My mom is out of town this weekend, so no fancy brunches or breakfast in bed for her today. I’d still like to do something special for her, though, so I thought maybe I’d give her a little taste of immortality, in blog form, by relating a few anecdotes that may illustrate her innate coolness.
About fifteen years ago, I was working at a nine-screen multiplex in Sandy, Utah, running projectors and dreaming of the day when I’d have some kind of theater set-up in my own house. This was a common fantasy among my fellow minimum-wage-earning, popcorn-sweeping work buddies. “The Dudes,” as we called ourselves, were all, to one extent or another, movie fans and movie collectors, and we all had unique ideas about what would comprise the perfect private screening room.
Remember a couple months ago when I wrote about a guy named John Pecorelli? He was the firebrand writer who worked for my college newspaper, the columnist I compared to Hunter S. Thompson. If you’ll recall, I wistfully mentioned in that post that I’d lost track of Pecorelli in the years since college, and that I hoped he was still out there somewhere, rattling chains and pissing people off.
Well, yesterday I received an e-mail from a guy who knows a guy who is a friend of the infamous John Pecorelli. He kindly offered me the following information:
I thought you might be interested to hear that he is alive and doing well and rattling chains anywhere he goes. He toured as a writer for Rolling Stone magazine with Gwar a few years ago. He had the dubious honor of being part of their stage show for at least one of the performances. He still writes… a lot! He’s still extremely opinionated and not afraid to voice them. I’m never sure from one year to the next what he’s officially doing, but he’s mostly in Los Angeles, writing. I thought I would just let you know that your personal encounter with Gonzo is still alive and kickin’ in this world.
This sort of thing has happened to me several times since I started blogging — I’ve written about some obscure subject and sent my musings out into the void, certain that only half a dozen of my Real World friends were likely to read them, and then out of the blue a stranger (or a long-lost acquaintance, in a couple of cases) has contacted me because of what I wrote. It never fails to amaze me when this occurs, and it amazes me even more to think that the medium through which I’m making these connections didn’t exist (at least not in its current form) up until just a few short years ago.
Truly, we are living in magical times…
Remember when some whack-job tried to assasinate Pope John Paul back in ’81? Eddie Murphy commented on that event on his very first album of stand-up comedy, which was recorded just a year later. My friend Kurt Stephensen owned that album. He and I must’ve spun it about a thousand times on his crappy old Yorx record player, laughing ourselves sick in his musty basement bedroom. We believed we were so grown up and sophisticated at the age of fourteen because we were listening to a profane comedian tell jokes about the Pope and President Reagan and a lot of other sacred cows. So to speak.
Well, thanks to the extensive collections of the Bennion Archives (also known as my basement), I’ve managed to come up with my own copy of that album and review the applicable passage. It’s still funny, and not nearly as blasphemous as I used to think. In fact, I suspect that Karol himself would’ve seen the humor in it. So, to brighten your Monday afternoon, here is Eddie Murphy on the subject of shooting the Pope:
“What’s your rationale for shooting the Pope? I guess the guy figured, ‘Hey look, I want to go to Hell and I don’t wanna wait on line with everybody else.’ …You walk up to the door with your ticket, they say, ‘Shot the Pope? You can go right through, man.'”
Dana Carvey on Live with Regis and Kelly this morning, speaking in a “gosh-and-begorrah” Irish accent:
“You’ve got to be grateful in this life. You’ve got to be grateful there’s not a tiny man in your pants whacking at your weiner with a hammer.”
Timeless wisdom indeed.
That blogger I recently discovered, Javier Grillo-Marxuach (who also happens to be a writer for the TV phenom Lost), cleared something up for me today:
my friends shrink tells him that there are two kinds of people in this world. the kind of person that goes through life, sires a bunch of kids, gets divorced tons of times, drinks like a fish and comes out the other end with nary a sign of unhappiness because they are just not prone to introspection… and those who have “an artistic temperament.”
I don’t know about you, but I think this explains a great deal…
[Sunday Night Update: I’ve changed the title of this entry and pulled up some text from “below the fold” — i.e., the dividing line between what you see here on the page and the “Read More” section — because I realized that this entry really isn’t so much about finding a new blogger as it is about my reaction to him, and my three loyal readers might not have been getting that point. Or maybe they were and didn’t care. Whatever. The point is, I made a couple of changes…]
I’ve run across something that may interest fans of the TV series Lost: the show’s supervising producer, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, maintains his very own LiveJournal. You won’t find much in the way of insider info or spoilers on upcoming episodes — he doesn’t seem to write about the show at all, at least not in the half-dozen entries I’ve skimmed — but he is an articulate fellow with some interesting opinions.
I’m actually rather envious of his abilities. Take his entry on the demise of Star Trek, in which he says pretty much the same things I did, but with a bit more flair and precision than I think I managed to summon. For example, I loved his description of the depressing opening night for the final Trek film, Nemesis, when “manns chinese theater theater [was] only half-full with the last remaining faithful who, like brezhnev-era muscovites, dragged themselves out into the cold to vote in yet another meaningless election.”
Yesterday I met my good buddy Jack for lunch at my old college hangout, The Pie Pizzeria. (The location is actually irrelevant to this entry; I just wanted an excuse to link to The Pie’s Web site. Make sure your speakers are on so you can experience the genuine ambience of the place.)
We talked of many things over our pepperoni slices, but the topic that stuck in my mind was blogging. I’ve been thinking a lot about this subject since Monday’s anniversary, about various aspects of the whole enterprise. I’ve questioned why I do this (it isn’t for the money, obviously) and what I get out of it (at first glance, not much). I’ve also questioned whether or not it’s worth the effort to continue doing it.
There’s more Galactica talk on the way, but in the meantime I’d like to direct the attention of my three loyal readers to some cool stuff I’ve run across during my recent surfings.
The crew over at Boing Boing has pointed me toward a site that nicely refutes the dubious North Korean claim that long hair robs energy from the brain. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. Some of these undeniably brainy folks have achieved levels of hirsuteness that my own increasingly challenged follicles can only dream of. In some cases, the end result is really cool; in others, it’s a bit frightening. (No personal insult intended to the latter fellow, it’s just that, as much as I admire lengthy male tresses and guys who dare to express themselves, I think you can go too far with any particular look. I don’t want to know how much this guy spends annually on conditioner…)
One thing that I thought was cool, given my longtime affection for the rock group Queen, was the inclusion in the LFHC of guitarist Brian May, who is apparently quite the amateur star-gazer. Who would’ve guessed the guy responsible for “We Will Rock You” has a thing for astronomy?
