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My 2005 Top 10 (updated 2/11/2006):

1. Millions
2. Brokeback Mountain
3. Sin City
4. Syriana
5. Good Night, and Good Luck.
6. Match Point
7. Munich
8. Batman Begins
9. Jarhead
10. The Constant Gardener

Take this with a grain of salt, though. I’ve still got some films to see. King Kong and Revenge of the Thithhhhh don’t really belong on this list, and I’d guess that they’ll fall off once I’ve seen a few more movies.

Even more fun than actually going to the annual Xmas Movie, is the months-long nomination and selection process of said Xmas Movie. Normally. This year—the fourteenth year of the Xmas Movie, by the way—was a different story. Not that there’s a lack of good movies in theatres right now, but the three of us just couldn’t seem to come to an agreement about which movie to see. There are criteria at work during the selection process. We try to strive for something light (which rules out Munich and Syriana and movies like those) and not terribly taxing on the brain (ruling out those same movies, coincidentally). We try to pick a movie that hits theatres in December (so we aren’t sick of hearing about it by the time we see it), and one, usually, which is getting good reviews, or which has some characteristic which predetermines our interest in it.

As you know, we have historically had poor luck when it comes to the Xmas Movie. They’re normally pretty crappy. This year we spent a long time arguing about three different movies that met our criteria, and which seemed like strong candidates to actually not suck, with one of us objecting to each one. Alisia was totally opposed to The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; NEM was totally opposed to King Kong (2005); and I was totally opposed to Brokeback Mountain (tending not to be interested in A. stories set in the midwest and B. stories about cowboys). Having given up on those three films, we started looking at more middle-of-the-road-type cinematic fare. Movies like The Family Stone and Rumor Has It…. Blah. Sounds like the crap we normally go to, right?

But, really, my theory has always been that it matters not what a movie’s about, as long as it’s good. Everything is interesting if you pay attention. And I’m sick of going to movies that I can’t even remember three weeks after xmas. I’d rather hate the movie than just be numbed by it.

So, I gave in and Brokeback Mountain was the official selection. And, boy, am I glad it was. Here are the brass tacks: this is the best movie love story I’ve seen in a long, long time. Probably since The Piano (1993). It’s probably significant that all three of us were crying at the end of the film. It’s probably even more significant that I could cry again right now if I thought about it enough.

Here is, through this year, the all-time ranking of Xmas Movies, from best to worst (there have been fifteen Xmas Movies over fourteen years), in my not-so-humble opinion:

Continue reading ‘Xmas Movie 2005′

We never wrote about Annie. She is my dog. She is 3/4 Bassett Hound and 1/4 Beagle. She is so cute. She is such a good girl, too. She has lost about 9 pounds since she has been with us. Everyone thought she was fat, but she is slim now and so cute. Her face is beagle, but her body is very bassett. She hates peeing outside and hates pooping out there even more. She hates loud noises, but makes loud otter noises when she first sees Jonathan or I come in the house. She knows the sound of the car locking and Jonathan says she gets excited when Mommy comes home. That’s my Nanna. She likes to eat the Christmas tree and throws it up afterwards. She can pee 5 times in one hour (I have seen her do it). She likes to sleep on my couch or on the bed, where it is soft. She likes to have baths with her bath wipes. She is such a baby.

Annie is 5 years old. She was born in a litter of two. Annie (originally Cheyenne) her Mom and her sister were tied to a tree outside a New Hampshire home on two feet of rope for 3-4 years. They were skinny and sickly. The girlfriend of the man who had these dogs suggested to the man that he bring them to the junkyard and chain them to a fence. He did so, and she called the New England Beagle Rescue. Her mother and sister died, but Annie went on to live in a foster home, where she made friends with her other foster dog-mates and ate a lot of food. I found her picture on a website and decided she had to be a part of my life. After a lot of convincing, we got Annie.

Annie is probably about the best dog I could have asked for. She is quiet and loving and make you feel better when you are down. She just loves whoever gets close to her.

Thank you, Jonathan for helping bring Annie home.

I was thirteen when I saw My Girl, a romantic melodrama made for the sole purpose of jerking the tears right out of teenage girls and their mothers, starring Dan Aykroyd and Macaulay Culkin. It tells the overwrought, saccharin story of Vada Sultenfuss (I’m not making this up), an eleven-year-old girl whose mother has died, whose father owns a funeral parlor, and whose best friend, Thomas J., is “allergic to everything.” As I sat there in the theatre watching the story unfold, its events escaped harmlessly from my memory almost as quickly as the images flickered past on the screen.

Until the moment of Thomas J.’s all-too-predictable death.

Yes, the movie’s plot was certainly manipulative, trying to tug, no, yank at one’s heartstrings at every opportunity, but something happened as I watched the life blink out of this slightly-younger-than-I boy. It was like the filament of my own insulated, comfortable existence was quietly tearing, somewhere in the distance.

The next weekend, I went to see The Hand That Rocks the Cradle at the Orange Showcase Cinemas. Boy, was I in for another afternoon of high-quality early-90s filmmaking. I won’t even bother to summarize the story of this cradle-rocking mess, but during its final reel, Rebecca De Mornay’s character, a homicidal nanny of sorts (this was the era of Basic Instinct, Single White Female, Sleeping with the Enemy, Point of No Return—female leads were predominantly either frigging whacko, frigging vengeful, or frigging both), meets her end by falling (or being shoved, I don’t exactly recall) out a window and through the glass roof of the greenhouse below (I’m not making this up, either).

It was at exactly that moment, as I sat there with my monstrous bucket of popcorn in my lap, watching Ms. De Mornay’s awkwardly contorted, bloody corpse on the screen, that the filament which anchored me to my comfortable obliviousness gave way completely.

Suddenly, I was bathed in a cold sweat. My pants clung to my legs and crotch, and my shirt felt two or three sizes too small. My heart was pounding hard enough that I could feel the blood pulsing through my ears. My face was hot and seemed to be pushing out against the air, as if my head were expanding. My stomach had flipped itself upside-down and inside-out. My mouth was dry, and the lump in my throat was too large and raw to swallow around.

Without even thinking about it, I was out of my seat and fumbling down the row toward the aisle, out into the hall, and through the men’s room door. I stumbled to the wall of urinals—they were the sort that run all the way to the floor with drains slightly below floor-level—and flushed one. The sounds blurred into their own reverberations: my hand on the metal handle, my sneakers squeaking on the tiled floor, the water rushing drainward. The echo surrounded and consumed me and redoubled itself in its endless amplification and multiplication. The fluorescent light and the shiny chrome and porcelain assaulted my pupils, and the room spun violently. As the water ran down the white enamel wall in front of me, I knelt on the textured floor—tiny grey and maroon squares which scraped my palms—and vomited undigested popcorn and Jujyfruits into the urinal.

As bits of food followed the running water down and were trapped outside the drain beneath me, I thought, This is the moment of my death. This is how I’ll be found. Covered in my own puke, face-first in a movie theatre urinal. And at thirteen, no less.

Continue reading ‘Rebecca De Mornay, Macaulay Culkin, and the Day I Finally Died’

Firefox v1.5 (an upgrade from v1.0.7) is now available for download.

“I don’t ever want to see either of you in here again,” said Officer Sanderson, the straight-out-of-70’s-porn, it’s-part-of-the-uniform-ma’am moustache barely moving above his lip. “Now, beat it.”

And there we were, banished from The Gap for life. The Roman Polanskis of middle-class fashion. The Andrew Dice Clays of pretentious, overpriced, “pre-weathered” jeans.

Alisia and I had stopped that Wednesday evening in search of a belt for me. We were attending a company function at her office that coming Friday to which I’d be wearing my black suit, and the only belt I seemed to own was brown, although we were pretty sure we’d gone on this same shopping trip for a black belt the last time I’d had to wear that suit. But whatever.

We arrived at 6:50, knowing full well that The Gap closed at seven o’ clock. But how long could belt shopping take? As we entered the store, I nodded in greeting to the police officer stationed near the door—Officer Sanderson, I would find out later—in that way that people tend to act with unjustified familiarity with the police, firefighters, military personnel, or really anyone who might make a person feel a twinge of guilt for not having done something more “heroic” with their lives. Or, perhaps with police officers, that look is meant to convey something more like, “See? You don’t have to worry about me. What are the chances that I’ve got six kilos of heroin hidden under the upholstery of my car if I have the gumption to nod to you in salutation? Pretty small, I’d say.” Either way, I did the macho head bob thing, feeling slightly like an idiot, and headed into the store.

As Alisia perused women’s tops and jeans, I looked quickly through the men’s belts, wrapping a few around my waist trying to find one that fit.

Now, one would think that if one’s waist size is thirty-six inches, one’s belt size might also be thirty-six inches, but that isn’t the case, is it? Through some feat of metric-to-American conversion, or in some strange parallel to women’s vs. men’s shoe sizes, my belt size is some non-36 number, like 42 or 44 or 21, which I can never remember. So, I just grab belts off the rack by the handful and wrap them around me until one fits. Makes sense, right?

Anyway, once I found one that was to my liking lengthwise, I quickly made sure that it fit into my belt loop while hoping that the belt loops on my jeans weren’t bigger than the loops on my suit’s pants. What could be worse than purchasing a belt that fit comfortably around my waist, only to find that I’d have to, I dunno, staple it to my pants or something? Hardly anything.

Finally satisfied with a particular belt, we paid for it and were on our way out the door, just a minute or so before seven. Officer Sanderson was now out on the sidewalk, leaning on the hood of his cruiser, and I could feel myself preparing to tell him to have a “good one”—we’re old pals, remember?—as Alisia and I passed him on the way to our car.

We stepped out onto the sidewalk and as my mouth started to form the words, he said to us, “Okay, now, why don’t you give me what you took?”

Continue reading ‘Black Belt’

There’s finally a full trailer out for Pixar’s Cars (2006). Check it out.

I really just can’t take this. And, to be honest with you, I’m sort of sick of it. For a few years there (1998, ‘99, and, to an extent, 2000), watching the Yankees was fun because they just flat out won. Except that that’s mostly untrue, too. The ‘98 and ‘99 playoffs were littered with one- or two-run victories, extra inning games, and late come-from-behind Yankees rallies. So, they were just as nerve-wracking to watch as these games are now. Except that I wasn’t entirely sure that the Yankees ever could lose an important game back then. I had heard about their heartbreaking loss to the Indians in ‘97, but I hadn’t seen it (having not followed baseball basically from 1994 through 1997). So, there was a certain invincibility that these Yankees had built up for me, winning 114 regular season games in ‘98, and then going 22-3 over consecutive post seasons.

But, at this point, I’ve seen the Yanks lose enough times in big games to know that it’s always possible. It’s like that with staff aces. Everybody thinks of Roger Clemens as a lights-out starter, but I watched him pitch enough games for the Yankees that I saw him lose enough to always have doubted him. Same thing with all these guys: Pettitte, Wells, El Duque. You watch anyone pitch enough, you’ll see their weak spots, and then you’ll always know what they are. Even Mariano Rivera. I’ve seen him pitch enough that I know he isn’t entirely unhittable like a lot of people think (he blew saves in back-to-back games I was at—against the Braves and Orioles in ‘99—in fact).

So, now that I know they can lose, I have to fear it all of the time. And I don’t even mean those four games last year in the ALCS. From my point of view, the Yankees never had any business winning the first three games of that series, so it all evened out in the end. I mean 2001 and 2002. I mean games one and two against Oakland in ‘01. I mean game one against Minnesota last year.

Sometime back in ‘99 or 2000, I told Alisia that there would come a point where the Yankees would be terrible again, and they’d win 65 games per year for a while, but we’d have to love them anyway. And the thing is I kind of long for those days.

Continue reading ‘Friday Night at the Fens’

Okay, so, the guy’s my hero, at least in my chosen field (as he is for a lot of people who do what I do). He’s the most famous graphic designer in the world. USA Today called him “the closest thing to a rock star” in the industry. He’s written a novel that was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of 2001, the rights to which he recently sold to a Hollywood studio to be made into a movie, and he’s currently working on a new novel. He designed the covers for all of the recent Sin City graphic novel reprint editions. He’s edited and contributed to innumerable books about the DC Comics universe, and he’s written an actual Superman-Batman strip, which was painted by Alex Ross. He’s got a monograph of his work coming out in a month, and he’s speaking at AIGA tonight in Chicago.

And by some incredible happenstance, I’m working with/for him on his first official website. And it’s just gone live today. It’s a limited, preview-type site at this point, but it’s there. And it’s my work. Go check it out.

The white plastic toilet seat is somehow tacky enough with the left-behind goop of its previous occupants to chafe my thighs at the same time as it’s almost too slippery with my own cold sweat to prevent me from sliding right into the bowl. A wave of teeth-grinding abdominal pain has just passed, and the feeling returns to my fingertips as I gradually relax my fists. The occasional derelict pocket of rank air squeaks its escape from beneath me, and the churning cauldron of foulness burbles listlessly from within. It feels like the worst may have passed, but I’m hesitant to trust that notion as my two previous attempts at standing only brought on new floods of paint-peeling horror.

It’s my mom’s fiftieth birthday, and she and I are in Manhattan celebrating. We’ve already spent the afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art, we’re at a swanky restaurant for dinner now, and we’ve got tickets to Cats afterwards. The bread and salad courses had come and gone, and our entrées had just arrived when I realized just how urgently I needed to meet with the proverbial man in reference to his proverbial horse. I had ordered filet mignon, and when the waiter set it down in front of me it was perfect and juicy and thick. I can just imagine its current condition. It’s probably quite room temperature, and its accompanying butter sauce has likely congealed into a tan-yellow lump of aged Elmer’s glue, petrified parsley flakes suspended within.

I shift my weight from one slippery cheek to the other, and the disturbance is enough to send my innards back into full spasmodic fit. The pain fades my vision to white, and I’m acutely aware of the ticklish sweat dripping from my hairline, down my forehead and neck. My sport coat is folded and draped over the stall door, my dress shirt is hanging from a rusty metal hook, and I’m clutching my undershirt in my fists like a security blanket. Here I sit, shirtless in the interest of preventing wrinkles (and, in fact, splattering), with my pants around my ankles, as I spray rancid hell into the porcelain chasm beneath me while my mother eats her fiftieth birthday dinner alone. It will be another forty or forty-five minutes before I’m sure it’s safe to hoist myself up off the commode and drag my damp, accordion-pleated undershirt back over my head.

Continue reading ‘The Case Against Eating’

This is, of course, the first iteration of this year’s template, and this is definitely a proprietary image, but I wanted to show it off anyway, ’cause I like it:

Continue reading ‘New Gift Cards’

Firefox v1.0.7 now available.

Today, September 19th, is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, so, imagine yourself with an eyepatch, a peg leg, and a ship all your own (except for the part where you stole it from someone else) and, you know, talk like a pirate today, damn it. Or you’ll have to swab the deck, or walk the plank, or something.