Writing from home tonight. No movie to review, because Grimsley came over and we hung out for a while. He wanted to play me some tracks from a Frank Zappa album he bought called "The Lost Episodes", which as the title suggests are recordings that were never released, including a few that FZ made when he was just a teenager in Lancaster. I am a big Zappa fan (and you are too I bet), so it was a treat to hear this music. I will be ordering a copy of "The Lost Episodes" myself, to add to my collection.
I know I said there was no movie tonight, and there wasn't.
But there sort of was.
Grim brought a dvd with him, but we didn't watch it all the way through. Not only that, but this was a "movie" in name only, only because it consisted of a series of frames that are generally considered to constitute a "motion picture". So in that sense, it is a movie. But in any other way........no.
It is called "The Room", and you may have heard about it. It was "directed" by a character named Tommy Wiseau. You can Google him. In any event, the film is so bad that, in some circles (but not mine), it acquired a "so-bad-that-it's-good" status. Somehow, James Franco got wind of it, and liked it so much that he made his own movie about it, called "The Disaster Artist", in which he apparently recreates "The Room" to some degree. Because Franco is a star, "The Room", which was made in 2004 and went straight into the dustbin of history, became known to the press and public several months ago, and now it has gained a cult status.
For myself, I would never have bothered to check it out, because, though I had read about it, it seemed to be Just Plain Bad rather than So Bad That It Is Good.
And tonight my suspicions were confirmed. Grim brought the dvd with him and insisted I watch a few minutes of it, which I did, to placate him. It's not worth reviewing, because your nine year old nephew could make a better film, or your grandpa, or your dog. The only thing it has going for it is Wiseau himself, who stars, and the only reason that I say that is because he does have a tiny bit of Aging Rock Star charisma. But that charisma is extremely slight, and only extends as far as if you have already put the dvd in your player and pressed "play". In other words, there is no way you would seek this movie out, and you would never even see a few minutes of it unless you were James Franco, or unless Grim brought the dvd over to your apartment. But if that happened, and you had to sit through a few minutes worth, you would grudgingly say that Tommy Wiseau, with his funny accent and Whisky-A-GoGo look, is the only possible drawing card for "The Room".
It's not "so bad it's good", except in the minds of Hollywood hipsters.
In actuality, it's "so bad that you would never have heard of it had it not been for James Franco".
And that is far too much for me to have written about "The Room", even if I am always looking for something to write about. :)
I am gonna keep writing about 1989, and what I am looking for are unique angles that focus on specific details, the kind of stuff Columbo would notice if he were working the case. I have been going over everything I can remember about the overall experience for so long - almost 25 years - that I long ago hit dead ends in trying to understand the individual events that constituted the entire thing, which lasted (I think) about 12 days. But a couple of years ago, I figured out the connections between Howard Schaller, Mr. D and X, and in realising those connections I came to understand the knowledge of "K", who knew about what had taken place and tried to play coy with me. People in my circle knew that I had amnesia, and they took advantage of that fact. And when my amnesia started to break, they still attempted to control the situation by banding together and feeding me a bunch of BS, as "K" tried to do in June 1994.
With me being a natural-born detective, that strategy backfired, and here we are now, writing to the CIA.
To digress for a moment, we are living through some very stressful and challenging times in America. I will stand up right here and say that I am American to my core. I am not very political, but this is the land of my family and my ancestors going back 400 years. I can feel the land in my bones. I haven't traveled (though I'd like to), and the point is that I am connected to the history of this land in a spiritual way, and to the values this country was founded on. Now, I hear a lot of stuff in the ranting computer age that we live in, where many people want to take the country down and say that it was founded by racists or by the Illuminatti, and that America has never been a great country and blah, blah, blah.
And while I do not back away from a clear eyed view of what our ancestors did to the black slaves, or to the Indian people, or to the effects that excessive capitalism is having on our country right now, I still believe in America, because it is indeed a great country and it was meant to lead the world toward peace. Look at Europe over the last thousand years, and you know that Europe, despite the grand cultural histories of their countries and the fact that their scientists and engineers led the way toward the modern world, was not a place, with it's neverending history of war, to be a leader for world peace.
Nor was Russia, nor China.
Say what you will about the United States Of America, even as messed up at it is at the moment, but it has always been, since it's founding almost 250 years ago, the best hope for peace in the world.
The world is all messed up with violence. Who is gonna stop it? Russia? China? Germany?
No. Only the United States can fix the world. Not anarchy, not some third party dream, just the U.S. as we know it and hope for it.
But it will never happen until we Step Up To The Fucking Plate.
It is not enough just to go to your job everyday, and then come home and have a nice evening, and pretend that nothing out of the ordinary ever happened in your life, or that you never participated in anything unsavory. It is not good enough to hide. To wake up every single day of your life, and hide. You have got to stop hiding.
This is imperative, because this is the United States of America. And we need to save it. We now have a man - right at this moment - who is trying to exert his will on America, worse than Joe McCarthy ever did, and we have to stand up to him. But he never would have been in there in the first place if this country, which was once so great and such a hope, had not decayed to the extent that it has.
You are hiding an enormous secret, and what you are doing is profoundly wrong. Every day that you get up, and ignore what you know, and continue to keep your secrets, you are helping to throw America into the trash can.
So please, step up to the plate. Stop being a coward.
End of digression.
Sorry about that, but it needed to be said, and we will keep touching on the subject. What we need to do is to pay attention to the psychology behind the secrecy, and there is more to it than just cowardice. Some folks may have been threatened, or may feel a tremendous amount of shame. So we will work on that. But to get back to my original point, we will be looking more at small details, like those which finally connected the Schaller situation. Those minor details may work better than trying to understand the Grand Scheme. We can ask such things as, "how did Mr. Rappaport know that I would be home alone", when he came to get me? Or, "how did the authorities find out I was inside his house"? Who called them? Certainly not Jared Rappaport, nor his zombie-like wife. So, who knew I was in that house? Who called the authorities, and why did the person who knew I was in there not call the police?
Or did the authorities, i.e The Feds, know I was in there? Maybe nobody called them. Maybe they knew I was in there all along, and finally came to get me out, after 24 hours.
Those are the kinds of minor but important details we will be looking at.
SB, I hope all is well. I am thinking of you of course, just so you know. xoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
See you in the morning. :)
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