Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp

I don’t even own a guitar cable. I have two guitars (with 11 strings), neither of which currently work. One of them is an Epiphone Les Paul Custom, alpine white with gold hardware. It was my first guitar. My other guitar is a Music Man Axis Super Sport (the one with the fixed bridge, none of that Floyd Rose crap), red flame-top with a birdseye-maple neck. My amp is a Fender Hot Rod Deville, 4x10” that is missing both its cover and its footswitch.

I use the amp as an end table.

It’s funny to me that I used to want to be a rockstar. I started playing in bands when I was 15 years old. It was the late 90’s so most of the kids who were playing music were in punk (because it’s easy to play when you can’t really play) or ska bands (which were really punk bands that raided their high school marching band when Reel Big Fish and the Bosstones got huge for half a minute).

I quit my band when I relocated for college. Having grown up in central Florida, I played an awful lot of shows with bands that have gone on to make quite a good living making music, and when I’m feeling particularly diluted, I allow myself to wonder what could have happened if I had stayed at home and really pursued music. If I’m being honest I know that it wouldn’t have worked out for me because, frankly I was never that good.

I didn’t give up on music right away when I got to college, but putting a band together and keeping it together proved to be difficult at a small school. There’s too much turnover of personnel. My most successful endeavor lasted a mere four months until one member moved to Montana, one member moved to North Carolina, one member moved to Florida, and one member moved to Virginia. Really.

When playing music ceased being a viable option, I briefly considered learning to be a studio engineer, but instead opted to go to graduate school to be a teacher (ha!). After grad school, I spent two years in retail management back home in Florida, before moving back to my college town (as if retracing my steps in an effort to find something that I had lost).

Eight months after making the move, I found myself still working in retail management and in desperate need of a vacation. When most people think about vacation, they picture beaches or mountains or cruises or Branson, Missouri, but I went the other way. I booked a week at First Street Studio, conveniently located beneath my loft apartment, and sat in the dark for a week arguing about guitar tone and drinking Natural Ice until I convinced myself that I could sing (kind of).

I’d love to say that the experience was therapeutic or cathartic, but really, it was just fun. It was like rock and roll fantasy camp. I didn’t do anything but play, sing, drink beer, smoke cigarettes, and eat bad food. I think that I actually had more fun that week than I ever had playing music when I was younger, probably because I no longer possessed any real musical aspirations.

I may never play music in front of people again, and I’m ok with that.

Really.

But if I did... I think that the absence of pressure associated with the desire to succeed, or make headway, or get noticed by the “right people” would make the experience far more enjoyable. Maybe I need a little rock and roll fantasy camp in my life all the time.

Anyway, if you’re interested in hearing the finished product from that vacation, you can listen to it at myspace.com/duskatdusk

Warts and all.

I promise you nothing.

My passion. My secret shame. My movie collection.

My passion. My secret shame. My movie collection.

I started buying movies in 1999, when I was a freshman in college. My roommate and I had two TVs. There was no cable in the dorm rooms but I had a 13” with a decent antenna, so we got to watch Conan (O’Brien, not the Barbarian) every night. The 13” sat on top of Travis’s larger TV which we hooked to my VCR. It’s hard to believe that at one point I was buying new movies on VHS at Walmart at twenty bucks a pop. I hadn’t seen many R-rated films as a kid. My parents were strict about the kinds of things that we were allowed to watch (a fact that I do not resent. In fact, I’ll probably be just as strict with my children, if I ever have any; although, I have no idea what i’m going to do with my movie collection when and if I ever do have kids.)

The great thing about not having seen much is that if you set out to see all of the great films that everyone should see, you get to experience a continuous string of the kinds of highs that you feel when you see a great film. This experience for me reached its peak in 2004/2005 when I was in grad school. It was during that time that I discovered both Netflix and the monstrous collection of VHS at the Cleveland (TN) public library. At this time I was watching two to four new movies every day.

I never really intended to become a movie collector. I had been purchasing movies for six or seven years and had somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 films when I finished grad school. Then one day I stumbled across a Movie Stop that was liquidating its VHS inventory at a rate of 5 for $3. I’m not proud of what I did that day. I started walking up and down the alphabetized racks and saw movie after movie that I loved, at prices that I couldn’t pass up. By the time I hit the letter “C”, my arms were too full to carry any more. I went to the counter and asked if they had carts. They handed me a basket. I filled it and asked for another. I bought over 120 movies that day. I almost felt that I need to rescue them. They were like cute dogs at the pound, except they were all films to which I had already established an emotional attachment.

I’m going to pause for a minute and give you some of the statistics.

Total films that I own: 579

On DVD: 332

--This includes:

Two copies of Shaun of the Dead (I started watching it with a friend who hadn’t seen it and my first copy froze, so I went and bought another so we could finish).

One copy of the Sting: Special Edition (I hope to get this back from Lucas, but I won’t take it back until he watches it.)

One empty box that contained my criterion collection copy of Rushmore which has inexplicably disappeared. This is the second copy of Rushmore that I have lost. The other copy was on VHS and was stolen from my freshman dorm room.

On VHS: 237

The first thing that anybody says when they see my collection is, “Wow, that’s a lot of VHS!” I’ve replaced some of them, but I can’t really afford to replace them all. Maybe some day.

On Blu-ray: 10

I just got a player this Christmas. I’m a fan.

I also own two TV mini series:

John Adams on Blu-ray. You should see it if you haven’t.

Ken Burns baseball on DVD. It’s 18 hours long, and I watch it once a year, in April.

Then there’s the TV series on DVD: 87 seasons on DVD, plus 6 on my computer from iTunes.

This is starting to get upsetting.

Here’s a short statistical breakdown of the movies that I own.

Best Picture Oscar Winners: 39

Hitchcock films: 4 (plus the box for Psycho. I bought it at a Blockbuster closing and was upset to find that it contained the Gus Van Sant remake.)

Woody Allen films: 12

Tom Hanks films: 14

Jack Nicholson films: 13

Coen Brothers films: 11

Philip Seymour Hoffman films: 17

Spielberg: 13

Scorsese: 10

Bill Murray: 15

Kevin Bacon: 5 (?!)

I also own 44 movies that I have not seen.

I don’t really know why I’m so obsessive about movies. I think that maybe it’s just the collecting that I love. Everybody needs a hobby, right? I do love movies, but I never really had a burning desire to make movies (although the ideas of writing and/or acting do appeal to me). I don’t think that I’m visually oriented enough to direct. I don’t know if I’d be a decent film critic, because while I do enjoy analyzing and comparing films, I think that being forced to pick them apart would take most of the enjoyment out of it for me.

Yes, I do read books.

Anyway, if anyone has any questions about my collection, I’m more than willing to answer. If you want a recommendation, I’ll give that too, but as always...

I promise you nothing.

This is not a review of Hot Tub Time Machine.

This is not a review of “Hot Tub Time Machine.”

I’m a sucker for a title (not like viscount or marquis). I will eagerly throw hard-earned money at a book, film, or album on the basis of a clever title.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. “Hot Tub Time Machine” is simply the most recent example, but as soon as I heard about this movie, I knew that I had to see it the first week. It was the same feeling that I had when I saw the book “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”. I purchased Zombies immediately. I honestly felt that the author deserved my fourteen bucks for the title alone (which works out, since the entire book is an extrapolation of the title joke. It’s not bad; it’s just a one note song, not that there isn’t an art to the beating of a dead horse. More on that another time).

Some of the other examples that immediately come to mind are “Snakes on a Plane”, which might be the coolest name for a film to ever come out of the studio system and crush millions of people with disappointment; and “Harold and Kumar go to White Castle”, which succeeded in making me laugh really really hard at a stoner comedy, a genre that I typically despise (I’m told that this is probably due to the fact that I don’t smoke pot. I’m also told that smoking pot makes Dane Cook funny and the Doors listenable).

Now that I’ve alienated half of my audience...

So, why am I obsessed with clever titles? I think that it probably stems from a fear of failure. If I can hook an audience with a title, they may be more forgiving of the content between the covers. This is why I wrote a master’s thesis titled: “Driving a Pinto with a Mustang in the Garage: Exploring Issues of Underachievement.” You can’t hate a book like Christopher Moore’s “Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal”, nor would you want to. Even if it weren’t delightful and fun, it would get a pass on the strength of its title. Actually, Christopher Moore is a poor example, because the work that he does between the covers always lives up to the name printed on the spine (that sounded weirdly sexual).

For the record, I did enjoy Hot Tub Time Machine, and I will continue to spend my money on entertainment of its ilk. I need to save up as much Karma as I can until I unleash my own half-baked projects. I assure you that they will be cleverly titled. As for the content...

I promise you nothing.