ofadam.com

Backyard, 3 inches of snow under a full moon

There are a few things to mention… first, my beloved 4th generation 20gb iPod is dead. It was a sudden, random passing (as these things often are) and I’m now waiting on delivery of a slightly used 8gb iPod Nano. A simultaneous downgrade/upgrade!

Secondly, I’ve discovered my size 12 feet are really a measly 11. I had a sneaking suspicion the last time I ordered shoes online, so I got out the measuring tape and made the conversions. ELEVEN. Sniff sniff.

And finally, I had a remarkably long day that ended with bread pudding 30 minutes from Peoria. I even witnessed the entire light-cycle today, a rarity for a second-shift man. We’ll discuss that tomorrow.

Dear Judd Apatow,

I feel it necessary to break rank and tell you just how much I dislike your “brand” of comedy. I’m man enough to admit that I did love one creation of yours, the defunct TV series “Freaks and Geeks.” At the time, it was a fresh approach on the nerdy life. It was the start of what I will coin “The Apatow Approach.” You’ve received critical acclaim and now have a slew of new movies in production. Entertainment Weekly ranked you as #1 on their list of 50 Smartest People in Hollywood. But could you tell me the difference between “40 Year Old Virgin,” “Knocked Up,” and “Superbad?”

Plenty of directors/producers/writers stick to a formula. Wes Anderson comes to mind, with his twee-drenched, 60′s pop-accompanied flicks. He casts the same actors and actresses over and over again, and so do you. But while he seems to have a greater inspiration in his work, you appear to have never left the beer-stained, beta-male college existence you no doubt experienced. Weak female characters emphasize your adolescent terror of women, sickly family values somehow give you an excuse to toy with profanity like a 6th grader might. It’s time to grow out of that.

Your latest, “Walk Hard,” was a disappointment. Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post said it perfectly: “The best part of ‘Walk Hard,’ oddly enough, is the music. I might not care to see ‘Walk Hard’ a second time, but I can’t wait to hear it again.” Most of the gags were three times longer than my attention span. And when we’re talking about a penis protruding in the top-right of the screen for minutes on end, I think we can all agree that shorter is better. (ahem)

But what really brought this to a head is my recent viewing of “Superbad.” I was excited to see Michael Cera, an actor who I believe has enormous comedic potential. But Jonah Hill, a tubby, strident whiner who clings like a parasitic lamprey to Cera, ruined this goddamn movie. As Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe said, “it mostly made me understand the case for staying a virgin until you’re 40.”

So, what’s the solution? I propose a two-fold fix. First, consider tinkering with small-budget indie movies. Learn how to flesh-out your characters and how to portray someone beyond a 16 to 25 year-old middle-class white kid. And two? I’ll avoid any and every project with your hillbilly name attached to it.

all photos by Adam Gerik / Journal Star. more found here

“Chicago – this vicious, stinking zoo, this mean-grinning, mace-smelling boneyard of a city; an elegant rockpile monument to everything cruel and stupid and corrupt in the human spirit.” -Hunter S. Thompson

Welcome to hockey: land of fights, plentiful beer and open-leering at women. It’s perhaps appropriate that I shot my first NHL game last night at the United Center in Chicago.

Chicago Blackhawks vs St. Louis Blues, my editor tells me. I nod and pack my things. It’ll be a long day, most of it on the road. Rush-hour to jostle with, another checkbox to check. Bears, White Sox, Cubs, and now Blackhawks.

It wasn’t all unpleasant; hockey is a fifth-tier sport in the Second City. Pro-football, two baseball teams and the Bulls make up a tangle of worthless teams that clog the pages of the Trib and Sun-Times each day. There might be six photographers total, a measly number in Chicago sporting events. In fact, if you drain 10,000 of the 17,000 fans out of the arena, you might fool it for an AHL game in Peoria’s Carver Arena. Pro, semi-pro and college sports are all congruent, anyway.

Hold on. Joni Mitchell is blaring here in Starbucks and I’m getting on edge. I don’t mind JM at all, but goddamn, why do places crank their music so loud? To stifle thinking men and women, that’s why!

I’m sitting on a cold cement floor rink-side, catching the wet spray of ice as it squeezes through the fist-sized hole in the glass, my picture porthole and a horrific liability should an errant puck decide to pass through. Later, after transmitting photos between periods, I find my little window in disarray, the entire pane of plexiglass knocked loose from its neighbors.

Soon the game is over, a 6-1 blowout over the Blues. A 20-1 game in baseball, a team zeroed in basketball, and a complete bore. I walk out of the arena into an empty Chicago, a neighborhood where thugs roam and the law gives little comfort. I waste no time fleeing.

It’s time to hit the road, traversing that unimportant space between Chicago and Peoria in the middle of the night.

“Someday I want very much to get all these journals together and publish them intact. I think they should be eventually published that way with footnotes by their author, since they may have some usefulness as a history of an individual’s fight for survival, emotional travail… — very few bits would have literary value, I am afraid, as I wrote them purely the way that Catholics talk through a black cloth to the priest in the next cubicle. Except that I was both Father Confessor and Son Confessor.” -Tennessee Williams

Mustache failure… so I have become a small boy again.