I tried to listen to Guy Ritchie's commentary on the Revolver DVD this morning and couldn't make it through. The stupidity, the arrogance, the condescending tone, it all just burned. He goes on and on about shit I learned in my Philosophy 101 class back in college like he's laying enlightenment on the fucking masses. What a tool. He's so completely full of himself and his imaginary wisdom, it's actually infuriating for me to listen to him carry on about "the self," human concepts of ego, transcending the material and physical world in a quest for spirituality. Rubbish like that. He thinks this shitfest is a deep reflection on our perceptions of reality. He thinks it's a highly original way of getting us lesser beings to think about these things in an effort to improve ourselves and the world around us.

As Marc wrote in the mad e-mail exchange we've had back and forth since my life went from B.R. (Before Revolver) to A.R. (Anno Revolvus - or "The Year of Revolver"), "Uh, no. It's fucking Fight Club"

Anyway, I'm killing time before going to meet little bro, so I'll jump on the navel gazing meme train with Tommy, Sheila and Tracey.

( Click here if you give a crap )

Thanks to Marc, I finally got to watch Guy Ritchie's Revolver last night.

I'm just not ready to talk about it. I still can't believe it. I'm a different person today than I was twelve hours ago when I hadn't yet seen it. I never thought I'd do this. Not in my worst nightmares did I ever imagine myself typing the seven words that follow.

This movie is worse than Battlefield Earth.

There. I said it. I have to write more about this later, but the stream of Xanax I've needed afterward is kind of distracting at the moment. But there is one thing I do have to get off my chest before I go start a support group to recover,

WHAT THEFFUCKING FUCK WASUPWITH THE RANDOMANIMATIONSEQUENCE?!?!!?!?!?!?

This is hilarious. Apparently, what I am assuming are the acts of Penguins fans, the Rocky statue in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art has been decorated several times with the jerseys of a Flyers' rival (again, probably the Penguins). The Flyers' official street team checks in on it throughout the day to give free team merchandise to any fans willing to sit outside of it and "guard" the Rocky statue.

I'm not making any predictions about the upcoming series between the Penguins and Flyers, mostly because predictions are stupid, but also because the only thing I'm sure enough to put money on is that by the time it is over, one of those cities is going to get trashed. I'm thinking of starting a pool on how many square miles of which will be destroyed by rabid sports fans.

(Cross posted at MySpace)

Today's LiveJournal "Writer's Block"

Has anyone ever done something so horrible to you that "I'm sorry" couldn't fix it?

Yep. Discretion will keep me from specifics because I don't name names, not even under torture.

I have pretty low standards when it comes to friends. Don't lie to me. Don't steal from me. Don't treat me like I'm stupid. Don't be rude to my family. That's pretty much it. I'll accept anything otherwise. I don't care how you dress, what kind of music you like, who or how you like to fuck, where you are from, how much school you've had, who you pray to, where you are pierced or tattooed, whether or not you like opera, how you take your coffee, or what you regularly injest into your body (unless it causes you to do any of the first four things I mentioned. Drugs often do). When it comes to politics, nearly anything short of Nazism, racism and homophobia is just fine by me. Believe what you like. It's a free country.

The thing is, for me, doing something "horrible" doesn't have to be appalling. You don't have to kill my mom. Well, that would be hard, since she's already dead, but you have to be real, honest. You can't be a phony. I can forgive a criminal record. My belief in redemption is enormous. Forgiveness is important to me. People make mistakes. Jeebus knows I've made more than a fair share of my own. We're all human. That's what makes the world so wonderful and interesting, so fantastic and devastating, even when it's shockingly sad. But a phony? Someone you can't trust under normal circumstances, never mind when the chips are down? A person whose only interest is how they can use you for their own ends? The guy who puts on airs to prove how impressively cool or smart he is?

Nope. I can't forgive that. It's too boring, too much of a waste of my time. More importantly, life is just too damn short. There are so many interesting people in the world who aren't busy pretending they're something else that I'd rather spend my time getting to know. There are "friends" I have cut out of my life because of this. That's not cruel - trust me, they probably didn't care. They certainly didn't act like they did when I had them around. I've been through enough hard times. I won't invite deliberate transgression in through the front door ever again. I can forgive a lot, but I forget very little. I just can't afford to anymore.

(cross posted at MySpace)

I've had this profile of the Detroit Red Wings' Darren McCarty, about his struggle with addiction, gambling, rehab and, finally, bouncing back to a pro-hockey career, stuck in my head for the last few days. Between that, just finishing up Tom Sykes' What Did I Do Last Night and still suffering linger bouts of emotion after reading Nikki Sixx's The Heroin Diaries, there's something I noticed. Drug and alcohol abuse are the only things these guys really have in common, but there's one remarkable trait that's consistent in all of them: humility. There is something very humbling about having to admit to yourself, to everybody around you - some of them strangers that you know may offer no pity, no compassion, nothing but harsh judgement - that you were not only weak and vulnerable, but that you caved into that weakness repeatedly and against better judgement.

Way before James Frey was exposed by the Smoking Gun as a liar and a fraud for his bogus "memoirs," my good friend Sheila nailed it. She completely nailed that guy as a phony. I wasn't really aware of him when he was being celebrated as the author of "the War and Peace of addiction" (uh, Pat Conroy? Puh-leeze. Melodramatic much?). I've never read that book and I don't plan to. I didn't really know anything about him before he was outed as a poseur and had Oprah shake a finger at him on her talk show. The quotes that Sheila excerpts from one of his pre-busted interviews are distinctly lacking in that same humility. Like Sheila wrote, "There's something adolescent here, about how he lists what a pig he is ... it's like a teenage boy choosing to wear smelly socks ... but he's only doing it to thumb his nose at his mother. Like, you might THINK you're being rebellious - but a TRUE rebel isn't always glancing around at authority figures to see how 'outraged' everyone is. A true rebel just does his thing and doesn't care."

James Frey cared enough to fake his life story and then went around the press circuit telling everyone how cool he is because he used to get wasted and have trouble with the law. People that have gone through those kind of things and managed to recover may be willing to tell their stories, share them with other people, sometimes in the hopes of saving them from making the same mistakes, but they don't generally brag like they've re-invented Fonzie because they used to get high too much, not after traveling the long road to recovery and knowing that they face a lifetime battle against addiction. Frey has the letters "S.P.C.D.H.C." tattooed on his wrist and they're supposed to stand for "Simplicity, Patience, Compassion, Discipline, Honesty, Courage." Maybe he should have added "humility" to the list. He could have used a little then. He's probably got more than his share now.

(Cross posted at MySpace)

Before anyone goes out and starts a charity to help with the nearly inhuman suffering I almost had to endure yesterday (see post here), I just want to let you know that the Dutch people called later in the morning to say they weren't going to be able to make the meeting because they were hungover. Nice. I wish they could have told me they were planning on binge drinking to the point of illness the night before so that I could have not only done the same, but didn't have to wake up so bloody fucking early to meet people that weren't even going to show.

At least I got to see the Pens knock out the Rangers. That's the important thing. Sorry, Shanny. You're a class act, but as long as you're on the same team as Avery, I can't root for you to win. The Pens/Flyers face-off is going to be interesting. I wonder which city will end up getting torched?

I also finished Tom Sykes' What Did I Do Last Night?, which was awesome. Sykes is a British journalist who wrote a column for the New York Post about Manhattan night life (among other publications, but primarily that one for most of the book). He would go out to bars and drink and write about the social scene, fashion, celebrities and who made great martinis, that kind of thing. He also occasionally wrote in the coveted Page Six column, so every proprietor and restaurant owner on the island was willing to ply him with food and alcohol for free. In other words, he had the coolest fucking job in the world. Or at least he thought he did for a while, until his drug and alcohol intake turned into a threat to his health and sanity. It's a sort of anti-Heroin Diaries, if I can make a comparison, in that most of it was more glee and happy adventure than the memoir of a completely fractured man taunting death. There were moments while he was still getting wasted where he admitted lying to himself about his problem, making excuses because, well, look at that smelly guy on the park bench drinking Strawberry Hill from a paper bag. That's bad. My drinking's nothing next to him. Those were a little hard to swallow without having some sympathy for the guy and what he was ultimately going to have to face up to.

The last quarter or so of the book, after he cleans up and gets sober, is pretty devastating. I cried three or four times. The most of it, though, despite the fact that you know you are reading about a guy with a real problem, is a ton of fun. The best part for me was when he wound up drunk after a night of hard partying and called his boss at six in the morning to brag about how much ecstasy he'd taken, then crashed out and tried to get away with calling the very same person four or five hours later to say he couldn't come to work because he was sick from bad sushi he'd had the evening before. Yeah, dude. Nice try.

But Sykes will forever have a certain status of idolhood for me for thanking James Frey in his opening acknowledgements. Good call. Stick it to the poseur, ya drunkard-for-real. That's actually how I first learned of this book, when Sykes had written about the unusual number of fake "memoirs" that have been published of late in an article at the Guardian. You can read that here.

I'm also absolutely in love with the artwork on the cover of the paperback edition I have. I tried to look up the artist, but he has one of those unfortunately bland names (Christopher Rhoads), that turn up websites for midwestern professors and teenagers with MySpace pages in Sydney when I tried the search engines, so I can't even find any of his other stuff. I guess I'll have to look a little harder.




(cross posted at MySpace)

They had another good "writer's block" question today:

What fictional character do you relate to most and why?

I can't even imagine trying to browse through my bookshelves or memory to come up with an single answer to this one. There are too many characters, too many stories to pick just one, but I'll give it a shot. "Relating" to someone can happen on a variety of levels; I have never been a woman living among a Puritan colony in the New World that has been knocked up by someone who is not her husband and been made to suffer humiliation for it. Circumstances being what they are, I never will. I will never live in that harsh world of restriction and judgement, ThankyouGod. I can relate to Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter, though. I love her subtle defiance; when she's made to wear the letter "A" on her chest as a declaration of her misdeeds to those who weren't pointing and whispering already, she doesn't do it plainly. She's comfortable enough with the choices that she's made under the circumstances she's been forced to live under. The "A" she wears isn't just a simple letter. She adourns it with elaborate thread and decoration. It was meant to shame her and she instead made it a nearly flaunting work of art. She might as well have just written the words "DAMN STRAIGHT" across her bosom. When she finally gives birth, she names her daughter "Pearl," a precious and rare object that is only born from the discomfort of its creator. She doesn't hide her sins and she makes no apologies to those she feels don't deserve them. I adore her. She's unforgettable.

I was going to write more about Karen Green from Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, but that book has seriously fucked my shit up and writing about it, at least for now, was even worse. I'll save it for another time when I'm not knocking on walls to make sure they're really there or carrying around a measuring tape without realizing when or why I'd even picked it up in the first place.

I didn't wake up early. I never went to bed last night. I had some drinks and took the wrong pills for the occasion and wound up abusing my keyboard until the coffee shops opened for business.

Writing under those circumstances almost always results in an output that can only politely be described as "crap." An hour ago, I took a look back and, for nearly the first time in my life, that's not the case. Someone asked me last night "what is it about?" I hate that question more than I hate being asked "where are you from?" The brief answers to both respectively are "people" and "everywhere," which always results in a baffled look that hints at an urge for details that I don't have the heart or patience to give anymore. I'm forever in wonder that anyone's interested in the first place.

The longer answer to the first question: it's about three people who are isolated and lonely that think they don't give a fuck about any of it, including life or death and all that they lost along the way, through either fault or accident. They manage to find each other just in time to realize it's not true and it scares the shit out of them. It's people in pain who have lived with it for so long they don't notice it's there anymore until someone comes along and makes a point of it.

It's amazing how people who aren't even fucking real have been haunting me for the last year; it damn near killed me emotionally and now I can sit back and say that it's all over. I didn't realize how much I was getting out of my system through this. I'll spare the fine print. I don't want to talk about it anyway. It's tired me out, drained me of everything from tears to my fucking will to live.

I've still got the uppers in me so I can't hit the sack, but it's just as well because Chippy's got a column about the persecution of the Philadelphia Flyers to get done. The poor dears, contending for Lord Stanley's prize under the scrutiny of not being allowed to give their opponents concussions on purpose.

I put on the greatest hits of Simon and Garfunkel a short while ago because I thought I could use the quiet contemplation. Fuck that shit. It was pissing me off. I'm busting out with the Sixx:A.M. Loud.

Cordially yours, these have been the the thoughts of a doped-up playwrite at the ass end of a night without slumber. Cheers.

(Cross posted at MySpace)

LiveJournal has this feature called "writer's block" on their main page, where they post a question for people to blog about in case they can't come up with something on their own. Usually, they're pretty dumb, like "what kind of spices do you like to put in your leek soup?" that kind of thing. Today, for the first time, they actually posted a question I could get behind.

If you had a crowbar and could smash anything in your home or office, what would it be? Why?

I suppose the first question I have before answering this is will there be consequences? If not, I'd smash a lot of stuff. I'd start with my laptop, but that's only so I'd have an excuse to buy a Mac. Smashing televisions during sporting events that aren't turning out the way I'd like would be pretty cool, too. If Sean Avery ever came to my home or office, I'd smash him more than once. I'd also smash the fax machine for all the grief that fucker has given me over the years. This is what we generally refer to as "pulling an Office Space on the mofo."

That's just for right now. I'm sure there will be other stuff I want to smash to come.

In case anyone's still stopping by this place, I'm starting over from scratch. More on that later.

In the meantime, you can find me at MySpace. I know, I'm not twelve or in a band, but still...it's the easiest tool I have for staying in touch with the most people I know right now. Or you can visit Chippy McGuinness here and at the fabulous and reliable news organization she has recently joined here.