 1) length and 2) the lack of a strong central comedic idea (know in the film business as a "joke.") It's unfortunate because a lot of bad work looks like it took time and effort to put together, and when the idea isn't there, there's really nowhere for the film to go.


This made the good stuff really stand out, but it also made me start to second guess my own writing. Did I have a strong enough motivation for the protagonist? Where could I tighten the dialogue? That sort of thing. Yesterday I spent rereading both my script and my blog.

This self ego-busting occured at Cafe Doma and Esperanto Cafe in Greenwich Village.

As far as writing, neither was worth a second visit. Cafe Doma was pretty (ceiling fans!) but way too crowded. In a writers cafe, people do not talk very much because they are writing. It was loud enough at Doma that Gorillaz wasn't cutting it and I had to switch to Robert Walter's 20th Congress turned up all the way. It might be okay on a Tuesday around 2:00, but part of the point of a writer's cafe is that you, the writer, are always welcome. Cafe Doma was more than I could be bothered to deal with.

Esperanto Cafe was recommended by my cousin the revolutionary. Earlier this week I had to explain to him that a writer's cafe was not just a place with WiFi. A place with WiFi is where people come through, they get a coffee, they browse the web, they talk to their friends. A writing cafe is a bunch of people hardcore focused on their writing. That said, Esperanto was about what I expected. It was mostly college kids chattin' and doing their college thing.

As far as my writing, it seems to hold together better than I expected. I especially enjoyed rereading this blog. I update because I can't stand not having new content for me to read, like a fashion designer who makes whatever's missing from her closet.

We're getting to the end of this little quest of mine, with just a few scragglers to pick up. It's been a fun little ride.

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Offline Praise for ribble's

Peer reviews from sources no less objective than my two best friends and my mom:

Mom's favorite post is "Hawai'i Memories" for its descriptive passages. Mom says I have a real talent for writing. Thanks, Mom!

My cousin the revolutionary likes "Last Night" because its description of codename Erin is "right on."

Finally, Speedrail says that the link for "young, stay-at-home mothers" "ribble's Quest" is the dorkiest thing he's ever read.

You want it! The public demands it! ribble's ... Must ... GO ... ON!

People from Atlanta like ATL

Last night I watched ATL with codename Erin, my cousin the revolutionary, and a few other friends from my cousin's high school in Atlanta.

I liked this movie, but people from Atlanta LOVED this movie. They were elated coming out of the theater, and conversation quickly turned to the film industry and their usual way of doing things.

All of which shows (again) people like seeing movies they can relate to. A good half of these kids were in New York because of the movie business, and seeing a film about people like them set where they're from and doing things they could have heard about growing up really made these people want to make a movie.

With a summer of bullshit on the horizon, that doesn't seem like such a bad thing.