A legitimately awesome interview with ME on a thoroughly great podcast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihsPVLFUOro&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR20qUjfh8RtAZL00G2SPxiphA9uJrxQWhtvABVjkVz_LgR5ykiAbHl66Mw&ab_channel=DebbieElicksen
One moment is stuck ‘tween my mind and my heart.
Through the plains of the days that would keep us apart,
It wandered with motions unbounded by sight,
For no truth had it found after leaving your light.
Hot frost on your lips in a break from the freeze.
That memory stands still unflung by the breeze
Of a thousand old winters and ancientry’s rime.
That kiss I’ll recall through the vastness of time.
It could be the hour that’s loosing these thoughts
Or the leftover lees of a legion of shots.
But I’ve drunk not a drop, and still shall I warn
That what’s said after midnight maintains in the morn.
So listen with all that you’re willing to give,
For these lines I recite are the lyrics I live.
This chance of enchantment impels me to pray
For an omen from you that could tell me to stay.
Check out our interview!
People keep saying “The Incredibles” is the best live action adaptation of the Fantastic Four.
It’s good, but for real, that award has to go to the “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” TV show.
Check it! Family, time travel, big gruff sweet guy. Even a council of Reeds!
When do I have to turn on Endgame so that Thor knocks Thanos’s block off right as the New Year’s ball drops?
Hot Apollo’s doing a special pre-NYE show to end out the year by celebrating Papa Reuben’s birthday alongside his band and the Mendozas!
It all happens at Handlebar at 9:00 on Friday, December 30th.
PWYC. 159 Augusta Avenue. Rock!
https://www.facebook.com/events/876452376691164
Check me on the newest episode of this fabulous podcast!
Also on Spotify and all the other platforms.
Here's what happened.
My shoulders are messed up. Not too bad. But they dislocate with some recurrence. It started with a seizure years ago, and one dislocation makes subsequent ones easier. They're just loose, my man. I've been working on it, but solving it isn't really feasible without surgery, and surgery's gross. It also has its own uncertainties. But I actually have a trapezius now! That's a win.
Anyway, on Monday, I think that I found another new way to dislocate my shoulder, and this one's probably the weirdest. There have been a bunch. I was dancing about as I was waiting for the train, and in this process, I briefly hopped up on a bench. As I jumped down, I banged my head into a sign, which wasn't a big issue for my head, but somehow the recoil or something knocked my shoulder out, and it took a bit of a while for me to pop it back in, diring which I was hobbling about in a pained hunch. I know that my brand is basically being the weirdest guy in the room, but it must have been especially strange to see someone hit his head and immediately start struggling with his shoulder. It was odd for me, and I at least had some idea of what happened.
Bonus Question!
Are the Gyllenhaals the Cusacks of this century?
So I was doing some home tailoring and cut my thumb, which led to that kind of disquieting throbbing as all the blood pumped to the wound. That made me imagine that my heart, seeing the tiniest opening through which it could exit, was trying to escape its place in the body of someone whose hopeless romanticism had exposed it to so much pain and put it through so much ridiculousness.
Heart, I get you. But you’re staying.
Bonus Question!
Best Heart song?
“Barracuda”. Which I remember first hearing in the Charlie’s Angels movie when I was a little kid.
I've been eating a lot of chicken in recent times, and this has brought two things to the fore of my mind. First, chicken is really good. Second, the phrase "chicken dinner" seems to lack any real positive connotations. The first thing that springs to mind is along the lines of a dingy bingo prize, and things just go down from there.
Nevertheless. Chicken. Just grill a breast and enjoy. So good. Much chicken. All the chicken. Teach those fowls a lesson for not learning how to fly.
You know what does fly? A helicopter. Like the one in the new "Jumanji", sequel to the 1995 classic. Which I just saw. The new one. I saw the old one ages ago. In a hotel. But there wasn't sound at the beginning for some reason. And then we accidentally changed the channel in trying to fix it, which meant that we couldn't go back to the movie we paid for because that was how hotels did paid viewing in the 90s. Is it still? I don't know. But my father called the concierge to explain the issue, and the concierge let us view it from the start at no extra charge because he knew that it was an incredible movie.
Anyway.
I think that the last big thing Jack Black did was "Goosebumps"? Where he had to deal with a bunch of things that escaped from a work of fiction into the real world? And now he's hopping around "Jumanji", dealing with being taken from the real world into a work of fiction. The 1995 one had a bit of both.
And Dwayne Johnson's playing a scraggy boy in The Rock's body, which seems like a good prelude for his Black Adam role.
And Nick Jonas is the Robin Williams of this iteration of "Jumanji". I don't know what to do with that, but it's good too.
Oh. And Rhys Darby's Nigel character feels close enough to a live version of Nigel Thornberry to make me very happy.
Bonus Question!
Are there any chicken phrases that do hold positive connotations for you?
"Chicken and rice". In large part because I saw it on a soup can while I was listening to The Doors, which means that I now hear it with the tune of the "city at night" refrain from "L.A. Woman".
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Jake Pearson for an interview on his podcast What Makes You Happy?, which is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube right now! Check us out!
I don’t always get why people make such a point of disliking things. Maybe it’s because I have less capacity for dislike? Most people seem to have a level of dislike and a level of like. I think I generally have that second level in place of the first, so instead of disliking something I’ll like it, and instead of liking something, I’ll adore it to the point of near obsession.
It’s like those climates where their winters are like our summers and their summers are like the surface of Venus or something.
Bonus Question!
I’ve always been a fan of Lou Bega’s classic “Mambo No. 5”, but that fondness has been boosted in recent years by the fact that hearing it reminds me of arriving in the lobby of our hotel at Disney World at the outset of my family’s vacation in high school, whereupon I was greeted by a version of that song Lou had recorded about Disney characters.
So today I thought “Instead of just being reminded of that by the original song, why don’t I seek out the Disney version that enchanted me so in that hotel lobby, where the sun was shining through the vast windows at the far end?”
So I found it on iTunes, which I still use because I just like the feel of having the files on my phone. But I had to buy the whole album to get that one song despite the fact I’ll probably never listen to any of the other tracks, which also seem to be Disney-focused covers of pop songs. Bega’s might be the only one by the original artist? Anyway, it was a worthy purchase.
Bonus Question!
Favourite Disney song?
I was just thinking about the wondrously appropriate casting of Kelsey Grammer in the X-Men franchise. It really is up there with Patrick Stewart's Proffy X. But I was just musing about its applicability on a deeper level.
Beast was always an exemplar of duality. Mentally, he's an erudite and amiable gentleman, but in physical terms, he's monstrous enough to warrant his code name. And old Kels is a dualistic dude too, famous as he is for two things. First, he's the refined intellectual Frasier Crane. The next thing that jumps to mind after that is his true persona of a ravenous hedonist.
Boom! Dude knew how to get rid of the pain of being a man even before he became the Beast. Blue fur's just a bonus.
Bonus Question!
"American Beauty" versus KGBeast?
I think that KGBeast could be drawn to the movie for Kevin Spacey, and he'd appreciate the guy's performance. It's the type of thing he'd jump to after finishing "House of Cards" on Netflix, and though it wouldn't fully scratch that itch, it'd still see him through a few hours of the night quite pleasantly.
Despite not doing much of anything to take care of it, I have had decent skin throughout my life. But there are times of the year where it can get especially dry in places, and I was having a bunch of that dryness recently around my mouth. A friend noticed and implored me to get over my tactile aversion to putting creamy stuff on my skin and left some moisturizer at my place for me to try. I took a chance and tried it, and within a few days, my skin cleared up quite decently. Then at the end of that week, I happened to get an audition from my agent for a skin care campaign that was seeking dudes with decent skin. If it had not been for that moisturizing regiment, I would have been disqualified instantly, and that whole thing felt like validation for my pushing through my reluctance to use such products. And after getting into the habit of it, I’m less sensitive to the grossness of putting creamy stuff on my face. Yay for skin care!
Bonus Question!
Best creamy stuff for the face?
Melted marshmallows. Specifically for the inner mouth part of the face.
So everyone’s calendars are marked for May the 4th Be With You, and some of the edgier ones also observe Revenge of the Sixth? Right? But there are those who fall between or beyond the Jedi-Sith dichotomy, and among them are the Mandalorians. So in the middle of those two occasions, there’s Fifth Is the Way.
Bonus Question!
What do you celebrate?
Since the Jedi-Sith thing is essentially the classic Enlightenment-Romanticism divide in space, I fall firmly on the side of the latter. In space.
Unintentional but appropriate coincidence of going to the new Sonic movie with spiky blue hair. And it rules actually.
Bonus Question!
Who wore it better?
I was recently reading the entire original run of Avengers comics when I came across this panel from an early ‘80s issue.
It wasn’t odd just because the whole issue seemed like a thinly veiled metaphor for police reform with the exact same talking points that are shouted today. It’s because it was written by a notoriously harsh conservative man named Jim Shooter who was known for injecting his rightist politics into his work despite the editorial edict he himself made against doing so. Of course, that edict was almost entirely in place because he knew the rest of the writers at Marvel were liberals and he didn’t want that in the comics of the company he ran.
But even that dude knew this stuff about the police four decades ago and campaigned for the same changes that are still being called for today.
Ugh. I know there’s been progress, and progress can be slow, but this progress seems glacial even on that scale.
Bonus Question!
Best Marvel Jim?
Steranko.
So I had this idea for a new tattoo, and I went into the shop as soon as I could. While I was waiting for my artist, I saw another employee with a gorgeous cheek piercing and asked if they did that. The piercer said he could do that for me while my tattooist was getting ready, and while their stock of jewellery didn’t offer a lot of choice on that day, I did see something in a gorgeous blue colour and went with that. But after it was in my face, I realized it was actually a pretty prominent spike, and while the hue worked for me, the overall form did not. Unfortunately, most of the people in the shop informed me that I’d have to wait for two months at least to change the piercing, which didn’t sit totally well with me. Then the piercer said “Well, it’s risky, and it might suck because of all the extra trauma to your face, but I can try taking it out and putting a new one in.” So we did, and so far it’s fine. And I’m staying on brand by doing things in the dumbest possible ways and thereby making things far harder for myself than they need to be. XD
Bonus Question!
Worst stabbing in the face?
That one with Oberyn on “Game of Thrones” was pretty brutal. I think it was the first character death on that show to really hit me. I liked that dude.