For Frank Angones, a chronological compilation of my Midnight Run liveblog from last year:

What's that soulful, smooth guitar? Is that Robert DeNiro creeping up the stairs? Why, it must be MIDNIGHT RUN!

"100 thousand, you outta your mind? It's an easy gig, it's a midnight run for chrissakes!" #titleofthemoviequote

"Alonzo Mosely, FBI."

Man, they really didn't waste a lot of time trying to come up with a distinctive score for this movie.

"Hey Eddie, you get any more sheet music? "Theme from Midnight Run?" No? "Jack Walsh's Theme"? "Alonzo Mosely, FBI"? No?"

Fuck it, throw in some more soulful, smooth guitar. Melody? Nah, let Ralph just wail around aimlessly. Who's gonna notice, it's 1988!"

Why doesn't Robert DeNiro star in more movies these days where he gets to say "fistophobia"?

I've never in my life forgotten how absurd this airplane is.

Who is more likable than Charles Grodin in this movie?

"Don't you want to be loved?" #thingsiwishcharlesgrodinwouldsaytome

zomg So obviously I remember loving this movie, but I forgot it has a moment that inspired one of the all-time Top Laughs w/Abe & Brian.

"His REAL name's Mosely."

"I'M MOSELY" #thingsmeabeandbrianlaughedaboutforanhourorso

Eyes on the road, Robert DeNiro! Eyes on the road!! #midnightrun

God this stuff with his daughter is so fucking brutal and sincere.

By the halfway point, these guys are full on BUDDYZ and I fucking love it.

It's weird this movie isn't in more script analysis textbooks, this diner scene is straight out of an NYU Character Development seminar.

This entire movie is made up of buddy duos:Jack/John, the two mobsters, Eddie/Jerry, Serrano/Sidney, I suppose even the mom/daughter counts.

Marvin's the only real lone wolf, and even he gets a few good moments with Jack (cf. "Yeah, who the fuck's talkin' to you?")

Uh-oh! Looks like Charles Grodin's stunt double is in trouble now!

I love how Robert DeNiro can knock any human unconscious with one punch in this movie.

Psst... Robert DeNiro. This is the part where you're supposed to kiss Charles Grodin.

Every car chase ever filmed should be intercut with the reactions of a terrified Charles Grodin.

Robert DeNiro's entire life dreams just went up in smoke, but fucking with the FBI is enough to make him grin ear-to-ear. Inspiring.

"Looks like I'm walkin'!" #basicallyafuckingperfectmovieforfuckssakeitssogood

That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you write a third act.

Ok I apologize for dissing the score earlier, this credits theme is fucking great.

Whoa! "In fact, Grodin has permanent scars resulting from the handcuffs he had to wear for most of the film."

Time was, I put my emotions on the internet and didn't think twice about it.

There was this Livejournal, duh, and also its Diaryland predecessor. I wrote entries about how I felt. That's how it went. They weren't usually big long emotional screeds or big weepy monologues, but hey, sometimes they were. Emotions on the internet was how it went.

Years ago, for various reasons and by various people, I was shamed out of this practice. Today, I scorn the very thought of anyone posting emotions online. It's dumb, it's indulgent, it's unnecessary.

And then there are the times, not horribly infrequent, when I have an emotion and have a desire to put it online.

Why am I now incapable of doing this? Sometimes I think about posting something in code, or making a veiled reference without actually specifying what I'm feeling. But, I tell myself, that's even worse. If writing about your emotions is a cry of LOOK AT ME, CARE ABOUT WHAT I AM FEELING, MY FEELINGS ARE SOMETHING IMPORTANT ENOUGH FOR ALLLLL OF YOU TO READ ABOUT, then doing it in a veiled, roundabout way is a two-faced, faux-passive way of saying the same things, but with an implication that YOU have to ask ME "Oh, Pitr, what's wrong what's up?"

What is this? Aren't friends there for you when you are feeling emotions? Of course, yes, duh, I know this. But I still have this nagging sense that it is selfish to bring up things that are bothering you. It's presumptuous to think that people want to hear about it, it's pointless as it is unlikely there is any helpful advice to be given most of the time, and it's ignorant to think that my problems are really all that bad that I need to whine about them.

Maybe it's the Internet. Maybe I think it's not the venue for Real Emotions, that it's the venue for YouTubez and Wiki2.0sourcehashtags. Lord knows this is the first time I've used this LJ for any real writing in over a year. Even this entry is sort of a satirical jab at my old LJ, writing about not being able to write emotions in the very place I learned to stop writing about emotions.

Or maybe it's just the skill of ironic detachment that I learned 12 years ago to impress a pretty girl (can you count how many Pitr Strait stereotypes are in that sentence alone???).

Bottling things up is wrong, I know that. And I am generally a happy guy. I hope I am generally a happy guy.

It is a hideously ugly day outside, and it makes it difficult not to dwell on the wretched things today has brought. Incidentally, Miley Cyrus was the perfect thing to listen to on the ride home. Anything brighter would've been too dissonant with my mood and irritated me, anything darker would've just magnified my crummy feelings.

There's that word again.

Anyway, you should know, if you have read this far, I am fine. Everything is okay, there is no need for worry.

This is the end of this entry.

The goal: Watch a noir, be it proto/quasi/whatever, every day in July. I am accepting suggestions. The list so far:

* = I have seen this
** = I have seen this and remember not loving it, but believe it was due to me being young(er) and stupid(er)

1. M
2. Casablanca**
3. The Big Sleep
4. The Maltese Falcon
5. Citizen Kane
6. The Third Man**
7. The Invisible Man
8. Scarface
9. The Public Enemy
10. Sweet Smell of Success*
11. Double Indemnity*
12. The Postman Always Rings Twice
13. Stranger on the Third Floor
14. Kiss Me Deadly
15. Touch of Evil
16. In a Lonely Place*
17. Notorious
18. Sunset Boulevard*
19. White Heat
20. The Manchurian Candidate*
21. Out of the Past*
22. Gilda*
23. Laura
24. Murder, My Sweet
25. The Killers*
26. A Double Life*
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.

For the first week in August, I'm planning on having an epilogue of neo-noir/genre-noir/post-noir

1. Breathless**
2. Brick
3. Blade Runner**
4. Alphaville
5.

Oh snap Wallace from V. Mars had a one-line bit part on Freaks & Geeks.

I'm not super happy with how this one turned out, but I do like how the costume looks.



This one, though, is basically exactly what I wanted it to be.

Holy shit you're welcome guys

Watchmen Condensed, MS Paint style

Nothing to do with the movie, just good old-fashioned funn

 "MANDATE" - A Victory Mix for a New America

 Look this is the only time I'm gonna say it:

Halloween is the official holiday of People Who Do Not Suck

HALLOWEEN 2008 = SUCCESS

You may now resume your normal autumn lameness.

Well, obviously the face didn't turn out as well as I'd have liked, but it's tough to do detail with such soft clay. Still though, I think she fits in well with the ones so far. I figure J'onn is next, then the Big Three.

Now, it's not usually my style to post pictures of unfinished projects, but I have to go to sleep, I'm not going to finish the head before bed, and I need to post this so I can achieve semi-closure.

EDIT: Fixed the right hand, but I ain't takin' more pictures.

Two down, five to go.



Look, they're friends! The Brave and the Bold!

It's been a while. I missed this stuff:

WAIT WHAT THE FUCK BLAH BLAH COOKING BLOG BLAH

WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME PAUL NEWMAN DIED

I SPEND ONE FUCKING WEEK WITHOUT INTERNET IN BROOKLYN AND PAUL NEWMAN DIES

WHAT A WORLD

WHAT A GODDAMN FUCKING WORLD



YOU GUYS ARE ALL FIRED I'M GOING HOME

Experimental Southwestern pizza was a rousing success, if not an unqualified one. The fried corn tortillas stayed crispy for the most part, but I still need to get a little better at frying them more evenly so they're not soggy in the middle or burnt at the edges. The chipotles get really nicely toasted, but I should use more of them next time to even out the slow burn they're perfect for.

Haven't tried the safe pepperoni and onion pizza from the top rack, but, well, it is the safe one. I assume it's fine. I buy some fruits and vegetables tomorrow to even out the pyramid, I should have food for the rest of the week, and plus it's a nice change of pace from the New York style.

If I weren't so convinced of the inevitability of the failure of such a goal, I would seriously start a cooking blog. I would fucking love that shit. I'd have to get a new camera, though, and also I would have to care enough to attract readers. Both unlikely.

Two weeks off from work. Two week free trial from NetFlix. What should I rent, Doom Patrol?

Perhaps there is some mystery in the minds of those among you who have seen me on the Russian national news. If you do not know the story already, here is the clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIPZkNJS4-0 and here is the story in full:

Our friends Jeffrey Julian and Alexander Weinberg write a WEB LOG that they call “Dregslist.” The concept is simple: post hilarious, fake Craigslist ads, cross-post them in the blog along with people’s responses. To give you an idea of the level of incredibility involved here, a recent ad was written as a man looking for a woman to let him put his ear up to her vagina to study the sound. We are not talking subtle here, people.

Late last week, they posted an ad in character as a former Lehman Brothers broker desperately trying to unload his 4.5 million shares of now-worthless Lehman stock. The full text of the ad can be found here: http://dregslist.net/2008/09/bartering-45-million-shares-of-lehman-stock-for-anything-you-can-give-me-soho/ For those of you too lazy to click external links, the highlights include his worry that he will have to give up one or all of his three Manhattan apartments (each with their own live-in girlfriend), his regret for spending too much money on things like a fleet of Porsches painted the colors of Skittles, a wine glass that Plato drank from, and the original Zapruder film (if you don’t know what that is, read the Wiki immediately; it will enhance your enjoyment of this story tenfold). Obviously, clearly fake. No one would think otherwise.

Not so!

Weinberg soon received an email from Alexey, a reporter for NTV, one of Russia’s largest national news networks; think ABC, NBC. Alexey wanted to know if he could interview the author of the ad to add a human touch to the story NTV was doing on the collapse for their Sunday program. Alex replies, “Sure.”

Thursday night, Alex calls me. He says, “We need you to be Mark Auld, former Lehman Brothers banker.”

Sure enough, the next day, 4 o’clock Friday afternoon, I was meeting with a Russian camera crew outside of Lehman Brothers headquarters on 7th Avenue in Midtown.

Alexey asks me if I brought any of the stock with me, like he had asked. I explained that I had been lucky enough to get a job interview with my friend’s consulting firm later that day, and that I didn’t feel comfortable going to an interview with a new job with my cursed LB stock with me. “We all got a lot more superstitious on Monday,” I told him.

I told him about what it was like on Monday (“No one knew what to say… it was like someone had died”), what it felt like to see the building now, what the logo meant to me (“It seems so surreal. I feel like those signs should be shut down, that the lights should be off, the doors locked. But nothing’s changed. Except everything’s changed.”), was I mad at management for poor leadership (“I was… but then, you realize, you know, I worked there too, who knows how I contributed. You can’t be mad at leadership without being at least a little bit mad at yourself, and at this point in my life, I can’t afford to be mad at myself, I have to stay positive until I get back up on my feet.”). Tourists, overhearing me, stopped to listen to what I had to say.

We talked for half an hour. We did the stationary interview. We did the walk-and-talk with the cameraman (who spoke not a word of English) walking backwards in front of us. They got a shot of me walking down the block past the building by myself, looking thoughtful. At the end, Alexey had the brilliant idea to get some footage of him buying me a soda to help me save money. Had I been who I claimed to be, I would have found this extraordinarily offensive. Instead, I replied, “Sure… can I keep the soda?”

(Incidentally, in the Russian voiceover, he claims to have offered to buy me dinner. WHO IS THE REAL LIAR, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.)

(It is still me.)

I could go on and on about all the absurd things I said. Mostly, though, I was just very plain and simple with him. Times are tough. You’ve got to stay positive. This country has not seen the end of the financial crisis yet. No lies, not really. Except for my name, profession, age, and emotions in general. But nothing that was fundamentally untrue.

My friend Daniel calls me a terrorist. My friend Brian says that “the KGB says hello.” Most people are just baffled. But all I know is, after all the pranks and lies I’ve perpetrated, Operation Barbarossa (as Weinberg christened it) is the first of them to have been witnessed in 11 time zones. Most charts show NTV as reaching somewhere around 120 million people. This is the biggest audience we’ve ever had.

China, you’re next.

Due to my really fucked up sleep schedule, I'm going to bed now.  The LHC wakes up at 2:30 AM EST.  I'm planning to take some Benadryl and sleep through that moment so that, if the world ends, I will miss our instantaneous and imperceptible destruction.  So, it seems that these lyrics, that I've loved for years, are truer than ever: 

lets hope this party never ends
A shiv in the ribs,
Some smoke in the hive,
You live how you live I'll die how I

Wake me up when we get to heaven,
Let me sleep if we go to hell.

Hope we all see each other in the morning, in a world filled with detectable Higgs bosons.  If not, you've all been pretty ok people.

 OMEGA EMERGENCY ALERT

MY FATHER WAS ON MSNBC: http://tinyurl.com/6xbs9b

THEY SPELLED HIS DAMN NAME WRONG

ALSO I DO NOT THINK HE IS A PROFESSOR LAST TIME I CHECKED

PEOPLE, HE IS GOING TO BE ON CNN TOMORROW

PLUS NO ONE BELIEVES THAT HE IS NOT PLANNING ON DESTROYING THE PLANET

STAY TUNED, DOOM PATROL

what up, Joe Biden

Hey Kids!

As Matt Fraction and Wikipedia reminded me, today is Trinity Day, the anniversary of the Trinity detonation, the first nuclear explosion done under the Manhattan Project, making this (by popular estimation) the 68th birthday of the Atomic Age. Here are some fun facts about the Trinity test!

-The bomb was referred to as "the gadget". Even though everyone was pretty sure it wouldn't ignite the Earth's atmosphere and destroy the planet, they did all the math for that eventuality just in case. Something to think about when the LHC spins up and we all get eaten by a black hole!

-The Trinity test produced arguably two of the most horrifying science-related quotations. Robert Oppenheimer, upon seeing the detonation thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." When he turned to his brother and said, "It worked," test director Kenneth Bainbridge replied, "Now we are all sons of bitches."

-Robert Oppenheimer was a fucking badass

-The mushroom cloud was 7.5 miles high, and the fireball lit up the sky like it was daytime for 150 miles around. Somehow, this was classified "a covert operation."

-The desert sand in the crater was melted and fused into a silica glass that is now called Trinitite. Trinitite is slightly radioactive, and comes in different colors, green being the most common.

-That's right. Irradiated chunks of our planet, usually green, but occuring in other varieties such as red and black.

-THAT'S RIGHT IT'S GODDAMN KRYPTONITE FOR JESUS FUCKING SAKE

-Sorry about that. The Trinity is pretty interesting, huh? Thanks, Matt Fraction! Thanks, Wikipedia! Thanks, Science!

Ok well I've gone almost 18 months backwards in my LJ and it looks like that Hellboy post I just made is still by FAR the longest. My highest fucking wordcount since at least 2006 is about fucking Hellboy II.

Also every time I write a long-ish LJ entry, it invariably includes some line in which I'm all I KNOW I DON'T USUALLY WRITE LONG POSTS which I mean is factually accurate but I have to stop doing that.

Also going through one's archives I imagine is always an interesting introretrospective, but it's extra intriguing for me since the vast majority of my posts are only about ten to thirty words long, forcing me to reconstruct memories and emotional states from scattered and infrequent fragments. It did remind me of this day, arguably one of the more magical and dreamlike days I've had in recent years.

Speaking of thirty word blog entries, since I realized that I usually post less than 140 character entries ANYWAY, I've started posting a lot more often at Twitter, if people care about that kind of thing. I can't be bothered to set up a cross-post, at least not at this stage, so head over there for my normal LJ-style word burps.