Rollins 2.0

If angry, nihilistic punk rock grew up and broke away from its anti-social niche of non-conformity and joined the trendy attire wearing, coffee klatch gossiping, restaurant hopping, Whole Foods shopping, globe trotting, book inhaling world of current ‘It-ness,’ we would get something that looks and sounds a lot like the post-Black Flag/Rollins Band Henry Rollins. Ever the contrarian, Henry 2.0 channels his rage and indignation into keen observations about every type of conceivable pet-peevish thing that irks the hell out of him. Henry admits that he is an angry man but says his urge to rip apart every stupid thing he hates with colorful words and sentences also motivates him to keep living, travelling, reading, learning, seeing, smelling, eating, tasting, touching and breathing. In “Uncut from NYC” (2006) Rollins takes us on a tour of the Trans Siberian Railway, he delineates and laments the humanoid creatures popping up across America which he calls Wal-Martians, and he fires hard-edged insults at the republicans and the Bush administration. Rollins delivers his insights unfiltered, they are as raw and free as the thoughts in his head, and this is what makes his spoken-word performances so funny and entertaining to watch. We all have ideas and images in our head that are blunt, immature, or vague, but decorum requires that we dress them up, make them less obvious, and inflate or trim them before we let our mouths utter them. But a good stand-up comic will fire away in a stream of consciousness style and let all the grotesque and obvious things that we all think on a daily basis fly out of her and fill up the air with reassuring reason. Rollins’ smart and unabashed quick-wittedness makes him very adept at this, and he brings his experience as a punk rock musician to the stage in the form of his huffing and puffing body language (I swear, at least once while watching this DVD I seriously thought HenRollins was going to hyperventilate and pass out). Henry Rollins says what we all know we know but are too afraid to say for fear of looking like simpletons, and if you disagree with him it is only because the truth hurts.

“Henry Rollins: Uncut from NYC” does not contain the comic’s best material, but he still delivers his commentaries in the usual Rollins-esque style of entertainingly angst-fueled, exasperated-at-all-the-weak-minded-stupidity-and-bullshit-of-the-world-ness. Buy it today or get it as a gift for that special open-mindedly angry person in your life.

Pornified: why admitting that you watch a lot of porn is no longer cool

I am very mad at Amazon because I wrote a review for Pamela Paul’s Pornified last night and it still hasn’t appeared with all the other reviews. I’m thinking about boycotting if it doesn’t post because I hate censorship, and any website that would censor the harmless things I write does not deserve my or any other free-speech loving individual’s patronage. Not only was my review harmless, but a lot of intellectual labor went into it. It took me at least an hour to write even though it wasn’t very long. I painstakingly constructed every word and sentence even going so far as to employ a thesaurus at one point. The reason I think my review might not appear is because I carelessly titled it, “I didn’t read the book, but I have some things to say.” This is not a good way to ingratiate yourself with the Amazon algorithms which might search out and try to subvert attention whores who are just trying to use their website as a free platform. But still, I bought and shipped a birthday gift to my brother yesterday using their “platform,” so I feel this entitles me to write at least one free review of a book I didn’t read. Furthermore, I gave the book three stars and deigned to agree with the author when most of the other reviewers ripped her apart.

From what I gleaned from the Amazon and other reviews, Pornified is a poorly researched and passionate (i.e. biased) book which attempts to caustically demonize the adult entertainment industry. Basically, it uses all the old arguments (many of which are feminist arguments) to call attention to this destructive obsession which is reeking havoc on families and marriages, women, children, teens, society as a whole not to mention men’s minds. According to the author, it is a corrupting and perverting force and perhaps the biggest bane of healthy relations in America. Keep in mind, this is inferring a lot from the scant reviews I read, the title and alluring cover of the book, and the fact that the genesis for this commentary had its origins in a TIME magazine story which ran a few years back.

But still, I felt like I had to stand up and say (or write) how I feel about porn. I think my opinion matters more than a lot of people out there who claim to know so much about the genre not least because of the fact that I was raised on pornography. Yes, I am 33 years old and I am a walking study in the long term effects of what more than half a life of getting off to porn will do to a person who is still relatively young. And lucky for me, I turned out normal. Contrary to what a lot of people might expect, I am not promiscuous, I have never contracted an STD, I don’t sexually harass girls or women (although I do stare), and I don’t set demanding expectations for my sexual partners. I have never videotaped myself masturbating and posted it on a tube site, I have never had cyber sex with a stranger, and I do not wear revealing clothing or send any other sartorial signals which might announce to the world that I am a “slut.”

If I am such a walking example of how porn is practically harmless, you might wonder why I side with Pamela Paul’s basic thesis that some things about it are simply ”bad.” Well, my gripe with porn is probably a little more intellectual than her’s and is mostly rooted in the fact that, when I came into contact with adult magazines and films in the early 90’s, porno was still a very private obsession for most people. It was not considered cool or even safe to transparently advertise your preferences for adult film genres and sex toys like it is today. Blabbing on about how much you dig seeing lesbians kiss or how you own a vibrating Fleshlight in the 90’s would quickly earn you the reputation of a pervert, and even worse, it could get you in serious trouble. I guess we all took it for granted back then that most of our friends and associates probably dabbled in porn, but these self-gratifying habits were protected by a sacred fortress of solitude that made engaging in them seem that much more pleasurable and salubrious.

Now when I see these people unabashedly debating the viscosity of lube and spit, or when I hear porn stars announcing the station identifications of local Middle America radio stations, or when I see a CGI John Holmes trying to sell me a taco in a TV commercial - I feel like I’m being violated. When porn oversteps its lecherous boundaries into normal, clothed society, there is a problem. Some people might see this as a lifting of the veil, or an overcoming of our more counterintuitive and destructive puritanical tendencies. But I disagree. I think we need veils in order to live, and we create boundaries to protect and uphold us. When people have no secrets they become vulnerable.  Without rules of eitquette and deportment, life becomes a never-ending bachelor party full of fart and penis jokes. “Hey, Bob. Want to see my dick, I just got it pierced?” “Um, no I don’t.”

I think I began to realize that the recent “coolness” of porn – started in 1999 by Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Corolla back when they did the Man Show together – had burned itself out when I awoke one morning to hear the DJ’s on the local radio station in my small little non-city interviewing Ron Jeremy live on his decision to retire from the porn business (as if porn stars ever retire). To hear the yokels in my backwards little Rust Belt town cajoling the so-called “king of porn” in real time as I went about my morning rituals caused an unsettling feeling. Knowing that every little weasel in the corner of nowhere that I called home had a personal relationship with Ron Jeremy that was similar in nature to mine, this robbed my secret admiration of the smut king of a huge part of its authenticity. I liked to think that by occasionally cranking one out to a scene starring Ron Jeremy and some callow newcomer to the biz was my own little private escape, and this gave these innocent corpulent and hirsute fantasies a sense of sophistication. It was like I was learning from the world master of the quicky himself, and to see a man who is so disgusting yet so confident in action added greatly to my own optimism and self-esteem. I thought of how I might someday employ his little tricks and seductive charms (like when I’m on a Royal Caribbean Cruise for instance). But to look at the world now and see all sorts of people from all walks of life admitting their fawning appreciation for this man and what his existence has meant and done for them, it seemed like a sci-fi movie in which the nation’s drinking water becomes tainted by truth serum.

These sorts of unchecked revelations are careless, reckless and unhealthy to say the least. There is a time for humor and lust, and there is a time for seriousness and professionalism. When the lines between pop culture and porn culture begin to blur, we set ourselves up for potential embarrassment and disaster. We become a society devoid of decorum where anything goes.

Americans’ ubiquitous exposure to porn is no doubt a symtpom of our overall decline in dignity and etiquette. We are rapidly becoming a nation of bad manners. This is evident in the decline of the standard dress code, the increase in the average waist size, and the elevation of numerous tawdry trends to full-blown domination status. People are starting to wear Bermuda shorts and baseball caps to church, foul language is uttered in places where it formerly wasn’t permitted, and tattoo covered skin is displayed everywhere. Despite the widespread awareness of the life-truncating effects of prolonged tobacco use and alcohol consumption, people smoke and drink more than ever now. Corporations don’t help either when they trample tradition in order to make a quick buck by marketing items which, at their core, are generic, garish, offensive and vapid. Entertainers have abandoned the more sophisticated art of tact and subtlety in their acts and now subject us to bombardment after bombardment of hackneyed immaturety (I swear, if one more recycled sitcom employs a reference to porn in order to invoke that single bachelor/ette levity…). And adding fuel to this fire is an ever-increasing trend of laziness. Generation X, spoiled by their Baby Boomer parents, never seemed to learn the value of hard work. They expect and crave the good life, but many of them lack the discipline needed to earn it. After sitting back for decades and having everything handed to them, they have suddenly grown up, and the awareness of their stark mature lives is no small cause for concern for many of them.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that a porn craze should emerge in this sort of early post-postmodern landscape. Many people who profess their love of porn were most likely raised on it like I was, and they’re probably just trying to bring their otherwise healthy obsession into the light as a way of moving out of the dark ages of the more repressed 80’s and 90’s. But progress is not always a good thing, and having a voluminous knowledge of adult cinema is a useless conversation topic in my opinion. Nobody wants to sit around and discuss the merits of Ron Jeremy’s latest directorial feature, or whether Jenny Layne looked better as a D cup instead of an A. This type of chatter belongs in the realm of sci-fi geekery, and any glib revelations about one’s porn viewing habits should be discouraged just as much today as they would have been ten, fifteen or twenty years ago. I hate to envision a newfangled world where keeping up with the Joneses means having a bigger wall of XXX rated DVD’s than they do!

Probably the most ironic thing about all of the professed “coolness” of porn lately is the fact that, despite having seeped out of its mostly inglorious and invisible niche into more respectable culture, the adult entertainment industry still manages to attract the lonely, the socially awkward, the desperate and the depressed. To have a heavy dependence on porn is to turn away from a life of healthy normal relationships and become immersed in a world of unquenchable virtual sex. Porn may always have a few advantages, but for a lot of people it is a heavy millstone, and the addiction comes when one tries to squeeze water from that stone.

I sided with Pamela Paul not because I want to be an old fashioned fuddy-duddy, but because I am a 1980’s fuddy-duddy. Like her, I would like to see porn go away. Not completely, I just want to see it go back in the closet where it belongs. Perhaps I realize that everybody peeks at porn, but to be constantly reminded of this serves no purpose for me and I’m sure a whole lot of other people. And when people try to use the fact that we’re all secret perverts as justification for destroying all barriers in the world, I get especially mad. I am the kind of person who likes to destroy the world each night and awake to it rebuilt again. I can’t fathom living in a world with no laws, no boundaries and no moral point of view.

Finally, I just want to mention that I think it’s funny that despite the fact that nearly limitless porn is now available for FREE to everyone who has a computer and an Internet connection (did I mention it’s FREE!), people still feel the need to divulge and brag about their masterbutory fetishes to the world. It’s funny because I would think this kind of easy accessibility to all the porn our brains and bodies can handle would enable us to get back in touch with enjoying it the way we used to – in the sanctum sanctorum of our own homes, bedrooms and closets.

33

IN A FEW DAYS I will turn thirty-three. Thirty-three is a significant year, not only because Christ the Lord is eternally thirty-three, but because many other celebrities have kicked the bucket at that age as well. Christ Farley croaked when he was thirty-three years young, and I am especially troubled by this not least because of the fact that I tend to have sleight issues with weight and hyperactivity just as he did (there is also a scary image of a freshly dead Chris Farley I saw once, and it seared its way into my brain to such an extent that I cannot watch his movies to this day without feeling a sickening rising/falling feeling in my stomach). Layne Staley also died at thirty-three – too late by many of his fans’ expectations (and probably the artist’s own as well), but frighteningly young nonetheless. And who can forget John Belushi, the first modern day celebrity with a penchant for excess who set the precedent for dying at thirty-three. Then there is Eva Peron, William S. Burroughs, Jr., Sam Cooke and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy just to name a few.

I have no intention of dying in my thirty-third year, which is why the demise of so many talented careers at this half-grown age is troubling to me.

It is as if there is a preternatural curse on the number thirty-three as it pertains to the lifespan, and it is similar in many ways to the curse that plagues the twenty-seventh year of life. Several entertainment luminaries like Jimmy Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain have all died at the age of twenty-seven, and I even knew a few people who took their lives at this age as well. The curse regarding dying at twenty-seven is cosmic in nature, and gets its significance from an astrological phenomenon known as Saturn Return. Basically, Saturn Return is a deep life assessment that occurs approximately every 27-30 years, which is the same time it takes the planet Saturn to complete its orbit (i.e., wherever Saturn was at in its orbit when you were born, approximately 27 years later it will be in the same place in the heavens). The first Saturn Return is viewed as a crossing of the threshold from youth to adulthood, and some believe people like Kurt Cobain who kill themselves in their twenty-seventh year are unwilling to relinquish their childhoods and mature into adults. This theory holds a lot of water when one considers the types of entertainers who have offed themselves either directly or indirectly at this age. But it is tragic that nobody told these people that growing up (or “old”) is not obligatory, as there are many fifty year old men and women who like to watch the Disney channel or curl up and read Harry Potter. Sure, Nirvana may have broken up and never recorded another album after In Utero, and Kurt could have gone solo and ended up trying too hard resulting in something that sounds like Days of the New - but he is no longer with us, and Frances Bean doesn’t have a daddy.

Luckily for me, the thirty-third year of life bears no potentially ominous significance in the realm of astrology. The number 33, however, does have revelevance in the similar field of numerology – and it’s optimistic relevance too! 33 is special because it is one of the Master numbers (double digit numbers which cannot be reduced) along with 11 and 22. According to the website www.decoz.com, these numbers, “are called Master numbers because they possess more potential than other numbers. They are highly charged, difficult to handle, and require time, maturity, and great effort to integrate into one’s personality.” 33 is viewed as the most powerful of the Master numbers not only because it is the highest, but because the other two Master numbers – 11 and 22 – can be combined to form it. According to www.decoz.com, 33 is marked by a, “determination to seek understanding and wisdom before preaching to others.” It is also referred to as the “Master Teacher.” It is not surprising, therefore, to see this number ascribed to Jesus Christ when he was at the height and climax of his earthly and eternal mission.

But if 33 is so rich with abstruse compassion, wisdom and enlightenment as the numerologists say (I abstained from quoting more from the website; but, trust me, this is what they say), it did not teach people like Chris Farley and John Belushi a whole heck of a lot. If it taught these men anything, it is not to gamble with your life and think that you can cheat death for another day by snorting all the coke you want. It taught them the cost of their own mistakes. In the case of Layne Staley, he learned the ultimate enlightenment of what he was putting in his veins. But since these has-beens are all dead as a result of their brief and scary satoris, their lessons can be passed on to the rest of us. Their final acts exist as visceral reminders (WARNING GRAPHIC PIC) of the death that hovers not too far above all of us. We can either cling to death and its inevitability, or we can embrace life as long as we’re alive.

I pray that 33 won’t teach me a harsh and permanent lesson like it did to the aforementioned celebrity party animals. I like to think that I am not playing with fire like these people were. Sure, I have my vices; but you won’t see me on any three day coke binge any time soon. I think I would have to gain 100-150 pounds before I resembled Chris Farley, and the only coke you will ever see me using is Diet Coke. But if 33 is the “Master Teacher,” who knows what it will teach me. Jesus often spoke in cryptic parables, and if 33 imparts its wisdom in a similar way, I may find myself sifting through life parables to find the gems of enlightenment contained therein.

Or not. I am not an acolyte of numerology, nor did I even know much about it until I went to www.decoz.com the other day on a whim and looked up the significance of the number 33. But my ability to think analytically makes me somewhat superstitious, or at least I want to believe that my various interpretations of life and the world carry spiritual and supernatural weight. I like to think there is more to life than just coincidence after coincidence. The mysteries are too great, and I don’t find the statistical assurance of coincidence convenient enough. But I think grasping for answers in the stars or picking apart number patterns is misguided. It is simply a way of drawing parallels, and this is where it derives its most intellectual fascination for me.

But it does make you think if there is not something more to everything we see around us. And it goes a long way in proving a point which Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons makes over and over, that the laws of physics (and mathematics and hence science) are God’s laws. There is order and balance all around us, in our bodies, in our ecosystems, in everything. The natural order is very clean and orderly. Whether one is an atheist or not, it has to be admitted that this is a miracle. It can’t always be taken for granted the way the seasons change, the way nature is very resilient, the way language and numbers – the building blocks of human understanding and communication – are so mathematically ordered.

And, of course, the way a celebrity mired in addiction often dies at the age of thirty-three calls to mind this order. It is a coincidence big enough to make even a statistician scratch his or her head, and it should be an actuarial warning to Hollywood people never to hire a coke sniffing, heroin shooting artist/actor for role in a big production if he is an the eve of his thirty-third birthday.

But I still want the pair of boobs featured at the top of this post!

Extrication

I really put myself out there and applied for three jobs this weekend, and it’s ironic because I rented three movies on Friday afternoon. I checked out The Wrestler, Sex and the City and Stephen King’s The Mist from the library. I was anticipating having a kicked-back, lazy weekend full of cuddling, stuffed-crust pizza and Freon (because it was hot yesterday and today). But on Friday evening I still had to apply to one more job to fulfill my obligatory “3 jobs” requirement for unemployment. You see, the people down at the unemployment office don’t really care what you do (we’re all adults, right?) as long as you are applying to at least three jobs per week. And in this economy, applying for three jobs per week isn’t going to yield immediate results, but at least it provides the structure to keep you thinking like a soon-to-be employed person.

Anyways, I was really looking forward to Mickey Rourke’s performance as a guy whose not-afraid-of-getting hurt lifestyle has left him with bum knees, a Vicodin addiction and an estranged daughter (at least that is what I think the plot of The Wrestler is about). Plus, the movie won some Oscars, so it is a must-see for every person who has ever almost had an article about being a cinematic phillistine published. I checked out Sex and the City two weeks ago and didn’t really watch it. I left it playing in the background while taking a phone call from someone in Los Angeles, but I remember there being some good Tn’A sex scenes as well as a brief shot of a showering guy’s semi (for the sake of symmetry no doubt, because why would viewers of a movie that’s mostly geared towards a female audience only want to see naked women?). Since Sex and the City was a visually appealing flick, I was interested to figure out what goes on narratively in the film. Finally, Stephen King’s movie about a mysterious mist in a supermarket seemed good after having just watched M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening a couple weeks ago. There is nothing more scary than a mysterious killer which may or may not be invisible and is capable of pervading everything within and around you. I think there is already something like that in real life, it’s called tobacco. Plus, having spent more than 6 years employed as a jack of all trades at a supermarket, I am eager to see if there is anything more scary about a grocery store other than the psychosis-inducing Musak.

So there I was, all ready to enjoy my weekend as if I had worked hard all week, when suddenly I decided to go online and get applying for that last job out of the way. I didn’t glance at the jobs listings for long before my eyes landed on a librarian job at MTV. According to MTV’s website, the position duties and responsibilities entailed, “The processing, tracking and coordination of media raw stock requests into company database,” and, ”the arrangement and distribution of raw stock to MTVN user community.” The job required a bachelors degree, customer service/library experience, and computer literacy and writing/communication skills – all of which I have. Furthermore, the job didn’t look like a promotional job open only to MTV employees, so I went ahead and applied.

Still, I had my reservations. For anyone who is thinking this might be a dream job, I’m tempted to ask what could be so fun about sitting in a stock room all day loaning DVD’s out to clients? I suspect working in a video store would only be slightly less glamorous, except in this job your patrons would be media conglomerates instead of suburbanites. Still, since MTV mostly works with D-listers these days, I don’t think I would be distributing a lot of “raw stock.”

The ease with which my qualifications seemed to fit with the job’s requirements prompted me to apply for the job despite any lingering doubts I had. It felt like I was applying to the position simply to fulfill unemployment’s mandatory “3 job” requirement, and I didn’t like this. I don’t want to go about the job search in a half-assed way, as that is what the unemployment police probably suspect people will do. They think we are all a bunch of sneaky bastards who view being on the unemployment dole as some sort of extended paid vacation. And this week I unexpectedly found myself giving in to that tendency to just sit back and do the minimum in order to earn my weekly benefits.

This incipient feeling of being a corner cutter caused me to shift gears. My priorities were suddenly reversed, and I lost any interest in watching the movies which I had brought home.  I felt how I did back in college when most Fridays were spent looking forward to a busy weekend of paper-writing, catch-up reading and cramming for Monday tests and quizzes. If this weekend of mine was rendered as a movie montage, it would include lots of horizontal pans of me hunched over my laptop or tugging at a jammed printer. These scenes would rotate along with shots of me tossing goldfish crackers into my mouth, watching tv or doing jumping  jacks. All the while Tool’s “The Pot” would be playing. Every time there was a shot of me doing jumping jacks the speed would be sped-up 2X in ascending order, and with each horizontal pan of me at the laptop the serious look of concentration on my face would deepen. Likewise, the busted printer frustration would increase from yelling to pounding eventually climaxing with me smashing the machine at the end in the way a drummer might destroy his bass drum after a band’s brassy performance.

I only applied for two jobs after the MTV job, but there can oftentimes be a lot of work involved in applying for a job. First, there is the research part. This can involve hours of culling hundreds of jobs, many which the job seeker has already seen before, and some of which are cleverly disguised scams. Then comes the resume-tweaking, the carefully worded cover letters, and applying to many jobs today usually requires creating accounts with the career branch of a company or institution’s website. This can be helpful for the sake of having an application of file if you ever decide to apply for another position with the employer, but it is also time consuming. Also, I spent extra time applying to the two jobs this weekend to make up for doing the minimum this week and cutting corners by applying for the MTV job (which, let’s face it, monkies with typewriters probably apply for these types of jobs).

The two other jobs I applied to were within my related fields of education and work experience. One was an ESL lab teacher job with CUNY’s Research Foundation, and the other was a writing job at St. John’s University in Queens. The former position entails teaching non-English speaking adults in computer literacy/career skills classes, while the latter would have me writing, “Content for various projects, including but not limited to, letters, solicitations, brochures, PowerPoint presentations, event materials, advertisements,” and alumni magazine pieces and articles.

For the ESL teacher job, I’m not sure if I put myself out there too much or not. In the cover letter I wrote:

Dear HR,

I am applying for the F/T ESL/vocational computer lab teacher position in the Begin Managed Programs (BMP) department. I came across the listing for this vacancy at the New York State Department of Labor’s Job Exchange website.

I do hope you take the time to consider my candidacy for this position, as I think I closely fit the qualifications you are seeking.

As my resume indicates, I have 1 year of substitute teaching experience in a diverse public school setting. While living in [redacted], NY between 2007 and 2008, I subbed on a per diem basis at the elementary, intermediate and secondary levels. [redacted], NY is a city with a high vacancy rate which has recently been injected with new life thanks to an influx of refugees and immigrants from all corners of the world. These immigrants flood the city’s school district, creating a cross-cultural learning environment for students as well as educators. On many days I was called to sub in ESL classes that contained students from nearly every continent, and the experience was enriching and rewarding.

A two-semester long tutoring internship during college in 2006 at [redacted]’s Refugee Center, prepared me for my subbing experience in the [redacted] City School District. [redacted] College (my alma mater) participates in Project SHINE, an international program which partners colleges and communities to help recent arrivals to the United States assimilate and learn English. My role as a Project SHINE tutor in ESL classes, working with adult learners two hours per week during college, facilitated my transition to subbing in a multi-linguistic school district after college. I was also aided in both endeavors by my ability to communicate in Spanish with native speakers when English failed. I studied Spanish for two years during college and have since continued to use it on frequent enough occasions that it doesn’t go to waste.

Finally, during my most recent job at the [redacted] Public Library which I held for a year and a half, I routinely assisted patrons with use of the library’s public computers. These patrons were mostly adults, and since ¼ of [redacted]’s population . . . was born outside of the United States, I often had to overcome language barriers while helping them. These computer users displayed a wide range of computer literacy. Sometimes I had to assist people with basic interfacing, and other times I would help someone with uploading photos or videos from a flash drive onto a multimedia website. More often than not, however, people needed assistance navigating the Internet, and I was always happy to help them do this.

My resume further lists my education, work history, skills and contact information. Thank you in advance for considering my application.

Sincerely,

Timothy F. Freeman

8/15/09

Cool stuff. I will keep everyone posted on how the job search unfurls.

A Tour of Hamilton College in Clinton, NY

Trainspotting (in my own way*)

 

* Urbandictionary.com defines it as: “Observing trains and logging the numbers. Generally involves standing around in bad weather, watching the tracks. A British hobby.”

2012 is Coming…

2012

PSH (writing crap on the train that will never get published is fun)

Philip Seymour Hoffman is humble and sublime at the same time. When he attends parties he sheds his layers of clothing slowly. He is like a cautious cat that slowly surveys and absorbs its surroundings before deciding whether it wants to mingle or not.

This is because Hoffman understands the business of acting from the inside out. He understands that acting – real, true acting – is about more than just image. It is about life.

I have never met Philip Seymour Hoffman, nor do I know anybody who knows him, but I have been mesmerized by his cinematic performances. From his Oscar-winning rendition of Truman Capote in Capote, to his portrayal of a tortured shallow gambling addict in Owning Mahoney, Phillip Seymour Hoffman proves that his malleability is limitless. And a recent New York Times Magazine feature story – trying to define and do justice to this behemoth of a man – also filled me in on some of the biographical facts of his life.

But these things don’t begin to paint a picture of the real person Hoffman is. Hoffman may not even know who he is because he is probably more aware than anybody else in Hollywood today that, besides being about the business of living, real acting (and all of art in general) is about people.

Hoffman not only alters himself to become like one of his characters, he actually becomes the character. This is what makes his roles so compelling and convincing. He cannot be typecast or pigeonholed. He is somebody new and unique in every film.

And he is also a Rochester native. His father worked for Xerox and his mother was a lawyer.

I don’t take rejection well, but kill fees are sweet

  

B MAN

 by: Tim Freeman

I like to think I’m somebody who has eclectic film tastes. I like documentaries, indies, classics, dramas, sci-fi, comedy, romance, you name it.

When I consider the plethora of CGI-laden movies being churned out these days, however, or the cerebral masterpieces by artsy intellectuals, I become gripped by a nostalgic yearning for the simpler creations of the 80s and 90s. It is because of this that I often find myself vehemently defending the movies I love against people’s accusation that I am a cinematic philistine. Nobody insults the movies I love…nobody.

In all fairness to my critics, I will freely admit that I like a lot of “bad” stuff. Anything with a plot involving a suburban dad who turns into Santa Claus or a quirky love comedy about an alien who falls for a devout Christian floats my boat any day.

I try to justify my fondness for these kicked-back films by equating movies with food. One wouldn’t eat seared sea scallops with truffled black pepper linguini every night for dinner, so why should every movie one watches be legendary classics like The Pianist? Groundbreaking films such as these can only be appreciated once one has digested a lot of forgettable Saturday afternoon TBS fodder like Kindergarten Cop, Big and Air Bud.

These movies are our meatloaf and spaghetti to the wild mushroom and buffalo cheese bruchette which is Trainspotting.

And, of course, there are all the fast food films I have slogged through on my way to earning a place at the table with more sophisticated and memorable movie repasts like The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cloverfield. Robocop III, They Live (who doesn’t love that unforgettable line, “I have come to chew bubble gum and kick ass”) and Road House all occupy a special place in my heart.

In fact, I find these opuses of bad acting and unconvincing special effects so therapeutic that if I were to compile a film list specially for sick days it would be entirely dominated by titles like Bloodsport, Freejack and Encino Man. Honestly, my stomach can’t tolerate cr่me brulee when I’m feeling under the weather any more than my senses can tolerate the moral complexity and sensory overload of films like The Dark Knight.

I will admit that I am somewhat of a fuddy duddy when it comes to movies. But a philistine? No way.

Ironically, my cinematic predilections in no way make me unique. America’s collective conscious is partly defined by its love affair with sub-par films. We want our lives to be simple and predictable, just like the plots of these movies. We crave heroic virtue, light-hearted humor and fantasy as long as these ingredients are portrayed within the modern contexts with which we’re so familiar. Life is much easier lived within a comfort zone, and while most of us would like to have statues erected in our honor, we know in the end that birds will only poop on them.

Invisible People

I recently (belatedly) saw Ramin Bahrani’s Man Push Cart. Camus would be proud of the Iranian independent filmmaker’s portrayal of a Pakistani pushcart vendor in New York as a modern day Sisyphus. Just as Sisyphus was doomed to push a boulder up a mountain in the underworld for all of eternity – a fate, “in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing” – Amhad (the main character of the film) must lug his vending cart through the streets of midtown Manhattan in the predawn hours in order to sell coffee and donuts all day to people who know – and take for granted – true physical and material comfort. His little breather in every 24 hour cycle consists of long, noisy subway rides, a few winks of sleep in an old, dilapidated apartment building, nights out on the town and smoke breaks (Ahmad is smoking in practically every scene of the film).

It is a sleep-deprived, futile existence, made more visceral by the frequent shots of Ahmad lugging his heavy cart for miles through the cavernous streets of midtown New York. And the fact that Amhad used to be a rock star in his native Pakistan makes his fate seem that much more tragic.

But while Ahmad may partly be a victim of circumstances, he is also punishing himself. It is never fully revealed how Ahmad fell from stardom and arrived in his Purgatory. We know that his wife recently passed away and that he is estranged from his son. His in-laws blame him for the death of his wife and therefore are preventing him from seeing his son. We read snippets of Ahmad’s personal history in the subtitles translated from Urdu during the tense and brief family visits. But this doesn’t begin to explain why Ahmad is killing himself.

And maybe that is the whole point Bahrani is trying to convey: do we really know these people, these invisible individuals who we tip every day or buy bottled water from? How deep would could we possibly delve into their lives if we tried? How much would we want to know about their histories?

Maybe Barhani is sparing us many of the details we’d rather not know. Or maybe he knows Americans could never relate to a Pakistani or Iranian pushcart vendor’s deep pain, it being so far removed from our world.

Ahmad’s existence may seem like a living Hell. Opportunities pop up throughout which seem to offer a way out. A Pakistani yuppie hires Ahmad to paint his apartment only to realize that he is Ahmad the pop sensation from their native Pakistan. Upon realizing this the yuppie immediately tells Ahmad to stop painting and offers him a beer. A few weeks later he is trying to set Ahmad up with a music producer to get his singing career up and running again. But Ahmad doesn’t want to be behind a microphone again. He would rather stand behind the counter of his pushcart. This much is communicated through his actions (there is a scene when Ahmad assaults the yuppie in his own apartment after he tells him to, “take [his] pushcart problems and get the fuck out”).

Other escapes to the pushcart fate appear as well, such as a budding love interest with a Spanish translator who works at a nearby newsstand. The possiblity for love seems ideal: the newsstand girl shares the arduous struggles of the minimum wage experience and can relate to the lack of respect these invisible people face each day from on-the-go New Yorkers. But Ahmad is distant and his emotions and personality are inaccessible to his potential mate. What is even more of a letdown is that we, the audience, can’t get at Ahmad’s pain and suffering either (this is probably the most frustrating thing about the entire movie). The only hope comes when they share a passionate kiss. Soon after, the girlfriend-in-the-making gives up on unforgiving New York moves back to Spain.

But probably the biggest nail that seals Ahmad’s fate comes when his pushcart is stolen. After paying $5,000 to partly acquire his pushcart (a big step towards greater income and more independence) Ahmad steps away from his business for only a few minutes to purchase a trinket. When he returns the cart is gone and so are his (and our) last glimmers of hope. If Ahmad’s seemingly futile existence seemed to be leading to anything, this was it. Despite the opportunities of love and stardom that seemed to reach out to greet him, all Ahmad seemed to care about in this world was his vending cart. We can feel our stomachs sink along with his as we realize he must start from scratch again. We don’t know how many more scenes we can endure of Ahmad pulling his cart down the avenues nearly being hit by buses and trucks in the process. We also don’t know how many more shots are stomachs can take of Ahmad sucking on his cigarettes or riding the subway half-asleep.

This is where we leave Ahmad, in this eternity. It is an unsettling outcome, far from a happy ending. But knowing that Ahmad accepts his pushcart existence with a mantel of personal conviction, or struggle, or pride, or torment–this offers at least some relief.

Ahmad is not a hero, and I do not think Bahrani intended to invoke our pathos. If anything, Ahmad is an enigma. An inscrutable character in a vast and complex world. He must have his reasons for lugging his cart around Manhattan just as crickets have their reasons for chirping.

Or just as Sisyphus had his reasons for ceaselessly pushing a boulder up a mountain for eternity.