TV Head

Either a tropical monsoon or hot-as-balls this entire weekend, which made it a good one for movies/netflix/tv obsessing. I had a couple of hours to kill before Shauna's birthday party on Friday night, so I used one of my movie passes to finally see Land of the Dead, which was not nearly as good as I'd been led to believe. A nothing plot and I-don't-care-about-you characters, turned it into 90-minutes of special-effects and zombie makeup watching, which still ain't bad way to kill some time. I did love, though, that Romero's way to immobilize the zombies in this one was to mesmerize them with fireworks. Nice subversive touch. Pretty crappy film, though. I much prefer Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later which I just rewatched on HBO-on-Demand, and could be one of the scariest zombie movies ever.

Saturday night I started my viewing festivities with Maria Full of Grace, which left me slightly disappointed, despite the awesome acting and sometimes-beautiful photography. There were scenes that were so perfectly acted and shot that I was literally squirming in my loveseat. But ultimately, I just never really cared about how things were going to turn out for the characters. There wasn't enough at stake for anyone, especially Maria, and I was left with a feeling of: "well, that was good. but so what?" I also felt like it was trying to be "gritty" like City of God, but could never quite overcome the fact that it was 'trying', and still not able to just give us a good story which is, at the end of the day, all we really want.

Right after MFOG, I tuned to IFC for the premiere of Don Lett's new punk documentary: Punk:Attitude, an even bigger disappointment. One redeeming aspect of this film, however, is that it focused on punk in the context of the EVOLUTION of Rock - instead of presenting punk as an anomalous movement that sprang up all on its own, as other filmmakers have done. I'm so sick of the boring "who started punk?" argument, which will never ever be resolved, because it CAN'T BE. In The Filth & The Fury (Julian Temple's Pistols doco), it's almost laughable how many people try to take credit for "starting" punk rock, all the way down to Vivienne Westwood (sic)! It was evolution, a spiral not a line, but no-one really seems to get that, or want to get it. The best line about all that was from Johnny Rotten in TFATF: "Punk was something that should have happened, and did". Thank you. So Punk:Attitude was unique in that it began its timeline with Chuck Berry and Elvis, and continued through post-punk genres like No-Wave (James White, Lydia Lunch, et. al.), throwing the spotlight on often-ignored bands like Sonic Youth and Agnostic Front, and ending with the rise and fall of Nirvana. In all other ways, the film was unremarkable - concert footage interspersed with talking-head interviews with former band-members, none of which gave the audience much insight into the meaning all this ultimately had for them. Henry Rollins was featured quite heavily in the movie, which terrified me at first. For the most part, I think Rollins is a meathead who wrote some good lyrics in his time, but I don't find him nearly as fascinating as the programming staff at IFC obviously does. He seems to rear his tattooed head on EVERY show on IFC, and has never struck me as an interesting TV personality. However, he did end up having the most interesting things to say about punk in this movie, in particular calling out a fact that most other books and movies have managed to ignore, ie that punk started out with experimentaiton and idealism, but very quickly became yet another bandwagon for assholes to jump on. And after the assholes, came stagnation and inevitible death.

I spent the day today with my other Netflix DVD: The O.C. Season One, Disc two. What can I say? Episode 7: The Escape (aka the "TJ" episode) is perhaps the finest hour of television ever aired. Marisa's OD sequence alone was gut-wrenching. After watching, I immediately found the script online and downloaded it, for a possible staged reading on some future rainy downtown day. I've also been keeping my eyes open for the evolution of the famed "bench-sitting" convention used so heavily in season 2, but in the first 8 episodes the closest you get is a little curb-sitting. Not the same thing at all.

What happens when you forget to bring your ipod

I rewrote the perennial philosophy tonight on the way home from the F Train,
Takiing a few liberties along in my pocket for the ride.
In mine, experience is all we are. I have more=we are more.
Junkie, mayor, preacher, son.
Playing in their dreams, doing flying backflips and other acrobatics
in mid-aether, laughing to each other
About how strange this all is.
And you are there, too. Dancing.
Turn to Thoughts / awaken back in a heavy body,
stolen from somewhere, not yours.
But the experience of being inside this machine. This feeling.
That's all you.

Looking for a hex key

I didn't "do" anything yesterday. Not really. I recently got a new phone after switching to cingular and spent most of my saturday figuring out how to use the bluetooth connection between the phone and the laptop, making little videos (I want to make a feature shot entirely on my cell phone) and creating ringtones. I'm determined to create the perfect assigned rings for all my friends after Magz reprimanded me the other night: "dude, you need a new ringtone". Ugh. Now I'm truly in the 9th ring of cell. Could I be more of a dork? I went out once to pick up my laundry, and watched "Cry Baby" on Oxygen. I'm determined to do something today!!

Oh, the other thing I did was fix the broken leg on my new loveseat. I busted out my drill from under the bed, but couldn't find the hex key to change the bit. I thought I had remembered seeing one somewhere around my desk within, oh, the last six months... so I went diving into the drawers to find it. Like most desks, mine is a black-hole of useless crap that, for whatever reason, I couldn't bear to part with (or thought I might need) at the time. Since a hex key is so small and hard to find amongst clutter, I emptied out my drawers item by item: several photo ids from old jobs, 2 clown noses from the circus, business cards collected from people i barely remember now. A broken watch - a christmas gift from a lover - relic of a broken relationship. Scraps of paper with numbers of girls I never called. I briefly considered calling one, any one, just to see what would happen. "Hey, Jessica, this is Tom... we met at Barramundi back in '97 and you gave me your number, so I just wanted to call and say hi and see if you maybe wanted to get a drink or somethlng". Nah. I was sure the numbers didn't work anymore anyway.

There was an impressive collection of my own business cards - some from actual jobs, some I'd had made - an interesting chronicle of my own personal ambitions over the past several years. One just said "Tom Tyler, Producer", another was from "The New York Comedy Network", the first project I'd undertaken after my return to New York 8 years ago, another: "Grindhouse-A-Go-Go! Hardcore Comedy". I saved one of each and tossed the others in the trash along with the other personal jetsam of my past. Way in the back of the drawer was a crumpled up piece of paper which I smoothed open to find a poem written by my niece Rachel back in 2000:

Friendship Is...
a smile
a garden made of love
the joy of being happy
and knowing there is hope
climbing trees together
sun and moon and stars
friendship is a secret home,
inside a heart forever.

-- Rachel Tenney Aptekar (age 9)

I read this and wondered if she was just a naive 9-year-old, or if I had grown too cyncial for my own good. Probably the latter, I concluded. It's sad when friendships are outgrown, when the garden is razed or turned slowly into compost to feed future flora. But it's sadder, I suppose, when stale friendships remain. I finallly found the hex key and fixed the damn couch.

Later, Rev called to ask me if Michelle Shocked had been in the Go-Go's. No, I told her, she hadn't.