I Will Always Hate Christmas...

...and while tragically post-hip microbes will peg their skinny jeans and pretend to hate the Black Keys for selling out (while overlooking how damn fine "El Camino" really is), I have a legitimate bitch against Christmas: my grandpa died on Christmas Day, 1988.

My wife has been telling me (literally for years) that my Papa wouldn't want his death to forever haunt my Yuletide joyousness. He'd want me to get over it already and enjoy Christmas again... which apparently means pretending to like Christmas music (I still don't understand how people can listen to it and claim to enjoy that ear-dissolving swill with a straight face), learning to like eggnog (it's nasty, even with brandy), and just having fun! 

Fuck Christmas... and while we're at it, fuck fun. We celebrate the hypothetical birth of a mythical half-man deity by embracing a grab-bag of pagan rituals while slathering the whole thing with a healthy sheen of good old American materialism. My birthday is alarmingly close to Thanksgiving (and in 2012, the two days will be one in the same... which means that while I'll have the day off, I'll miss out on the pleasure of forgetting to take the day off and acting like a martyr at work. Always fun.), so every year around November 15, I start to withdraw and shut down.

I know this batch of navel-gazing goo is precisely the kind of boo-hoo bullshit loathed by any of you Hypothetical Readers (who actually read my blog - I have come to realize that a great deal of the views I receive are directly related to the number of Google hits on "dark superman" or "superman vs batman," since Google helpfully tracks this shit for no good reason... all of this of course tracking back to this blog entry; I almost expect DC Comics to shut down my blog because those pictures are getting free traffic). I know we all have our demons, but my beloved grandfather (who turns out to have been something of a chauvinist who was impossible to live with) dropped dead of a heart attack on Christmas Day when I was 10 years old. I think I'm allowed my bitterness.

Because even I thought the ache for Papa would fade as I got older, but every year I seem to miss the man even more. He was 63, which was young even for '88. Each year on my birthday, he would give my younger brother his own, smaller gift, and vice-versa. I've never known anyone since who did that. For me, Christmas is the hollowest time of the year - cheap knick-knack garbage in the CVS aisles, fluffy, easy-listening Christmas tunes piped into the Barnes & Noble while the fat lady with the ghastly Rudolph scarf spills a peppermint-pumpkin-mocha across the coffee table book display. Christmas is not magical or holy or sacred or special - it's crooked and canned and plastic and useless to me.

And you know that there's no evidence to support the date of December 25 as the birth of Jesus Christ, right? You know that the date was co-opted by Christians and Santa-worshipers and actually refers in deep pagan myth to the day of the death of Nimrod, the son/husband of the goddess Semiramis, eventually to be known as Astarte, right?

Good, just checking.  

Taped Shut

Sometimes, I wish
my mouth was taped
shut,
that way
I wouldn't be so
horrifically wrong
all the
time.

Mr. Faded Glory - Pearl Jam: Twenty

I'm nostalgic about the 1990's. It's not that I miss high school. At fucking all. As a graduate of the Rio Vista High School Class of '97, I can say with absolute certainty that those four endless, hellish years I spent in that house of horrors the city fathers for some reason called an institute of learning were definitely some of the worst of my life... and I once lived in a shed in the middle of the Washington state woods with an insane hippie chick.

I'm sentimental about the music, I guess, but I didn't know that until I watched Cameron Crowe's wonderful documentary Pearl Jam: Twenty. Crowe was given extraordinary access to a band that has outlived the "grunge" pop-culture craze which practically haunted every band to come out of Seattle in the wake of Nirvana, and indeed is the last of those bands still touring and recording with their original line-up (minus Pearl Jam's bizarre list of former drummers, recounting in a very funny, This Is Spinal Tap-sampling montage) - Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Mother Love Bone, Hole... all gone. The film is a little too exhaustive in closely chronicling the band's timeline, and it comes at the expense of incisive insight into the band's in-fighting and personality clashes. Still, to see this great American rock band's life captured like this, and by Cameron Crowe (whose second feature film, Singles, featured members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden in cameo roles), is an amazing experience.

I can't imagine anyone under the age of 25 or so really appreciating this film or even understanding it. Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chili Peppers... these bands were the soundtrack to my wretched high school years. Did I mention how much I hated high school? (I did? Really? Shall I beat that shit right into the ground? I was unpopular, insecure and had few friends. I'm grateful for all that, looking back... I know too many people whose high school years turned out to the best years of their life. I like to think that mine are still ahead of me.) Pearl Jam: Twenty is clearly for Pearl Jam fans, but it reflects the shifting realities of an entire generation.

I turned 33 years old on November 22, 2011. Typing that sentence was not quite as painful as I thought it would be, but it's still a reality I'd like to somehow negate. As George Clooney's character said to Sam Rockwell's Chuck Barris in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind; "You're 32 years old, and you've achieved nothing. Jesus Christ was dead and alive again by 33. You better get crackin'." He could be talking about me, or damn near everyone I went to high school with. Or almost anyone my own age. Mine is a generation full of late-starters... I don't know why, but it might have something to do with Pearl Jam.

I'm kidding. Kind of. In an indirect way, it's all Eddie Vedder's fault. For a very, very short while I sang in a garage band, and one of the songs the guitar player insisted I sing was Pearl Jam's "Alive." So I did, quite a few times, but I guess I was trying too hard to sound like Eddie, I didn't really have the "self-balls" (as the guitar player told me) to be a frontman for a band at the time, so they fired me. And despite my love of listening to and playing music, I haven't seriously pursued musical performance since then. Is it too late? Depends on your point of view: Howlin' Wolf did not have a steady career until he was well into his 40's. It's too late for me to be a wild young rock star, but that didn't really turn out too well for Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin or Robert Johnson, did it? And life ended badly for Andrew Wood, as well.

The story of Pearl Jam exists in the shadow of the influential Seattle band Mother Love Bone. That band featured future Pearl Jam members Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard, and its lead singer was a fireball named Andrew Wood. Amazing archive footage reveals Wood as a charismatic, glam-influenced frontman, relentlessly "on." Wood's tragic death at age 24 from a heroin overdose still affects the surviving members of Mother Love Bone. Stone Gossard thought his career was over, but he approached Mike McCready, a Seattle lead guitarist, who insisted that Stone hook up again with Jeff Ament. The founding lineup is complete when they hear a demo recorded by a San Diego surfer and musician, who laid his vocals over one of Stone and Jeff's instrumental tracks. According to the film, the song would end up being the haunting, bluesy ballad "Footsteps." The singer, of course, was Ed Vedder.

Circling back to that abortive attempt to start a band in high school: on at least one occasion, the guitar player would put on Pearl Jam and tell me that this was how I should be singing. The problem: despite the countless soundalike ciphers that would follow, only Vedder really sings like Vedder, which is how it should be. We were handicapped by ludicrously high expectations, and I was hamstrung by my crippling shyness and insecurity. I'm somewhat happy to report most of that shit has been sloughed away - mostly by life itself, partly by film school... you can't be a withdrawn loner and expect to get any movies made. Well, you can, but they'll be really shitty movies.

Watching Pearl Jam: Twenty made me wish I'd been far more hungry and confident in high school - but that's probably the most common regret in America. (Aside from the Democrats nominating John Kerry in 2004 - we really should've stuck with Howard Dean.) I've come a long way from the core group of "alternative" rock bands I used to endlessly listen to from 1992 - 97; I discovered Tom Waits, delved deep into the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and jazz greats like Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk. I was gripped by a bizarre urge to the get to the bottom of the Great American Blues Myth, and studied up on Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and all the monstrously brilliant men and women who shared the stage with these people (including Charley Patton, who happens to be the proto-Jimi Hendrix. Playing the guitar with your teeth? Upside down? Around your back? Charley did it all first.) Lately I've been listening to the new Black Keys single "Lonely Boy" and the Trent Reznor/Karen O/Atticus Rose cover of "Immigrant Song" over and over again, but this movie has reignited my love of Pearl Jam. It may have been instrumental in reigniting my general motivation (which has taken a nose dive as I slog through my spirit-crushing cubicle job). Time will tell.

My favorite scene: at the band's tenth anniversary concert in Las Vegas, Eddie Vedder sang the great Mother Love Bone song "Crown of Thorns." The story of Mr. Faded Glory, a somewhat death-obsessed worldview, and a love that leaves me alone. Vedder acknowledged the past with that performance, and the song has remained in their concert set list ever since. You can disagree with their politics - and indeed, they're not exactly known for their crowd-pleasing sense of humor (take the much-booed rendition of Vedder's protest song, "Bu$hleaguer," featuring a George W. Bush mask impaled on a microphone stand as Vedder intones the not-that-clever lyrics while pouring alcohol in the mask's mouth.), but they scaled back their career, and have survived.

Twenty years. Holy fuck. Love it.

Adapt This: Zodiac

We have madmen waiting...
                      -Mideast terrorist leader,
                      1978
-opening quote of Zodiac, by Robert Graysmith

Sometimes, if you’ve seen the movie, you don’t need to read the book (The Boys From Brazil,Rosemary’s Baby, Marathon Man). Sometimes, the movie is a wretched pile of steaming garbage, making a great book seem even better in comparison (I’m looking at you, The World According to Garp and Beloved). Then you have cases like Zodiac, in which a terrific book is turned into an equally terrific movie, while being utterly different from each other.

I am well aware that David Fincher’s Zodiac has its haters. And while I’m not entirely clear whether these folks take issue with the film or whether it has something do with Fincher himself, I urge them to watch it again with an open mind. Zodiac is a richly layered, endlessly fascinating probe into one of the most haunting and perverse serial killer cases in American history. And to this day, it remains unsolved. I believe Zodiac is one of Fincher’s best films, far superior to his wildly over-rated The Social Network. Despite Fincher’s usual distant, coldly methodical tone, I also believe this is his most personal film, for a variety of reasons.

First, the basics: between December 20, 1968 and October 11, 1969, a deranged nutjob sent taunting letters to several newspapers in the California Bay Area which claimed responsibility for a series of brutal murders. The man who named himself the Zodiac sent four complicated cryptograms with his letters, only one of which has been persuasively decoded. Six victims have been confirmed to have been the work of the Zodiac Killer, and there are several more suspected, suggesting that Zodiac might have been active as early as 1966 and as late as 1971. The case remains open in Solano County, Napa County, and the city of Vallejo, California. While the case was labeled as “inactive” by the San Francisco Police Department, it was reopened sometime between 2004 and 2007.

Robert Graysmith was working as a political cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle at the time and was right in the thick of things. After spending years collecting a private scrapbook covering the killings, he published his famous nonfiction book in 1986.

Enter screenwriter James Vanderbilt (Darkness Falls, Basic, the upcoming The Amazing Spider-Man). After reading the book in high school and then meeting Graysmith (and according to some accounts, personally optioned the book at the age of eighteen - as a member of the storied Vanderbilt clan, this was possible.), Vanderbilt pitched the idea to Phoenix Pictures’ Mike Medavoy and Brad Fischer, who agreed to let him have more creative control over the project. The script attracted David Fincher, who grew up in Marin County. As Fincher told the New York Times:

"I remember coming home and saying the highway patrol had been following our school buses for a couple weeks now. And my dad, who worked from home, and who was very dry, not one to soft-pedal things, turned slowly in his chair and said: ‘Oh yeah. There’s a serial killer who has killed four or five people, who calls himself Zodiac, who’s threatened to take a high-powered rifle and shoot out the tires of a school bus, and then shoot the children as they come off the bus.’"

What fuels such an obsessive, morbid fascination with these kinds of things? Are we a culture of potential sociopaths, a culture of unfeeling savages so empty and devoid of human empathy that we study instances of sheer horrific tragedy just to give our own private prick-ish tendencies some kind of perspective? Kind of, yeah. But you're not here for my armchair sociological insights. Like Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac Killer is one of unknown boogeymen that still have the power to haunt our collective psyche. It's enough to inspire a former cartoonist's decades-long investigation - not to mention getting the preternatural attention of David Fincher. 

So how is the movie different from the book? If you're tempted to wonder if the book is "better," know that such qualifications are pointless here. I'm sure much the same can be said of the upcoming Moneyball, an intriguing-looking movie based on - by many accounts - a relatively dry, statistics-drenched work of nonfiction. Robert Graysmith's Zodiac gives us the facts in a straight-forward, exhaustively researched, detailed narrative. The prose is thoroughly readable, and as one reads on, becoming utterly absorbed in what happened all those years ago, there is the sense that Graysmith meant his book as a tribute to the victims, the majority of them young couples ambushed on a date, next to a lake, in a parking lot. I think that Graysmith, subconsciously or not, considered himself a recording angel. These people existed. They were brutally killed. The killer wrote letters to the police, mocking them with cyphers and riddles. He was never caught or even concretely identified. How fucked up is that? Who would do these things and why? 

The movie is a gripping dramatization of these events. Fincher has been lauded by critics for being able to craft a film so full of names, dates, events and mysteries and never once is the viewer lost or wondering what just happened. But what was this director's driving need to tell this story borne of? He's from the Bay Area, and on some primal level, these killings still haunt the area. I feel an odd connection to this story as well: Zodiac's first confirmed victims, David Arthur Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen, were killed in Benicia, California; Michael Mageau Renault and Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin were attacked in Vallejo, California; both towns are part of Solano County, as is my own hometown of Rio Vista. I know Benicia, I know Vallejo, I know San Francisco - this part of the world is famous for its tolerance and accepting attitude. The knowledge that this place can also breed such vicious, unfathomable violence is deeply disturbing... and endlessly fascinating.

David Fincher had already directed a serial killer movie, the modern classic Se7en,  which propelled Brad Pitt's star deep into orbit, put Kevin Spacey on the map in a big way, and made it common practice to put numbers in movie titles for no reason. That movie was a hard-line thriller, heavy on style and atmosphere and grisly hideousness. Zodiac recreates the killings in clear-eyed detail, but it's not about the gore (and aside from a graphic stabbing scene and a slow-motion gunshot to the head, it's a surprisingly bloodless film), it's about the three men who made the Zodiac killings a personal mission.

Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal as his most wide-eyed, earnest and convincing)  was a divorced cartoonist. Dave Toschi (a strong Mark Ruffalo)was a flamboyant, well-known San Francisco supercop, the basis for not one but two iconic movie mega-detectives: Bullitt and Dirty Harry. Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr., typecast but excellent) was a boozing, driven crime reporter who suffered a personal melt-down in the wake of the Zodiac killings but went on to publish probing accounts of the Patty Hearst kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army and later a book on the subject. The unique structure of this film places each of these characters in the role of central protagonist at different times. And we cannot overlook the solid supporting performance by Anthony Edwards as Bill Armstrong, Toschi's partner and the cop whose notes and reports supplied some of the most detailed accounts of this case.

As time passes, the case grows cold and the public consciousness moves on. Avery melts down and disappears. Toschi fights crime, one day at a time. Graysmith gets the bright idea to write a book about the case, thinking that something new might shake loose.  Graysmith gets Zodiac's - or someone's - attention, culminating in one tense, wordless encounter in a hardware story between Graysmith and everyone's favorite suspect, one Arthur Leigh Allen.

This all occurs under Fincher's steely, demanding direction. Vanderbilt's incisive script handles the meta-story in an admirably restrained way. The book studiously ignores the personal lives of these three men. Avery's meltdown is never mentioned, Toschi's obsession is hinted at, and as for Graysmith... well, he wrote the book, after all, devoting years to a maddeningly unresolved series of crimes. Fincher, Vanderbilt and the producers did further research, wisely realizing that to hold an audience's attention they'd need more than a series of grisly murders and that huge central question: who did this?

Jake Gyllenhaal turns in what is still his best performance to date, infusing Graysmith the Eagle Scout with a deeply honest urge to solve this puzzle. Graysmith's near-desperate confusion and befuddlement is a proxy for our own: why, after shooting at couples in parked cars, did Zodiac shoot cabbie Paul Stine in the middle of San Francisco for no apparent reason? Was Zodiac really responsible for the 1966 death of Cheri Jo Bates in Riverside? These questions whirl around the story, often leading to dead ends and red herrings. Indeed, the single most terrifying sequence in the film follows Graysmith as he is lured into a very creepy man's basement (played by the very creepy comedian Charles Fleischer - the voice of Roger Rabbit, of all things) by the promise of previously undisclosed evidence of Zodiac's identity. Fincher pours on the intense, stylized lighting, setting the encounter on an appropriately dark and rainy night. It's genuinely chilling, and ultimately fruitless.

As is the investigation. Arthur Leigh Allen was - and remains - the best suspect. A convicted sex offender, Allen was ambidextrous, which means he could have written the Zodiac letters with his non-dominant hand while in a disturbed state of mind. He had admittedly talked about shooting little kids as they came bouncing off the schoolbus - one of Zodiac's early threats. He lived right across the street from the first victim. He was one weird bastard. Was it really him? Was it one of the other suspects outlined in the book? How can we be sure either way?

Fincher may not have been driven by Graysmith's need to solve this, to honor the victims and not let this tragedy dissolve into the background. Fincher is not the most beloved director in La-La Land, and I would guess that this film is less about honoring the memories of the dead and more about the nature of obsession. Fincher is known to take a Kubrickian amount of takes per shot. Ruffalo recalled that the director required fifteen takes of him shuffling through a bunch of files. This exacting nature fits the material perfectly. Keeping Vanderbilt's studio-aggravating open-ending must have proved gratifying to a man who, upon receiving the green-light call on Fight Club, hung up the phone, turned to his assistant and said, "Those idiots just green-lit a $70 million experimental film."

There is a coda of sorts: one of Zodiac's few survivors, Michael Mageau, picks Arthur Leigh Allen's picture out of series of photos, identifying him as the man who shot him. This is a logical place to end things, but it's remarkably unsatisfying. In Graysmith's book, once the facts as he knows them are set forth, the incomplete and unresolved story laid out, he goes on and on in an extended appendix describing Zodiac's cars, his speech patterns, his weapons, his possible training. The book ends with this description from Zodiac's psychological profile:

The sexual sadist kills to achieve sexual pleasure. May never have had sexual intercourse. He seeks dehumanization of his victims into objects that he can have control over, power over. He takes great pains in appearing normal and in evading capture.

Whoever Zodiac was, he left a legacy of eternal shadow. I urge those who did not care for the film to try it again, and to read the book. You might learn more about yourself than you might expect, depending on how you react to what you find in there.

Last Saturday (sketch)

last saturday

these sounds, even in the haze:

"bedawze the sickness

belight the waste –

bethrone the barnacle'd husk of this world."

more and more:

a blitz and a blight and a shack and a surface

of okra and solidarity and bad cornmeal – who

were you, my brother? Blackened? Fuck your husk,

my brother – i choose the family i chose.

so rise up and dance with the damned

we walk in herds with our cousins

we shamble along

as empty pages in the back of a book no one

even ever glanced at or picked up or

wondered about –

and improbably,

we demonize this mortality,

a simplicity in the territorial coil –

a dead shackle coated in the slick

grease of what came before

"you are warped and ridiculed & yoked by

paralyzing quiet. you are shackled. you are

shackled. we are voices in the maze, the string in the

maze and you are shackled."

And the night comes on,

a balmy dream of evening surrounds Shea's

desperate grief –

he leans in and the voices mute the

wind whistling through treetops and

skittering across chainlink fences –

"we promise nothing, only offer."

"tomorrow is promised to no one," Shea says.

Coke & Computers & Johnny Cash

I recently finished Stephen Elliot's excellent nonfiction-true-crime-drug-addled-memoir The Adderall Diaries. It's a completely engrossing, steadily hypnotic account of a year in the life of someone addicted to a completely legal and FDA-sanctioned version of bad old speed - Adderall, like Ritalin, is most often prescribed to people with what they're calling attention-deficit hyperactivity-disorder... but it's just a smoother, gourmet version of crystal meth.

As I ride the very last wave of my 15-30 mg/day Adderall habit, I feel the urge to not just defecate, but to share an observation noted in Joe Hill's terrific novel Heart-Shaped Box. At one point the main character, a fifty-four-year old heavy metal rock star named Judas Coyne, reflects on the nature of addiction, and why he fucking hates computers: the notion of being "wired." Having once spent four years wired on cocaine, Jude had no inclination to get wired again. A lot of people wouldn't understand the parallels he draws between coke and computers, but Hill describes someone hunched over a computer, endlessly refreshing some meaningless bit of information... it really is the same thing.

These things are sucking the life force right out of us all. I'm no different, I'm as hooked on technology as anyone, to the point where I didn't even realize it, at least not consciously. Then I caught myself taking my cell phone with me wherever I went - not just from my cubicle at work to the bathrooms down the hall or to the kitchen area of the office to get a cup of water... from room to room of my house, from one side of the goddam living room to the other, as if terrified the fucking thing would break the invisible tether between us and float out into the world and latch onto a different owner. How pathetic.

Not that this has anything to do with Johnny Cash. I just threw that in because I feel better after I listen to Johnny Cash.

UPDATED: I've been off Adderall for a solid week now.

UPDATED AGAIN: Fuck my life.

Say My Name, Bitch!

The other day I had the idea of re-naming this blog something else. Something clever. Something memorable and funny, the kind of blog name you'd keep with you, like a secret. (That's a Built To Spill reference for you aging hipsters out there.)

I must have been drunk, because I don't remember what it was. This sucks. I don't like the name of this fucking blog anymore, and I usually don't have anything to say... at least nothing I want to share with the six or seven people who read this thing. 

Actually, what I'm not sharing is exactly what I'd tell the people who follow this chronicle of my increasingly hideous cubicle existence, so why wouldn't I spill the meta-beans all up on here?

Because I'm not an asshole, okay? Or at least I try not to be one, and succeed at something like a 60/40 rate - you can guess which is which because your guess will tell me all I need to know about how you feel about me. 

Deal with that. Good night. 

Oh, and if you can think of a way better name for this lame blog, I'll totally steal it. Go!