Sins of the Father

For as long as I could remember, my dad’s evening commute included a one-mile walk from the 7 train’s terminus at Main Street, Flushing to our two-family home in Auburndale. Usually, he would come sauntering through the door, whistling some complicated tune and swinging his canvas briefcase like a happy grade-schooler handling his lunchbox. He’d maintain this jocular mood while walking up the steps to our second-floor apartment, then his happiness would disperse and he’d adopt his regular sour puss in preparation for what was to come–for very often, there was some situation involving my brother. Adem was caught cutting class again. Adem drank all the beer in the house. Adem punched the bathroom mirror, shattering it and lacerating his hands with the shards. In the ten seconds it took for my father to traverse the hallway between the front door and the door to our apartment, between his guises as Employed Guy and Punitive Father, you could catch a glimpse of the man in his natural state, unencumbered by responsibilities and ethics and harsh realities. And you know, I’m glad he had that much. Because as bad as my brother could be, there are plenty of dads who don’t get even that time to be themselves, to be absolved of their own anger and guilt and whatever other stupid feelings parents have towards their wayward children. For want of a twenty-minute walk home from the subway, other dads have no respite at all.

Take, for instance, Commissioner James Gordon, that well-known fictional character from the Batman universe. Doggedly devoted to his job and a high-minded concept of justice, Gordon is commonly depicted sympathetically by applicable funny book writers, sort of the “good cop” to Batman’s “bad cop.” But he is not without his faults, and along with his awards and trophies and commendations for stellar police work, Gordon is also the owner of one failed marriage, one second wife tragically murdered in the line of duty, a handful of crooked cops making merry on his watch, and other assorted failures and derogatory accusations. These hurdles, they wear on any man, even dads. And Commissioner Gordon is a dad, to his adopted daughter (in the current iteration) Barbara Gordon and his biological son, James Gordon, Jr.

Oh, you don’t know about James Gordon, Jr.? You don’t remember when, as a baby, he was rescued by Bruce Wayne in Batman: Year One? That act of heroism is why then-Captain Gordon started trusting Batman in the first place. See, now you remember, but you didn’t remember before because James, Jr. appears in Batman: Year One and practically nowhere else. He figures prominently in the well-done graphic novel Night Cries by Archie Goodwyn–in which we actually see Gordon’s first wife separate from him and move to Chicago–but otherwise, we don’t learn too much about the lil tyke. We’re so intimate with Barbara Gordon that we can predict her menstrual cycle, but James Gordon, Jr. remains an enigma.

Until the story arc contained in Batman: The Black Mirror by Scott Snyder. Perhaps you’ve been avoiding reading recent Batman fare because all of the established constants of the mythological world he inhabits are perpetually shifting as of late. Or maybe you never gave a shit about Batman and are asking yourself why you’ve read this much of my review. For the purposes of The Black Mirror, it’s only important to know that the usual Batman, Bruce Wayne, has taken leave and left his ward, Dick Grayson (aka Nightwing, aka the first Robin) to wear the Batman costume. Get all that? So where the Bruce Wayne Batman is all brooding and large swaths of black ink, the Dick Grayson Batman is more convivial and happy, preferring the high-flying trapeze routines recalled from his youth as a circus performer to wallowing in the filthy streets, violently separating miscreants from their teeth. Got all that? Any questions? Good. You should have questions.

So in The Black Mirror, you’ve got Dick Grayson playing Batman, trying to fill the shoes worn by his adoptive father, Bruce Wayne. You’ve got the bastard daughter of mafia boss Tony Zucco, now a bank manager trying to escape from the shadow of her biological dad’s criminal past. And you’ve got James Gordon, Jr., who approaches his poppa with an apparently sincere desire to reconnect with his family. The rub is that James Junior is a psychopath, he does not feel empathy for his fellow man, and is suspected by his dad of having committed several violent crimes. Intertwining all of these characters, The Black Mirror challenges the idealized nature of father/son relationships, affirming the dichotomy of being any member of a family and its contradictions. Parents are sometimes required to dole tough love, children need to be self-reliant and independent in order to prove that they’ve been raised with due attention. Dealing with members of your immediate family can sometimes be like looking into a mirror, a black mirror at that, a very similar reflection turned unfamiliar by obfuscating the features we expect to see.

And that, my patient readers, is where The Black Mirror fails. For while I was able to create an adequate metaphor for the story based on the title of this trade collection, Todd Snyder goes on for the entire run about how Gotham City is “hungry,” how it feeds on pain or whatever trite bullshit you want to assume about a city that’s positively famished. Sure, Gotham City is hungry, it’s also sleepy and sneezy and Doc if you sit and think about it long enough. You can apply virtually any metaphor on a fictional city, so why Snyder insisted on going to the long way around to describe its hunger is beyond me. It’s called Black Mirror, many parent/child relationships can be construed as each person being a mirror for the other, and sometimes that mirror is blackened in that we see things about ourselves that might not be pleasant. How does a starving city play into this? What does a corrupting, peckish city have to do with fathers and sons? Very little, I think, and Snyder doesn’t seem to care enough to draw even those parallels. It’s more like he wanted a noir concept to run through the series in order to tie the narrative together, but either didn’t see or care to acknowledge the lay-up concept. No matter. It’s disappointing to see an easily-fielded ball dropped, but it doesn’t mar this engaging story terribly. Check it out, Batman fans.

Tags: Batman, black mirror, Commissioner Gordon, DC Comics, James Gordon, Jock, Todd Snyder

The Forgotten Assassinations

For those of us Americans that did not pay close attention in junior high school Social Studies class–me, for example–many of our nineteenth-century presidents kind of run together in a pudgy, high-collared blur. We all know Abraham Lincoln, we know about Andrew Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant and anyone else featured on our money, but the remaining guys are often considered as an aristocratic whole, a bunch of faceless members from the Monopoly man’s extended family. You don’t often hear people praising Franklin Pierce, or Rutherford Hayes, or even Andrew Johnson–vice president to Abe Lincoln, for crying out loud. But no grade school student ever has to make a construction paper report about him. What could they say? “Andrew Johnson was the sucker tasked with filling a vacancy left by the revered and beloved Abraham Lincoln, and did a piss-poor job of it.” I’d give the kid an A.

So it is with James A. Garfield, our twentieth president, and William McKinley, our twenty-fifth president, about whom I once knew exactly this:

James A. Garfield was a bearded president who was shot by some schizophrenic guy and died in office.

William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist, leaving Vice President Teddy Roosevelt in charge.

For some reason, I was glad to leave it at that. There exist, and I have read, dozens of books about the presidencies and assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. These two and their fatal termini have been analyzed and dissected by scholars and armchair historians, archivists and conspiracy theorists from all over the world. And yet, the lives and deaths of James Garfield and William McKinley seem to be regarded as minor events in America’s history. After reading a couple of books about these guys, I have to wonder why. What strikes me is not how unique or different they were, but how eerily similar their presidential terms and circumstances seemed next to the more popular presidents who met violent ends while in office.

In Garfield’s case, perhaps it isn’t because he met his end at a handgun’s report, but because he died on a sweat- and pus-soaked mattress, months after being shot. Technically speaking, it was not the bullet fired from madman Charles Guiteau’s gun that killed him, but sepsis. Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard does a fantastic job dovetailing the lives of Guiteau, Garfield, his attending surgeon Dr. Willard Bliss and even inventor Alexander Graham Bell into an enjoyable narrative set against one of my favorite periods: America after the Civil War. Echoing the assassination of JFK, Charles Guiteau was a lone gunman, also off his rocker in having the erroneous, unfounded belief that he was a political insider owed something from Garfield. He plugged the president in the middle of the day in plain sight at a train station, but that would be a pleasant beginning compared to the rest Garfield’s ordeal. His convalescence dragged on for months as doctor after doctor stuck their grubby fingers in his bullet wound, at a time when washing your hands seemed a spurious luxury though everything was covered in a fine layer of horse manure. I couldn’t help but draw a parallel between Garfield’s literally being prodded with the metaphorical prodding of Lincoln and JFK, albeit postmortem. Garfield, like JFK and Lincoln, was also a reformer, his intention was to reform the Republican party from patronage to a system based on merit. Seems like a small cause in today’s times, but remember that he was challenging the status quo during Reconstruction against rival U.S. Grant, hero of the Civil War (except to the South.)

The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century by Scott Miller is a very different book than Destiny of the Republic, yet many of the same uncanny similarities between Lincoln, Garfield, and Kennedy persist. McKinley was president at a time of robber barons and magnates, of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, when the disparity between the wealthy and the working poor was tremendously palpable. Men, women and children worked ten hour days, six days a week, under stifling, dangerous conditions for twenty-five cents every pay day. Meanwhile, McKinley’s policies favored unrestricted trade and further boons for business owners. Enter Leon Czogolz, another lonely man, entranced by a budding anarchist movement heralded largely by Emma Goldman. After hearing one of her stirring lectures, Czogolz determines to make a spectacle by killing McKinley, though his connection to anarchism and, indeed, the working class is tenuous at best. Unlike Garfield, McKinley expires within ten days of being shot. The President and the Assassin is an engaging book, but it provides a bit too much detail about McKinley’s rise to power for those who actually only wanted to read about the president and his assassin. Additionally, it jumps backwards and forwards in time which can be a little confusing. It’s all important stuff, however, to describe the conditions that eventually allowed Czogolz to get within range of McKinley and shoot him.

We see the same occurrences, again and again: a lone gunman of dubious sanity shoots a president calling for political and social reform. This leaves a vacuum that is filled to moderate capability by the vice president, sometimes bettering the legacy of his predecessor. If anything, the four presidential assassinations–two remembered, two forgotten–teach us that we should pick our presidential candidates based not only on their integrity, but on the integrity of their potential posthumous successors. No one likes to think about it, but the availability and easy use of guns can change our political fortunes overnight. Imagine if George H.W. Bush had been assassinated in office and Dan Quayle became president! Only a few synaptic misfires and a functioning trigger finger separated that thought from reality.

Tags: 1880s, 1890s, Alexander Graham Bell, America, assassination, Charles Guiteau, James Garifield, Leon Czogolz, William McKinley

I Got Rid Of My Old Television

We moved into a nice, affordable two-bedroom apartment at the beginning of 2003, coinciding with the departure of a downstairs neighbor about a month later. He was not vacating his studio apartment voluntarily, mind you, but at the firm, legal request of our mutual landlady. He hadn’t paid rent. In a while. Presumably cash-strapped, he offered to sell his lightly-used, practically brand new Samsung high-definition television–at less than half of its original price, to boot. This was too good of an opportunity to pass up. Though we, ourselves, were light on loot at the time, having just moved and all, we scraped together the five-hundred bucks our neighbor wanted for the television and a shitty TV stand that looked half put-together. We were satisfied in the feeling of having come out ahead in this particular transaction.

Until we tried to move the thing upstairs.

This television weighed four-hundred pounds, if it weighed an ounce. Why such a television would be made for the home consumer, considering it required a pair of professional weightlifters to move it, beggars explanation. Compounding the problem of relocating this appliance to our apartment was the fact that it had been designed by some Lovecraftian aficionado well-versed in non-Euclidean geometry, for though it seemed to have a number of corners and crevices, the television could not be accurately gripped or held by any being with an outstretched span less than that of an orangutan. We moved the television upstairs, step by step, taking frequent breaks to pant and curse. Several times, I considered giving up, leaving the television on the stairs, and navigating around it when entering or exiting the apartment. But we got the thing up to the second floor and somehow–I do not remember how–perched it atop its accompanying television stand.

A couple of years later, our pairing parted ways and we divvied up our belongings. I gave her my older television, a second-hand tube set with roughly a thirty-five inch screen. I took what I believed to be the better, newer television. And so began seven years of lugging this terrible behemoth from apartment to apartment, anxiously worrying whenever tasked to budge it, expelling deep relief once I’d secured it in a location from where it would not need to be shifted again, at least for a while. I actually moved only three times since 2004, which is relatively stable for dwelling in New York City. Twice, I hired movers, once I moved myself with the help of a very strong friend. Each time, the Samsung television needed to be moved, and each time it presented the biggest problems. The television became a proverbial elephant in the room, and weighed about as much by my estimation.

Over time, the television’s other limitations surfaced. For one, I had lost or had never received a remote control. More importantly, though this television claimed to have high-definition resolution, it simply did not. I don’t know if the meaning of high-definition changed from the early part of the century, or if it was a bold-faced lie, but the very year we got our massive television, I got a high-definition cable box and invited a bunch of people over to watch the Super Bowl. The total lack of a crystal clear picture was obvious and immediate, and we ultimately switched back to regular digital television before the second half started. More recently, since most newer programs are broadcast in widescreen, I was missing the extreme left and right of my picture. It was screwing up my Netflix and Hulu menus and generally soured my television addiction. Watching that Samsung television in recent years was probably akin to a junkie on methadone: it does the job, but it’s not quite the same as the uncut dope. So, I endeavored to get a new television.

Of course, the new TV is almost twice as large, screen-wise, but weighs one-fifth of the Samsung. I shoved the Samsung into a corner while setting up the new appliance, and it stayed there a week. “How are you going to get rid of it?” my knowledgeable friends and family asked. “When do you want to move the old TV?” my girlfriend gently prodded. I despaired. I didn’t know how to get rid of this television. People suggested I advertise it on craigslist, but since the thing could only be moved by two or more stalwart lumberjacks, I envisioned a stream of people trampling through my house to look at this pig in a poke, rightly decide that they couldn’t budge it, and exiting only to leave me with the monstrosity and the dirty feeling of having a stranger judge me for my Batman comics collection. I considered taking the television apart and disposing of it in pieces, but a friend advised against this as a substantial charge can remain within the recesses of older television sets. I worried, I fretted. I tried to ignore this gigantic television lying dormant right next to my seat on the couch. “Maybe I can pass it off as sculpture,” I pondered. I wondered how much trouble I’d get into for shoving the television off of my balcony, and even how I would shlep the thing four measly feet to do that much.

Then, in a fit of hopeless exuberance, my girlfriend and I got rid of it. How we did it is not important, and I don’t know that I could even describe it. The important thing is the extreme feeling of relief upon expelling the beast from my apartment, from my life. It was more than the weight and size of the physical thing, that Samsung television amounted to a quarter-ton badge of shame signifying my familiarity with shitty prime-time sitcoms and interminably boring sporting events. As with many such feelings, I wished I had gotten rid of the damned thing sooner. We all carry our impossible televisions through life, metaphorically and sometimes literally, feeling like these are our crosses to bear, the things we’re given with which we’ve got to make do. It isn’t true. I’ve got a new television, but it doesn’t carry with it the worry and discomfort of my old immovable, anxiety-laden set. Getting rid of that headache sooner would have been worth missing all of the episodes of Family Matters re-runs that I watched in the interim.

Tags: television, Samsung, LG, monstrosity, high-definition, non-euclidean

Some Movies That Fucked Me Up a Little

I have the honor of being a Younger Brother. Moreso, my sibling is an Older Brother, not an Older Sister, which has deep ramifications. My childhood was full of farting contests and instruction on masturbation and being made to feel like an insignificant worm, while an Older Sister might have simply made me feel like an insignificant worm and left it at that. One dubious benefit of having an Older Brother is that I got to hear music and watch movies that, at the time, I was probably too young to fully comprehend. My particular Older Brother was a big fan of the horror genre, which is why, when my age was still in single digits, I saw a lot of movies that kind of fucked me up.

When A Stranger Calls, 1979, color

Of all the movies I watched at grade-school age that I shouldn’t have–A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Sleepaway Camp–When A Stranger Calls is arguably the least scary from an objective viewpoint. However, it made a big impact on me because it was the first horror movie I ever saw. It may have been the very first time my parents went out for the evening and left my brother in charge, but it was certainly during one of these initial expressions of parental trust that I saw the movie, which ultimately led to me not sleeping for two weeks. The plot to When A Stranger Calls is the same as that campfire story about the prank caller who ends up have called from inside the house all along, a trite, old yarn that I had never heard before seeing the film. I can recall a scene depicting a bloody guy in a bathtub that I don’t believe is actually in the movie. Though I was terrified of When A Stranger Calls and had lingering nightmares because of it, I don’t think I ever explained as much to my parents. I guess I thought they’d be pissed off if they knew my brother let me watch it.

Phantasm, 1979, color

My brother was able to traumatize two family members with this film: my mother first, when she took him to see it in the theater and then never took him to see another horror movie again for as long as he lived. Then again, much later, when he and I watched it one evening that my parents were out. The plot, as I understood at age nine, is about a horrifying tall man that scares the shit out of everyone just through his sheer existence. There are also little Jawas that kidnap people and send them to another dimension through a portal hidden within a mausoleum, but what I mainly remember is the Tall Man, played by Angus Scrimm. How good is that name? Angus Scrimm. With a name like that, you’re either going to be a bagpipe player, or someone that scares the pants off of little kids without much effort. But there’s no way you could be both.

The Last House On the Left, 1972, color

I’m closing in on forty years old at the time of this writing, and I still don’t think I’m old enough to watch this movie. Arguably one of the most disturbing theatrical releases in history, Last House On the Left is about two thrill-seeking teenage girls who go to a rock concert only to get raped and murdered. Parents of one of the teens take their opportunity to enact (a sort of convoluted) revenge when the killers show up at their doorstep due to car trouble. I saw this movie when I was nine years old. The song that plays over the closing credits is one of my favorite songs of all time–a kind of freewheeling country tune that basically outlines the plot of the movie. If you’ve got a strong stomach, I recommend you watch this movie because it’s definitely an interesting juxtaposition of gore, psychological horror, and slapstick comedy–yes, you read that right, slapstick comedy. However, if you’re a nine year-old boy who pisses himself when highly anxious, then you should put this flick on the back burner and watch something more tame like House.

Tags: 1980s, Adem, Carol Kane, horror, Last House On the Left, movies, my brother, Phantasm, When A Stranger Calls

Punch Wood: It’s a Family Affair

My family never had a Game Night. We hung around with each other at times, and I certainly played games with my dad–Mille Bornes was one of his favorites–but we didn’t sit around as a family to roll dice against a piece of cardboard once a week. I think the main reason we didn’t do this is because board games suck. This fact can be applied to all board games, without exception, and any person who postulates otherwise is possibly suffering from a mild hysterical delusion. Board games are “fun” when pitted against “sitting in a room of uncomfortable silence;” if the latter is a likely option, only then does playing a board game seem like an attractive alternative. But anything else is better than playing a board game, down to arguing with loved ones about politics and scrapbooking. You might actually take away some memories, bad or good, from scrapbooking with your mother and Aunt Matilda. You’ll never remember a solitary thing you did while playing a stupid board game.

However it’s also true that I was not instilled with much familial “team spirit.”. We didn’t have a goofy sign with our surname outside the house, we took no yearly Christmas photos of us in a huddle dressed like a group of used car salespeople. I was given the option to join every manner of extracurricular activity: Cub Scouts, Little League, after school art programs–but unlike many of my peers, it was my option to do these things, they weren’t forced upon me as requisites. Given the choice, I opted out, and there was never any fighting or further discussion about it. I was happy to read and draw and concoct my version of the world within the angular walls of my attic bedroom. I don’t think it’s for me to say whether mine is an enviable or regrettable way to have grown up, but I don’t feel in the least bit angry or bitter about having missed the camaraderie of playing sports I don’t enjoy with kids I regarded suspiciously. My eschewing of team experiences were just some of the lustrous fibers that wove themselves into the wonderful, loveable tapestry that I am today. Don’t cry for me, Auburndale Soccer League.

I am aware that Family Game Night is an institution in many homes across America, one begrudgingly attended by teenagers who then turn around and foist it upon their own children, perpetuating a cycle that allows the board game industry to exist. One pitfall of playing these games is that the learning curves are so steep: games appropriate for all ages are often suitable only for infants and morons, while more adult fare like Pornographic Pictionary is too ribald for pre-pubescent family members to appreciate. Today, many Family Game Nights involve playing video games, often computer graphic-interpreted versions of popular board games which have the same inane pitfalls as their cardboard counterparts. Most other video games are either a non-stop bloody sex carnage, or involve repeatedly bouncing a pink bubble from one rainbow cloud to another while an anthropomorphized woodchuck cheers you on in Japanese. Enter Minecraft, a game that is simple and pleasant enough for small children to play, but also entices older players with action and challenges. And perhaps playing Minecraft is a better pursuit than racing your plastic token around a crummy picture against other members of your own family, because success in multi-player Minecraft involves teamwork.

I don’t mean to sugar-coat it and imply that playing Minecraft is primarily a team-based effort. You can certainly play it quite happily all on your own, and you can also spend time on servers slicing other players to ribbons with your pixelated sword (though you must then watch your back once your target respawns). I furthermore don’t intend to imply that Minecraft is the only or even best co-operative video game: many team-based first-person shooters require precise, military-style group maneuvers to effectively extract a maximum number of bloody deaths from the opposing team. But Minecraft seems to be an equalizer, a compromise between the many different wants and needs of a family unit. Watching families play Minecraft on YouTube, you see how easily each member falls into their supportive roles, depending on their proclivities: one person might spend tireless hours gathering resources (like the interminably boring job of chopping wood and replanting saplings) while another concentrates on constructing a sturdy home and establishing an animal farm. Even the hormone-addled teenager can satisfy his wanderlust and carouse the countryside defeating monsters, only to return and use his valuable experience points to enchant tools for the rest of his clan. Or, more than likely, get blown up by a Creeper and be respawned back at the family’s virtual stead anyway. Now there’s one way to make sure your kid is home on time.

One of my favorite things about families playing Minecraft is how variance in levels of immersion from each player can still result in a productive afternoon of playing games. When a family plays Monopoly, it’s usually one person who cares about playing and winning the game, and a bunch of other people who half-heartedly push their top hat or terrier around the board until the one person actually engaging with the game wins. In Minecraft, one member of the family can be very pro-active in killing zombies and collecting iron, while other members lazily tend to their wheat farms and home decoration, and at the end of a session everyone will have something to show for it. Most of all, they have the collective experience of having created something together, existing in an equalized playing field where the youngest member can defeat the meanest monsters. Mom and dad don’t have to worry about providing for the family in Minecraft, they can let the kids distill watermelon into life-giving potions while the adults go off on a journey to punch sheep. When the goals aren’t explicitly defined, the only thing left to do is have fun.

Or be bored out of your mind. I won’t pretend that Minecraft doesn’t have its limitations, but with a long list of potential activities and ever-expanding and updated software being provided by Mojang, Ltd., not to mention all the mods available for the game, you could play for a long time before it truly gets redundant. The virtual world is also a good place to commune over family issues that might be too touchy or painful to deal with in real life, as evidenced by the above video. Luclin at Minecraft Workbench produced this episode as a memorial to his son, Devlin, and it features the construction of a virtual remembrance while the family recalls memories of their lost member. Sure, that could–and almost certainly did–happen in the real world, where there would be real tears, real hugs, real warmth. But mourning on a Minecraft server carries different implications, a sharing of thoughts and words, the collective creation of something unique and wholly from one’s mind. A little easier on the old heartstrings, I think. For someone raised without a Family Game Night, and therefore is emotionally detached from everyone, it speaks to me as a good alternative to sobbing over a casket.

Tags: family co-op, family game night, luclin, minecraft, minecraft dad, minecraftwb, parker bros., paulaoresjr

Here’s Why the World Owes Me a Living, Part One

Here’s why the world owes me a living: neither of my grandmothers could cook for shit.

Actually, it is possible that my maternal grandmother may have been a good cook, before I met her. I really wouldn’t know. In my lifetime, nearly all of her meals were frozen fare, either boil-in-the-bag pasta or some gelatinous TV dinner heated in the oven. Though she watched me every day after school until I was thirteen, when she passed away, she never made anything for me beyond a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, recipe was as follows:

INGREDIENTS
Two slices Wonder® white bread
Three slices Oscar Mayer® ham
Two slices Oscar Mayer® American cheese

DIRECTIONS
Create sandwich from ingredients. Heat in oven until cheese has nearly evaporated and ham no longer glistens. Fish out of the oven and serve on an unfolded napkin. Serves one. Do not cut the sandwich before serving, or the ham slices will slide against each other and damage the meal’s integrity.

Just because my grandma didn’t cook for me, doesn’t mean there wasn’t food in her house. Many of my lifelong eating habits were learned while watching Inspector Gadget in my grandmother’s smoke-filled living room. At all times, she had a bag of Lay’s potato chips and a two-liter bottle of Pepsi that she kept on hand specifically for my brother’s and my consumption. I would also receive a daily ration of one “fresh” Kit-Kat candy bar, kept in the refrigerator to maintain maximum freshness (which had the side benefit of making it hard enough to eat each chocolate-covered wafer like a miniature corn on the cob), and sometimes I’d get a special treat: a Hershey’s ice cream pie with chocolate sauce and a tablespoon of strawberry preserves in the middle. I’d eat about two thousand calories in my grandmother’s living room before my parents got home and made dinner. This was in the 1980s, when many people thought diabetes was a sissy disease for people that couldn’t handle their corn syrup. While my maternal grandmother, to my memory, never cooked anything worthwhile, she never really tried, and her house was well-stocked with plenty of kid-friendly food (read: sugar) so I could at least learn the American tradition of equating food with love. My paternal grandmother, on the other hand, really couldn’t cook worth a damn.

I have heard tale told of her poor culinary skills for years: meatballs she would make in a pressure cooker, rendering them into little grey hi-bounce balls. Pot roast cooked to the consistency and taste of leather. Being that I wasn’t raised by my grandmother, I didn’t have many opportunities to sample her victual creations. My brother and I would stay over her house every year on New Year’s Eve, and presumably she fed us, but I can’t recall one dish she prepared while I was in her presence. That doesn’t speak well for her cooking. I do remember that my grandparents’ house was always well-stocked with bruised, gently rotting fruit that perfumed the air with the scent of a zoo. And my grandmother had an old adding machine from the 1950s that I liked to play with a lot, but I couldn’t eat that.

My personal memory of my paternal grandmother’s cooking is limited mainly to two dishes: a Yiddish pastry called rugelach, and a baked casserole called kugel. Rugelach is a simple little dessert, consisting of cookie dough shaped into a crescent and baked with a dollop of jam inside. Every time I heard that my grandparents were coming by for a holiday or some other event, I dreaded the hard, flavorless rugelach cookies that my grandma would bring in a blue cookie tin lined with wax paper. That they were cookies–a pleasant dessert, even–was something their recipients would need to be told, because there was nothing sweet or palatable about my grandma’s rugelach. The bottoms were always burnt and the treat had the consistency and taste of a dog biscuit. I would eat one, for reasons I can’t now discern, by gingerly nibbling away at the ends of the cookie until I reached the center, where a smear of jam had been begrudgingly tucked into the pastry’s folds. Over time, this quantity of jam decreased and decreased until it could only be detected by an electron microscope. It wasn’t until I was an adult and had the opportunity to eat rugelach from a bakery that I discovered it was actually supposed to be sweet and edible. I thought “rugelach” was a Yiddish word for “flavorless tooth-breaking cookie of sadness.“

The tale of my grandmother’s kugel is more about her unyielding bitterness than her lack of culinary talents, because in fact her sweet potato kugel was good. Very good. Good enough that I anticipated it when she brought it over for Passover dinner every year. I remember there were sweet potatoes and raisins in it. Unfortunately I can’t remember any of the other ingredients, which is a damn shame because the recipe seems to have been lost to the world, buried along with my grandmother. Her sweet potato kugel stood out like a sore thumb against the tapestry of other dishes my grandma prepared, poorly. As a teenager, I relayed as much to my grandmother, and asked why she only made sweet potato kugel once a year. “Well, then it’s special,” she replied flatly, as if to confirm my suspicion that the other food she made was, indeed, a punishment for some untold transgression. “Well, grandma,” I replied sweetly, “I love your sweet potato kugel. I look forward to it every year. Feel free to bring it by any time, whether it’s in the Spring or not!”

And she never made sweet potato kugel again for the rest of her life.

This is why the world owes me a living, or at least one of the reasons. I have heard of grandmas whipping up sticky cakes and delicious cookies by the gross before their grandchildren awoke. All manner of matronly, loving ladies with names like “bubbie” and “nana” and “gramma,” all perpetually wrapped in aprons and permanently wielding wooden spoons that continually stirred giant pots of secret, delectable meals whose crafting had been mastered a dozen presidential terms ago. People bolstered by these lovingly-prepared meals have gone on to become happy, productive members of society, secure in the knowledge that there is some good in the world, because they know their grandmothers made the best gosh darn snickerdoodles. Me, I had to eat warm ham sandwiches and homemade dog biscuits. Frankly, I think I should be commended for not becoming a serial killer.

Tags: 1980s, cake, casserole, cookies, grandma, matronly, Norman Rockwell

Dear Mr. President: Leave Me the Hell Alone

It’s amazing to think that not but two-hundred years ago, many Americans didn’t know what their president looked like. Most likely they never got to hear him speak, would never see him in action campaigning for their votes or delivering addresses. Those living in or near the largest urban centers might have had access to a tabloid newspaper, wherein they could see a line drawing of the president. A few thousand lucky people nationwide might see the presidential hopeful’s East Coast campaign speeches and ceremonies. The vast majority of American citizens would never see the man’s actual face, never witness his mannerisms or gauge his idiosyncrasies. It seems strange to us, in this day and age, when a person is elected to office based mainly around how he presents himself, and not his ideas, to the public. It’s especially strange in 2012, when I, personally, receive upwards of five fucking e-mails a day from President Barack Obama and members of his family or the people he works with.

I’ve heard of needy, but this is ridiculous. President Obama is worse than some jilted girlfriends I’ve known. And it’s not just structured e-mails outlining his strategies and plans, but quick messages just to let me know that he’s thinking of me. “I’m about to stand before Congress and act like they’re not a bunch of fuckwits while asking them to pass some legislation without tacking a bunch of anti-abortion bullshit to it, and I’d like to thank you for your continuing support.” I know you’ve probably got some pre-podium jitters, Obama, but give me a break. There’s nothing more pathetic than someone constantly seeking your approval and praise. How about this, Barack: go get ‘em, champ! I believe in you. It gets increasingly difficult to believe in you when you’re constantly looking for me to pat you on the back every time you sign your name. How would you like it if I messaged the Oval Office every time I turned down a slice of cake or some fattening food? Which never actually happens, but hypothetically. Just sayin’.

And it’s not just the president, but his wife Michelle, his vice president Joe Biden, and the fucking Vice President’s wife Jill. Who’s next, the Obama family dog? Plus there are the endless e-mails from Obama’s campaign staff and cabinet that reiterate the same shit Obama writes about in the first place. That’s how you know they’re sending these behind his back, probably because they don’t want Barack to think that their faith in him is assailable. “Hey, this is Jim Messina, one of Obama’s political staffers. I’d just like to say that I think you’re great for supporting the old bean. Don’t tell him I wrote you, okay? He’d be so pissed off if he knew.” Meanwhile I’ve got half a dozen e-mails from Obama in my e-mail in-box that are the conversational equivalent of “whatcha thinkin’?” I’ll tell you what, if you want to know if I like Obama or “like” like Obama, then why don’t you pass me a note in study hall and see if I’ll go to the homecoming dance with him? Because if you keep sending me more e-mails than amazon.com, I’m definitely not going to like Obama “in that way.”

I think the final straw came a few months ago when there was some kind of contest where the prize was dinner with the president and his wife. It all started innocuously as a couple of e-mails detailing the requisites for this contest, but then the missives became more and more desperate. E-mails from Michelle Obama asking me what I planned on wearing to the dinner and what kinds of questions I had to ask her husband. E-mails from Barack thanking me for my interest and telling me how much he looked forward to dinner with me and a guest of my choosing. Buddy, I didn’t even respond to your fucking invite in the first place. Take a hint for crying out loud. Harassing me about what I’m going to wear and whether I’m allergic to shellfish isn’t going to make me want to come to dinner. I’ll tell you what, Mr. President: let’s limit the e-mails to twice a year, once on Christmas and once on my birthday. We can catch up, trade stories, shoot the shit, and part as friends. Because at the rate you’re going now, I think I might have to get a restraining order against you and your White House staff.

Tags: Barack Obama, Bo Obama, e-mail, harrassment, Jill Biden, Joe Biden, Michelle Obama

Please Leave a Goddamned Message for Fuck’s Sake

My family held on to a rotary phone longer than anyone else I know, even my grandmother. In fact, even after we did get push-button telephones, the line was still set for pulse dialing, so you’d hear the corresponding number of clicks through the receiver after pressing a number: five (pit-pit-pit-pit-pit) five (pit-pit-pit-pit-pit) five (pit-pit-pit-pit-pit), six (pit-pit-pit-pit-pit-pit) three (pit-pit-pit) four (pit-pit-pit-pit) zero (pit-pit-pit-pit-pit-pit-pit-pit-pit-pit). I think that pulse dialing is the primary reason why most of my friends growing up had phone numbers comprised of lower digits. My family never had voice mail, never had caller ID, never had call waiting added to our phone plan, even after these services were made free in the early 1990s. It wasn’t a matter of money, clearly, but more that my parents regarded the telephone as a necessary inconvenience, a dinner time intruder and general time-waster that wasn’t worth the same consideration as family necessities like new Eurythmics records and sugared breakfast cereal. I’m not too bitter about it, I recall not really caring one way or the other whether my parents added these features to our phone line. My friend Rikki would call the operator and do an emergency break through when she was tired of getting the dial tone, to my parents’ chagrin, so the most important communiques were getting through; for example, which boys Rikki thought were cute and which she thought were losers.

I’m pretty sure that my friend Justin’s was the first family I knew to get an answering machine. It was a flat machine around the size of a pizza box, with tasteful wood grain along the edges and a tinted cover obscuring the two cassette tapes needed to make the thing work. I can distinctly remember the first outgoing message on his machine, recorded by Justin’s father. It was easily forty seconds long, if not longer. Doubtless many of the incoming messages were shorter than the outgoing. But in the early days of answering machines, you wanted to be precise and thorough about your expectations. “Leave your name, number, and a brief message,” intoned Justin’s father. Back in those days, you had to advise everyone to leave their message after the beep. It seems silly now, but there was actually some confusion on the matter.

Like many new communications technologies, the answering machine, and its grandson voice mail, changed the way we interact forever. Used to be if you called someone and they weren’t home, you had to remember to call back at another time. But leaving a message puts the onus on its recipient to return a call. “Tag! You’re it!” some glib caller would announce on a recording, leaving you to decide if you’d like to call them back, or if you’d rather not have an acquaintance who leaves such corny bullshit on answering machines for people to hear. Conversely, I remember friends of mine calling people when they thought the recipient wouldn’t be home, so their message would be proof positive that they had done their part to stay in contact. As if there is some Friendship Tribunal determining who is at fault in failed relationships. “I submit exhibit B, a voice mail left by the defendant eight months ago. I think the court will agree that his closing with ‘smell ya later’ implies that the friendship was well intact at that point, at least in the defendant’s mind.” A kind of relationship hierarchy was created, with those at the top of the totem pole receiving long, adoring recorded phone messages, while those at the bottom received no message, or worse, the occasional butt dial.

It seems like most everyone today that has a phone line in any capacity has voice mail as well. It’s a requisite offered freely in nearly every cell phone plan, for every land line and digital cable package that also includes the telephone. There’s no excuse to have your attempts at reaching someone else go unrecorded. So why, pray tell, won’t people LEAVE A FUCKING MESSAGE ANYMORE??! It’s ridiculous. I mean, I’m not expecting much from the automated mass-dialers that try to sell me crap or switch banks or otherwise do something that will ultimately screw me in ways I cannot predict. But friends, family–why have you stopped leaving messages? You surely haven’t stopped fucking calling! If you’d leave a motherfucking message, it might serve as a reminder to myself that I have to call you back. If that message contains useful information pertaining to the phone call, it could entice me to get back to you that much quicker. But instead, most of the people I know choose to call back over and fucking over until I get exasperated enough to stop whatever it is I’m doing and pick up the phone. And it’s always the same crap on the other end: “Why didn’t you pick up before? I must have called twenty times.” No shit, dude. I do have Caller ID, you know. THAT’S WHY I DIDN’T FUCKING PICK UP IN THE FIRST PLACE YOU MORONIC PIECE OF GARBAGE! If you’ve got something important to say, then say it and let’s take it from there. If you’re calling me a dozen times a day to ask why I don’t pick up the phone more frequently, then please grab your phone, delete my number from the address book, and jam the receiver far enough up your ass that it becomes ensconced in the pulpy folds your brain. Maybe the telephone can help stimulate your dendrites and synapses into producing rational thought.

Tags: answering machine, AT&T, cellular phone, friendship tribunal, phone, Sprint, T-Mobile, telephone, Verizon, voicemail

The Joystick is Broken: Watch the Way I Dance

In the initial parts of this rather muddled series of essays, I attempted to show how video games have been a communal function from their inception, beginning with crowds of competitors and onlookers thronging arcades and pizza parlors in the 1980s, and ultimately arriving at online co-op play of games of every type, sometimes including hundreds of people at once. There is another, lesser-known way that people share video games–one very much akin to the origins of video game spectating–and that’s when one records oneself playing games, sometimes with simultaneous commentary, for the benefit of people to watch later. This commentary can be aimless rambling on any number of personal or universal subjects, other times it is structured, scripted role-play and carefully edited video game footage. It seems to me like a new form of expression, one whose implications are interesting to consider as the format invents itself.

Many of life’s most perplexing problems were pondered by yours truly while he played Battletoads and listened to the Dead Kennedys during my junior high school years. Most video games, especially those made before the twenty-first century, are little more than sequential patterns that behave predictably. The first few times you play a game, it’s a matter of discerning these patterns and then anticipating their pitfalls on the next go ’round. By the time you’ve played a game a few dozen times, you’re barely even looking at the screen as the muscles in your hands react to pure timed memory, particularly on the first levels of game that often get played again and again. And it was in these zen moments, playing world 1-2 of Super Mario Bros. for the umpteenth time, that I would ruminate on my life’s deepest issues: at that point, mainly girls and acne. My mind would wander and I would consider events that had happen at school, or concoct complicated dramas involving myself and school crushes. Playing video games becomes a therapeutic, meditative experience at this point, an experience separate from the goal-oriented task of, well, achieving that game’s goals.

Thanks to online video outlets like YouTube and twitch, gamers can now share these intimate thoughts with the world at large. Many of these videos are interesting thematic juxtapositions, as people talk frankly about something like bullying or depression while blowing opposing players’ heads off with a 10mm submachine gun. By adding this layer of soundtrack–their voices–to gameplay, there is created a unique piece of media, presenting elements of watching video games and listening to talk radio, but providing the full extent of neither. Often, the commentary is about events in the game, but it always spirals into any number of subjects on which the commentator wishes to expound. Watching how they play certain games and listening to them speak about particular subjects give the (perhaps illusory) effect of getting to know the person, in ways you might not know someone you merely have lunch with now and again. How people play games and complete puzzles is one of the factors in making psychological and psychiatric diagnoses, and in this way, these viewers of these videos become armchair therapists, offering their support (or derision) in commentary and public responses.

Not all commentators free associate, however, some role-play or even create elaborate dramas that are acted out within the framework of a game. This takes a few different forms: sometimes, the commentary is live and the player assumes the role of an in-game character. Other times, video game footage is carefully edited to present a scene that is voiced-over. In any case, episodes run about ten to twenty minutes in length and are uploaded around once per week (with a potential for higher frequency of episodes in the instances involving live commentary). A YouTube video game commentator will juggle three our four different “shows” at a time, either by playing through a few different games simultaneously, or by acting out different roles in one game, or they’ll do a little of both. Minecraft is a game that is very popular among video game commentators, for two reasons: Mojang, Ltd., the company that owns the game, has given express consent for video of its game to be uploaded to the internet. But the second reason is because Minecraft is a game that is what you make of it, and since everyone plays it differently, there’s merit in watching how disparate people deal with it. Some Minecraft players concentrate on the building aspect, others are more into adventuring. I wrote an essay about Minecraft, so I won’t go into detail about its many facets here, except to say that there are many.

I became clued in to the potential of this new form of entertainment while watching a series by a UK group that call themselves the Yogscast. What began as a normal Minecraft series, featuring two relatively funny guys figuring out how to play the game, subtly became a massive, fantastical drama, rich with a dozen fully-realized locations and a limitless cast of characters that could rival any daytime soap opera. Using various game mechanics and modifications, they’re able to display and exploit the best aspects of the game, making for a show that is as entertaining as it is tutorial (well, perhaps a bit more entertaining than tutorial). Based on their wildly popular YouTube channel, the Yogscast have created a little cottage industry all their own, with a legion of devoted fans who line up at conventions for a glimpse of their heroes in three-dimensional glory. It’s brilliant, I think, and the possibilities for this format are wide open. As computer graphics get better and actual, human actors more annoying, we will probably see more and more cartoon programming, where the only things actors lend are their voices. There’s every reason to think that these cartoons will increasingly be representations of popular video game characters, probably opening a bar together or moving in with their auntie and uncle in Bel Air, or some stupid thing like that.

Tags: commentating, creatures, gameanyone, machinima, outsiders, twitch, video games, YouTube

Mormons: Morons, or More “On?”

Growing up in New York City, I didn’t get the opportunity to interact with a lot of Mormons. In fact, until I was in my late twenties, I encountered exactly zero Mormons, at least to my knowledge. I was aware of Mormonism, however, through a series of awesome commercials that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would run on Saturday mornings during my cartoon time. When I was very young, I thought they were another of the morning’s public service announcements, like the one where a bunch of sock puppets warned you not to take your mother’s Sucrets. By the time I was nine years old, I realized that I was actually being pitched to by a religion, and a Christian one at that. It didn’t really bother me, except that religion was cutting into my personal Saturday time, when everyone knows that church and evangelical television programs belong on Sunday.

My first exposure to actual tenets of the Mormon religion–besides their famous and salacious allowance for polygamy–was from watching the movie Plan 10 From Outer Space. This remains on the list of weirdest movies I have ever seen, and I could spend this entire essay trying to explain the plot. Pertinent to this piece were some of the facts about Mormonism as presented in the movie: that God came from a planet called Kolob, and every Mormon gets his own planet in the afterlife. It was starting to sound more like science-fiction than spirituality. A couple of years later, I started dating someone who had a copy of the Book of Mormon, which I promptly borrowed and read and never returned.

I truly think that every literate person should read the Book of Mormon, because it is one of the funniest and most insane books ever written. If you’re like I was, you probably think the book is full of a bunch of new age baloney and pseudo-holy mumbo jumbo that isn’t worth your time. But you’d be wrong. The Book of Mormon is the unbelievable and ludicrous story about Jews living in America during biblical times, how they warred among themselves, and how a faction of the Jews named the Lamanites angered God were turned into red-skinned Native Americans as punishment. The book claims that, during the three days between Jesus Christ’s crucifixion and his resurrection, he zipped over to what would become America and imparted some sage wisdom to its multitude. I mean, that just blows my mind. That means the Book of Mormon is partially an account of Jesus’ “lost weekend.”

In 2003, I read Jon Krakauer’s wonderful book Under the Banner of Heaven. It’s a compelling, well-written account of the history of Mormonism interspersed with a more current story about a Mormon woman murdered by her brothers. The book is really about a Mormon sect that is not part of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints–that would be the “official” Mormon church, but like any religion there are lots of splinter groups with their own ideas. Some of them still practice polygamy and engage in incest as proscribed by scripture, and Under the Banner of Heaven makes clear that these practitioners comprise the smallest portion of Mormons. In fact, they would not even resonate as Mormons as we know them. Turns out that the ones practicing incest and killing their wives were a far cry from the short-sleeved, starched shirt missionaries with precise haircuts and shit-eating grins that one would normally associate with Mormonism. I still came away with the notion that Mormons are a strange, backwards people, well worthy of my ridicule.

It was around this time that I actually met a guy who was Mormon, the idea of which tickled me to no end. Imagine my disappointment when he didn’t try to explain that the Garden of Eden was in Jackson, Missouri, didn’t tell me about Heavenly Father’s plan to give me my own, personal planet in the afterlife. He was, annoyingly, a very pleasant, polite person that liked a lot of the same comic books that I do. I plied him about his faith, and he pretty well pulled my card: “You’ve read the Book of Mormon,” he said, “you know what we’re about. If that doesn’t appeal to you, then fine. It doesn’t make me want to stop talking about Batman.” I was very embarrassed. Here I was, hoping to meet a kooky, wacky Mormon that would regale me with ridiculous stories about Jesus visiting America, all along I was the nut job hovering around, pressuring him to say something that I could laugh at. It occurred to me that practically every creed and belief sounds like complete bullshit when you voice it aloud: “I believe that the universe was spontaneously created and that the invisible air around us actually contains tiny particles whose structure and movement matches that of our solar system.” Weirdo. I lost touch with this Mormon friend a while ago–he lost touch with me, actually, probably because I was such a pain in the ass about his church. But I resolved from then on to judge people by the things they do, not by my regard for their beliefs.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw The Book of Mormon on Broadway. I’m a fan of Matt Stone and Trey Parker, and really enjoyed the episode of South Park which details a basic history of Mormonism. The musical was hilarious, too, and if you’re not shy of some seriously blue language, you should check it out. However, the play ends implying that working together and helping each other are the real major tenets of Mormonism, not the stuff about golden plates and multiple wives. The important things are the values that they espouse, because everyone believes in some retarded-sounding shit whether they know it or not. The episode of South Park dealing with Mormonism ends in much the same way. Many people I’ve known say that they respect religious scripture and spirituality, but reject churches as inherently corrupt. Mormonism kind of turns that idea on its ear, a religion based on scripture that sounds like a load of donkey loafs, but realized in a church that actually fosters community, family, and good works. You really can’t hate on that.

Tags: Book of Mormon, Jon Krakauer, Joseph Smith, Kolob, Matt Stone, Mormonism, Plan 10 From Outer Space, Trent Harris, Trey Parker, Under the Banner of Heaven