Even in Movies, Mean People Suck

Netflix created another odd double-bill for me, the Lindsay Lohan vehicle Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen and the Oliver Stone opus (where’s the sarcasm font?) Alexander, two very different movies which suck for the same reason: the protagonists are assholes.

You’re probably wondering why I’m talking about two movies that are so old (actually, you’re probably wondering why I’m watching Lindsay Lohan movies, but that’s not important right now).  Well, I rarely have a vested interest in seeing movies immediately.  When a movie piques my interest, rather than brave crying babies, hordes of teeny-bop-texters, talkers, and ten-dollar popcorn, I toss the movie in my Netflix queue.

I hate to brag, but my queue is very long. Hence, the delay.


In Confessions of Teenage Drama Queen, Lindsay-as-Lola moves from New York City to New Jersey.   She trashes her new best friend’s life in various ways, giving nothing more to the “friendship” than her company.  The antagonist is a rich, evil, Machiavellian bitch, and Lola robs her of everything that matters in her life.  Classmate love.  Boy attention.  The lead in the school play.  Lola out-dances the antagonist in Dance Dance Revolution, for God’s sake.  Such an insignificant thing to have mastered, but Lola can’t let her have even that.  I was supposed to hate Miss Popular Machiavelli, but I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her.

Of course Lola isn’t vicious; she can’t help it if she’s better at everything she does than everyone else. No, her flaw is making up wild stories.  When her classmates learn she’s a liar, she makes a transformation which is nothing of the sort; she’s still a selfish taker who will say anything to get people to like her.

This…is our hero.


Cut to Colin Farrell as Alexander the Great, a power-hungry prick who conquers and names “barbaric” provinces after himself until he’s got two million miles of land under his rule.  Supposedly, Alexander respects the tribes who lived thousands of years before “civilization” found their land, he just wants to free them from slavery to warring kings.  He does so by killing mighty bunches of them, then enslaving the survivors to feed the war machine.

Alexander wins Babylon but spends three years hunting the powerless king Darius in the mountains. The parallels between George Bush and Osama Bin Laden are obvious, except the exiled lords give Darius up hoping to call Colin / Alexander off.

Guess what? Doesn’t work.  More war, more slow-motion death, and the putting down of a mutiny.

Colin exudes no charisma* and no leadership qualities as Alexander, making it impossible to believe he won the love of his troops.  He fights beside his troops, sharing every hardship of their nine-year conquering spree, but so what?  His soldiers just want to go home to their families.

Only after suffering a near-fatal wound does Alexander finally turn back, not as a changed man, but a guy who was afraid to die.

That these two movies portray selfish egomaniacs as heroes makes me worry for societal trends.  That they failed in my modest expectation of a couple of hours of mindless entertainment makes me worry for the state of the movie business.  That all I have for a blog is complaining about two bad movies no one saw when they came out years ago makes me worry for Sweet with Fall and Fish.

But if I save one person from wasting time or money on these cinematic suckfests, it will have been worth it.


* - While in town filming the movie version of Miami Vice, Colin Farrell came in to Books & Books.  Two members of the staff invited him across the street to John Martin's to tip a few back, and tip they did.  The female staff member vibrates when she tells the story.  The male staff member has never been with a man, but would have let Farrell violate his body six ways to Sunday.  I’m not sure why this obvious personal charm didn’t come through on the screen.

The Brilliance of Mistakes

In my short story “Happy Halloween,” the narrator starts off hungry from not having eaten for a week. Immediately, his narrative is suspect. As he slides into a drunken state, the narrative degenerates. By the time he spins a fellow party-goer around to ask where the bathroom is, our narrator is pretty drunk.

The party-goer is dressed as a mime, with a bullet-hole in his forehead. Our narrator gets a kick out of this and forgets what he was going to ask. It’s first person, present-tense.

I meant to write, I spin him around and I laugh and I forget what I was going to say.

Editing later, I found I’d written, I spin him around and I laugh and I forget what he was going to say. Oh, perfect – that’s how far gone the narrator is.

I wish I’d thought of it instead of mis-typing it, but I’ll take it.

Three Week Increments

In November 2006, over the course of three weeks, I met my goal of finishing my first book, worked my first Miami Bookfair International, had an editor at Harper Collins looking at the book (yikes; I hadn’t yet learned to keep all first drafts to myself), and went up north for Thanksgiving where the three cousins I grew up with – Shane, Shawn, and Shannon – were there all at once for the first time in years.

November 2004, I took three weeks off work to go up north. I’d missed Thanksgiving the year before with work, and I was determined to gain twenty pounds. From Dinosaur Barbeque to homecooked meals, from the Thanksgiving bacchanal to Steak and Sundae, I came home twenty-three pounds heavier than when I left.

November centers around family and friends, so they’re usually good to me. But my two favorite chunks of life had nothing to do with November, and both also lasted three weeks.

In August of 96 (I’m honestly not sure of the year; keeping track of life before I started recording it all is difficult), I took a three-week road trip with Andi, driving up and down the east coast in a battered k-car. I don’t remember what we saw on the drive down and what we saw on the drive up, but we re-visited our favorite restaurant on Strawberry Street in Richmond, Virginia. We saw a friend perform on stage in The Sound of Music in New Jersey, where the ocean was dark, cold, and violent, in contrast the warm, calm waters of South Beach. Along with famous monuments, we saw some of the best artwork in the world in Washington, DC. We danced at a lesbian club in New York City despite their strict policy of not admitting men. Along the way, we ate in some amazing restaurants, lay in the sun, reminisced with friends, and partied with Mickey Mouse. It was the best vacation I’ve ever had.

Of course, any chucklehead can have a great vacation; making a glorious time out of day-to-day life is more difficult.

It’s odd considering all that went wrong while her parents were in Europe (apart from expensive, painful problems with her cat, it’s personal Quiroga family business I’ve no right to air), but these last few weeks with Becky and her son have been a little slice of heaven.

Waking without hitting snooze, getting as much writing time as possible before Dylan wakes (Becky says I can use his real name; he’s not Apple or Lourdes, after all), making breakfast, making lunches, getting to work, leaving to pick Dylan up from summer camp, getting dinner on the table for all of us, bathing Dylan and reading him to sleep, ending the day with Becky – the two of us falling asleep in front of the TV, or reading, or making love…

It’s all so mundane, and so beautiful, and so perfect. It’s a family like the one I grew up in, only smaller. My mother had breakfast on the table for all of us in succession each morning, a constant rotation of French toast, omelets, bacon and eggs, pancakes, Eggos, and cereal on Fridays. The entire family sat down for dinner every night. Recreating that on my own is more satisfying than I could have imagined. Add yoga, biking, and a book contract and I’m the person I’ve always wanted to be.

These last three weeks have been the greatest of my life because they showed me what I want out of my life.

Don't Try to Live Your Life in One Day

Fridays at Books & Books are made for one thing: getting through them so we can have a Warsteiner dunkel at Fritz & Franz Bierhaus. Then I heard about how Becky and Cleo Jr. spend their Friday nights. They make pizza, pop popcorn, and watch a movie. The evening often involves cookies or cake as well.

I think my generation is the last who remember movie nights on TV. Growing up, television offered four channels: NBC, CBS, ABC, and a local PBS affiliate. VCR’s hadn’t been adapted to home use. No one had thought of pay cable. If you missed a movie in the theater, you had to wait for one of the networks to show it. I don’t think this wait lasted years; it probably only felt that way to a child.

My father would pop popcorn in oil on the stove, batch after batch until he had most of a doubled-up paper grocery bag filled. This popcorn tasted better than any I’ve had made with any other method – the hot air popper you used to plug in, microwave popcorn, even fairground or theater popcorn. He added just the right touch of melted butter and salt. The paper grocery bag would sit beside the couch for a few days, for whoever wanted to munch. It tasted best the second day.

I tried popping corn from scratch on the stovetop once; I ended up with charcoal, sending smoke signals.

Anyway, the thought of a new family movie night was compelling, even when presented with friends and co-workers talking shit while drinking the greatest beer on the planet. Knowing how we love our Fritz & Franz Fridays, Becky presented the offer with a little hesitation in her voice. She needn’t have worried; who wants to be the guy who’d rather get drunk than have family time?

Unfortunately, I decided to do it all. Warsteiner at Fritz & Franz with Mark, a Guinness and a chicken wing with Hilldawg and Linda at The Bar, and then movie night with Becky and Becky Jr.

Texts and calls revealed that drinking nights and family movies night run on different timelines. Cutting off drunken revelry extremely early still means you miss dinner. You arrive late, hungry, with no sympathy for your hunger forthcoming because you were supposed to be there earlier. You also miss the beginning of the movie.

Drinking with friends was a bust. Movie night was a bust. I could blame my lack of a car, but that’s a circumstance which can be worked around. I won't get into specifics of Sunday, but just know I was short of breath by day's end, having flitted through everything I had planned but without enough time to enjoy or appreciate any of them.

This weekend taught me to choose. Say yes to everything and you end up giving everyone in your life short shrift.

The hard part isn’t choosing what you like, it’s letting things you don’t choose go.

You Should Still Read Joyce Maynard

I finished Joyce Maynard's The Good Daughters this morning over breakfast.  Looking up from my kitchen table, I saw two Christmas gifts hanging on the wall: the picture Becky drew of the two of us in Sarasota and the quilt Stacy had knitted, inspired by Leonard Cohen's Anthem.

Tears stood in my eyes; I thanked God for my life.

When fiction is done right, it’s powerful, evocative, simple.  The Good Daughters is amazing, but is it amazing because of how it struck me, or because of the work itself?  That’s always the question, and it can’t be answered because you can only have one first reading.

The Good Daughters was my second foray into Joyce Maynard, after Labor Day made me an instant fan.  I also purchased her memoir At Home in the World some month’s back, but I’ve yet to read it.  I was surprised to learn that Labor Day is Maynard’s tenth book and sixth novel.  Even if I’ve never read a book or an author I can fake it up nice when customers ask, but in ten years of bookselling I had somehow managed to overlook Maynard.  Also, the marketing for Labor Day felt fresh, not like here’s another remarkable (Stunning! Amazing! Gripping! Blah! Blah! Yowza!) work from the genius (Original! One-of-a-Kind! Masterful! Unique! Yawn!) mind of Authorten L. Writerface, but like William-Morrow was suggesting a new voice they knew you’d love.

Reading The Good Daughters scared me the way being in love is scary.  What if we’d never met?  How lousy would my days be without this other person, who makes my life so rich?  As a reader, I wonder how less lovely my literary landscape would be if I’d never picked up a Joyce Maynard novel.

If you need another reason to look for the book when it comes out on August 24th, Maynard thanks local author, Lip Service co-founder, and all-around cool person Andrea Askowitz as an early reader.

I’d love to pull quotes so she can speak for herself, but Maynard doesn’t write that way.  There are lines in this book that are just- oohhh.  Like hearing a gorgeous voice raised in song over a cessation of music, or seeing a powerful actor in that moment when she’s fighting against tears.  I could pull quotes and they would be quite something, but without the rest of the work, you lose too much meaning.  Maynard’s straightforward style is the gradual lapping of waves unearthing an object in the sand which is ultimately revealed as something wrenching and beautiful.

You know I don’t do plot synopsis, either, so we’re left with just this: buy the book and read it. You’ll be glad you did.