I can never justify writing in here anymore, because if I had the time to write an update, I would have the time to work on the zine, or finish the story I’m trying to write for it. There are five stories now locked in for the next issue, two from old regulars, and three from new people. I am hoping for more stuff this issue, maybe to press out the length a bit. Last time I think it was 168 pages. I could go up to about 200 pages and keep the cost under $9.99. I think I could push 300 pages and keep the price around $11.99. I’m still making absolutely nothing on that, but I’d rather make nothing and have a great read versus make money and have a piece of shit. Anyway, I’m still taking submissions for another month, so if you had something in mind, get cracking.

We went to see The Last King of Scotland last night. Very fucked up movie. It was well done, and I’m almost certain the story was fictitious in the sense that it was maybe biopic and the doctor character may have been largely invented to carry the narrative. But the Idi Amin stuff was real, and it’s one of those things that was largely ignored by the press here in the US while people made fun of Jimmy Carter or wringed hands over the hostage situation. Meanwhile, he kills 300,000 people, and it’s mostly brushed over in the history books. It makes me wonder what is happening now in some of these shithole dictatorship countries that is largely ignored by the media while they quibble over what the president ate for lunch. The other thing that surprised me about the movie (other than the gore) was that they shot in the capitol of Kampala, and it looked surprisingly urban. The film starts out in the sticks, where there’s nothing but dirt farmers and lean-tos, but the city of Kampala was bigger than pretty much every city in Indiana. (Shit, I just looked it up, and Kampala is almost twice as big as Indianapolis!) Anyway, I thought the whole movie would be in mud huts and straw roofs, but it’s a real shock to see such a big city with modern buildings and cosmopolitan looks. Sure, you’ll see the occasional Range Rover with a dead elk strapped to the hood, but it’s still a strange contrast to what you’d expect. It’s also a good example of how the wealth is concentrated, and the people that farm and live out in the rural areas are truly fucked over by those in power.

Not much else. It’s pouring rain outside, so maybe I will sit here and get some work done later. Most of my work lately has been focused on cleaning off my damn desk, going through bills and papers and filing them away, and throwing out or recycling what I don’t need. It sounds easy, but it isn’t. Maybe I should take a picture some time. Anyway, time for lunch soon.

The final lasting image of my grandparents together is a Steven Seagal movie. No, my grandparents were not sixth-degree black belts, and neither of them had the 80s hip-guy ponytail. But Seagal’s first movie, Above the Law was shot in their Chicago neighborhood. So whenever the flick’s on cable TV over the weekend, I usually tune in for a few minutes to catch a look at the old neighborhood where I spent all of my Thanksgivings and Christmases, plus other holidays we loaded up the station wagon and drove two hours west to the big city.

I don’t know Chicago geography well, but the one now-gone landmark that was the nucleus of their old neighborhood was the Ludwig Drum factory. Go to the intersection of Damen and North, and then go up a couple of blocks to St. Paul Ave. That’s where my grandparents’ three-story brownstone sat, the place they bought back in 1940 for about the current cost of a new compact car. Across the street was an old brick warehouse where Ludwig made their drum kits, the kind almost every rock band used back then, or the big marching band bass drums used at football games. My mom told me when she was little, the Beatles came to the drum factory to see where Ringo’s skins were put together, and it turned into a full-scale riot. (Of course, in my mom’s stories, pretty much everything turned into a full-scale riot, so who knows.)

The big plot point in Seagal’s movie was this old church, and that was shot at Saint Mary of the Angels church. (Here it is on google maps.) I used to go to this church all the time with my grandma. She was really serious about the church, and was a Polish Catholic, which was like an order of magnitude more strict than just being a regular Catholic, although I didn’t really know how. Our church back home didn’t use any Latin, though, and this place had all kinds of songs and sayings I didn’t understand. The church got shut down because of structural problems right after the film came out. When my grandma died in 1989, the funeral was at another church; the city had slated Saint Mary for demolition. Some people got together the cash at the eleventh hour, and they rebuilt the place. So both Catholics and martial arts fans can rejoice that the landmark was saved.

The Ludwig plant fell apart, and they moved the drum production to Texas or Japan or something. Another company used the factory for a while, but in the 80s, it was used as a studio space for a few TV and film productions. The Color of Money was shot there, and allegedly, my grandfather ran into Tom Cruise, and said he was a nice guy. (I don’t know if this was before or after he turned to Scientology.) Above the Law shot a lot of indoor scenes in the old factory. Like there’s a scene where they’re going to a police evidence locker to check on some C4 explosives - that’s totally the inside of the Ludwig plant. I’ve never been in there, and I only know the place from sitting across the street and looking inside the mesh gate over the loading dock, watching the forklifts move around. But I could tell at a glance that the scene was shot there.

A lot of Above the Law reminds me of the general feel of the mid-to-late eighties Chicago, a place I just barely knew. All of the cars had those blue and white license plates, and in the background of the chase scenes, you could see the Jewel stores and gritty-looking car repair places, with red brick walls that were turned black from years of soot and pollution. The L-Train ran overhead, making that distinctive sound and looking like nothing we’d ever see back in Elkhart. All of the backgrounds in that movie of the neighborhood remind me so much of what I saw in the back of the station wagon, looking out at this giant city, where every square block housed more people than my entire high school. Watching five minutes of that film reminds me so much of that brief moment in time that it always amazes me.

The one big regret that I have about my grandparents’ old neighborhood was that I never really tried to explore outside of the close domain of their place. My mom was 100% convinced that there were rapists with full-auto machine guns every hundred feet, and if we left the fenced confines of their back yard, we’d be on the back of a milk carton or worse. Now, I don’t think as a four-year-old I should have wandered far, but when I was 14, maybe I could have walked around the block, or down to Wicker Park, or to Osco’s to get a Coke or something. In retrospect, the place was probably as safe as the streets I walk today in New York. I really would like to have more memories of the area around there. I don’t want to live there, and a vacation in Chigago is not high on my list of things to do with limited time and money. But it’s something that interests me in some weird way.

That area is now called Bucktown, and it’s a trendy little place to be, if you’ve got the goatee and the money. The Ludwig factory got broken up into single-serve condos, and the mom-and-pop bodegas and corner bars are probably all cloned Starbucks storefronts. The neighborhood’s probably all filled with hipster doofuses, listening to Coldplay on their iPods and reading J.T. Leroy books. After my grandpa died in 1995, they sold off his building for some obscene amount of money. Looking at the place on Google Maps, I see that they’ve torn out the garden and swingset next to the building and made it into parking spots, which really pisses me off. I’ve always wanted to go back and see the place again, but I’m guessing all of the wood pocket doors and elaborate cabinetwork got kicked to the curb and replaced with Pottery Barn.

I still haven’t watched Above the Law all the way through. But one time my mom rented it, and we found a part in the church where my grandparents were extras. (They probably went because there was a free lunch or something; my grandfather could not pass up anything like that.) You can see them for a split-second on-screen, which is awesome. How many of you can say your grandparents were in a Steven Seagall flick?

Bonus: Coincidentally, Larry Falli now lives about 20 blocks south and four blocks west of where they used to live.

All I’ve done this weekend is consumed movies and consumed food. Well, I’ve done a bit more than that; I actually broke down and did the whole stereo rewiring project I have had on the back burner for years. It involved a lot of dusting and me crawling around to figure out where wires should go. I retired my Kenwood 6+1 CD player that I bought in 1994, since I usually only listen to CDs on my digitally-linked DVD player. And I got my computer hooked up to the stereo now, so I can run xmms on continuous shuffle. The line level is a little weird, and I keep readjusting it at the mixer level, xmms level, receiver level, etc. to try to get it right. Sometimes it’s perfect, and then an MP3 sounds louder and muddy and I have to dick with the volume. I’m not really into that, but it’s cool to have 5000-some songs on shuffle.

Movies… I’m getting a lot of stuff in for xmas, so I’ve been trying to watch stuff and get ideas for writing. The other night was After Hours, which I have only seen once, and that was five or six years ago. It’s funny because it all takes place a few blocks south of where I work, but even though they did film there, the place looks like a closed-off movie set more than it does look like New York. I mean, there are some 80s stereotype things in there, like the bohemian artist’s loft (which honestly looks like my office building before a good cleaning, a corporate paintjob, and a cube farm installation) and the guy working as a word processor. No, he’s not working WITH a word processor, he IS a word processor, typing archaic commands on an old greenscreen mainframe terminal. After Hours is one of those films that formed my only opinions about living and working in Manhattan before I actually came here, and it’s almost nostalgic and strange to revisit that old opinion and see how different it is from the reality of being here.

There are two other things that are captured in After Hours that I took away from this recent viewing. One was the way it captured the chase that crumbles in your hands to but still keeps you on your feet. I used to feel this back in college, the blind date that falls apart but leaves you at a bar where you run into someone else and then follow them to a party, where you end up talking to someone else and going to a different bar and then running into other friends and so on and so forth. It’s the kind of thing that only happens when you’re around other people who look around the usual social convention and chase the same thing just like you. I mean, now, dating and socializing is such an alien thing to me, and it’s such a formal constraint. When I was in college, I’d hit on someone in the student union, I’d ask a couple people working in a store a totally random question and then end up in a long conversation that would turn into a years-long friendship. Paul (in the movie) ends up in the apartment of a waitress after knowing her for ten seconds, and they’re listening to Monkees records and she’s drawing a sketch of him. It seems like in college, weird shit like that was happening all the time, ending up in a dorm room at three in the morning talking to someone about the Civil War or going to Germany to paint or whatever. And I miss that now. Maybe I should write about it - there are bits of it in Summer Rain, but I wish I could write more like that.

And speaking of wishing and writing, I love the way that After Hours flows. It’s the granddaddy of Clerks and the “I wasn’t even supposed to be here today!”, with this guy looking at his watch and knowing that in the morning, he’s gotta be at the desk doing his word processing, and he just wants to put head to pillow, but with someone as beautiful as Rosanna Arquette kissing you, you want to keep going after it. Screw sleep, you can catch up when you die! And of course, she’s insane and giving more mixed signals than a bad traffic light, but… man, she is beautiful! The whole film unwinds like that, mostly in real-time but with the tension of getting the fuck home and the drama of the million related coincidences, that it works so well. I would love to write a book like that.

Last night I saw F/X, a very underrated suspense movie that I used to love back in high school. I rented the hell out of that thing back in the day, but I haven’t seen it in years. I never thought about it, but it’s another New York Eighties movie, with lots of cops in the old cop cars and huge loft apartments and “dirty” streets that are far cleaner than when they actually clean the streets here. What was funny is how new the movie felt to me, although I remembered so many of the little nuances, especially Jerry Orbach’s acting.

Today, as I waited for my shipment from FreshDirect, I watched Goodfellas for the New York trifecta. I saw most of it recently on TV, but of course, Joe Pesci was talking about “Mother melons” or whatever else they dubbed over his cursing. I liked the movie, although I’m somewhat reluctant over it, because every jerkoff in my neighborhood worships it like it’s the new fucking testament, and they all think they are fucking gangsters and can double-park everywhere and act like they own the damn neighborhood. Even though the moral of the story is that if you’re in the mafia, you’re basically fucked, the people here don’t really see that. But it’s entertaining to see Pesci go off, and Ray Liotta’s a great actor in this kind of role.

The thing I got out of Goodfellas was the “last day of the wiseguy,” the last sequence where Liotta is driving all over, getting coke, trying to sell guns, making the meat sauce, looking for helicopters, and so on. I love how that sequence is cut together, how it makes you feel like you are him, paranoid on coke and rushing through a futile set of obstacles. I would love to try that in a book somehow, although I really need to think about it.

And then I saw Real Genius tonight, which was good, but it made me absolutely wish I could date that girl Jordan in the movie. I went out on a date once with a girl who looked almost exactly like her, but she was really shy and the whole thing didn’t work out. I don’t know, I had this strange idea that maybe she did like me from how she acted, and I cooked her dinner once, but she was a vegetarian and I had to scramble to do everything right, and I don’t know what happened. This was all the semester before Summer Rain starts and I guess I forgot about her in the wake of everything else going on, but then years later she suddenly popped in my head again, but by then I was 2500 miles away and couldn’t even remember her name let alone how to get in touch with her.

Speaking of which, I was reading old paper journals last night. Man, that’s always fucked up. That’s like starting a story with “Okay, I smoked a bunch of PCP first” - there’s really no way it can get better. I don’t know, I guess I at least feel better about money, reading myself bitch about cash back in 1996. Sometimes now I’m a little tight in the wallet, but I guess I’m more above water than under.

Okay, I’m debating Mean Streets or trying to get some writing done, so I should go flip a coin or something.

I have a blank emacs buffer open for the filename “cover-text.txt” that will become the back cover of Dealer Wins, the Vegas book. I can’t think of what to write. I’ll drink about nine more Cokes and then use whatever appears.

My temporary crown came off this morning when I was flossing, and fell behind the toilet. You’d think that, even with 97 minutes of rinsing with hot water and Listerine, I’d have serious germophobic fears about putting it back in my mouth, but I guess the sheer panic of popping the thing out and the anticipation of a metric fuckload of pain overrode all other senses. The pain didn’t happen, though. And it looks really weird with the thing off; there isn’t just a metal post, but rather what looks like a little, rounded-off tooth under it. I bought some Fixodent at the drug store and all is well. I also got a waterpic, which I might or might not use regularly. Maybe I will just fill it with Coke and use it to drink a steady stream while I’m sitting at the computer.

I am listening to The Fight Club Score by the Dust Brothers for the first time, and I really, really like it. I realize I’m like four years behind the curve, but this has to be the coolest background music ever. I don’t know anything about techno or the Dust Brothers or anything else, but I have a feeling this CD will be on during a lot of the writing of the next book.

I have decided that after this Vegas book goes out the door, I will seriously get on Zombie Fever, the tentative title of the next book. It will be, in a stylistic sense, a sequel to Rumored to Exist, and it will share some of the secondary characters, but it will be a new, start-to-finish fiction piece. I probably have about 20,000 words of notes and snippets, but I need to take a big step back and think through the whole thing again before I get started.

As far as media consumption, I finished reading John Sheppard’s Home is Where You Hang Yourself last night. It’s a pretty tight little book; at 136 pages, it seems like it’s a lot longer. Some of the short stories continue loose threads from his other books, but for many of them, he created new characters a lot different than the punk cast he’s used before. The stories aren’t all the beginning-middle-end typical MFA creative writing workshop format, and tend to spend more time building up characters rather than pushing people through the movements. I like that, at least that it makes you think a lot more about the people rather than the events. Anyway, it’s only $7.75 on Lulu, so check it out.

I also got through 3 of the 4 discs of the Star Wars trilogy. I haven’t watched Jedi yet, but I might do that this afternoon, just to see if Lucas admits that the Ewoks were simply a bad idea. He probably won’t. He’s given little time in the commentaries to mention the obvious about the special edition additions or the stormtrooper hitting his head or anything else. This is outweighed by him spending a ton of time talking about stuff I had no idea about. If you even vaguely like the original trilogy, you should immediately lay down the $42 on Amazon to get a copy of these. I know, everyone thinks there will be some big 6-movie set coming out later, but it’s worth it to buy this now, especially at the cheap price. I have mixed feelings that I spent $100 on the super-ultra boxed edition of the original films on VHS, but at least I can go back and see Greedo shoot first if I really want to.

Okay, I better get to those Ewoks. I was thinking of going into Manhattan and spending some cash, since the tooth debacle ended up being cheaper than I thought, but I have such a huge pile of DVDs to watch and work to do on this back cover, I guess I will stay here for a bit.

I went to buy movies yesterday after a haircut, and found out that The Day After just got released on DVD. It wasn’t ever on DVD, and I never thought I’d get to see it again, unless I bought a tenth-generated pirated VCD copy from some guy in Brazil off of eBay, so I was very happy to see a real version of it for only ten bucks, and I grabbed it immediately. I managed to watch it last night, and had a lot of thoughts about it, so here I am.

The Day After was a two-hour disaster movie about nuclear war shot for TV and aired on ABC, and it was a really big deal when it was aired in November of 1983. This was at the height of Reaganism and when the Soviet Union and the US were standing toe to toe on the brink of atomic war, and the idea of a movie that showed all of this in great detail created a groundswell of controversy and interest. This was around the time of movies like Red Dawn and Wargames, when movies about nuclear apocalypse were in vogue. Also, at a time when few people had cable or satellite dishes and all of the minor TV networks and cable outlets hadn’t bled away the focus of the big three networks, it was much easier to get people to crowd a TV premiere and make an event into an Event.

I remember watching the first half of The Day After as a twelve-year-old kid. They divided the movie into hour-long pieces, with the nuclear blast happening after the first hour. They also went commercial-free for the last hour. Since they publicized many warnings about how traumatizing the post-apocalypse scenes might be, my parents would not let me watch the last hour, and I was pretty pissed. I mean, at this point, I’d already seen Freddy and Jason slice open a million people, and I think Salem’s Lot was more scary than watching a bunch of people with bad rubber makeup of flash burns on their faces. What was even stupider was that my bedroom was right next to the family room where my parents continued to watch the show, so I HEARD the whole thing. Well, looks like all of that cautious parenting turned me into a well-adjusted normal person, right?

Anyway, I watched the DVD last night, and it’s always amazing to see something you haven’t seen for twenty years and add a fresh layer of detail to the distant memories you have in the back of your head about it. The movie takes place in Lawrence, Kansas, a place I saw a few years ago. Lawrence and the nearby Kansas City are about as Midwestern as any part of Indiana was back in 1983. The movie opens with panning aerial shots of farmers working in fields, kids playing football, the stadiums for the Kansas City Royals, the college campus at Kansas University, and the people walking through town. It all had that late 70s/early 80s feel to it, like Breaking Away did - the signs are all different, less corporate; the stores look friendlier, more like that old IGA instead of the big mega-grocery; the people wore earth-tone colors and big collars and dorky hairstyles like those old grade-school photos you try to hide in the rest of your picture collection. Despite what MTV might tell you, the 80s weren’t all like Miami Vice and Joan Jet and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. To a lot of us who did not live on a coast, the 80s were a gradual extension of everything bad about the 70s, except we got personal computers with 64K of memory.

The movie starts out by building up a troop of characters and families. Jason Robards plays a doctor working at the college medical center; John Lithgow is a scientist also at the school; a whole family, including a daughter about to be married, is headed up by John Cullum (who most recently played Mark Greene’s dying father on the TV show ER); Steve Guttenberg is a wandering college student; there’s also an Air Force airman and his family, and a few other people. It’s a nice little cross-slice of America, and makes you think you’re about to step into some sort of sappy situation-comedy as you get to know each group.

Just as you see these people introduced into their daily routines, the shit hits the fan. There’s a lot of vague pieces of news thrown at you about the fall of Berlin, different countries being taken over by tanks, and Russians moving ground against Europe. This is all in the form of TV bulletins and stuff on the radio, shown in snippets. You never get a clear idea of all of the politics behind it, but that’s the intention; they aren’t going to sit back and explain World War III at a later point, like they did in Red Dawn. You just get the shots of people freaking out, hording food at the grocery store, boarding up windows, or standing there paralyzed with fear. This is mixed with stock footage of Strategic Air Command putting people in missile silos and communicating with their airborne command center, which holds all of the codes needed for an all-out nuclear war.

Finally, it all falls apart. Lawrence used to be home to SAC and had tons of missile silos scattered around farmland. So people are sitting on their back porch of their farm house, and all of a sudden, giant columns of white smoke erupt from the ground as Minuteman missiles leap out of their silos and head off to Russia. Then the everyone-running-down-the-street footage starts, mixed with the all-out military footage of guys running to B-52s, pulling the safeties out of ALCMs, getting on the horn with Looking Glass for confirmation codes, and all of the cool stuff that you never ever see except for about 18 minutes before the end of the entire world. There’s also a great quote in which Lithgow and a few other science students are standing outside watching the missiles launch and this girl says “What is it? Is it some kind of test?” To which he replies, “no you bitch, there’s an alien on the wing of the plane!” (Oh wait, wrong movie.)

When the nukes hit, it’s an eerie and paralyzing feeling, even though the special effects look like something my 7-year-old nephew could do in Microsoft Paint. They do a lot of the thing where the bodies get zapped and you can see the skeletons inside for a second, which is pretty spooky. However, the whole thing is marred by the fact that if Lawrence, Kansas got hit by a Soviet attack in 1983, not one god damned person would live to tell about it. And they’re showing people that are like ten miles away from the air blast of a 500 Megaton bomb ducking down in their car and putting an arm over their eyes, and then getting up a second later and saying “what was that?”

A lot of people do die, but many of our main characters are around. Cullum (who, by the way, would be my first choice if I was casting a movie about Richard Speck in his later years. He doesn’t wear a shirt in one scene where he’s digging with a shovel, and THAT was more traumatizing than seeing two billion people die.) and his family are boarded up in a basement that is sealed with a radiation-stopping inch of dirt over the windows, and they all live. His son looked right at the blast, and has bandages over his eyes for the rest of the movie, although he has some hope that he will regain his vision, despite the fact that his retinas were deep-fried and there is absolutely no medical technology on the planet anymore. Also, his mom and daughter are going increasingly nutso, and Steve Guttenberg’s character drops in and becomes sort of an adopted son to them. It’s strange to see Guttenberg so early in his career, because you expect him to break into some kind of Police Academy shtick at any moment. The airman spends his whole time wandering around the countryside, which is pretty stupid, but there you go. The doctor played by Robards basically spends 24 hours a day dealing with severe radiation burn victims with no power, lights, fresh water, sterile conditions, or medical equipment. Lithgow spends his whole time fucking around with a shortwave radio and a Geiger counter.

A lot of the movie plays like a bad filmstrip teaching facts about nuclear annihilation, in a way that makes the actors look like they are reading straight off of cue cards. A girl runs outside and Guttenberg runs after her and the exchange is like this:

Him: “Come back inside. There’s, um, radiation out here.”

Her: “What’s, um, that?”

Him: “Radiation is all around. us. It’s, going through. us. now. Like. An x-ray.”

Most of the post-war world is nowhere near as bad as it really would be. In fact, at the end of the movie, they ran a disclaimer, that basically said “Know how bad it looked in this movie? Well, it’s going to be a hundred times worse in real life, so kiss your ass goodbye.” They did a reasonable job of trying to show radiation sickness, given 1983 makeup technology and the masses of people that had to be shown. There were ruins everywhere, and everyone was losing hair in weird, funky patches, and had fake burns on their faces and all kinds of dermatological nightmares on their skin. But in reality, that entire area would be a crater. And while some nuclear winter effects were shown, they neglected to mention that the ash thrown skyward from the bombs would create a cloud of darkness that would last decades. I guess that darkness interfered with their film cameras, so they had to work around it.

The movie has no real ending, no “we’ll get through this together” or “we will persevere” or anything else, and I think that’s good. If they made this into a miniseries, I wouldn’t have minded seeing more of what happened around the world, or what became of the rest of the country. But I think the idea was to show that Lawrence, pretty much in the middle of the country, would have taken the least of the damage, so New York or LA would have been completely fucked compared to Kansas.

Despite the goofy special effects and the fact that you had to ignore reality a bit, I actually enjoyed seeing this movie again. The first half of the movie, like I mentioned, was a time capsule to that period right before I started Junior High, the wood-paneled living rooms and giant console TVs and portable radios as big as ten iPods. The second half was a time capsule into the fears and politics of the era. I remember around the time of this movie thinking about what would happen if there was a nuclear war, how we’d probably be fucked because we lived just east of Chicago and just north of Grissom AFB. I can’t say that I missed a lot of sleep over it, but the thought was there in my head for my whole childhood. I wonder if kids now worry about terrorists the way we used to worry about Soviet nukes. Probably not. It’s not like it was a great thing, but it was part of my culture as a kid, and now that’s gone, so it’s always interesting to take a peek back at it and see how much the world has changed.

Okay, time to go get some work done.