Monkey Robot

Blasphemy

2010-09-06T18:58:00-04:00

At night, Astoria is lousy with kids. Kids aren’t afraid to fuck with you to get your attention. I suppose I was like that when I was in high school, too. When alcohol isn’t readily available, saying stupid things to passersby—whether those things are spiteful or just weird—is your primary source of amusement. I was walking home late Saturday night when I passed a group of high school students sitting out in front of an apartment building. One of the little troublemakers said, “Bro, she thinks you’re cute.” A quick assessment showed that all of them were below my age threshold, so I ignored this comment. As the group disappeared into the night, the kid quipped, “Dude, he looks like Jesus.”

This is truer than I’d like to admit, and reminded me of my days at William & Mary, when someone else mistook me for the Messiah. I had missed my bus home; since the buses in Williamsburg ran only once an hour, I had time to kill, so I took a walk along the footpaths that meandered through the centuries-old campus. I came across a paunchy man dressed in black slacks and a white shirt. Approaching his starboard side, I assumed, from the way he repelled students, that he was a campus security officer. As I nodded and mumbled a hello, I saw the distinctive name badge on his left breast. Recognition dawned on me: he wasn’t an officer of Jefferson’s alma mater, but an officer of God—a Mormon proselytizer.

Despite my central Pennsylvania upbringing, I am a fearless nonbeliever. In high school, though, I was interested in religion, and once spent a lunch break talking to a couple of Mormons. The legacy of this encounter is a dusty copy of the Book of Mormon on my bookshelf and an earnest belief that Mormons are fairly nuts. It had been an educational encounter, but one I didn’t wish to repeat.

My fate was sealed, as I’d already made eye contact. I hoped he’d let me pass unmolested, but my hope was in vain. “Hey,” he said, “do you mind if I ask you a question?”

What could I say? I was a fly, he a Dionaea muscipula, and I was trapped in his ciliated maw. “Go ahead.”

He pawed at the short stubble that passes for hair among Mormon evangelists. “How long did it take you to grow hair that long?”

My long locks swished against my shoulders. Maybe I’d get off easy after all. “Oh…about a year and a half, I’d say.”

“That’s really something. I’ve never had hair that long, so I thought I’d ask. You have a pretty thick beard, too. Say, do you know who else had long hair and a beard?”

Here it was, the coup de grace. “Hm, let me guess,” I said, giving him my best interpretation of a sly look. “Jesus?”

His face lit up. This hippy had heard The Word! “That’s right! Would you mind talking to me more about the Church of Latter-Day Saints?

I politely declined and left him to find another victim. His hook reeked of a desperation akin to the bad pickup lines that young women endure at dive bars and frat parties, and I’m too classy for that sort of proposition. Besides, I bet he says that to all the guys who look like Jesus.

Good Dick Is a Painful Experience

2010-08-08T02:08:00-04:00

The great thing about bad movies is that the review pretty much writes itself. Based on a suggestion by Netflix, I watched Good Dick, an underwhelming film by writer-director Marianna Palka about a lonely young woman and the lovelorn video store clerk who slips into her life by sharing soft-core porn with her. It’s an interesting, possibly even romantic, idea, but Good Dick goes limp pretty quickly.

Netflix is convinced I’m some sort of film hipster, going so far as to create a category for me called “Quirky Independent Suburban-Dysfunctional Movies”. The thing is, Netflix is usually right. In fact, its recommendation of Good Dick—a movie that Netflix predicted I’d like with the zeal of four stars—is but one major failure in a string of brilliant successes. It’s not Netflix’s fault, though: based on the cover art, it appears to be a witty, charming romantic comedy in the same vein as Juno. The person who said you can’t judge a book (or a DVD) by its cover must’ve foreseen Good Dick.

Good Dick is primarily shot in two locations: a video store, and the girl’s apartment. I’d like to think the director wanted a challenge like that of Twelve Angry Men, but she was probably just trying to economize on sets. She certainly didn’t splurge on casting, either: the entire cast consists of cheap plastic knockoffs of blockbuster movie stars. The female lead (also Marianna Palka) is a low-cost copy of Kristen Stewart, who’s already the Wal-Mart edition of a good actress. There’s also a photocopy of Seth Rogen (although the real Martin Starr appears in the film, in case that matters to you). If those star-studded templates were Legos, the cast of Good Dick would be Mega Bloks.

So, the plot: A lonely girl (Marianna Palka) frequently rents soft-core porn from a local video store. Piqued by her taste in erotic film, the video store clerk (Jason Ritter) follows her home one night, stalking her until she lets him watch porn with her (as long as he doesn’t get an erection). Hilarity ensues—or so I’d hoped, but the only thing funny about Good Dick is that I sat through eighty-six minutes of it. The rest of the movie is mostly a sequence of scenes of the two of them watching awful porn and arguing about sex (which they’re not having). Occasionally these sequences are interrupted by the girl telling the clerk that she just got her period or she hasn’t masturbated in a few days. I’d give Palka a pass to write dialogue this weird if she were European, but Palka is Scottish, which makes her European only by technicality.

Good Dick is ostensibly about the nature of sex in relationships, but it does little more than scratch the surface of what is generally an interesting topic, and the characters approach this subject with all the complexity and nuance of middle school students.

All this would be acceptable if the film were witty, or at least quirky, but I’ve heard sharper dialogue in Will Ferrell movies. To wit, here’s the climax to a scene in which the main characters are debating the physical appearance of penises:

Man: I think my dick looks really nice.
Woman: That’s because you’re an idiot.

The whole movie feels like Palka’s fuck-you to all the guys who didn’t get her “dark” personality and couldn’t find her clitoris (yes, they talk about that in the film, too). And therein lies the problem with even critiquing this film: it’s awkwardly personal. It reminds me of workshopping short stories in my college creative writing courses. It flows like a love story written by a frustrated college sophomore who wanted an artistic way to explain why she hadn’t had sex in a long time, when the real reason was her shitty—pardon me, brooding—personality. Good Dick speaks from the heart, but it says something no one but the writer cares about.

Leveling that criticism should probably make me feel guilty, because in the film’s climax you find out that the main character was sexually abused by her father (I’m not spoiling the ending: the director wishes you didn’t find out until the end, but even the densest of viewers can deduce that in the first fifteen minutes). But I don’t feel guilty, because Palka depicts the abuse in such a ham-handed way that it’s clear her only experience comes from Lifetime movies and 20/20 specials.

In the end, there’s really nothing redeeming about this film. It’s not witty, it’s not charming, and despite the feverish discussions about sex and porn, you don’t get to see any boobs. It doesn’t even present a fresh take on the meaning of relationships. The only good thing about Good Dick was the constant reminder that there are people more awkward than me.

Home

2010-05-23T01:32:00-04:00

I’m surrounded by boxes. I’m moving to Queens soon, which means that for the third time in two years, I have to pack my entire life into tiny cardboard cubes. I haven’t been motivated to pack a lot of things yet, so most of these boxes are empty. Kind of like my life.

My new apartment is smaller than this one, and I have a roommate, so I can’t move everything down to New York with me. Things like my bookcases, pots and pans, and couch can go. With the exception of my couch, I can’t throw out or sell many of my items, since my dad, an enthusiastic woodworker, built my bookcases and some of the rest of my furniture. Which means I have to truck it back to my parents’ abode in central Pennsylvania.

In telling this tale to friends, or thinking about it, I find I keep repeating the phrase, “I have to take some stuff home.” Home. As though my parents’ little house is my home. I haven’t lived there full-time since I left for college six years ago, but I’ve found that in the past two years, whenever I talk of home, I mean my childhood residence. Virginia, upstate New York—it doesn’t matter; for the past two years, home hasn’t been my apartment, the address on my driver’s license—it’s been my hometown.

It hasn’t always been like this. I remember when I was at college, I used the word “home” to refer to my dorm room. The definition is a bit muddled because I went to college about fifteen minutes’ drive from where I grew up, but I distinctly recall thinking of my little dorm room, barely big enough for me and my books, as home.

That’s when it dawned on me: “home” is wherever you feel most comfortable. During college, I felt comfortable at Bucknell, so it was home. I was never as at ease while at grad school in Virginia, and despite all efforts, Troy, NY, never managed to assimilate me. Thanks to my fond memories, Lewisburg, PA, is what I’ve considered to be home the past couple of years.

I’m hoping that I’ll be able to call Queens home.

On a related note, when do you get too old to use your parents’ attic as temporary storage?

And Now For Something Completely Different

2010-05-21T01:22:00-04:00

Orson Welles once said, “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” For the past year, my story has taken place in Troy, NY, a dreary town outside of Albany that lacks the excitement of a big city and the charm of a small town. At one time, Troy was a bustling city, the most affluent in mid-1800s America; it gave birth to Uncle Sam, and has counted Kurt Vonnegut among its residents. Troy has its perks (Brown’s Brewery being a highlight of the city), but it also embodies the grey, crumbling remains of the dilapidated American post-industrial dream. The chapters of my life have mostly been written deep within the bowels of the Center for Earthquake Engineering Simulation, a geotechnical engineering lab at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where ostensibly I worked as a systems programmer but, like many unfortunate aspiring programmers, I spent most of my day setting up Microsoft Outlook, fixing printers, and babysitting moderately-priced Dell servers.

My friend Nilanjana once told me that every twenty-something is eager to make their impact on the world; before the ink has even dried on his diploma, every freshly-minted college graduate is itching to do something to transform the world for the better. I’m not sure if this mentality is a good thing or a bad thing; enough inspirational movies have been made about people who have “thought differently” and changed the world that I’m convinced such aspirations are an important part of life, but it’s frustrating to realize that you, your bachelor’s degree, and your lack of experience aren’t enough to make a splash right out of university.

A few months ago, I realized that I was not at all where I expected to be when I was 24. Six years ago, fresh out of my green high school graduation robe, I planned to go to Bucknell University for a degree in creative writing, then go to NYU for an MFA in dramatic writing. From there, who knows? I guess I planned to make documentaries, since obviously none of those degrees would get me a real job. Somewhere along the line, I ran off the tracks; I ended up with a degree in computer science, which led me to a Ph.D. program that I later abandoned. Disorganized and disillusioned, I took an IT job because I was young and needed the money.

So I quit.

Before you go thinking that I’m a real badass, I should clue you in on the fact that I already had another job lined up before I quit. Starting May 24th, I’ll be working as a web developer at The New York Review of Books, a literary magazine based in Manhattan. Within the context of what I might be able to accomplish now, it’s pretty much my dream job: I’ll be living in New York, working at a literary magazine, and hacking Python code on a Django-based website. If I took a time machine back to my high school graduation, I think my 18-year-old doppelgänger would be proud of me.

Despite my rural upbringing, I’m looking forward to the move. I have a decent apartment in Queens (specifically, Astoria), with easy access to Manhattan. It’s a lot different from what I’m used to, but I think that’s exactly what I need. I’m excited about working at The Review, too. Although it’d be cooler to be writing or editing for the magazine, at least I’ll be working with writers and editors. Working on The Bucknellian was one of the most fun and most exciting aspects of my college existence, and I’ve missed that outlet. I’m hoping that working at The Review will encourage me to dust off the writing skills that have been left dormant in the attic of my psyche.

This change isn’t so much a new story as a new chapter, but I’m optimistic that it’ll ultimately lead to a happy ending.

What Does Wikipedia Have to Do With Kanye?

2010-04-16T09:33:00-04:00

I finally broke down and acquired two Kanye West albums, Graduation and 808s and Heartbreak. Being a recent college graduate, I’ve heard Kanye’s remix of “Harder, Faster, Better, Stronger” about a thousand times in the past couple of years, but I hadn’t really listened to any of his other tracks. And yet, I still had opinions about the guy—opinions that, I realized, were probably ignorant and ill-formed.

That so many people treat Kanye as the messiah of hip-hop music was partly the reason I resisted listening to his albums. I sometimes have a silly, unconscious resistance to things that others treat as the epitome of cool. In fact, trying to analyze Kanye’s creativity and impact on hip-hop made me think of the debate surrounding Wikipedia’s notability guidelines. That’s a strange connection, but bear with me.

Wikipedia’s notability guidelines are a major source of contention among Wikipedia editors. Frequent Wikipedia contributors often lump themselves into factions, with some considering themselves to be “Deletionists”, editors who devote their entire lives to keeping Wikipedia free of “cruft”. Often times, they nominate an article for deletion by declaring it to be “non-notable”. Wikipedia has arcane rules for article deletion that I won’t regurgitate here because they’re only of interest to obsessed Wikipedia administrators, but suffice it to say that many articles are deleted under these “guidelines”.

But here’s the thing: non-notability is so hard to judge. Just because I haven’t heard of a person, place, idea, or concept doesn’t mean it’s not notable. It seems a bit pretentious, even arrogant, to declare an article to be so unremarkable that it should be purged from the Internet. (Don’t forget that there is a lot of crap on the Web.) The fact is, you really have to possess in-depth knowledge of a field to know whether something in that field is notable or not. If you only have cursory experience with a subject, you can’t accurately judge whether an idea is notable or not.

Back to Kanye. I’ve heard a lot about how Kanye is a creative, original a musician, but even after listening to a couple of his albums, I still can’t tell whether he owns the originality fans ascribe to him; like a lot of Wikipedia editors, I don’t know a damn thing about this subject area, so it’s hard to tell whether one piece of music is more innovative than another. I’m not saying he’s not as good as his fans suggest; I just can’t be a good judge of his talent. But I will say this: anyone who can grab a track from Daft Punk and make it palatable and fun for hip-hop fans (i.e., people who probably wouldn’t otherwise listen to a French electronic band) is okay in my book.

Since pop music is nearly devoid of any sort of originality, any mainstream artist that has a distinctive style—one who puts out music that makes you say, “Yeah, I can tell that’s one of his songs”—must be doing something right. Compare Kanye West to Taylor Swift, who sounds like the pop queen she dethroned, and will sound like the pop queen who dethrones her in another year or two. Aside from her “I’m a marching band geek, but I’m still cool” vibe, she has no personality or originality of her own. (And yes, I’m still pissed that Kanye all but validated her entire cute, cuddly career by stealing her mic at the VMAs.)

So what can Wikipedia teach us about Kanye West? A lot, actually. I don’t consider myself to be a part of Kanye’s throngs of followers, but I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of his music. Sure, they’re not the most amazing beats I’ve ever heard, but it has made me think about taking a look at hip-hop music to find out if what they say about Kanye is really true.