Ted Mann's thoughts on watersports, refined sugar, and monkeys.
Andy’s server hard drive crapped out the other night, and although he gets a gold start for backing up on a regular basis, I noticed that a few of the most blog entries didn’t survive. But after Googling “turkeymonkey,” clicking on the caches of recent posts, and cutting and pasting the text, they’re all back for your viewing pleasure.
Dear Santa,
I would like a pair of albino Pygmy Marmoset monkeys. Or as I call them, mini turkeymonkeys. That is all.
Thank you.
As a staffer at an obscure community lifestyle magazine, it’s impossible for me not to look lustfully at the mastheads of national mags like Esquire and Vanity Fair. And yes, I confess to subscribing to the creepy career-voyeur newsletter that is mediabistro’s “Revolving Door.” But what about the magazine that I obsess over most — i.e. The New Yorker — which don’t publish its editorial staff?
Enter Mastheads.org, a site devoted entirely to cataloging the current staffs at magazines. The New Yorker is there, as is just about every other national pub. My only big question: Where’s InTown?
Yes, it’s true, I’ve seen the version of “Snakes on a Plane” for those who get the Senior Citizen’s discount. Its a sadistic little film called “The Boynton Beach Bereavement Club.” I’m still in a state of minor shock that Ana and my mother dragged me to see two hours of retirement community widowers attempting to get it on in Florida, while throwing nostalgic 1950s sock hops and surfing the listings at Match.com. Troubling. Very troubling. At the very least, I can console myself in the fact that, after being five movie picks in the hole with Ana, I’ve now earned those five back and then some. Such is the price she pays for taking me to a theater with nobody under the age of 65.
There is something deeply troubling about this blog, which I must now come clean about: I have yet to post about John Hodgman’s “The Areas of My Expertise,” perhaps the single greatest 500-words-per-sitting bedtime-reading tome ever collected into a hardcover binding. And while I am not particularly proud of not plugging the book — of effectively trying to hoarde all of Mr. Hodgman’s complete world knowledge, including matters historical, matters literary, matters cryptozoological, compilations of all the presidents who had hooks for hands, 700 hobos named and illustrated, the mystical secrets of Yale university, the dark side of the food court at the Mall of America, squirrel and lobsters and eels … especially the eels — but at this point, I can still atone. Which is to say, if you simply click on the icon at the center of the image below, follow the instructions outlined in the video, and kindly post comments to TurkeyMonkey the blog in thanks, all will be forgiven.
It’s been a while since I broke out the pee test, my movie rating system that basically ascribes a movie’s quality to the length of time needed at the urinal after exiting the theater. The longer the duration, the better the flick. Suffice it to say that, while watching “Snakes on a Plane” on Saturday night, my bladder was rarin’ from the moment that first snake struck that first woman’s boob during the mile-high-club scene. By the time of the second bathroom snake attack, it was positively throbbing.
I know, I know, too much info. Like the brilliant conceit of the movie, as executed in a full-length feature film, it sounds like a little too much of a good thing. But I’m here to tell you that — despite what naysayers Ana and Katie will claim — “Snakes on a Plane” is wonderfully, stomach-spasmingly, 5:20-pee-minutes-long good. Not all that funny, I admit (though the guys in back of us were enormous Keenan Thompson fans, and cheered for the last ten minutes straight as he landed the plane), and not enough to get my fellow moviegoers to throw gummie worms at the screen (a la Rocky Horror Picture Show), but still worthy of all the praise the Joel Siegel, the New York Times, and Entertainment Weekly have been heaping upon it.
Incidentally, if you don’t see me writing any movie comments for a while, there’s a reason: Seeing “SoaP” unwittingly put me five movies in the hole with Ana. It’s an accounting I don’t fully agree with, but I’m not appealing until something else hits the theaters worth seeing. Until then, I’ll suck it up and watch my five “Trust the Man”s. My bladder could use the rest.
When Ana and I moved from West Philadelphia to Westchester, NY, we took for granted that there were certain set, understood, inailiable lifestyle changes involved. The cost of living would go up, but so would our square-footage and yard acreage. The cultural amenities would be few and far between, but the parking spaces would be plentiful. And perhaps most obvious and certain of all, we would be more insulated and would only see minorities once every other week, but we would be much, much safer.
Where in the hell did we get those crazy ideas?
Now, a year and a half into living here, I can confirm that not a single one of those assumptions about life in the suburbs (or at least, the second parts of the equations) are true. Yes, the cost of living went up, but our we have no yard to speak of and a slightly smaller apartment that costs twice as much as our Philly one did. Parking is nonexistant — so much so that we sometimes walk for an eternity to our cars. And worst of all, the crime here would make even the most hardened Christopher Miller car thiefs nervous.
In our building we recently got a letter that there have been break-ins. I regularly read about violent stabbings and other crimes at nearby malls. And most alarming of all, one of my colleagues at work in White Plains has had his car tires (all four) slashed on repeated occassions. In my entire time here, I’ve only seen a handful of police, and the only times I’ve ever laid eyes on them is when their staking out a speed trap, sobriety checkpoint, or pulling over someone for making an illegal left-hand turn. In other words, crime may be out of control, but all we’ve got here is a bunch of traffic cops.
On the eve of a visit from our West Philly friends, Andy and Katie, it’s got me wondering why the suburbs have such a utopian rep, and why the inner city get’s such a bad rap.
Update: OK, turns out I posted literally a few hours too soon. Our West Philly friends Andy and Katie visited us on Saturday, and when they woke up to drive to Westchester, suprise!, their Jeep was missing. The car and the GPS navigation system inside it were stolen. So, for all my griping and comparing the crime here to the crime there, it appears that the only real, concrete conclusion is that there’s crime just about everywhere. And LoJack is looking like a smarter and smarter investment every day.
Like many, after the recently foiled Gatorade-and-disposable-camera plot, I’ve been waiting all week for the other shoe to drop in the war on terror. Say, for example, no more flights to Lisbon in September. Or no more monkey torture jokes in the terminal. Or, shudder to think, no more snakes on the planes.
As it turns out, the real aftershock is far worse: No more mentos and diet coke. Not just on planes, either. No more mentos and diet coke, period. The Homeland Security dept, Michael Chertoff, and Alberto Gonzalez have spoken:
“The war on terror is an ongoing thing,” added Attorney General Gonzalez, “we adapt and we improvise and we adjust our tactics. Americans have always been willing to make sacrifices during times of war. Reluctantly, we will institute tomorrow a ban on all carbonated beverages in America as well as suspect over-the-counter breath freshener preparations. Bad breath is a small sacrifice we can all pay in support of our troops overseas.”
Many thanks to brother-in-law Dan R. (as opposed to Dan Q. and Dan S.) for pointing me to this story.
Even since seeing Little Miss Sunshine a week ago, I’ve been trying to figure out why I liked it so damn much — why a movie that didn’t really have any jokes, and even at times felt like a James L. Brooks movie, could feel so fresh and moving and funny. And the thing is, it was so much better than Spanglish or As Good As It Gets. But it wasn’t the pitch-perfect dysfunctional characters that made it truly memorable. Nor was it the the broken-down yellow VW bus that carried them on their cross-country journey. No, after much pondering, I’m quite sure that it was the one character who I’d never heard of before, the pudgy little girl who’s determined to win the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pagent. Steve Carell, Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, and Alan Arkin are all great, but it’s Abigail Breslin who helps the film transcend the category of heartfelt ensemble comedy.
Not since I watched a little kid named Spencer Breslin carry a Bruce Willis movie called The Kid has a child actor seemed so brilliantly, unimpeachably innocent. And wouldn’t you know it! — Spencer’s little sister is none other than Abigail. To add to my affection for the Breslin family, it turns out that they have a connection to my hometown, Summit, NJ. In this month’s Rachael Ray mag, Spence recounts a day in his eating habits while visiting his uncle in NJ and stopping in Summit:
We always bring my uncle fresh mozzarella and roasted peppers from Russo Mozzarella and Pasta (212-254-7452), an Italian market near our apartment in Manhattan. Then we make two important stops in Summit, New Jersey, where my mom grew up, first at Natale’s Summit Bakery for the best cake and Italian bread. (I had my 14th birthday cake made there with the Grateful dead logo in the center.) Then we get sandwiches at the Towne Deli. My mom and I love their special Sloppy Joe sandwiches: deli meat, coleslaw and Russian dressing on three pieces of rye bread. These are the best sandwiches I’ve ever had. My dad likes a roast beef sub and my sister, Abigail, always gets a plain turkey sandwich on plain white bread.
I’ve long suspected that Towne Deli Sloppy Joes, which I too subsisted on for much of my childhood, gave me an almost supernatural cuteness. Of course, I never capitalized on the cuteness at the time, but current child actors of New Jersey, I hope you’re taking notes.
When I heard that Mel Gibson’s anti-semitic Malibu rant — or at least, an impersonation of it based on the arrest report — has been turned into a ringtown, I felt inspired. Not so much by the words uttered by Mr. “Sugar Tits,” but by the speed with which our buddies on the Net manage to turn celebrity scandal into a downloadable piece of pure brilliance. And then it hit me: If we can have our Motorola’s tricked out with the rantings of California’s most notorious religious yahoo, surely we can do the same thing for New York’s most evangelical pentecostal.
And speaking of Stephen Baldwin, wouldn’t you know it, but I still have recording of him giving his testimony at the New City Gospel Fellowship. I quoted some of the kookier parts in my profile of Brother Stephen in my article in last month’s Rockland Magazine, but now, in honor of his soon-to-be-released memoir, The Unusual Suspect, which — get this! — is going to be excerpted in Esquire. Anyway, I’ve posted three of your very own downloadable ringtones from Baldwin’s Pentecostal sermon, here:
1. “Die for Jesus”
2. “I can do everything”
3. “A complete and total stranger came into my house”. Enjoy!
And for those interested in Steve-O’s born-again coming-of-age story, here’s a piece from the NY Daily News with some choice excerpts from the book:
He’s perhaps a smite too zealous
Actor Stephen Baldwin is the born-again, George Bush-loving Baldwin brother, but who knew he’s also a fan of threesomes in the bedroom?
“I like to ask friends of mine, happy couples who seem to have a pretty good marriage, I will ask them, ‘How’s your sex life?’” Alec Baldwin’s little brother writes in a new book excerpted in the upcoming Esquire mag. “They will say something like pretty good or okay or no complaints here. Here’s what I tell them: Imagine taking a healthy sex life and inviting the power of God into that exchange.”
Baldwin also seems to prefer a muscular — make that violent and aggressive — form of religion.
“I’d always imagined Jesus was the sweet, cuddly, loving dude, and suddenly I find out he makes Conan the Barbarian look like Conan the wimp,” he says. “He didn’t come with a guitar singing Kum Ba Yah. Jesus brought a sword to the earth, and he is still swinging it.”
As for Baldwin himself, “God has called me to go and make disciples of the youth of America. That is what I am going to do. And if you try to stop me, I am going to break your face.”
Or an Ellie or Golden Pen or CRMA plaque or whatever it is you award to groundbreaking regional magazines published by newspapers. “Baby, Give Me a Kiss” is what we in the editing business affectionately call “Writing Gone Wild.”
Hoffman’s story in the LA Times West magazine, published on August 6, was simply one of the most brilliant pieces of narrative journalism I’ve read in — well, ever. The story is about Joe Francis, the founder of the “Girls Gone Wild” series of softcore porn videos, but it’s much more than just a story about a sleazy businessman. I laughed out loud at a few places–especially when Francis starts chastising women for not knowing what a qwerty keyboard is, and then ragging on the reporter for what he assumes will be a merciless article about him:
“She’s going to slaughter me now,” he shouts to the group as I keep smiling, writing in my notebook, tape recorder running. Apparently, he wants more of a reaction. He’s pantomiming me typing furiously, writing an article.
“She’s going to be looking at her keyboard going, ‘Ah, you think you’re so smart now.’ Qwerty keyboard. Who’s smart now?” He sounds happy. “She’s going to be playing that tape back. It’s going to be echoing in her head. Qwerty, qwerty, qwerty. She’s going to go all psycho.”
He’s right, of course. Hoffman slaughters Francis in her story. But not for the reasons he anticipates — that she thinks he’s condescending to her or that she’s got the hots for him. No, in fact, she tells the story of an underage girl who was raped by Francis on one of the days that Hoffman was, with his permission, shadowing him. At which point the story transitions expertly from a humorous profile of an eccentric, sleazy, wacky entrepreneur into a riveting expose of our exhibitionist culture, the objectification of women, and the abuses and crimes that this mindset can perpetrate. At 6,000 words, the story ain’t short, but it’s every bit as brilliant as anything I’ve read in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or any other publication (excluding InTown, of course) in the past year.
Many thanks to my colleague Robert Zeliger for pointing me to this story. And one last time, just ’cause it bears repeating: Somebody please give Hoffman a Pulitzer!
I don’t know if purchasing your first full TV show season on iTunes qualifies as a technological rite of passage, but if it does, I’m guessing it falls somewhere between the intellectual self-indulgance of downloading the New Yorker podcast at Audible and the willful absurdity of creating your own Wikipedia entry.
At any rate, I think I’m going to finally make the plunge by buying Weeds Season 2. Ever since ravenously watching Weed Season 1 on DVD — and proclaiming it the best sitcom I’ve seen since, well, ever — I’ve been eagerly looking forward to the encore. It premieres this coming Monday, August 14. However, I’ve gamed out the costs, and ever though iTunes’ $20 cost for the season seems steep, it’s still cheaper than subscribing to Showtime for 3+ months. I suppose I could wait for the show to graduate to Netflix (probably sometime in mid-2007), but that’s just going to take far too long.
There’s no link to Season 2 on iTunes yet, but you can link to Season 1 here.
I keep meaning to carve some time out to blog in earnest, but work has been wearing me down lately. If I have the energy for an episode of “America’s Got Talent,” I consider myself lucky. So, forgive me, I’m going to just post some more links to some of my recent, favorite magazine features (all of which I’ve added, along with plenty of others, on my MediaBistro portfolio).
1. “Extreme Makeover: Purdys Edition,” from InTown Northern Westchester’s August issue – A story in which I went undercover when Extreme Makeover arrived in Westchester to do a home in Purdys. I tried to uncover what really goes on in those 30-second time lapse shots, when the homes appear to spring up suddenly. Hint: It ain’t Ty Pennington doing the work.
2. “Where Have All the Caddies Gone,” from InTown Sound Shore’s June issue – An exploration of caddie culture in Westchester, and whether they’ll one day lose the battle to golf carts. (Best part of this story: getting to interview and write about the original, quintessential caddie, Michael O’Keefe — aka Noonan from Caddyshack).
3. “The 7 Most Interesting People in Scarsdale: Carl and Clarence Aguirre,” from Scarsdale Magazine’s May issue – This one was short, but one of my favorite stories to write. It’s about the formerly conjoined Aguirre twins, who turned four on my birthday. It was a nightmare to get that photo of the kids, as they were attacking each other like rabid dogs the entire time, but it was utterly fascinating to meet them and talk with there mom, Arlene, a single mom from Manila raising the kids in a donated Scarsdale home all on her own.
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