Robust McManlyPants on Average Display

Last night we caught the midnight showing of Quantum of Solace at the Carolina Theatre of Durham. I wanted a really, really big screen for it and so that was the natural place to turn. Without going into details, it’s very good. There’s an argument to be made that Casino Royale was more mind-blowing but I think largely it’s because that one had that new-Bond smell. In the new one, Craig is still fantastic as Bond, the “Bond girl” is unquestionably his peer, the action had me literally, physically tensed in my seat, Bond’s relationship with M is fun to watch and the theme song is very, very good. What more could one want?

Odds I’ll pay to see it again: very high.

20,175 words. Whewf.

This year I’m writing a noir thriller kind of thing called Particular People about a gay insurance agent caught up in the life of a famous client who is a closet-case. It’s set in Nashville, TN, in 1983 and the title is an allusion to the old trick the queer community used to use to identify one another: when they were sitting at a bar, so it is said (and as often it’s said to be untrue), they would leave out a pack of Pall Malls so that the motto - Wherever Particular People Gather - would be visible.

I’m up to 12,923 words as of tonight. I’m only barely keeping pace with the normal progression of 1,667 words/day but tomorrow afternoon there’s a write-in at a coffeehouse around the corner from me so I plan to get way out ahead of the curve while I’m there.

I’m going to make a prediction, hangover be damned: NC will be certified blue in a matter of days. The 40,000 to 50,000 provisional ballots outstanding simply will not be so overwhelmingly in favor of McCain that they erase Obama’s 11,000 vote lead. Having worked a few elections now, I can tell you who winds up voting a provisional: college students and new voters. Neither of those are likely McCain voters.

Why college students, one might ask? That’s easy: they don’t know they aren’t registered or they don’t have the ability to vote in their “normal” precinct so on election day, between classes, they walk into the nearest polling place and wind up voting a provisional. It is entirely likely that hundreds of Durham County’s provisional ballots from yesterday fall into this category as students walked in who (a) thought they had registered but hadn’t or whose registrations had failed to make it into the books or (b) lived off-campus and had someplace else in town as their “real” polling place walked into the one next to campus thinking they could just vote wherever.

Why new voters? Because they don’t know where to go and so they go to the polling place they see on their way to/from work or the one that’s nearby when they get a break.

There are exceptions and there are theories that some measure of provisionals are from recently-moved retirees and from retirement homes but they don’t hold water. Recently relocated retirees are always on top of their voting registration and retirement home residents don’t show up in person and wind up voting a provisional. Anyone who votes a provisional walks in the door and has the stamina to fill out a bunch of paperwork. Both of these favor Obama. That’s a pretty harsh thing to say, but it’s true.

Now I’m scared to post this for fear of jinxing my state turning blue.

3,791 words. My main character, it turns out, is named Jason Marks and his office (he’s an independent insurance agent in Nashville, TN in 1983) is in a dying shopping mall. At least a part of last night’s writing time was spent reading deadmalls.com, a site that is every bit as awesome as its name suggested it would be. His only work friend is a screaming queen who works at the Orange Julius. Jason Marks is also, it turns out, not nearly as nice as I had thought he would be but I suspect that’s going to be his arc: learning a little empathy in the course of having his entire world completely fucked over by one dead country star.

I’m going to try to cross the 5,000 word mark tonight before bed since I won’t get to do a lick of writing on Tuesday. Truly, I love November.

I am such a stereotype.

A couple of weeks ago I caught the cats snuggled together for a nap and got a picture of them. The flash woke and annoyed Didi, however, leaving him looking freaky.

So cute.

Sunday evening The Boyf and I went to the State Fair. Right away I need to tell you that deep-fried pecan pie is fantastically good. It is reason #587 why I can never own a deep fryer.

Second, there is a pretty stunning thing that has been done to an apple.

There’s a competition in which kids have made various bits of art out of apples. One made dinosaur eggs by painting it, etc. One of the winners on display is an apple that has been, by means of a dowel rod and some other bits, turned into a vaguely dinosaur shape. It has a sign in front of it with its name. I swear to the gods that’s really what was sitting there. The Boyf and I had to stare for a long while before we could say anything and then finally he asked, “You’re going to take a picture, right?” I did - though I was giggling so hard I couldn’t hold the phone steady - then stood back up, looked at him and we both silently mouthed the word, “Wow.”

As we walked away two young women approached and one said, in her best Valley Girl, “Oh, look, those are soooooo cute.” We snickered a little at the incongruity of the reaction, waited a couple of seconds and then heard with tremendous satisfaction the same voice shrilly cry, “Oh my God, does that say ‘raping?!’.”

This weekend I had an almost ridiculously good time attending ESCAPISM at the Carolina Theatre of Durham. In addition to seeing some excellent movies I also got to do some pretty sweet shopping at the Sci-Fi Genre booth. Some quick thoughts on some of the films:

Friday night I got to see They Live on Fletcher Hall’s enormous screen. The print was crystal clear and the sound flawless. I don’t know if it was a new print or one that had been sealed away for twenty years but it was an utterly unique experience. I hadn’t watched it in several years and had forgotten a lot of it. It remains a ridiculous B movie but in our current climate its anti-authoritarian message about the evils of conquest-for-profit are pretty startlingly relevant. Damn but that was some sweet watching and the crowd was very into it.

I also got to see Sukiyaki Western Django, the new film by Takashi Miike, maker of Audition, Gozu and The Happiness of the Katakuris. Sakiyuki Western Django is an incredibly stylized and cartoonishly Americanized film about warfare between Japanese clans, half spaghetti western and half Japanese historical drama. I loved it. It is not a film for the faint of heart, as anyone who’s seen Audition or Gozu would surely already expect, but it is very, very, very good. It is… it’s hard to describe, actually. I think “hott” is probably the best word for it. I highly recommend it and recommend seeing it on the big screen rather than Netflixing it at some later date. It’s being held over and will play at the Carolina twice nightly for the rest of this week.

The last movie I had a chance to see was The Punisher and I do mean the 1989 version with Dolph Lundgren. The director, Mark Goldblatt, was on hand to tell stories before the movie and it was his personal print the theatre got to show. This was, in fact, the North American premiere of that film as it went straight to video here after the US distributor went under before release. Dolph is kind of disturbingly hot in this movie and the movie itself is completely over-the-top in every regard. It is far more comic-booky than any of the comic adaptations made today in that regard. It is also extraordinarily violent to the point that the violence just becomes funny after a while. This was an even more unique opportunity than seeing They Live. This was something that will probably never happen again and I’m really glad I got to be there for it.

Once again, many thanks to the Carolina Theatre of Durham for the chance to see something no one else will ever get to see.

Last night The Boyf and I went around the corner to Tokyo Fun, the new sushi place on NC 55 in Durham. It’s in the building vacated a few months ago when China One closed up shop. We had originally loved China One but a serious decline in its quality before it entirely fell by the wayside made us wary of anything new that opened up there. I read a couple of reviews on Yelp, though, and decided it was worth a shot. I am extremely glad that I did.

Tokyo Fun’s food is easily on-par with that of Shiki Sushi, just up the road, but here’s the thing: like the reviewers on Yelp said, Tokyo Fun is not packed. Specific to The Boyf’s and my experience of Shiki Sushi, Tokyo Fun is not packed with recent Duke grads screeching at one another. Whereas Shiki Sushi has gone from quiet-awesome-sushi-bar to enormous-trendy-noise-factory, Tokyo Fun is simply fantastic food, attentive service and relaxation. While the redesign of Shiki Sushi made it a very attractive place, it is the least acoustically friendly storefront anywhere this side of the now-defunct Caffe Trio or possibly The (much loved but ear-splitting) Borough in Raleigh. That place is, and there is no other way to say it, hell of loud inside. Add to that a frequent wait of 20 or 30 minutes for a table and a clientele consisting largely of die-cast frat cheese and I think it’s plain why I haven’t been there in a while. With Tokyo Fun now within shouting distance of my house - and with a drive-through service lane around the back corner of the building! - I don’t need to.

Right now, at least, they’re running a 2-for-1 dinner special on sushi rolls and at lunch they’re running an introductory 30% off discount. I would imagine the place is a lot busier during the weeday, given its RTP location, but for a late dinner on a Sunday night we had the place entirely to ourselves. We also spotted a little raised section with rice-paper walls and low, traditional tables. We’re considering trying to organize an outing to reserve one of those tables sometime.

This weekend I drove from Durham to Asheville and back. Along the way, counting only cars with NC tags and not counting my own, Obama cars were winning 8 (four sedans, two mini-vans and two pickups) to 4 (two sedans and two mini-vans). Counting cars with in-state and out-of-state tags, Obama was winning 8 to 6 (two ginormous RVs towing SUVs behind them, both with Texas plates).

Several years ago I rented an extremely stylized and ultra-aware-of-its-own-cool 1960’s yakuza flick based on a recommendation of it in some one-off piece in the Indy. I then immediately forgot its name, who made it, etc., had long since tossed the issue with that article and have spent the intervening, oh, seven or eight years wishing I could find that movie again. After realizing late - very late - last night that the internet could almost certainly solve this for me I sat down with Netflix and Wikipedia and started the serious hunting. It appears that it’s Tokyo Drifter - the description of the film and the bio of the director certainly fit - and right now it’s on its way to me as we speak.

It is so satisfying to scratch a mental itch that’s lasted nearly a decade.

On a vaguely related note, the 2008 schedule is up for the ESCAPISM festival at the Carolina Theatre of Durham. How stoked am I for this festival? Wicked stoked. It’s going to be tricky for me to schedule around because that’s also the first weekend of early voting, IIRC, and I’m an election judge for early voting but it is totally worth scheduling around to do both of these things. ESCAPISM this year has three things in particular that just make my scalp sweat with desire to see them: The Punisher from 1989, They Live (an all-time favorite of mine) and Something Wicked This Way Comes which, due to election judging, I can’t see. Feh. What this means is that my friends must go see it for me.

So, through a chain of links and events too circuitous to be interesting, I recently learned that a GLBT pay channel called here! has a show called “The Lair” and that this show is a soap opera about gay vampires who run a strip club. This had “trainwreck” written all over it in big letters so I had to step up and watch it. Once I knew this existed I knew I would have to see it. Happily, Netflix has it so I got to watch the first half of the first season this week.

Here is the thing: its negatives are some real negatives and its positives are, surprisingly, some real positives. This is a half-hour show with a season length of six episodes. We are talking about some extremely efficient storytelling here and they honestly get points for that. The storyline moves because it doesn’t have time to dawdle over much of anything.

On the other hand, the DVD should feature a voiceover on each menu that says, “We’ve replaced the lifestyles section of your local newspaper with Skinemax; let’s see who notices,” because that is exactly what one gets when one watches this show.

The basic premise is that a small-time reporter at a small-time paper lives in something right out of the Tour of Homes with his boyfriend, Fauxhawk McJunkyard, and investigates a string of grisly murders perpetrated by the gay vampires. It is an almost woefully ambitious storyline that tries to incorporate a lot of different topics that could make for a really interesting story: trust issues in relationships, the ways in which an unrestrained and irresponsible sexual environment can be seen as preying on people, the political angle of a boyfriend who can’t get any information from the doctor after his boyfriend is attacked because he isn’t technically a family member, etc. There’s a lot to work with there, the lead is cute, the boyfriend is cute, they’ve got a resident fruit fly, plus the whole fangs thing. In the end, though, it’s such a low-budget affair and the villains are so ham-fisted that it falls fairly flat.

The impression one cannot escape is that the incredibly stupid vampires in this town - whatever it’s name is - are incredibly lucky to be surrounded by even dumber mortals. They occasionally require the characters to make stupid choices just so they can set up false, fleeting suspense. The only straight people in the show are in a horribly abusive relationship to make Fauxhawk’s creepy stalking seem less crazy. The dialogue could be worse but the delivery is pretty cringe-worthy. To top it all off, no pun intended, every episode has to include at least one session of incredibly lackluster and unenthusiastic dry-humping. There’s actually a scene in which, to demonstrate his ennui, the head of the local vampires watches with obvious boredom as a bunch of dudes in those way, way played out leather strap bandolier things hump each other and all I could say in response to his complacency was, Brother, you and me both. If the softcore is how they sold the show, well, so be it, but damn, it is not in fact a selling point.

As I said to Deadblob after, this show is the intersection point for cute guys, bad acting, unrealized ambition and pantomime blowjobs. For all that, its ambition wins out. I have to respect it for trying so hard. I left the second disc at the top of my Netflix queue, anyway.

Long live the Annex.

The Boyf and I went out for a drive and some errands today. Given UNC was starting their football season we took a bit of a long route to get to Chapel Hill and, once there, went on out to Furniture Follies where we saw an awesome stove and some other stuff.

Afterwards, we dropped in on Chapel Hill Comics to check out the new store. The new store gets a huge thumbs-up and is highly recommended. I commented that a friend might be leaving some DVDs for me in my bag there as he and I had failed to meet up when he had the DVDs in his possession and then I said, “Which is, I guess, kind of like having a post office box at the comics store?” I was worried that the request would bug such kind people but instead Vanessa seemed pleased to see evidence of their clientele as a larger community. The store itself is very nice, much larger and much easier to move around in and browse the aisles, very colorful, very engaging. Insanely awesome, in fact.

After that we hit the grocery store and in the parking lot I was taken with the way an approaching storm loomed over the Kroger. I took some quick pictures and while we were standing in the dairy aisle the building shook from the first peal of thunder. Awesome.

The 13th NC Gay & Lesbian Film Festival is over and since yesterday evening I’ve seen two more films.

The Gay Bed & Breakfast of Terror is way, way better than the slasher flick from last year. It’s got a lot of genuinely funny parts and some very good physical comedy in addition to the standard gore. It has a creepy kid (check), tasty beefcake (check) and a few annoying characters one is glad to see offed (check). Unfortunately it takes a little too long winding up the pitch and in the end felt like it had run about fifteen minutes past its shelf life. That said, that is basically all I have in the way of complaints. The slapstick is top-notch, the likable characters are genuinely likable, the camp completely works and the villains chew scenery in fantastic style. Only once did I lean into The Boyf’s ear to whisper, “Jeez, where’s a fundamentalist cannibal when you need one?” There were some serious belly laughs to be had and the audience broke into applause more than once during the course of it. By the same token, I jumped in my seat more than once. Well worth watching.

This morning I caught Boystown, a Spanish film about a string of murders in a gentrifying neighborhood of Madrid. It has a lot of sass and a lot of grunge and a sweet little love story and a hot villain. I think it would make a better date movie than solo excursion - The Boyf was working - but all in all worth getting up early to see. It tended to stick a little closer than I prefer to the arrogant style of attitude-based humor - unlike Tranny McGuyver which manages to be both arrogant and self-deprecating - but it’s extremely well done and a saucier queen than I would probably enjoy it a lot more.

Then I stuck around to watch Tranny McGuyver one more time and just about split my sides seeing it again. I don’t know what it is about that movie - OK, I know: timing, writing and delivery, so the whole package - but that short just slays me.