Month: March 2024

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Shit Shit Shit

So, I watched the Ocean’s series again recently.

If we judge the idea of our “favorite” movies by the number of times we’ve watched them, there’s a very strong argument to be made that Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Twelve, and Ocean’s Thirteen are three of my favorite movies of all time. Certainly, they’re movies that I probably watch once a year if not more often than that, despite not owning them. (They’re always streaming somewhere, somehow; you just have to look and see where.)

It’s neither the writing nor the acting that brings me back to these movies over and over again, as good as both are throughout the trilogy. Thirteen is a bit ropey in terms of writing, but apparently the version people see on screen is very, very different than the original screenplay, being the result of significant after-the-fact edits and reshoots in order to make something that moved faster and had a significantly different tone; when you know that, you can see the joins pretty easily on a rewatch. Instead, it’s the sense of style that both Soderbergh and soundtrack maven David Holmes bring to proceedings.

(Holmes’ music — his score, but also the tracks from external sources that he brings in, especially in Twelve, the ultimate style-over-substance installment, and my favorite of the three — cannot be overestimated in how much it impacts the final product in these movies; I’d argue that Thirteen only gets away with working because of his contributions.)

The concept of “cool” is, at best, a fool’s errand, because it’s so subjective and equally so changeable — what’s in today is, as everyone who watches Project Runway knows all too well, out tomorrow. Despite that, there’s an inescapable cool to Soderbergh’s Ocean’s movies that, the more I rewatch, seems to come down to the purposefully relaxed feel of all three movies. For heist movies, it’s impressive how not tense these films really are, how the audience is never really able to believe for more than a couple minutes that any of our heroes is actually in trouble. Instead, each of the three feel like you’re getting to hang out with a bunch of people who have just worked out some cosmic truth and are just breezily moving through the world in an entirely different way than you and I, and you get to ride in their slipstream for a few hours.

What’s instructive, though, is to see the way that Ocean’s Eight, the after-the-fact spin-off/sequel to the trilogy centering around Danny Ocean’s previously unmentioned sister, fails to match up to its predecessors. Again, special attention should be paid to the music, with Daniel Pemberton (the man behind killer scores for both The Man from UNCLE and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse) understanding the assignment, but director Gary Ross just fails to make the movie as weightless and stress-free as Soderbergh did the earlier trilogy, and as a result, it drags and ultimately fails to match the energy of what came before. You get the feeling that everyone involved isn’t just trying, but visibly trying too hard, and that’s just not what people come to Ocean’s for.

(Of course, now I want to re-watch Soderbergh’s own Logan Lucky, which I suspect might more readily match Eight. Hmm…)

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Waiting for Something to Happen

I’m very familiar with the concept that we end up looking just like our pets, in no small part because I should be so lucky — if I had the deceptive baby face of the old dog Gus, I’d be thrilled; if I had the unavoidably adorable charm of Alfie, or the inexplicable charm of Ging, I’d be similarly excited. I think you get what I’m saying here; I think all of my (many) pets are at the very least cute, if not downright beautiful, and I can only wish that my own physical features matched up to their standards.

Instead, though, what I’ve found myself thinking about with increasing, concerning regularity across the past few months, is what I would be like were I suddenly transformed into an animal — how my personality would show up in my behavior, how I’d interact with the world at large.

What brought this on, of all things, was watching the two dogs interact with the backyard when they go out to piss or shit, Alfie, the younger of the two by some distance, attacks the world and collapses all over it energetically, investigating but with such enthusiasm that he’s a perpetual motion machine just moving and moving and moving until suddenly it happens, whatever the it of the moment happens to be.

I feel much more in tune with Gus, who cautiously circles where he wants to go and then waits, patiently, crouching or with his leg cocked, as if knowing that something has to happen eventually if he can just… get there. I watch him when all of this is going on, and I think, that would be me if I were a dog, if I had to go through everything a dog has to go through to go to the bathroom. And maybe it’s true; I feel as if there’s some accidental attempt to self-compliment hidden in there, a “I could be as patient and zen as he is,” when I’d likely be grumbling and unhappy with the discomfort.

Whether or not I’ll ever end up looking like any one of my pets, I remain unconvinced, but I’ll say this: I’m pretty sure I could learn from their approaches to life.

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The Words, Made Flesh

That whole thing about “Never meet your heroes” is, I’m sure, a truism for a reason; I can only imagine the number of people who have had the misfortune to spend time with those people who have shaped their lives, only to discover with an unfortunate comment (or worse, an awkward silence) that things are not going well. I’ve had more than enough experiences meeting… well, not exactly “heroes” as much as “people who I thought I admired or respected from some distance,” that started uncomfortably and ended far worse, after all.

Meeting my “heroes,” though? It’s happened no less than three times, and in a surprise twist of fate, each time they turned out to be either exactly what I wanted them to be, or somehow even better. (Technically, one of these meetings is more “talked to repeatedly over Skype, Zoom, and other forms of internet communication,” but that counts, surely…? It feels as if it should, at least.)

Rather than embarrass myself with listing all three of these experiences here right now, I’ll mention just the first, in large part because it’s the one I was arguably the most nervous about. There was a period of time around the turn of the century — I really can’t remember which side of the changeover it was, because there was a lot going on in general at the time — where I was helping out a local arts group I’d gotten myself involved in; I did their newsletter and, when I was in the same town as them (which was not often, for awhile; like I said, there was. a lot going on), I’d sit in on meetings or help out in their rented art space. At one of the meetings I missed, it was decided to get a visiting artist in to help bring people to said art space. It was also decided that that artist would be Bill Drummond.

When I found this out, I re-arranged what would I self-consciously avoided calling my schedule to make sure I’d be in town to meet him. This was Bill Drummond, after all — co-founder of the KLF, artist, musician, and for the intents of my hero worship, writer of 45, a book that was as friendly, curious, and kind about pop culture as I could imagine. He was, in many ways, who I wanted to be when I grew up. I had to meet him, if I had the chance, I thought, even as I winced at the possibility of embarrassing myself as soon as I opened my mouth.

By the time he showed up, I had managed to get myself entirely wound up by the paranoid certainty that it would go badly. I’m going to say something stupid, I thought to myself, or he’s going to be terrible. There’s no other way this can go. For days leading up to the event, I just got more and more convinced that disaster was around the corner, but I still had this need to meet him, no matter what. When would I get this chance again?

I needn’t have worried; he was charming, patient, and chatty. He was odd, and off-kilter, in the best of ways, with stories that seemed to go on too long and not long enough at the same time. I remember him as being tall, which I have no idea if it’s true or not, but feels like it should have been, just because of how it felt after I’d met him — as if something magical had happened, in the most literal sense of that phrase: something nonsensical and meaningful, but outside of the realms of logic or common sense. I remember walking home that night more clearly than I remember actually meeting him, just feeling awash with the possibilities of a world where such a thing had happened, when there was no reason why it should have.

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The Smell of Old Books and Rubber Flooring

When I was a kid, we’d go to the library once a week, as a family; me, my older sister (for awhile, both of my sisters before the oldest got too old to think it was cool), and both my parents. It was something I looked forward to intensely, this weekly pilgrimage en masse; no matter what else might have been going on in my life, it was always a highlight of the week — a chance to find new things, new words and new worlds, and new thoughts to go inside my head.

I had favorite books I’d return to time after time, of course, but more than that, I had favorite areas of the library where I’d find new things every single week; even though I’ve not been there for more than 30 years, I could still draw you a detailed map of where you could find books about movies and TV shows — making-of type things, that I was obsessed with — or the books about art, whether it was art history or how-tos. I could take you to the exact shelf where Jonathan Carroll’s books were, which I returned to time after time; I could tell you where the music section was, and even more than that, where you could find the cool and weird music if you really wanted it.

(A sudden reminder how old I am; I can remember when the music section was primarily made up of vinyl. Not even cassettes — vinyl.)

I was in love with that library. It was one of my favorite places in the world when I lived in my hometown, somewhere that felt safe and exciting at once; somewhere that I felt safe to be myself, even when I didn’t know who that was. I loved it so much that, when I was back in my hometown last year, I went all the way to the walkway leading to the library, but daren’t walk up to the doors themselves. I knew that it would have changed from the way it was when I was a kid — it should, that was more than three decades ago — and, at the same time, I knew that it would break my heart to see it any different, even after all this time.

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Reviewing the

The older I get, the more I realize that my long-term memory is very keyed off of sense memory and instants, rather than any coherent narrative. I’m not sure if this is the way that things work for everyone else or if I’m the odd one out, but I remember a chain of events as if it’s something I’ve read or been told, even when they’ve happened to me — something that I shorthandedly think of as flattening events into a straight line — while I can remember absolutely everything about very specific, seemingly meaningless, instants or seconds that just nonetheless feel fully immersive as soon as I even nod in their general direction.

I was thinking about this lately as I prepped for this year’s Emerald City Comic Con. I offhandedly tried to remember what the weather was like the year before, so I could think about what clothes to pack, and instead of any coherent “well, on the Thursday of the show, it was like this” response, my brain immediately flashed back to running from the hotel to the convention center on the first day, trying not to think too much about the rain as I listened to “Reviewing the Situation” by Sandie Shaw.

I remembered crossing the roads, the precise path I took and the sense of, Well, this year’s show needs me to do X, Y, and Z as I did so, listing off that day’s to-dos to make sure that I didn’t forget anything important. (I did, but I remembered before it was too late.) I remembered the coffee shop I passed, thinking, maybe I should get something now while I have the chance and then convincing myself that I should be responsible and get it done after my first work for the day. (A bad decision; work took over and suddenly it was lunchtime and I was starving.)

I remembered everything with such clarity and detail, even though it was this minor moment on the way to a show. But when I try to think, well, what happened on the Thursday of the show last year, it’s as if I’m reciting a list to myself instead of anything so detailed. I can’t work out if this is a gift, a curse, or simply the way everyone’s memory works… and if I think about it too much, I just end up derailed on another odd sense memory from years ago…

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The Perils of the Season, Again

Because I am a responsible adult who, very importantly, doesn’t want to get in trouble with anyone thank you very much, I spent part of the last weekend doing my taxes. It’s a chore that has become the most depressing second nature imaginable in the many years that I’ve been living in the U.S., and one that without fail leaves me in a melancholy mood with one simple question: Why don’t I have more money?

Not in the sense of, why don’t I earn more money generally, because that’s a thought that I keep to myself during the work week, especially on those more stressful times; instead, it’s when I do the math about how much income I get, and how much I spend to pay rent, pay bills, etc., I’m always left thinking, surely I should have more in my bank account for the two minutes before I remember things like groceries and eating.

This year was worse than usual, because of the multiple international trips I took, and the dent they made in my bank balance. (On the one hand, yes, the flights were paid for my work, but once I was there, I paid for the majority of my accommodation and all of my domestic travel, and that really piles up when you’re there for two or three weeks at a time and criss-crossing around the country all the time.) I added up all the incoming money I had, looked at the outgoing and then… took a quiet moment to myself.

The other thing that traditionally happens when I do my taxes is that I promise myself that this is the year I’ll be better with money, that I’ll save more, that I will be conscious of everything I could and should be doing to prepare for my future. This year, thankfully, I put that to the side; I’m old enough now to accept that shit will happen no matter what I plan, whether it’s pet medical expenses, family medical expenses, or, you know, global pandemics dramatically impacting my ability to make a living. The best you can hope for is… well, the best you can hope for.

Tax season is a time of year where you come to terms with how powerless you are about your own finances, or else you want to stare out a window wordlessly for a few hours.

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The quiet hum of a city outside your hotel room window

I’m trying to work out how best to describe the recent Seattle trip for this year’s Emerald City Comic Con. It was a particularly odd one, for all number of reasons — having almost no sleep the first night because the dinner I had that night not agreeing with me, and then feeling exhausting and increasingly out-of-it the next day to the point where I was asleep by 8:30pm set a very strange tone for what proved to be a very strange trip, in the end — and one that felt perpetually out of whack for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on, entirely.

Something that only added to the feeling of disconnection was the fact that, even more so than most Emerald City Comic Cons, on this particular trip I didn’t really exist anywhere that wasn’t the hotel or the convention center. It was a combination of having a busier than usual schedule — breakfast meetings! Evening panels! — and the weather being impressively bad, with freezing temperatures and enough rain that I didn’t particularly want to wander through the streets in the early morning, as I’ve done in the past; instead, I worked a lot, and as such, I existed at either the convention center or in my hotel room. The rest of Seattle didn’t really exist, for all intents and purposes.

It’s a lonely way to be, which is ironic, given that I was definitely at my most social that I’ve been for a long time at the show; I got to see a lot of friends and almost-friends, and I got to have a lot of good conversations, but in a strange way, that underscored how strange it felt to be working at 10pm in the hotel room and sitting in bed afterwards, my brain still turning over and feeling the silence surround me almost tangibly after failing to find anything to watch on TV, knowing I wasn’t ready for sleep just yet, but I also wasn’t up for anything else, either.

On the final day, one of the people I work with said something along the lines about the whole thing having felt like it had happened out of order, with that last day feeling like the first. The days weren’t the same for me, but I knew what she meant; the entire trip felt like it was jumbled, collapsed in on itself and rebuilt in a hurry. Even a week later, I’m unsure whether or not I enjoyed it or not.