Slowly Going Bald

Very, very boring.

Click here for the review.

We found the cats on a Thursday. Someone had abandoned five kittens — four small, one very small — outside the church where my wife works. They'd left them in a cardboard box with a bowl of water; miraculously, none of the kittens had drowned in the bowl. They looked to be no more than ten days old, far too young to be without their mother. The most likely explanation is that someone didn't spay their cat, and rather than find a way to deal with the kittens, they left them at the church and hoped fate and charity would take over. The kittens got more than that in my wife, though. They got a home.

She brought them home that evening — no shelter would have taken them and let them live, and they can't even be adopted out until they're six weeks old — and we bathed them with lemon-scented dish soap to kill the fleas that had already taken root in their thin fur. We fashioned a clean bed for them from a new plastic litter pan lined with towels and a shirt, under which we placed a heating pad. That first night was so long: cleaning, feeding, caring, figuring out what to do. The kittens needed to be nursed every two hours, and we used cotton swabs in warm water to simulate their absent mother's tongue and get them to relieve themselves. They scrabbled and howled, and they walked with a tremor, and we loved them. My wife took them to the vet before bringing them home, and the vet had made it clear that there was no way to know if the kittens would survive, or for long. We could only feed them, and help them, and hope.

The little one's eyes hadn't opened yet, but that didn't stop him from yowling at every opportunity. He ate less than the others, but he was also half their size. We did for him what we did for them all. We held him and fed him, we told him he was safe. We knew he had a fight ahead of him, but we saw the way he scrambled around and refused to quit. We hoped.

Tuesday night — five days after the kittens came to us — we bathed the litter and changed their bedding. The kittens had grown stronger since their first bath, but also more understanding on some level of what was happening around them, and they put up far less of a fight for their second bath. The little guy was a little too resigned, though. While drying him off, I noticed a dark smear on my hand. He'd begun having diarrhea. I massaged him a while until he was finished, then cleaned him off. The kittens had started defecating a couple days earlier, but not like this. This was different. This was bad.

As my wife and I took turns feeding them throughout the night, we noticed that the littlest one wasn't eating as much as he used to, nor as much as we reasoned he might need to eat to start replenishing what he'd lost when he was sick in my hand. It's dangerous to overfeed kittens, and my wife and I had both been worried about how little the tiny one was, but we'd hoped that his sporadic bursts of appetite had been a positive sign. We never forced food on him.

Wednesday morning, he was the same. Not his old self, but not great. He didn't eat much, if anything. He was still half the size or less of his brothers and sisters, just two or three ounces. Around midday, my wife noticed he wasn't responding to her attempts to feed him or offer physical affection. Worried and tearful, she took him to the vet immediately, though we already had a follow-up appointment that afternoon for the litter. When she arrived, the doctor examined the little guy and determined that he was suffering from what's known as Fading Kitten Syndrome. Essentially, living was becoming too much of a fight for the little boy, and there was precious little to be done. He was already unresponsive and uninterested in food, and his heart rate was drastically lower than what it should have been. Seizures would be next. The last thing my wife or I would ever do would be to cause harm to an animal, especially one as vulnerable, confused, and innocent as this one. My wife agreed with the vet's recommended course of action, and we allowed our little man to be put to sleep.

He was just shy of three weeks old. We knew when we took the litter in that their odds of survival were small and wavering, and that the little one would have the toughest road to walk. We prepared ourselves in the abstract for the possibility that at least one of these five helpless creatures might not survive. People asked us for pictures of the litter, but my wife and I didn't take any. We didn't even discuss it with each other: we simply knew that we wouldn't be able to bear looking at the photos if things took a turn for the worse. Our little guy left us just five days after we met him, but we gave him the best home we could in that time. We gave him a warm bed, and food, and we tried to give him every chance at life we could. Mostly we just loved him. His time here was short, and it's likely that he wouldn't have made it even if he'd had his mother around. But we loved him anyway. We gave him a place to sleep and be happy, to eat and rest with his brothers and sisters, to try and find a way to fight. That he couldn't isn't a failure on his part, or ours. It's just what had to be.

I think about how he came to us, and about how someone threw him away. Some days I want to find his former owner and howl at them about their recklessness and ignorance, about their total disregard for the safety of their own pet and the children it had, about what kind of empty freak they must be to have such little respect for life. Other days I remind myself I don't know where he came from, and that maybe whoever used to have him regrets not being more responsible, and that I should be grateful they were at least thoughtful enough to leave him and his siblings outside a church where people would likely find them. I don't know. I don't know how to feel about that person, and I try not to think about them. Instead, I think about our little guy, our brave boy, our little warrior, our tender man who tried so hard to live and who wanted so badly to make it, and who, in the end, slipped away. We loved him, and I hope so much we made him feel better for just a few days. How we loved him.

He never even opened his eyes.

Had a blast over the weekend at the Alamo Drafthouse's "Cougar Town" screening and shindig. Check it:

"Cougar Town" Season Three Preview Event: I Won't Back Down

Pretty solid.

Click here for the review.

Not bad, not great. Somehow calmly in the middle.

Click here for the review.

I bought an Xbox 360 in December 2010, though I already owned a few games for the system. My former roommate had one, and we lived together for four years, so it made sense to pick up a few used titles to play when he wasn't using it. However, he and I parted ways in the fall of 2009, so I went quite a while without playing video games. It had been even longer since I'd owned a gaming system: I sold my PlayStation 2 in summer 2004 to help defray the cost of moving to California after college, meaning I hadn't been anything remotely like a real gamer in years. I knew I wanted to get back into gaming, but I also wasn't sure what kind of gamer I'd become. I spent the year finding out what I like and don't about games, as well as discovering just how much my gaming preferences have changed.

What follows is a mostly chronological list of the games I played in 2011:

Medal of Honor: Airborne (unfinished, sold)
One of the carryover titles I sold soon after I got my own Xbox was Medal of Honor: Airborne. I was a huge fan of first-person shooters growing up, especially the Medal of Honor series, so I'd picked this up years earlier while living with a roommate. I knew when I fired it up this time, though, that my days with simplistic games stuffed with infinitely spawning enemies were at a close. I still like a good combat game, and I'm not even averse to playing through something as narratively derivative as a World War II shooter laden with hilariously somber quotes about the cost of battle. But I want a shooter to be a real game, by which I mean a challenge I am asked to solve. Just running around and triggering waves of enemies (or, equally troublesome, their elimination) by hitting hidden checkpoints is pointless. There's no strategy, no thrill. It's just mindless explosions. I've got a feeling I won't be returning to the MoH series for quite a while.

Burnout Paradise (unfinished)
Leaving a racing game unfinished isn't the same as quitting on a narrative. Burnout Paradise is meant to be played in discrete chunks. It's a great game, too, and one of the very few racing titles I like. (I got hooked on the series with Burnout Revenge.) I like the open-world set-up that lets you start challenges whenever you want or just drive the roads to explore and set speed records. The challenges are more interesting than typical races, too, involving stunts and crashes. It's a solid title.

The Orange Box (unfinished)
I bought this just to get my hands on a copy of Portal again, and the game remains as pleasing and frustrating as ever. Pleasing because it demands concentration and smarts as you build out the moves in your head you will need to execute; frustrating because too many of the solutions rely not on intellect but on twitchy reflexes. This problem was solved in the sequel, which I loved.

[ http://www.youtube.com/embed/iYZpR51XgW0 ]

Fallout 3 (finished)
An amazing game, and the first title to really show me the possibility of open-world storytelling. I fell in love with the postapocalyptic wasteland of Fallout 3, and I was enamored of the karma system that let you influence the world around you through your actions. I also really liked the mix of RPG and FPS in the combat system, which let me stack moves with the game's special targeting system or just fight it out in real time. Great powers, great choices, great story. The enemies scaled up as you went along, too, though there seemed to be a plateau at the end. Once you level up past a certain point, you can take down most enemies with some basic strategy (though I will never forget the genuine worry I felt when I had to fight mirelurks). My only real complaint is that the main narrative seemed to reach a point of no return toward the end, and while I thought I'd have time to explore the world some more between missions, I found myself rocketed toward the end. (Though that also meant recruiting an ally in Fawkes, which meant mowing through enemies like so much grass.) In a lot of ways, 2011 was the year I relearned how to play games.

Continue reading "My Gaming Year in Review, 2011" »

I've kept a running list of every movie I've ever seen (or as near as I can recall) for years now, but 2011 was the first time I charted my monthly movie-viewing habits with the same approach I take to my nightly reading. There aren't too many firm conclusions to be drawn in terms of scheduled viewing or preferred genre, though it's interesting to note that my paid reviews drive most of my screenings. I rarely get to the theater for something I'm not reviewing, mostly because I can't stand the graceless and selfish attitudes in which most theater audiences seem to revel. In 2011, it was June by the time I went to a theater to see something for pure consumption, not review, purposes. Also, the only movies I saw in September were ones I was paid to see.

All told, I saw 79 films in 2011. That only counts those films I hadn't seen before, too; repeat viewings of previous releases or cable favorites aren't included in the final tally. I've included links below to those films I've reviewed, and any other thoughts that have come up for those I haven't.

January
The King’s Speech (2010): Sweet, small, and easy-going. Not the most magnificent movie ever made, but entertaining.
Restrepo (2010): An absolutely riveting war documentary that captures the sisyphean nature of battle in all its horror.
Casino Jack (2010): A decent turn from Kevin Spacey, but mostly forgettable.
Casino Jack and the United States of Money (2010): The documentary that inspired the feature film is a little better, but too overstuffed.
The Extra Man (2010): Genuinely awful and off-putting. Unfunny and awkward at every turn.
The Green Hornet (2011)
La Moustache (2005): Nice existential thriller from France about a man who shaves his mustache and promptly begins to question his sanity when his wife tells him he never had one. Pleasingly ambiguous.

February
Unknown (2011)
Easy A (2010): Solid, smart comedy that wouldn't be half of what it is without Emma Stone in the title role.
Cedar Rapids (2011)
Waking Sleeping Beauty (2010): A great documentary about the modern Disney renaissance, which included their releases from 1989-1994 (basically The Little Mermaid to The Lion King). It makes you realize just how much heart the creatives there used to have, and why Pixar saved the company.
Crazy Heart (2009): I missed this award contender from the end of 2009, and I was glad to finally catch up with it. Great music, great performances.

March
The Adjustment Bureau (2011)
Despicable Me (2010): Cute, if insubstantial. Steve Carell has some surprisingly moving scenes, though.
Red Riding Hood (2011)
Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times (2011): A fascinating look behind the scenes at the Times, albeit one that doesn't quite know how to handle the industry's self-immolation.
New Jerusalem (2011): An actor's piece, through and through. Well-observed, but very slow.
Turkey Bowl (2011)
A Bag of Hammers (2011): I walked out. Too sloppy and cute by half.
Wuss (2011): One of those festival entries you only see at festivals, for good reason. Can't even remember what happens.
The Other F Word (and here) (2011)
Sound of My Voice (2011): Amazing movie. Great story, wonderful cast. When it finally earns a theatrical release, I'll go see it again.
Undefeated (2011)
Buck (2011)
How to Train Your Dragon (2010): DreamWorks isn't up to Pixar's level, but films like this (and Kung Fu Panda) are solid family movies.
I Am Comic (2010): I checked this out because I'm a comedy nerd. It's average. There are more penetrating comic docs out there, but it's worth visiting if you're a completist or collector.

Continue reading "My Cinematic Year in Review, 2011" »

This is the third year I've kept tabs on what I read (here's 2009 and 2010). My number's down from last year, when I read 30 books; this year, I finished 22 and abandoned two at various stages. And that decrease becomes more stark when you realize that quite a few of my choices this year were graphic novels, which take much less time to read than traditional ones. I'm not totally sure why the number went down, or even if that's something I should be concerned about. I was always working on one book or another, and (typical for me) I'd start a new book immediately after I'd finished the one before. I think it's because I traveled more in 2011 than ever before (both for work and myself), and because I finished the year with Justin Cronin's The Passage, which runs 800 tightly scripted pages and is not a journey to be taken lightly. Yet I'm not doing this as a contest, and my goal isn't to set a new personal record every year (if only because I'd eventually have to stop working, eating, and sleeping to squeeze in more titles). I just like keeping the list because I enjoy watching patterns emerge in my reading habits, whether it's seeing recommendations from certain friends appear with more frequency or uncovering certain genre patterns. I sought out more humor writing in 2011 than ever before, and I also explored more memoirs and nonfiction. Picking a favorite is almost impossible, but for sheer emotional power and ambition, The Pale King was hard to beat.

Anyway, here's a chronological list of what I read in 2011. As always, suggestions for future reads are welcome.

The Somnambulist (2007), Jonathan Barnes
There's a ton of potential in Barnes' historical fantasy-thriller, including the pleasing device of having the reader experience time travel from the perspective of the characters who aren't traveling through time. (So our narrative moves forward as progressive meetings with the time traveler are earlier in his life.) But the final product was too cute by half, and suffered from some of the pacing and dialogue issues that trouble first novels. I finished it out of sheer commitment to the project.

And Here's the Kicker: Conversations With 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft (2009), ed. Mike Sacks
For a comedy nerd, this is a fantastic read. Sacks talks with a smart group of comedy writers to pick their brains about how they got into the industry and what they think is funny. The interviews are introduced with biographical chunks that are a little too cheesy, but the talks themselves are worth it.

Sleepwalk With Me: And Other Painfully True Stores (2010), Mike Birbiglia
Mike Birbiglia is a hilarious comic who's found success by shifting away from typical sets and telling longer narratives that weave in jokes; when I saw him a couple years ago, his show was nothing but a few stories drawn out to epic length. Those stories work wonderfully on the stage, but they don't translate that well to the page because Birbiglia commits the sin that many stand-ups do when they write a book: he assumes that a transcript of his act will work as a humorous essay. But humor written is far different from humor spoken and performed. What feels natural out loud reads as choppy and far too short, meaning much of Sleepwalk With Me reads like half-formed pieces. There are some good punch lines in here, but you're better off hearing them than reading them.

The Likeness (2008), Tana French
I really dug In the Woods, French's first novel, and The Likeness is just as good. It's not a sequel exactly, but a sequential novel involving a supporting character from the first book and now told from that character's point of view. It's a solid device that lets French poke around in whole new personalities while keeping the story rooted in the world readers have come to enjoy. Great literary mystery.

I Found This Funny: My Favorite Pieces of Humor and Some That May Not Be Funny At All (2010), ed. Judd Apatow
The title doesn't lie: some of these stories are bitter, weird, and intentionally off-putting, while others are plain anti-humor, anti-drama, and anti-enjoyable. Still, there are some highlights, including Paul Feig's piece about his brief flirtation with sports announcing (imported from Feig's Kick Me) and Conan O'Brien's "Lookwell" pilot. Some of the dramatic pieces are good, too, but overall the collection is pretty hodgepodge.

The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop (2010), Dan Charnas
Dan Charnas used to be a talent scout for Profile Records and later the head of the rap division for American Recordings, meaning he had a front-row seat to the rise and bloat of hip-hop as a cultural force. His book is a dense but readable history of hip-hop from a business perspective, charting the path the music took from blowing out New York basements to dominating pop culture worldwide. Great read.

Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence (2002), Paul Feig
Now this is humor writing. Feig has worked on a number of TV series and films (he directed Bridesmaids), but it's his role as creator of "Freaks and Geeks" that earned him a place in TV history. His personal essays about growing up as a weird, repressed little geek are heartbreaking but hilarious, and anyone who's seen "Freaks" will recognize many, many story lines in Feig's own childhood. A fantastic memoir.

Continue reading "My Literary Year In Review, 2011" »

I'm fascinated by how it's possible to be nostalgic for something that happened in your lifetime but that you didn't actually experience firsthand when it happened. Case in point, for me: early-1990s alternative rock and pop. I love great guitar pop from this era, even though I was too young for it at the time. I was 12 in 1994, and as I've said, I was a musically sheltered kid who didn't know what was happening even in mainstream modern rock, let alone the alternative or power-pop worlds I'd come to love so much when I got older.

There's something about that sound that's endlessly captivating for me. Part of it's the fact that kids my age and not much older were into bands I'm only now enjoying, but it's really a kind of wistfulness that this sound, this energy, was popular right before I was really culturally aware of musical trends outside my parentally prescribed window of country and oldies. Listening to certain records now is like hearing someone describe a party at which I arrived moments too late to do anything but help clean up.

That's how I feel about Freedy Johnston's "Bad Reputation." The singer-songwriter's fourth album, This Perfect World, hit shelves in the summer of 1994, when I was very much a confused boy who would not at all be able to appreciate Johnston's witty lyricism or his soulful but poppy angst. It was just a little beyond me at the time, and besides, it wasn't even on my cultural radar.

I heard the song for the first time on a mix tape some friends made me as a parting gift when I moved to Los Angeles after college. It's an actual tape, too, and one I wore out through repeated use to the point that the tape itself began to stretch and warp, the songs losing or gaining speed at random. It's right now locked in the small fireproof safe I use to store things like my wedding certificate and Social Security card. It's that important to me. The tape was a wonderful mix of pop and hip-hop, rock and soul, and its makers spliced in sound cues that tied into the overarching themes of travel and challenge and that also made the final product feel that much more special. It's practically impossible to duplicate. Some songs have movie dialogue between them; others cut out halfway through as the next track kicks in abruptly. It's a work of art.

One of the anchors of the tape is Johnston's "Bad Reputation," and the song's feeling of finding yourself alone in a crowd, looking for someone you can't forget, cut raggedly to my core as I drove across the country to a new home away from the people I'd spent four years weaving into my life. Everyone goes through the same basic crises right after college, and those years of rockily searching for your identity aren't that interesting to anyone who wasn't in them with you, but still, knowing that everyone else was having a tough time didn't make mine any easier. The first year after college was a tough one for me — my job had low pay and even lower morale, and I went through three apartments and eight roommates in 12 months — and I found myself turning again and again to the songs my friends had put to tape and sent westward with me.

Sometime in those early post-graduate years, I came across Kicking and Screaming. I'd only heard snatches about Noah Baumbach's first film, and those only in the context of articles that talked about his hiatus in the entertainment industry between writing and directing 1997's Mr. Jealousy and returning to the field to co-write 2004's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou with Wes Anderson. I was so glad to find the film, too. It's a hilarious, sharply written, wonderfully observed comedy about the existential malaise that sets in in your early 20s as you stumble from the cocoon of academia into the unforgiving sunlight of the real world. The jokes worked, the characters were spot-on, and the stories of selfish heartbreak made perfect sense to a young man trying to figure out just what he was going to do with his life.

The film ends on a perfect note of reckless optimism with a young man reaching out to the woman in his life, and as it cuts to black, Baumbach cues up "Bad Reputation." It was a pretty timely choice from a technical perspective — the film came out in October 1995, just a year after Johnston's album — but for me it the resonance doubled and trebled, becoming not just a coda for the film but a reference to the very song that had carried me to California on the words and prayers of friends greater and truer than I could ever have imagined having. I didn't know the song would be there, nor that the film would speak so clearly to what I was living through at the time. But it was, and it did.

The tape my friends made me came with a note and a track listing, scrawled in a messy hand, and the note talks in part about how my friends want me to know that they will always be with me, and that I will always have people in my life willing to share in my joy, offer solace in my grief, or just make me a tape of songs they hope I'll like. That's what I think of when I listen to "Bad Reputation." I remember what it is to be lonely but brave, and loved above all, and to have nothing to hold onto but the knowledge that all things change.

Hard to watch, but also not that good.

Click here for the review.

No. No no.

Click here for the review.

The last "Community" we'll get for a while wasn't one of its best. Whatever happened to the simple joys of "O Christmas Troy"?

"Community" 3x10: "Regional Holiday Music"

Great, classically styled spy thriller.

Click here for the review.

Before "Community" goes on hiatus for a few months (?), I'm taking a look back at what I'll miss most about the show when it's gone.

5 Things We'll Miss About "Community"

Good episode. Only one more until the hiatus.

"Community" 3x9: "Foosball and Nocturnal Vigilantism"

Kind of a taxing episode for me. I tried to cover it in the review, but I'm not sure I got all the bones out.

"Community" 3x8: "Documentary Filmmaking: Redux"

Very good. My review doesn't do it justice.

Click here for the review.