Apparently, the best way for a writer to make a name for himself today is to do various writing jobs that doubles as an advertisement for his blog until he is ready to write a novel, which pays more than a job writing for a magazine. Sure, the writer could just skip a step and write the novel right away, but that shit is difficult, and without something resembling a cultivated audience, it would arrive in bookstores to general apathy. And that's even if it makes it into stores.
So, the writer of this rarely-updated-but-not-bad blog is trying to get back into the swing of blogging. This requires putting up a post a day. Rather than write something off the top of his head, though, he is burning "back catalogue", or material he wrote for classes that would get underappreciated, because he is tired on this day. Hell, he's been tired all week. OR HE'S BEEN WEAK ALL WEEK HA HA HA HA HA. Below is a short story that he wrote 4 years ago that has aged better than he thought it would, considering that it received a negative reaction in the creative writing class he shared it in. Enjoy.
"Thanks, Buck"
by John Downey
Negative. That’s the word you were looking for. “The night looked like its negative”—“it” being the day. You weren’t so much talking to yourself as you were grasping for an apt way of describing the night. It wasn’t a bad night, though. You were still underdressed for the conditions, and you had to look out for black ice, but compared to the past week’s negative temperatures with 30 mph winds, it was a good time to be outside. Negative, though, was still appropriate. At 1:00 in the afternoon, the ground was dark and the skies were bright grey. Now, with the snow still coming down and the sun setting, the ground was bright and the sky was dark. If it weren’t for a few coffee shops and night shift fast-food places, the picture would have been complete.
Maybe you were right when you decided that you were in no condition to drive. Nobody drives themselves hours removed from the death of an 8-month relationship. She didn’t end it; you did, by accident. She suggested a break, and maybe she was right, but you argued that breaks often turn into breakups, so “Why not just speed the process up?” (You’re an idiot.) She called your bluff. She still had your copy of “Perks”, but you were in no rush to get it back.
You did tell yourself, though, that you would start cramming for that World Civ test at 10:00. You started your walk at 12:30 without opening your notebook. You got good at not keeping promises; that’s probably why she wanted a break.
Maybe you were right when you said that you were in no condition to drive. How you decided that walking around downtown, alone, after midnight, then, was a bit of a stretch. In the end, you figured that this would be a good opportunity to form an opinion on T. Brooks, a rapper from Canada that the blogosphere had declared its new king. A friend of yours had given you an advance copy of his first official album. Illegally, but you promised yourself that if it was really good, you would buy yourself a copy when it came out.
Brooks had talent, that much was apparent. He wasn’t the problem. Your issue with his album had to do with his producers. A few songs had producer and performer meshing perfectly. Most songs had a beat that was technically good, but didn’t really suit Brooks’s flow. Then there were the tracks that sounded bad because the producer came up with a complete turd and Brooks was too inexperienced to salvage them. “A sensitive song shouldn’t have a ‘pretty’ piano arrangement undermining the song’s purpose,” you heard yourself mutter, “and sampling anything recorded after 1985 is lazy. The album’s not that bad, but the backlash from the hipster crowd is going to kill him.”
“Pulp Fiction” came on at 2:00 on Showtime, and you wanted to stay up for it. You examined your surroundings, taking in the big lights that signaled which eating establishment you would be landing in. Burger King let you walk through the drive-in, and Dunkin Donuts had a nice something-chino with your name on it. You decided on Denny’s, though, due to its proximity to your dorm. Your knees weren’t what they used to be.
Walking in, sitting down and ordering (milk, two sugars) were all autopilot by this point. You weren’t the only person eating there. Just a table away, a group of kids, high-schooled age, were chatting about things that you didn’t particularly care about. You suspected that they had started talking about you—something about “the guy with the hair”—so you put your head down, pretending to study the kiddy crossword puzzle that had already been started by a spelling savant. Apparently, G-E-W-S was a word.
You were about to start looking for Arthur—in a “Where’s Waldo?” type of puzzle—when you heard something crashing into the seat in front of you. The sound didn’t match the sight, though. You were expecting to see an elephant looking back at you. Instead, all you saw was a girl, maybe 17 years old, with her hair bound in a side ponytail and her smile set to ear-to-ear mode.
“I said, hey!” She knew how to be polite.
You said hey back, expecting her to return to her seat after winning a talk-to-the-freak bet. Instead, she said, “You know who you look like?”
You thought you were ready. You weren’t.
“MARCO FROM DEGRASSI!”
You didn’t know what a Degrassi was, so you didn’t see the humor in her declaration.
“You’ve got the hair, the soul patch, the eyes…wait, are you gay?”
Her friends bursted out laughing. The girl showed you a screenshot from the television program “Degrassi: The Next Generation” that she had on her iPod, or her phone, or some other complicated contraption that you couldn't immediately place. You did share a resemblance with the character, though he had much better fashion sense and was Hispanic.
“Marco is Italian; he’s not Hispanic!”
Well, then. You asked for the name of the actor who portrayed Marco. She smiled. “Adamo Ruggiero.” For once, you were wrong.
You happened to hear one of her friends say something about “claps from “Think””. You asked for him to repeat what he said.
“Well, we were just on an inspirational early morning breakfast binge. I just spent the last hour or so messing around with some drums I got from my parents’ records.”
You asked what kind of drum machine he used. “SP 1200. What else?”
You were blown away. You weren’t on the up and up as far as drum machines went, but you knew what the SP 1200 was capable of. Any drum transferred from vinyl onto the 1200 would sound so crisp, you could almost bite into it. You asked the guy if he did any rhyming.
“I’m a behind-the-boards kinda guy. What about you?” You simply said that you were an English major. “Well, then, you wanna make some music, Mr. Del Rossi?”
You thought about your World Civ test. Then you remembered that it was at 4:30 the following afternoon. You had time.
As you got out of your seat to sit with them, you almost fell over. The girl sitting across from you helped you regain your balance. “Bethany.” She smiled again. So did you.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Downey's "Classics" Presents: Max, Francine, And The Monkey
Apparently, the best way for a writer to make a name for himself today is to do various writing jobs that doubles as an advertisement for his blog until he is ready to write a novel, which pays more than a job writing for a magazine. Sure, the writer could just skip a step and write the novel right away, but that shit is difficult, and without something resembling a cultivated audience, it would arrive in bookstores to general apathy. And that's even if it makes it into stores.
So, the writer of this rarely-updated-but-not-bad blog is trying to get back into the swing of blogging. This requires putting up a post a day. Rather than write something off the top of his head, though, he is burning "back catalogue", or material he wrote for classes that would get underappreciated, because he is tired on this day. Below is a short screenplay written for a class, typed up in the 2 hours before it was due. Enjoy.
Max, Francine, and The Monkey
By John Downey
BLACK
FRANCINE
(V.O.)
I mean, it’s not as though I think that we can’t, you know, conceive, it’s just that…
MAX
(V.O.)
Well, we haven’t really tried, have we, honey.
FRANCINE
(V.O.)
Max, please don’t interrupt me.
MAX
(V.O.)
Doctor, it’s not as though my cannons aren’t ready to fire—but not at will, mind you.
FRANCINE
(V.O.)
We use protection every time.
MAX
(V.O.)
EVERY time.
SMASH CUT TO:
INT. DOCTOR’S OFFICE – DAY
Max is sitting to the left of Francine (on Francine’s right). Max is not an ugly man, but not gifted in the looks department, either. Francine is taller than Max is, even while sitting down, but has no other remarkable features. Both look to be in their early 30’s. They are facing the camera head-on.
FRANCINE
Max, I don’t think the doctor is interested in our sex life.
MAX
She might be.
FRANCINE
Max, don’t be ridiculous.
MAX
We’re here to get advice on having a baby. Sex makes babies, ergo, our sex life is very relevant, probably.
FRANCINE
I think she can be the judge of what she needs to know or not know.
MAX
Well, doctor?
ANGLE ON: Doctor Moore, an organized-looking woman in her 40’s.
DR. MOORE
So, the concern isn’t so much on making the baby as wondering if you have the capacity to take care of the baby?
Max and Francine agree.
DR. MOORE
Well, there are ways of determining if you are ready to have a child, though they certainly aren’t conventional. The most common technique we use is to give a special doll to teenagers to take care of for a week.
MAX
That could work.
DR. MOORE
I have a better solution, though.
FRANCINE
What’s that?
Dr. Moore claps her hands twice. Pierre, a monkey, walks in and jumps on Dr. Moore’s desk.
DR. MOORE
The best baby simulation, ever.
CUT TO:
INT. CAR DRIVING DOWN ROAD – DAY
Max is driving, Francine is reading from a piece of paper, and Pierre, dressed in snazzy diapers, is strapped into a child seat in the back. We see them through the windshield.
FRANCINE
(reading from paper) “Your monkey will not only simulate how your child will act during his—or her!—first year of life, but also give you glimpses into what to expect from his—or her!—teenage years!”
MAX
Get to the part where it says how much we’re being billed for this chimp.
FRANCINE
Max, c’mon. (continues reading) “Your monkey has been trained to communicate through a variety of techniques, including grunts—”
MAX
(grunts in disapproval)
FRANCINE
“Sign language—”
MAX
(while rubbing the side of his nose with his middle finger) Go on.
FRANCINE
Don’t think that I don’t see that. “…and he—or she!—can even talk to you through his—or her!—writing.”
MAX
What? You’re kidding me.
FRANCINE
No, it says so right here.
MAX
I have to see this. Do you have a pen and something to write on?
Francine takes a notepad and pen out of her purse and hands it to Pierre, who grabs it eagerly. Pierre writes something down, then hands it back to Francine.
MAX
Well? What does it say?
ANGLE ON: The notepad. There is a circle drawn on it.
FRANCINE
It says “oh”.
MAX
Honey, I think that’s a circle, not a letter.
ANGLE ON: Windshield shot.
FRANCINE
Oh.
MAX
Why would a monkey draw a circle?
FRANCINE
Maybe it means something to him, but we haven’t figured it out yet?
MAX
Yeah, right. What could the monkey be trying to tell us?
A few seconds pass. Suddenly, both of them start making gagging sounds and clutching their noses.
FRANCINE
(through coughs) Open the windows!
Max starts pounding on the “window open” buttons while Francine holds a handkerchief over her face. Pierre starts laughing maniacally.
CUT TO:
INT. HOUSE, KITCHEN – DAY
Max places Pierre on the kitchen table.
FRANCINE
(V.O.)
Remember, anywhere but the table! I don’t want him near where we eat!
Max lifts Pierre up.
MAX
(while placing Pierre on the kitchen counter) Do you think I’m completely stupid, honey?
FRANCINE
(V.O.)
I’m just making sure!
Francine walks in. She is wearing oversized rubber gloves, safety goggles, a dust mask, and a pair of raggedy, beaten-up jeans.
FRANCINE
Open it.
MAX
No, YOU open it while I hide in the basement.
FRANCINE
Open it, Max.
MAX
Honey, just thinking about “2 Girls 1 Cup” makes me feel dizzy, and if I throw up, that’s one more mess you have to clean up—
FRANCINE
FOR CHRISSAKES, OPEN IT, MAN!
Max takes a deep breath in and undoes Pierre’s diaper with a pair of metal cooking tongs.
ANGLE ON: between Pierre’s legs, facing Francine and Max. Max’s head briefly props into frame before he faints; a comically exaggerated sound effect should accompany Max hitting the floor.
FRANCINE
Let’s go, monkey boy.
Francine leans over Pierre, casting a shadow over him until the screen fades to black.
CUT TO:
INT. HOUSE, LIVING ROOM – NIGHT
Max is writing in a diary while an extended montage is playing. His words are spoken aloud to accompany each scene. First, it shows him writing on a poker table.
MAX
(V.O.)
Dear diary, it is now Day 7 of Operation French Monkey, and we can see light at the end of the tunnel.
CUT TO:
Max and Francine trying to get Pierre off of the top of their kitchen cabinet.
MAX
(V.O. CONT.)
The little bastard has showed us how difficult it is to raise a baby. Babies, it seems, are capable of getting anywhere.
CUT TO:
The refridgerator bursts open. Pierre jumps out holding two ketchup bottles, screaming with delight.
MAX
(V.O. CONT.)
They are also smarter than I used to give them credit for.
CUT TO:
Pierre is jumping up and down in front of Max, crying for something. Max gives him a notepad and a pen. Pierre writes down a “B” and starts pointing at his stomach. Max gives a “what the hell are you talking about” look, then Francine throws a banana to Pierre, who catches it and starts peeling it.
MAX
(V.O. CONT.)
My wife is a warrior. I have a newfound respect for her ability to keep her head in dangerous situations.
CUT TO:
Francine walks into the bathroom and finds all of her cosmetics in the bathtub, where Pierre is bathing while testing out Francine’s lipstick.
MAX
(V.O. CONT.)
I wasn’t there for the day that Pierre went through his transgender phase, but she told me it was one of the hardest experiences she has ever worked through. I’m sure she’s exaggerating, though.
CUT TO:
Pierre, wearing a dress with sunflowers on it and carrying a rolling pin, chases Francine, dressed in plain clothes, in a hallway, from the right side of the screen to the left side offscreen. A second passes, then Pierre, naked and bare-armed, runs from the left side of the screen to the right side, being chased by Francine, who is wearing a football helmet and holding a golf club.
CUT TO:
MAX
(V.O. CONT.)
I think she’s actually kind of sad that we’re going to have to give the monkey back tomorrow.
CUT TO:
Pierre jumps up and down on Francine’s back while she is sleeping. She checks the clock, which says 4:13 A.M., and then looks at Pierre. He gives her the middle finger, blows raspberries, and then runs out of the room.
MAX
(V.O. CONT.)
That’s not to say that I haven’t pulled some weight, though.
CUT TO:
Max and Pierre are on the couch watching wrestling.
MAX
(V.O. CONT.)
I would want my son to grow up to be a cultured adult, so I showed Pierre some of the most graceful and powerful ballet in the world.
At this point, we see a shot on the TV of a man flexing his biceps while sitting on another man’s face. Max and Pierre both start laughing at the sight.
MAX
(V.O. CONT.)
I just hope he takes something away from what I showed him.
CUT TO:
Pierre sits on Francine while she is sleeping, flexing his muscles like the man on the TV. Francine quickly wakes up, at which point he gives her the finger again. Francine wakes Max up. Max gives Pierre a high-five, then Pierre blows raspberries in Francine’s face and runs out of the room. Max passes out again before Francine can say anything.
MAX
(V.O. CONT.)
Sometimes, he acts so much like a human that I forget that he’s a monkey.
CUT TO:
Max enters the bathroom and finds Pierre on the toilet, reading an old issue of Penthouse. Max covers his eyes and quickly exits.
MAX
(V.O. CONT.)
Tomorrow, we’ll learn for sure if Francine and I are ready to have a real child. Until then, I’m going to make Pierre’s last night at home a memorable one.
CUT TO:
Max finishes writing in his diary, then picks up a few cards.
MAX
You ready to ante up, kid?
ANGLE ON: Pierre, who is sitting right beside him, holding some cards.
MAX
Good, because we need to win my pants back this round. There’s a draft in here.
Max looks at his hand and smiles.
FADE TO BLACK
MAX
(V.O.)
It was a pleasure to take care of Pierre for a week, even though he made us lose a game of strip Rummy to Francine and her sister.
FRANCINE
(V.O.)
Oh, like that was the worst thing that happened this week. Remember when he got the runs on Monday and the bathroom smelt like rotten banana for the rest of the day?
MAX
(V.O.)
Well, he was healthy enough at the end of the day to watch some cultural programming that night, so all’s well that ends well.
FRANCINE
(V.O.)
He got into everything we didn’t hatch down! The fridge, my makeup, the top of the cabinet—
MAX
(V.O.)
All learning experiences, Francine.
SMASH CUT TO:
INT. DR. MOORE’S OFFICE – DAY
Shot of Max and Francine. Francine is holding Pierre in her lap. Pierre is sucking on his thumb. This shot should look like the same shot at the beginning.
FRANCINE
He managed to completely unplug the toilet from the floor. I didn’t even know you could do that.
MAX
Well, now you know.
FRANCINE
It wouldn’t have killed you to not leave on Wednesday?
MAX
I had business to attend to, it was planned out months in advance, I’M SORRY, and it sounded like you got through it easily enough.
FRANCINE
(grunts in displeasure)
MAX
So, Doctor Moore, what do you think?
ANGLE ON: Dr. Moore. She claps her hands two times, and Pierre jumps on top of her desk. She starts examining Pierre.
DR. MOORE
Well, the wind viscosity of the triangular bistro shows abnormal, but acceptable, variations in the western hemisphere of Jimmy Buffett’s eyebrow.
ANGLE ON: Max and Francine. They look confused.
MAX
Okay…
ANGLE ON: Dr. Moore. She continues examining Pierre.
DR. MOORE
There is a surgical hemoglobin within the 5th triceratops that looks very raccoon to me. It could be water buffalo, but it looks raccoon to me. I won’t be able to tell for sure without a thorough schenectady.
ANGLE ON: Max and Francine.
FRANCINE
(whispering) What the hell is she talking about?
MAX
(whispering) She hasn’t said “no” yet, which is a good thing for now.
ANGLE ON: Dr. Moore continues examining Pierre.
DR. MOORE
Let’s check the 19th floor…good, no 19th floor OR Miss Zarves. Common parenting mistake. Glacier boxing pillowcase nerfherder cartwheel Zimbabwe. Bibbity bobbity boo, your mom lives in a zoo. Umbrella!
ANGLE ON: Door flies open. Two bald men in black suits walk in.
BALDIE #1
Rachel Karen Beadeaux, aka Dr. Alaska Rosemary Moore, you are under arrest for impersonating a licensed medical physician, bringing an illegal monkey into this country, and being out of your fucking mind.
DR. MOORE
Gentlemen, gentlemen, calm down. I can explain everything.
Dr. Moore jumps out of an open window. All rush to the window and look down.
ANGLE ON: Dr. Moore fell two feet onto soft grass face-first.
ANGLE ON: All step away from the window.
MAX
Okay, that simultaneously explained everything and made no sense at all.
BALDIE #2
That’s what crazy people do, sir.
Baldie #1 walks outside to put Dr. Moore in handcuffs.
FRANCINCE
So, what’s going to happen to Pierre?
BALDIE #2
He’s going to have to undergo some testing. If it turns out that he’s rabid, we’ll have to kill him. If he isn’t, we’ll put him in the best facility we can offer, where he can fulfill all of his monkey desires. He’s been through a lot.
MAX
Can we keep him?
BALDIE #2
Sure, if you have a couple thousand dollars to spare.
MAX
I’ll talk with my wife about it.
FRANCINE
So how are we supposed to know if we’re ready to have a baby or not?
BALDIE #2
That’s easy.
Long pause.
MAX
…Well?
BALDIE #2
What, are you waiting for me to tell you?
MAX
YES!
BALDIE #2
Well, I can’t. The only two people who know if they’re ready to have a baby or not are the prospective parents. They can feel it in their gut.
MAX
Can you feel it, babe?
FRANCINE
No…wait, yes, I do! I thought it was indigestion.
BALDIE #2
Then there you go.
Max and Francine walk to the door.
MAX
Why didn’t we think to trust our gut in the first place?
FRANCINE
Because your gut almost got you married to Bertha Wainwright, remember?
They leave. Baldie #2 walks over to Pierre.
BALDIE #2
So, what’s your name?
Pierre blows raspberries in his face and gives him the finger. Baldie #2 wipes the spit off of his face.
BALDIE #2
Ah, kids.
THE END
So, the writer of this rarely-updated-but-not-bad blog is trying to get back into the swing of blogging. This requires putting up a post a day. Rather than write something off the top of his head, though, he is burning "back catalogue", or material he wrote for classes that would get underappreciated, because he is tired on this day. Below is a short screenplay written for a class, typed up in the 2 hours before it was due. Enjoy.
Max, Francine, and The Monkey
By John Downey
BLACK
FRANCINE
(V.O.)
I mean, it’s not as though I think that we can’t, you know, conceive, it’s just that…
MAX
(V.O.)
Well, we haven’t really tried, have we, honey.
FRANCINE
(V.O.)
Max, please don’t interrupt me.
MAX
(V.O.)
Doctor, it’s not as though my cannons aren’t ready to fire—but not at will, mind you.
FRANCINE
(V.O.)
We use protection every time.
MAX
(V.O.)
EVERY time.
SMASH CUT TO:
INT. DOCTOR’S OFFICE – DAY
Max is sitting to the left of Francine (on Francine’s right). Max is not an ugly man, but not gifted in the looks department, either. Francine is taller than Max is, even while sitting down, but has no other remarkable features. Both look to be in their early 30’s. They are facing the camera head-on.
FRANCINE
Max, I don’t think the doctor is interested in our sex life.
MAX
She might be.
FRANCINE
Max, don’t be ridiculous.
MAX
We’re here to get advice on having a baby. Sex makes babies, ergo, our sex life is very relevant, probably.
FRANCINE
I think she can be the judge of what she needs to know or not know.
MAX
Well, doctor?
ANGLE ON: Doctor Moore, an organized-looking woman in her 40’s.
DR. MOORE
So, the concern isn’t so much on making the baby as wondering if you have the capacity to take care of the baby?
Max and Francine agree.
DR. MOORE
Well, there are ways of determining if you are ready to have a child, though they certainly aren’t conventional. The most common technique we use is to give a special doll to teenagers to take care of for a week.
MAX
That could work.
DR. MOORE
I have a better solution, though.
FRANCINE
What’s that?
Dr. Moore claps her hands twice. Pierre, a monkey, walks in and jumps on Dr. Moore’s desk.
DR. MOORE
The best baby simulation, ever.
CUT TO:
INT. CAR DRIVING DOWN ROAD – DAY
Max is driving, Francine is reading from a piece of paper, and Pierre, dressed in snazzy diapers, is strapped into a child seat in the back. We see them through the windshield.
FRANCINE
(reading from paper) “Your monkey will not only simulate how your child will act during his—or her!—first year of life, but also give you glimpses into what to expect from his—or her!—teenage years!”
MAX
Get to the part where it says how much we’re being billed for this chimp.
FRANCINE
Max, c’mon. (continues reading) “Your monkey has been trained to communicate through a variety of techniques, including grunts—”
MAX
(grunts in disapproval)
FRANCINE
“Sign language—”
MAX
(while rubbing the side of his nose with his middle finger) Go on.
FRANCINE
Don’t think that I don’t see that. “…and he—or she!—can even talk to you through his—or her!—writing.”
MAX
What? You’re kidding me.
FRANCINE
No, it says so right here.
MAX
I have to see this. Do you have a pen and something to write on?
Francine takes a notepad and pen out of her purse and hands it to Pierre, who grabs it eagerly. Pierre writes something down, then hands it back to Francine.
MAX
Well? What does it say?
ANGLE ON: The notepad. There is a circle drawn on it.
FRANCINE
It says “oh”.
MAX
Honey, I think that’s a circle, not a letter.
ANGLE ON: Windshield shot.
FRANCINE
Oh.
MAX
Why would a monkey draw a circle?
FRANCINE
Maybe it means something to him, but we haven’t figured it out yet?
MAX
Yeah, right. What could the monkey be trying to tell us?
A few seconds pass. Suddenly, both of them start making gagging sounds and clutching their noses.
FRANCINE
(through coughs) Open the windows!
Max starts pounding on the “window open” buttons while Francine holds a handkerchief over her face. Pierre starts laughing maniacally.
CUT TO:
INT. HOUSE, KITCHEN – DAY
Max places Pierre on the kitchen table.
FRANCINE
(V.O.)
Remember, anywhere but the table! I don’t want him near where we eat!
Max lifts Pierre up.
MAX
(while placing Pierre on the kitchen counter) Do you think I’m completely stupid, honey?
FRANCINE
(V.O.)
I’m just making sure!
Francine walks in. She is wearing oversized rubber gloves, safety goggles, a dust mask, and a pair of raggedy, beaten-up jeans.
FRANCINE
Open it.
MAX
No, YOU open it while I hide in the basement.
FRANCINE
Open it, Max.
MAX
Honey, just thinking about “2 Girls 1 Cup” makes me feel dizzy, and if I throw up, that’s one more mess you have to clean up—
FRANCINE
FOR CHRISSAKES, OPEN IT, MAN!
Max takes a deep breath in and undoes Pierre’s diaper with a pair of metal cooking tongs.
ANGLE ON: between Pierre’s legs, facing Francine and Max. Max’s head briefly props into frame before he faints; a comically exaggerated sound effect should accompany Max hitting the floor.
FRANCINE
Let’s go, monkey boy.
Francine leans over Pierre, casting a shadow over him until the screen fades to black.
CUT TO:
INT. HOUSE, LIVING ROOM – NIGHT
Max is writing in a diary while an extended montage is playing. His words are spoken aloud to accompany each scene. First, it shows him writing on a poker table.
MAX
(V.O.)
Dear diary, it is now Day 7 of Operation French Monkey, and we can see light at the end of the tunnel.
CUT TO:
Max and Francine trying to get Pierre off of the top of their kitchen cabinet.
MAX
(V.O. CONT.)
The little bastard has showed us how difficult it is to raise a baby. Babies, it seems, are capable of getting anywhere.
CUT TO:
The refridgerator bursts open. Pierre jumps out holding two ketchup bottles, screaming with delight.
MAX
(V.O. CONT.)
They are also smarter than I used to give them credit for.
CUT TO:
Pierre is jumping up and down in front of Max, crying for something. Max gives him a notepad and a pen. Pierre writes down a “B” and starts pointing at his stomach. Max gives a “what the hell are you talking about” look, then Francine throws a banana to Pierre, who catches it and starts peeling it.
MAX
(V.O. CONT.)
My wife is a warrior. I have a newfound respect for her ability to keep her head in dangerous situations.
CUT TO:
Francine walks into the bathroom and finds all of her cosmetics in the bathtub, where Pierre is bathing while testing out Francine’s lipstick.
MAX
(V.O. CONT.)
I wasn’t there for the day that Pierre went through his transgender phase, but she told me it was one of the hardest experiences she has ever worked through. I’m sure she’s exaggerating, though.
CUT TO:
Pierre, wearing a dress with sunflowers on it and carrying a rolling pin, chases Francine, dressed in plain clothes, in a hallway, from the right side of the screen to the left side offscreen. A second passes, then Pierre, naked and bare-armed, runs from the left side of the screen to the right side, being chased by Francine, who is wearing a football helmet and holding a golf club.
CUT TO:
MAX
(V.O. CONT.)
I think she’s actually kind of sad that we’re going to have to give the monkey back tomorrow.
CUT TO:
Pierre jumps up and down on Francine’s back while she is sleeping. She checks the clock, which says 4:13 A.M., and then looks at Pierre. He gives her the middle finger, blows raspberries, and then runs out of the room.
MAX
(V.O. CONT.)
That’s not to say that I haven’t pulled some weight, though.
CUT TO:
Max and Pierre are on the couch watching wrestling.
MAX
(V.O. CONT.)
I would want my son to grow up to be a cultured adult, so I showed Pierre some of the most graceful and powerful ballet in the world.
At this point, we see a shot on the TV of a man flexing his biceps while sitting on another man’s face. Max and Pierre both start laughing at the sight.
MAX
(V.O. CONT.)
I just hope he takes something away from what I showed him.
CUT TO:
Pierre sits on Francine while she is sleeping, flexing his muscles like the man on the TV. Francine quickly wakes up, at which point he gives her the finger again. Francine wakes Max up. Max gives Pierre a high-five, then Pierre blows raspberries in Francine’s face and runs out of the room. Max passes out again before Francine can say anything.
MAX
(V.O. CONT.)
Sometimes, he acts so much like a human that I forget that he’s a monkey.
CUT TO:
Max enters the bathroom and finds Pierre on the toilet, reading an old issue of Penthouse. Max covers his eyes and quickly exits.
MAX
(V.O. CONT.)
Tomorrow, we’ll learn for sure if Francine and I are ready to have a real child. Until then, I’m going to make Pierre’s last night at home a memorable one.
CUT TO:
Max finishes writing in his diary, then picks up a few cards.
MAX
You ready to ante up, kid?
ANGLE ON: Pierre, who is sitting right beside him, holding some cards.
MAX
Good, because we need to win my pants back this round. There’s a draft in here.
Max looks at his hand and smiles.
FADE TO BLACK
MAX
(V.O.)
It was a pleasure to take care of Pierre for a week, even though he made us lose a game of strip Rummy to Francine and her sister.
FRANCINE
(V.O.)
Oh, like that was the worst thing that happened this week. Remember when he got the runs on Monday and the bathroom smelt like rotten banana for the rest of the day?
MAX
(V.O.)
Well, he was healthy enough at the end of the day to watch some cultural programming that night, so all’s well that ends well.
FRANCINE
(V.O.)
He got into everything we didn’t hatch down! The fridge, my makeup, the top of the cabinet—
MAX
(V.O.)
All learning experiences, Francine.
SMASH CUT TO:
INT. DR. MOORE’S OFFICE – DAY
Shot of Max and Francine. Francine is holding Pierre in her lap. Pierre is sucking on his thumb. This shot should look like the same shot at the beginning.
FRANCINE
He managed to completely unplug the toilet from the floor. I didn’t even know you could do that.
MAX
Well, now you know.
FRANCINE
It wouldn’t have killed you to not leave on Wednesday?
MAX
I had business to attend to, it was planned out months in advance, I’M SORRY, and it sounded like you got through it easily enough.
FRANCINE
(grunts in displeasure)
MAX
So, Doctor Moore, what do you think?
ANGLE ON: Dr. Moore. She claps her hands two times, and Pierre jumps on top of her desk. She starts examining Pierre.
DR. MOORE
Well, the wind viscosity of the triangular bistro shows abnormal, but acceptable, variations in the western hemisphere of Jimmy Buffett’s eyebrow.
ANGLE ON: Max and Francine. They look confused.
MAX
Okay…
ANGLE ON: Dr. Moore. She continues examining Pierre.
DR. MOORE
There is a surgical hemoglobin within the 5th triceratops that looks very raccoon to me. It could be water buffalo, but it looks raccoon to me. I won’t be able to tell for sure without a thorough schenectady.
ANGLE ON: Max and Francine.
FRANCINE
(whispering) What the hell is she talking about?
MAX
(whispering) She hasn’t said “no” yet, which is a good thing for now.
ANGLE ON: Dr. Moore continues examining Pierre.
DR. MOORE
Let’s check the 19th floor…good, no 19th floor OR Miss Zarves. Common parenting mistake. Glacier boxing pillowcase nerfherder cartwheel Zimbabwe. Bibbity bobbity boo, your mom lives in a zoo. Umbrella!
ANGLE ON: Door flies open. Two bald men in black suits walk in.
BALDIE #1
Rachel Karen Beadeaux, aka Dr. Alaska Rosemary Moore, you are under arrest for impersonating a licensed medical physician, bringing an illegal monkey into this country, and being out of your fucking mind.
DR. MOORE
Gentlemen, gentlemen, calm down. I can explain everything.
Dr. Moore jumps out of an open window. All rush to the window and look down.
ANGLE ON: Dr. Moore fell two feet onto soft grass face-first.
ANGLE ON: All step away from the window.
MAX
Okay, that simultaneously explained everything and made no sense at all.
BALDIE #2
That’s what crazy people do, sir.
Baldie #1 walks outside to put Dr. Moore in handcuffs.
FRANCINCE
So, what’s going to happen to Pierre?
BALDIE #2
He’s going to have to undergo some testing. If it turns out that he’s rabid, we’ll have to kill him. If he isn’t, we’ll put him in the best facility we can offer, where he can fulfill all of his monkey desires. He’s been through a lot.
MAX
Can we keep him?
BALDIE #2
Sure, if you have a couple thousand dollars to spare.
MAX
I’ll talk with my wife about it.
FRANCINE
So how are we supposed to know if we’re ready to have a baby or not?
BALDIE #2
That’s easy.
Long pause.
MAX
…Well?
BALDIE #2
What, are you waiting for me to tell you?
MAX
YES!
BALDIE #2
Well, I can’t. The only two people who know if they’re ready to have a baby or not are the prospective parents. They can feel it in their gut.
MAX
Can you feel it, babe?
FRANCINE
No…wait, yes, I do! I thought it was indigestion.
BALDIE #2
Then there you go.
Max and Francine walk to the door.
MAX
Why didn’t we think to trust our gut in the first place?
FRANCINE
Because your gut almost got you married to Bertha Wainwright, remember?
They leave. Baldie #2 walks over to Pierre.
BALDIE #2
So, what’s your name?
Pierre blows raspberries in his face and gives him the finger. Baldie #2 wipes the spit off of his face.
BALDIE #2
Ah, kids.
THE END
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Extended Review of “A Lion’s Tale: Around The World In Spandex”
(Book by Chris Jericho, Review by John Downey)
My worries about this book being a ghostwritten autobiography, due to the presence of a second author, were addressed right away in Peter Thomas Fornatale’s foreword: “First, I want to say that this book is not an “as told to” autobiography. My role was to brainstorm ideas and help with organization and structure. The voice is 100% Chris Jericho.” That’s certainly one way to cut to the chase, though the next 500 pages make that foreword seem redundant. Chris Jericho has a vibrant, distinct personality, has wrestled over the world, won gold in the 3 largest wrestling organizations in North America, and has probably forgotten more about the business than most people will ever know (and still knows quite a bit, as his recent ladder match with Shawn Michaels was named Match Of The Year by Wrestling Observer). The only way that the story of Chris Jericho’s life could be boring would be if there was a concentrated effort to bore the audience. As it is, this is the best autobiography of a wrestler I have ever read, and I’ve read most of them.
Jericho (born Chris Irvine, son of a noteworthy hockey player named Ted Irvine) was drawn to wrestling as a child, first from attending American Wrestling Association (AWA) events in Winnipeg. Jericho found a connection with the smaller wrestlers who would have to do something extra to stand out in what is usually an art for the “big boys”. The man who made Jericho consider becoming a wrestler, though, was Owen Hart, who was Jericho’s size (if Jericho made a concentrated effort to get in shape), lived in a town not far from where Jericho lived (Calgary), and was quickly becoming one of the biggest names in Stampede Wrestling (whose best talent eventually ended up in the WWF). Seeing Owen Hart become successful convinced Jericho that he could be successful, too.
Jericho trained in the Hart Brothers Camp in Calgary, though Jericho makes sure to point out that training to be a wrestler is nowhere close to the experience that he thought it would be. For instance, though there were several successful wrestling Harts, only Keith Hart showed up for a few sessions, and those were usually marked by him torturing students who had the gall to stand out in their class. Also, there was only one other student in Jericho’s class who seemed to stand a chance at making a career out of wrestling, Lance Storm (who went on to become a respected name in the business in his own right). Jericho was under the impression that he would be working with like-minded individuals, but he ended up sharing class time with hillbillies and freaks. Even the training itself was incomplete. Jericho and his classmates were taught how to take falls and perform impressive athletic feats, but he wasn’t taught how to put them together into a logical wrestling match, which is something that, as I understand it, goes hand in hand with learning how to fall properly in most wrestling schools today.
After he gained a lot of experience wrestling in high school gyms, armories, and birthday parties (seriously), Jericho gained employment in Mexico. After being taught for months how to take convincing falls and draw people into a match, Jericho found that most of what he learned didn’t apply in Mexico, where lucha libre was the popular wrestling dish. Whereas Jericho was taught how to absorb high-impact moves, lucha libre involved wrestlers taking lots of rolls, flipping each other using one hand, and wrestlers dancing around for no reason to the delight of the fans. It wasn’t uncommon for matches to have multiple falls to a finish, or multiple referees, or for matches to end when a wrestler did an eye-catching dive onto another wrestler located outside of the ring—which is a rule that doesn’t apply to any other wrestling organization that I’ve ever heard of. Jericho, taking the name Corazon de Leon, became a sex symbol through his good looks and natural charisma, which upset a wrestler named Vampiro, who was easily the most popular wrestler in Mexico at the time whose position as such was never in any danger. Vampiro gave Jericho intentionally bad advice (none of which Jericho listened to), told Jericho’s employer that Jericho was unhappy with his pay and working conditions, and often lied about how he broke into the business. (This isn’t the first time that I’ve read about wrestlers having a problem with Vampiro. In fact, so much word of his misdeeds has gotten around that he has essentially been blackballed from most wrestling organizations in North America, with the only ones that use him being desperate for talent.) Jericho talks about how he enjoyed being the bad guy, as it was easier to make people hate him than to make people like him. He was so good at pissing off crowds that in the course of one match not only did somebody throw a bottle filled with fresh piss at him, but another person also pulled a gun. In most cities in Mexico, though, Jericho was well-liked, and became a solid performer, good enough to hold the NWA Middleweight Championship for 11 months.
Jericho met two close friends in Mexico, Art Barr and Eddie Guerrero, though both gave him a cold reception at first. Jericho broke the ice with Art Barr by accident, when they happened to see two people have comically absurd and disgusting sex. They had a lot in common, including missing their families more than most of “the boys” and having similar tastes in music. Barr was at the top of his game, on track to possibly become one of the most popular wrestlers in the world, when he suddenly died in his sleep. Jericho was staying in Barr’s room (at Barr’s insistence) when he heard of Barr’s death, and Jericho’s description of the minutes after hearing the news are heart-wrenching. Not long after Barr’s death, the peso crashed, and Jericho, who found himself working for a third of his usual salary in a place that reminded him of his dead best friend, sought employment elsewhere.
Jericho ended up working in Germany, where a style of wrestling called “catch” had caught on. It’s a style of wrestling that I wasn’t familiar with, and Jericho doesn’t do the best job of explaining it. (As I understand it, German fans were conditioned to accept matches that actually looked real. To this end, matches usually featured a lot of jockeying for position and attempts at submissions. Moves off of the top rope and other theatrics didn’t fit in this style.) Jericho’s first match in Germany sets off a habit that he calls “The Jericho Curse”: his first match in any promotion will suck. Jericho’s problem was that he tried to make himself look good in the match, as opposed to working to making the match better. When he figured this out, he started having great matches, though he doesn’t go into detail on any of them. He expresses gratitude for the opportunity he received in Germany, but when he got a chance to work for a bigger paycheck in front of larger audiences, he jumped at it.
Jericho was brought in to Smoky Mountain Wrestling, a southern wrestling promotion, by its owner, Jim Cornette, who had also made a career out of being a wrestling manager. Jericho’s first face-to-face conversation with Cornette let Jericho know that, even though he was working in North America again, Smoky Mountain was going to be just as strange as working in Mexico and Germany, as it took several moments for Jericho to figure out what Cornette was saying. (Cornette’s literal words: “Jeet yet?” Translation: “Did you eat yet?”) Fortunately, Jericho was working for one of the smartest men in the wrestling business, so, for once, Jericho didn’t have to worry about trying to find the midpoint between “what the booker is saying should happen” and “what I should do to make myself look good”, as they were often the same thing.
Cornette put Jericho in a tag team with his Hart Brothers training buddy, Lance Storm, and dubbed the duo the Thrillseekers. They were introduced through vignettes that made them look wild and cool, though Jericho mocks them as he describes them, and were immediately put into a feud with Well Dunn, who needed a good excuse to be kicked out of SMW, as they were going to be joining the WWF’s roster soon. (Though Jericho never explicitly states this, Cornette’s decision to have Jericho and Storm team up said a lot about Cornette’s faith in them, as Cornette had managed some of the greatest tag teams in wrestling history, including the Midnight Express. I gather that the only reason why the Thrillseekers didn’t win the SMW Tag Team Championship was because they didn’t need the titles in order to become popular.) Jericho was put off by the way that SMW engaged wrestlers with the fans. During intermission, wrestlers would work the concession stands, signing autographs and hawking merchandise. Jericho saw this as being beneath him, as wrestlers are supposed to have a mystique about them, and that mystique was destroyed when you sold bandanas and promotional pictures of yourself directly to the fans. In the book, though Jericho acknowledges that this was a terrible attitude to have, since he and Lance were the highest paid workers on SMW’s roster and should have just done as they were told in order to show their gratitude. Jericho also says that this was something that SMW’s audience liked, as they preferred their wrestlers to be accessible figures rather than children of Olympus, and that if Jericho had simply done his job, the Thrillseekers might have replaced the Rock And Roll Express as the most popular tag team in the south.
Cornette was pleased with Jericho’s work, and told him that the WWF was interested in hiring him. When he learned of the details of the job, though (basically, he was to be a colorful character who lost most of his matches), Jericho, along with Lance, took a job in Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling in Japan instead. By now, Jericho was used to expecting the unexpected, but he still wasn’t ready for what Japan had to offer. Wrestling match results were published in Baseball Magazine. He found a sports drink called Pocari Sweat. Most toilets in wrestling arenas were little more than holes in the ground.
FMW was strange, too. It employed boxers, men willing to set themselves on fire, and men in panda suits. It employed wrestlers, too, but they seemed to be the exception rather than the rule. Jericho’s stint with FMW was a bust, as he found himself waiting for future bookings and not getting them. When FMW did a tour (series of wrestling shows) based around tag team matches, they didn’t call Jericho. Eventually, FMW called and requested his services, but Jericho had already found a new home in Wrestle and Romance, a rival Japanese organization. (That name doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense to me. The only possible explanation I have for it is that the “Romance” half is in reference to the splintering politics and fantastic fighting techniques as described in “Romance Of The Three Kingdoms”. If that’s the case, though, why name a Japanese wrestling organization after a piece of classic Chinese literature? Even worse, the organization later changed its name to Wrestle Association R, which makes even less sense.)
Jericho had a much easier time making his name in WAR once he got accustomed to the Japanese style of wrestling, where gaining respect was based more on how hard a match was fought than if you actually won the match. For example, when Jericho wrestled an imposing man named Haku, Jericho threw punches and kicks that were much stiffer than most wrestlers would be willing to throw or take. It made sense in the context of the match, though, since Haku had a well-earned reputation of being a tough guy (indeed, several of his peers have told of his tendency to fend off half a dozen drunkards in a bar without breaking a sweat), and in order for Jericho to look like he had a chance in the match, he would need to go the extra mile. Jericho was also allowed to kick out of Haku’s finishing move, the powerbomb (which resembles a piledriver, but instead of planting the opponent on his head, the “attacking” wrestler throws his opponent onto the ground backfirst), which elevated Jericho’s profile despite losing the match soon after taking the move.
After becoming a star in Japan, Jericho worked for Extreme Championship Wrestling, an exceptionally well-booked Philadelphia-based promotion. ECW, even at its peak, rarely drew over 1,000 fans to its events, and its owner, Paul Heyman, was known for giving checks that bounced more often than not, but ECW’s influence was felt throughout the business, as its best ideas were used by larger wrestling promotions (ECW’s Sandman, for instance, was very similar to the WWF’s later Stone Cold Steve Austin), its best workers usually found themselves working for big money elsewhere, and its fan base were a creative, angry, and loyal bunch of individuals—the same people could be seen in the same seats at every ECW event (no matter where they held shows), providing weapons to the wrestlers, and delivering thoughtful chants, such as “She’s a crack whore!” (to a dastardly female), “You suck dick!”, and “Do the job, Dean, do the job!” (towards Shane Douglas, who, as Dean Douglas in the WWF, was told to lose matches in situations that made no storyline sense whatsoever). In short, getting over in ECW would get you far.
In the wrestling business, Paul Heyman was a strange figure. He would often book the shows while they were in progress (Jericho informed Heyman that Mikey Whipwreck couldn’t be in the 3rd match of the night because he was in the match that was going on right now), use grievance fares to fly in talent for cheap, and never edited out any mistakes that his performers made in a match before it aired on TV. He would be the first man that any wrestler saw when they came back from the ring, and he would always give his employees compliments, which was a big no-no in the business, since wrestlers usually were full of themselves already. His instincts for the business were on par with Cornette’s. The only difference is that Cornette got an opportunity to exhibit it, while Heyman, through ECW, made his impact from scratch. Everyone on an ECW show had their place, even the worst performers. For example, Heyman brought in a guy named 911. He was a big guy with natural charisma, but he couldn’t, you know, “wrestle,” not even in the WWF sense of the word. To work around this, Heyman would have 911 walk out during deliberately-juvenile happenings (a Santa Claus appearance, for instance) and chokeslam everyone in sight. Through a steady stream of use, 911 became one of the most popular guys on the roster, despite rarely actually competing in a match.
Heyman’s ideas for Jericho were equally genius. First, Heyman promoted Jericho through a series of vignettes on the ECW TV show, constantly referring to him as the “Last Survivor of Stu Hart’s Dungeon”. Then, in one of his first matches in ECW, Jericho was allowed to suplex Taz, who rarely ever left his feet, let alone get suplexed. (Taz is another example of Heyman’s booking genius, as Taz was booked to be the most dominating man in the world despite standing at only 5’9’’ and being towered over by most of the fans.) Jericho wasn’t allowed to beat Taz, though, as Taz gave Jericho a suplex that was so vicious, it “knocked him out”, making Jericho look good in defeat while making Taz look like a killer.
It didn’t take long for other wrestling organization to take notice of Jericho, as WCW’s Eric Bischoff quickly offered Jericho employment in his company (though, to be fair, Bischoff was making that offer to anybody with a pair of boots, as he wanted to lock up as much talent as he could before Vince McMahon did). Jericho agreed, and said he would start working for Bischoff as soon as he was done with his scheduled ECW dates. When Jericho told Heyman that he was going to work for WCW, though, Heyman told Jericho that he wanted Jericho to win the ECW World Television Championship before he left. Seeing as how Jericho was being paid for each show, and had no contract with Heyman, there was nothing legally stopping Jericho from leaving ECW with the belt around his waist, but Jericho agreed to Heyman’s plan, winning the title and then losing it shortly afterwards. (Jericho expresses confusion over this turn of events, wondering why Heyman did him this favor. It should be noted, though, that Paul Heyman hated WCW, and constantly took potshots at its bookers and performers. Heyman had done some great work for the promotion for chump change, and Bill Watts, who was running WCW at the time, treated Heyman and his friends like crap. On WWE’s “Bloodsport: ECW’s Most Violent Matches” DVD, Heyman gleefully states (I’m paraphrasing here, as I don’t have my copy with me), “Eric Bischoff did NOT ‘discover’ Chris Jericho. In fact, the VERY FIRST TITLE that he ever held in the United States was the ECW World Television Championship.” I’m guessing that Heyman arranged for Jericho to win the belt in case Jericho became a star in WCW, just so he could say, “I got there first.”)
The first time he called WCW’s offices to try to work out a long-term contract, Jericho was told that he would have to have a tryout match. This, despite already being told that he had a job. Welcome to WCW.
Jericho’s time spent working for WCW did more to kill his interest in wrestling than anything else in his career. His colleagues would get hostile if Jericho did something as unforgivable as introduce himself or (gasp!) give a compliment. His first match on TV ended in a double count-out when his opponent missed a dive on the outside and Jericho checked on his health rather than take advantage, which was meant to make him look noble but (and Jericho predicted this the second he was told of the finish) it actually made him look like a moron. The head booker, Kevin Sullivan, told Jericho to stop caring so much about his work (Ric Flair, upon hearing this, told Jericho to do the exact opposite). The only bright spot in Jericho’s early tenure was that WCW had a working relationship with New Japan Pro Wrestling, one of the largest wrestling organizations in Japan, and with no plans for Jericho, WCW sent him to Japan. New Japan was so pleased with his work that tentative plans were made to put the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship, one of the most prestigious belts in the world, on Jericho when WCW put the kibosh on those plans and made him return to America.
It wasn’t until Jericho was allowed to be a bad guy that Jericho found success in WCW. While the NWO group had made the idea of a cool bad guy seem fashionable, Jericho decided to be a chickenshit asshole instead. He called his opponents by incorrect name (he once referred to Booker T as “Tooker B”), he cut lengthy inane promos in which he gave himself countless nicknames, and he would exaggerate his Canadian accent. He became popular enough to win the WCW Cruiserweight Championship, though that isn’t as big of a deal as it may sound, as the belt didn’t mean much.
Jericho also engaged in a feud with Bill Goldberg, who had been on a long winning streak at the time. Jericho would call out Goldberg, only to easily defeat a midget dressed to look like him. When Goldberg didn’t show up to the arena, Jericho would challenge him to a match, have the referee count to 10, and claimed that he won by count-out. Fans (including myself) enjoyed the feud, since Jericho was entertaining in his role, and there seemed to be a lot of money to be had in seeing Goldberg beat the snot out of Jericho. Goldberg vs. Jericho never happened, though, since they couldn’t agree on the terms. Bischoff, Goldberg, and Hulk Hogan thought that Jericho should lose to Goldberg on free TV. Jericho argued that Goldberg vs. Jericho should have been put on PPV. (Hogan later told Jericho that he admired Jericho for standing up for himself, because Jericho was right. I can’t recall any other instance in which Hogan admitted that he was wrong, so props there, I guess.) After several weeks of build, the feud was ended without a proper showdown (though they did have a disappointing match in WWE), which is when Jericho started looking for employment in the WWF.
The book ends right before Jericho debuts for the WWF, leaving enough material for a second book, since Jericho’s best days happened in the WWF. With the book being 500+ pages long, I had to omit Jericho’s descriptions of bowling while taking sleeping pills, getting high on GHB at one of the most prestigious Japanese wrestling events, and his first sexual experience, among other lovely stories. I’ve learned more about the wrestling business from reading this book than from Mick Foley’s 3 autobiographies or Freddie Blassie’s book (which is saying a lot, since I think the world of those books). It’s also funny throughout, which makes it easy to read. Between the plain facts of Jericho’s career, the strange stories that he brings up (Cornette ends up threatening some Dairy Queen employees), and Jericho’s running commentary, I have to recommend this book. Even people who hate wrestling will like it.
My worries about this book being a ghostwritten autobiography, due to the presence of a second author, were addressed right away in Peter Thomas Fornatale’s foreword: “First, I want to say that this book is not an “as told to” autobiography. My role was to brainstorm ideas and help with organization and structure. The voice is 100% Chris Jericho.” That’s certainly one way to cut to the chase, though the next 500 pages make that foreword seem redundant. Chris Jericho has a vibrant, distinct personality, has wrestled over the world, won gold in the 3 largest wrestling organizations in North America, and has probably forgotten more about the business than most people will ever know (and still knows quite a bit, as his recent ladder match with Shawn Michaels was named Match Of The Year by Wrestling Observer). The only way that the story of Chris Jericho’s life could be boring would be if there was a concentrated effort to bore the audience. As it is, this is the best autobiography of a wrestler I have ever read, and I’ve read most of them.
Jericho (born Chris Irvine, son of a noteworthy hockey player named Ted Irvine) was drawn to wrestling as a child, first from attending American Wrestling Association (AWA) events in Winnipeg. Jericho found a connection with the smaller wrestlers who would have to do something extra to stand out in what is usually an art for the “big boys”. The man who made Jericho consider becoming a wrestler, though, was Owen Hart, who was Jericho’s size (if Jericho made a concentrated effort to get in shape), lived in a town not far from where Jericho lived (Calgary), and was quickly becoming one of the biggest names in Stampede Wrestling (whose best talent eventually ended up in the WWF). Seeing Owen Hart become successful convinced Jericho that he could be successful, too.
Jericho trained in the Hart Brothers Camp in Calgary, though Jericho makes sure to point out that training to be a wrestler is nowhere close to the experience that he thought it would be. For instance, though there were several successful wrestling Harts, only Keith Hart showed up for a few sessions, and those were usually marked by him torturing students who had the gall to stand out in their class. Also, there was only one other student in Jericho’s class who seemed to stand a chance at making a career out of wrestling, Lance Storm (who went on to become a respected name in the business in his own right). Jericho was under the impression that he would be working with like-minded individuals, but he ended up sharing class time with hillbillies and freaks. Even the training itself was incomplete. Jericho and his classmates were taught how to take falls and perform impressive athletic feats, but he wasn’t taught how to put them together into a logical wrestling match, which is something that, as I understand it, goes hand in hand with learning how to fall properly in most wrestling schools today.
After he gained a lot of experience wrestling in high school gyms, armories, and birthday parties (seriously), Jericho gained employment in Mexico. After being taught for months how to take convincing falls and draw people into a match, Jericho found that most of what he learned didn’t apply in Mexico, where lucha libre was the popular wrestling dish. Whereas Jericho was taught how to absorb high-impact moves, lucha libre involved wrestlers taking lots of rolls, flipping each other using one hand, and wrestlers dancing around for no reason to the delight of the fans. It wasn’t uncommon for matches to have multiple falls to a finish, or multiple referees, or for matches to end when a wrestler did an eye-catching dive onto another wrestler located outside of the ring—which is a rule that doesn’t apply to any other wrestling organization that I’ve ever heard of. Jericho, taking the name Corazon de Leon, became a sex symbol through his good looks and natural charisma, which upset a wrestler named Vampiro, who was easily the most popular wrestler in Mexico at the time whose position as such was never in any danger. Vampiro gave Jericho intentionally bad advice (none of which Jericho listened to), told Jericho’s employer that Jericho was unhappy with his pay and working conditions, and often lied about how he broke into the business. (This isn’t the first time that I’ve read about wrestlers having a problem with Vampiro. In fact, so much word of his misdeeds has gotten around that he has essentially been blackballed from most wrestling organizations in North America, with the only ones that use him being desperate for talent.) Jericho talks about how he enjoyed being the bad guy, as it was easier to make people hate him than to make people like him. He was so good at pissing off crowds that in the course of one match not only did somebody throw a bottle filled with fresh piss at him, but another person also pulled a gun. In most cities in Mexico, though, Jericho was well-liked, and became a solid performer, good enough to hold the NWA Middleweight Championship for 11 months.
Jericho met two close friends in Mexico, Art Barr and Eddie Guerrero, though both gave him a cold reception at first. Jericho broke the ice with Art Barr by accident, when they happened to see two people have comically absurd and disgusting sex. They had a lot in common, including missing their families more than most of “the boys” and having similar tastes in music. Barr was at the top of his game, on track to possibly become one of the most popular wrestlers in the world, when he suddenly died in his sleep. Jericho was staying in Barr’s room (at Barr’s insistence) when he heard of Barr’s death, and Jericho’s description of the minutes after hearing the news are heart-wrenching. Not long after Barr’s death, the peso crashed, and Jericho, who found himself working for a third of his usual salary in a place that reminded him of his dead best friend, sought employment elsewhere.
Jericho ended up working in Germany, where a style of wrestling called “catch” had caught on. It’s a style of wrestling that I wasn’t familiar with, and Jericho doesn’t do the best job of explaining it. (As I understand it, German fans were conditioned to accept matches that actually looked real. To this end, matches usually featured a lot of jockeying for position and attempts at submissions. Moves off of the top rope and other theatrics didn’t fit in this style.) Jericho’s first match in Germany sets off a habit that he calls “The Jericho Curse”: his first match in any promotion will suck. Jericho’s problem was that he tried to make himself look good in the match, as opposed to working to making the match better. When he figured this out, he started having great matches, though he doesn’t go into detail on any of them. He expresses gratitude for the opportunity he received in Germany, but when he got a chance to work for a bigger paycheck in front of larger audiences, he jumped at it.
Jericho was brought in to Smoky Mountain Wrestling, a southern wrestling promotion, by its owner, Jim Cornette, who had also made a career out of being a wrestling manager. Jericho’s first face-to-face conversation with Cornette let Jericho know that, even though he was working in North America again, Smoky Mountain was going to be just as strange as working in Mexico and Germany, as it took several moments for Jericho to figure out what Cornette was saying. (Cornette’s literal words: “Jeet yet?” Translation: “Did you eat yet?”) Fortunately, Jericho was working for one of the smartest men in the wrestling business, so, for once, Jericho didn’t have to worry about trying to find the midpoint between “what the booker is saying should happen” and “what I should do to make myself look good”, as they were often the same thing.
Cornette put Jericho in a tag team with his Hart Brothers training buddy, Lance Storm, and dubbed the duo the Thrillseekers. They were introduced through vignettes that made them look wild and cool, though Jericho mocks them as he describes them, and were immediately put into a feud with Well Dunn, who needed a good excuse to be kicked out of SMW, as they were going to be joining the WWF’s roster soon. (Though Jericho never explicitly states this, Cornette’s decision to have Jericho and Storm team up said a lot about Cornette’s faith in them, as Cornette had managed some of the greatest tag teams in wrestling history, including the Midnight Express. I gather that the only reason why the Thrillseekers didn’t win the SMW Tag Team Championship was because they didn’t need the titles in order to become popular.) Jericho was put off by the way that SMW engaged wrestlers with the fans. During intermission, wrestlers would work the concession stands, signing autographs and hawking merchandise. Jericho saw this as being beneath him, as wrestlers are supposed to have a mystique about them, and that mystique was destroyed when you sold bandanas and promotional pictures of yourself directly to the fans. In the book, though Jericho acknowledges that this was a terrible attitude to have, since he and Lance were the highest paid workers on SMW’s roster and should have just done as they were told in order to show their gratitude. Jericho also says that this was something that SMW’s audience liked, as they preferred their wrestlers to be accessible figures rather than children of Olympus, and that if Jericho had simply done his job, the Thrillseekers might have replaced the Rock And Roll Express as the most popular tag team in the south.
Cornette was pleased with Jericho’s work, and told him that the WWF was interested in hiring him. When he learned of the details of the job, though (basically, he was to be a colorful character who lost most of his matches), Jericho, along with Lance, took a job in Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling in Japan instead. By now, Jericho was used to expecting the unexpected, but he still wasn’t ready for what Japan had to offer. Wrestling match results were published in Baseball Magazine. He found a sports drink called Pocari Sweat. Most toilets in wrestling arenas were little more than holes in the ground.
FMW was strange, too. It employed boxers, men willing to set themselves on fire, and men in panda suits. It employed wrestlers, too, but they seemed to be the exception rather than the rule. Jericho’s stint with FMW was a bust, as he found himself waiting for future bookings and not getting them. When FMW did a tour (series of wrestling shows) based around tag team matches, they didn’t call Jericho. Eventually, FMW called and requested his services, but Jericho had already found a new home in Wrestle and Romance, a rival Japanese organization. (That name doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense to me. The only possible explanation I have for it is that the “Romance” half is in reference to the splintering politics and fantastic fighting techniques as described in “Romance Of The Three Kingdoms”. If that’s the case, though, why name a Japanese wrestling organization after a piece of classic Chinese literature? Even worse, the organization later changed its name to Wrestle Association R, which makes even less sense.)
Jericho had a much easier time making his name in WAR once he got accustomed to the Japanese style of wrestling, where gaining respect was based more on how hard a match was fought than if you actually won the match. For example, when Jericho wrestled an imposing man named Haku, Jericho threw punches and kicks that were much stiffer than most wrestlers would be willing to throw or take. It made sense in the context of the match, though, since Haku had a well-earned reputation of being a tough guy (indeed, several of his peers have told of his tendency to fend off half a dozen drunkards in a bar without breaking a sweat), and in order for Jericho to look like he had a chance in the match, he would need to go the extra mile. Jericho was also allowed to kick out of Haku’s finishing move, the powerbomb (which resembles a piledriver, but instead of planting the opponent on his head, the “attacking” wrestler throws his opponent onto the ground backfirst), which elevated Jericho’s profile despite losing the match soon after taking the move.
After becoming a star in Japan, Jericho worked for Extreme Championship Wrestling, an exceptionally well-booked Philadelphia-based promotion. ECW, even at its peak, rarely drew over 1,000 fans to its events, and its owner, Paul Heyman, was known for giving checks that bounced more often than not, but ECW’s influence was felt throughout the business, as its best ideas were used by larger wrestling promotions (ECW’s Sandman, for instance, was very similar to the WWF’s later Stone Cold Steve Austin), its best workers usually found themselves working for big money elsewhere, and its fan base were a creative, angry, and loyal bunch of individuals—the same people could be seen in the same seats at every ECW event (no matter where they held shows), providing weapons to the wrestlers, and delivering thoughtful chants, such as “She’s a crack whore!” (to a dastardly female), “You suck dick!”, and “Do the job, Dean, do the job!” (towards Shane Douglas, who, as Dean Douglas in the WWF, was told to lose matches in situations that made no storyline sense whatsoever). In short, getting over in ECW would get you far.
In the wrestling business, Paul Heyman was a strange figure. He would often book the shows while they were in progress (Jericho informed Heyman that Mikey Whipwreck couldn’t be in the 3rd match of the night because he was in the match that was going on right now), use grievance fares to fly in talent for cheap, and never edited out any mistakes that his performers made in a match before it aired on TV. He would be the first man that any wrestler saw when they came back from the ring, and he would always give his employees compliments, which was a big no-no in the business, since wrestlers usually were full of themselves already. His instincts for the business were on par with Cornette’s. The only difference is that Cornette got an opportunity to exhibit it, while Heyman, through ECW, made his impact from scratch. Everyone on an ECW show had their place, even the worst performers. For example, Heyman brought in a guy named 911. He was a big guy with natural charisma, but he couldn’t, you know, “wrestle,” not even in the WWF sense of the word. To work around this, Heyman would have 911 walk out during deliberately-juvenile happenings (a Santa Claus appearance, for instance) and chokeslam everyone in sight. Through a steady stream of use, 911 became one of the most popular guys on the roster, despite rarely actually competing in a match.
Heyman’s ideas for Jericho were equally genius. First, Heyman promoted Jericho through a series of vignettes on the ECW TV show, constantly referring to him as the “Last Survivor of Stu Hart’s Dungeon”. Then, in one of his first matches in ECW, Jericho was allowed to suplex Taz, who rarely ever left his feet, let alone get suplexed. (Taz is another example of Heyman’s booking genius, as Taz was booked to be the most dominating man in the world despite standing at only 5’9’’ and being towered over by most of the fans.) Jericho wasn’t allowed to beat Taz, though, as Taz gave Jericho a suplex that was so vicious, it “knocked him out”, making Jericho look good in defeat while making Taz look like a killer.
It didn’t take long for other wrestling organization to take notice of Jericho, as WCW’s Eric Bischoff quickly offered Jericho employment in his company (though, to be fair, Bischoff was making that offer to anybody with a pair of boots, as he wanted to lock up as much talent as he could before Vince McMahon did). Jericho agreed, and said he would start working for Bischoff as soon as he was done with his scheduled ECW dates. When Jericho told Heyman that he was going to work for WCW, though, Heyman told Jericho that he wanted Jericho to win the ECW World Television Championship before he left. Seeing as how Jericho was being paid for each show, and had no contract with Heyman, there was nothing legally stopping Jericho from leaving ECW with the belt around his waist, but Jericho agreed to Heyman’s plan, winning the title and then losing it shortly afterwards. (Jericho expresses confusion over this turn of events, wondering why Heyman did him this favor. It should be noted, though, that Paul Heyman hated WCW, and constantly took potshots at its bookers and performers. Heyman had done some great work for the promotion for chump change, and Bill Watts, who was running WCW at the time, treated Heyman and his friends like crap. On WWE’s “Bloodsport: ECW’s Most Violent Matches” DVD, Heyman gleefully states (I’m paraphrasing here, as I don’t have my copy with me), “Eric Bischoff did NOT ‘discover’ Chris Jericho. In fact, the VERY FIRST TITLE that he ever held in the United States was the ECW World Television Championship.” I’m guessing that Heyman arranged for Jericho to win the belt in case Jericho became a star in WCW, just so he could say, “I got there first.”)
The first time he called WCW’s offices to try to work out a long-term contract, Jericho was told that he would have to have a tryout match. This, despite already being told that he had a job. Welcome to WCW.
Jericho’s time spent working for WCW did more to kill his interest in wrestling than anything else in his career. His colleagues would get hostile if Jericho did something as unforgivable as introduce himself or (gasp!) give a compliment. His first match on TV ended in a double count-out when his opponent missed a dive on the outside and Jericho checked on his health rather than take advantage, which was meant to make him look noble but (and Jericho predicted this the second he was told of the finish) it actually made him look like a moron. The head booker, Kevin Sullivan, told Jericho to stop caring so much about his work (Ric Flair, upon hearing this, told Jericho to do the exact opposite). The only bright spot in Jericho’s early tenure was that WCW had a working relationship with New Japan Pro Wrestling, one of the largest wrestling organizations in Japan, and with no plans for Jericho, WCW sent him to Japan. New Japan was so pleased with his work that tentative plans were made to put the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship, one of the most prestigious belts in the world, on Jericho when WCW put the kibosh on those plans and made him return to America.
It wasn’t until Jericho was allowed to be a bad guy that Jericho found success in WCW. While the NWO group had made the idea of a cool bad guy seem fashionable, Jericho decided to be a chickenshit asshole instead. He called his opponents by incorrect name (he once referred to Booker T as “Tooker B”), he cut lengthy inane promos in which he gave himself countless nicknames, and he would exaggerate his Canadian accent. He became popular enough to win the WCW Cruiserweight Championship, though that isn’t as big of a deal as it may sound, as the belt didn’t mean much.
Jericho also engaged in a feud with Bill Goldberg, who had been on a long winning streak at the time. Jericho would call out Goldberg, only to easily defeat a midget dressed to look like him. When Goldberg didn’t show up to the arena, Jericho would challenge him to a match, have the referee count to 10, and claimed that he won by count-out. Fans (including myself) enjoyed the feud, since Jericho was entertaining in his role, and there seemed to be a lot of money to be had in seeing Goldberg beat the snot out of Jericho. Goldberg vs. Jericho never happened, though, since they couldn’t agree on the terms. Bischoff, Goldberg, and Hulk Hogan thought that Jericho should lose to Goldberg on free TV. Jericho argued that Goldberg vs. Jericho should have been put on PPV. (Hogan later told Jericho that he admired Jericho for standing up for himself, because Jericho was right. I can’t recall any other instance in which Hogan admitted that he was wrong, so props there, I guess.) After several weeks of build, the feud was ended without a proper showdown (though they did have a disappointing match in WWE), which is when Jericho started looking for employment in the WWF.
The book ends right before Jericho debuts for the WWF, leaving enough material for a second book, since Jericho’s best days happened in the WWF. With the book being 500+ pages long, I had to omit Jericho’s descriptions of bowling while taking sleeping pills, getting high on GHB at one of the most prestigious Japanese wrestling events, and his first sexual experience, among other lovely stories. I’ve learned more about the wrestling business from reading this book than from Mick Foley’s 3 autobiographies or Freddie Blassie’s book (which is saying a lot, since I think the world of those books). It’s also funny throughout, which makes it easy to read. Between the plain facts of Jericho’s career, the strange stories that he brings up (Cornette ends up threatening some Dairy Queen employees), and Jericho’s running commentary, I have to recommend this book. Even people who hate wrestling will like it.
Friday, May 8, 2009
"That's Nice, John, But It's Not Funny Enough"
I thought I’d slept my last good sleep.
Then:
Narcoleptic double dreams,
The inside of my eyelids tattooed with
Pictures of Michael and I—
Twins, almost—
Stealing dreams from those more liquid than us,
Chewing apples with eyeballs for seeds
(and getting the joke),
And seeing myself smash a wood bat over my daughter’s head
Thinking that I’m doing her a favor.
Thought I should spend as much time
Awake as I can,
As one minute awake
Is one minute not spent at my child’s bedside
Playing Whac-A-Kid.
Thought that consuming the grain at the bottom of the bottle would chase them away,
And it did,
But then I dreamt of the Sandman sipping Jack Daniels.
Thought that I should resign myself
To a small room
And two glowing magic boxes.
Then:
You told me that I deserve more.
And I believed you.
I sing myself a lullaby now.
You’ll hear it someday.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Steal this material!
(I found this under the title "Difficult Games". I forgot what I was planning on doing with it.)
ALL CONTRA GAMES (Various platforms)—You have almost every gun ever made at your disposal, but you die with one hit. Let the pain begin.
ALL CONTRA GAMES (Various platforms)—You have almost every gun ever made at your disposal, but you die with one hit. Let the pain begin.
Metal Gear Solid games (PS2, Xbox, Gamecube)—The first one was difficult because you were ridiculously unarmed. The second one was kind of easy…until you played it on ‘Very Hard’ difficulty. That turns the two ‘shooting with Snake’ sequence near the end into moments in gaming history. And the third one? Your radar is gone, medkits are completely unavailable, and there is a boss battle that will take you more than an hour to complete—and that’s without dying. Satisfyingly difficult games.
X-Men: Mutant Apolcalypse (SNES)—The X-Men have all their different abilities, which would make the game easy if it wasn’t for the fact that a single enemy could take away 1/3 of your health all by itself. A bit on the short side, but well worth playing to the end.
Alien Hominid (PS2, Gamecube, Xbox, Internet demo)—The first example of a Newgrounds game being turned into a commercial product, and it’s a good one. It’s like Contra, but with a sense of humor. Too short, but worth a rental (and a purchase if you can find it cheap).
Bebe’s Kids (SNES)—There’s hard good, and then there’s hard bad. This is hard bad. Avoid.
Starfox Games (referring to the N64 and SNES versions)—Hard to believe that I found these to be too easy when I was young. Now it’s an event when I can complete the first level of the first Starfox.
All Prince of Persia games (Various platforms)—Get a POP game, spend two weeks playing it. It’s a tradition that started a long time ago, and it continues today.
Chrono Trigger/Chrono Cross (SNES/PS)—RPGs done right; memorable characters, engaging dialogue, amazing twists, and difficult. Worth getting by any means.
Resident Evil 4 (Gamecube, PS2)—Brian Kelley can write entire essays based on how great this game is. In fact, I actually wrote a complete review of the game as one of my final assignments in English class last year. Suffice it to say that this is the first game in the RE series that no one can find a huge flaw in, and those that do are not worth hanging out with. (Brian once asked me how many times I had to go through the ‘village’ area near the beginning. I answered ‘once’. He didn’t believe me. I didn’t tell him, though, that I didn’t activate the part where the chainsaw guy comes in. He did, which was what took him multiple tries. I mention this to prove that I was better than Brian Kelley at one portion of RE4.)
Shining Force 2 (Genesis)—The first one held your hands while you took it to town. The second one assumed that you played the first one, and ramped up the difficulty. Guess which one has aged better?
Mischief Makers (N64)—Treasure, famous for its insane shooters, makes a platform game for a change of pace. Its still hard, but with a sense of humor.
The Timesplitters series (PS2, Xbox, Gamecube)—Honestly, I can probably own you in Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark, which were the precursors to Timesplitters. But then you give me DUAL ANALOG STICKS and set the frame rate at 60 FRICKIN’ FRAMES PER SECOND?! (The best FPSs at the start of the 00’s ran at 30 frames per second.) Now that’s a way to die, fast, over and over again. Play with 3 friends, set deathmatch at a 30 minute time limit, and with 60 kills to a win. Then chug your coffee, cuz you don’t want to blink.
Smackdown vs Raw 2006 (PS2, PSP)—I am the king of wrestling games, but this game has tried me in all the good ways that a video game can. I once wrestled a Triple Threat Match that took half an hour to complete, and I’ve wrestled in 60-minute Iron Man Matches that never got stale. Play against someone else who is good at the game in order to pass a good 20 minutes.
The Mega Man series (Various platforms)—A good example of a series that doesn’t hold your hand and has succeeded. Beat a boss, take his weapon, use it to beat another boss. How can that be so hard to imitate? And why has no one tried?
The Pokemon series (Various platforms)—Every gamer claims to hate it, and the fad is long past its prime, but every time a new one comes out, it sells like hotcakes. Just TRY playing without some sort of a strategy guide. Yeah, I can’t, either.
The Jak series (PS2, PSP)—Here’s the thing: it’s aimed at kids, but there are many levels in each of the games that I, John Edward Downey, gamer for the past 16 years (or so), have a lot of difficulty with. The fact that I want to get to the end of the game tells you about each games’s quality, though.
Super Smash Brothers Melee (Gamecube)—You cannot own a Gamecube and not have this game; it’s that simple. It’s also damn near impossible to unlock everything. It’s also impossible to guarantee victory against even the greenest rookie. The best Gamecube game on the market, period.
The Legend of Zelda series (Various platforms)—Proof that nobody cares about an original story, just as long as that story is told well. The early games needed walkthroughs, A Link To The Past remains one of the best games on the SNES, Link’s Awakening almost made me shed a tear, but Ocarina Of Time is the best of the series, and a good candidate for ‘Best Video Game Of All Time’. Majora’s Mask needed a walkthrough, the Oracle games were a nice change of pace (Capcom made those ones), and while I personally did not enjoy Wind Waker, I know a lot of people who did. With the exception of the long-forgotten CDI games (look them up for a good laugh), if it’s a Legend of Zelda game, it’s a compulsory purchase.
(I don't like to start online conversations with a simple "hello". That's my only explanation for the following gem.)
downeyfelix: why, oh, why, oh, mofogin, WHY, do the Jamster try to see me on shizzat that I don'ts want to be hereing? Like, who the hell thinks that I listen to Rick Ross? Why would I like Rick Ross? Who the hell is Rick Ross? I don't know, and I don't care to know. All I know is that he sounds like he swallowed too much syrup and he has a huge beard. That's it. Oh yeah, and who would name themself Lil' Scrappy? Why would you make people pay attention to the fact that you are little? Why not call yourself Bigass Scrappy? Makes more sense from an advertising standpoint. And why make people listen to the song before they buy it if the song sucks? Just say, "Hey, the new Rick Ross banga is available. It's only a click away!" Rick Ross fans will go, "OH YEAH! I'M HUSTLIN' MAH WAY TO THAT WEBSITE!!!" while everyone else would go, "Thanks, but no thanks." That makes more sense to me. Then again, I'm retarded.
(From a Creative Writing class at NECC in 2006, titled, "Eh, Steve!".)Pure reminiscence is impossible. It would require me to write in the mindset of whatever age I was, without editorial or nostalgia. The editorial part is the most difficult aspect to deal with, since it is only years later, when everyone’s ulterior motives are exposed, that the whole picture is revealed. Nostalgia isn’t a problem for me because I tend to ask “When was I young?” before I ask “Remember when we were young?” I mean, hell, I’m still young. In 10 years, I’ll be only 30 years old. It would still be too early to write my autobiography if I was 45 years old. Looking at that short span of time that I know I was a child (and I did not care), one moment sticks out, not because it was a good memory, but because very little could take away from the image. I was learning how to hit a baseball. A few kids from the neighborhood were trying to teach me the best hitting technique to use, and told me to only go after ‘good’ pitches. Of course, even at the age of 6 (7?), I was showing a fondness for alchemy, or at least attempting to turn copper into gold, as I tried to turn balls thrown above my shoulders into 500-foot bombs. I looked like an idiot, but hey, I was TRYING (and that’s all that matters in life, right?). And, well, that’s it; I hit a few, missed a lot, went home when dinner was ready. Where are those neighborhood kids now? Well, the catcher got married last May. The pitcher died 3 years ago (drunk driving, whatever). I’m not sure what happened to the rest. Two years after the batting practice, I was put on Ritalin because A) it was 1994 and B) my mom thought there was something wrong with me (ADD, no, Asperger’s!). Dad disagreed, but pretty soon, he was too dead to be able to object to the Ritalin, or Mom moving the family to a town outside of state. One thing hasn’t changed, though. I still think baseball sucks.
(From the same Creative Writing class, titled "GETUM".)So there was this time when I was little, well, I wasn’t that little, I was always a big ’un, but back when I should’ve been little, there was this girl on the playground who was really ugly and was named Samantha, and well, I don’t do well with girls named Samantha cause they’re always this close to being guys, cuz it’s the difference between Sam and Sam, essentially, and she always called me ugly, but I always told her that she was uglier so that I had the upper hand, and one time I called her really REALLY ugly, so she kicked me between the legs, in the place where the thing and the other thing and the other thing spend their time, and I was hurt a lot, and she started laughing, so I kicked her in the same place, but it didn’t hurt her as much because I was hitting practically nothing at all, but she fell over crying anyways and a couple of girls told me that I was a big meanie because I spent all my time hitting girls, but my friends who happened to be boys had my back because they knew that girls don’t have what guys have, so we agreed to have ourselves a MUD WAR, which is like a snowball fight, but with mud instead of snow, but the boys weren’t really athletic, so we asked for a day to prepare, and the girls agreed to do it the next day because they were stupid and ugly, so the boys and me ran around the school 20 times after school, well, actually, we planned on running around the school 20 times, but Fat Ricky gave up after two steps because he didn’t have the right kind of shoes, and Joe gave up after two laps because he hurt his ankle, and Lenny gave up after 6 laps because his mom was waiting to drive him home, and the rest of us did 14 laps because we didn’t want to miss “Power Rangers”, but at least we worked out, the girls probably sat in a corner, practicing their best “DON’T SHOVE MUD DOWN MY THROAT” looks, and the next day came, and the girls had forgotten all about it because they were stupid like that, so I got a big pile of mud together and put it in my right hand, so I had, basically, a mud fist, and I punched Sam in the ear with it, and she started crying, and the boys all threw mud at all the girls, and I tried to shove mud down Samantha’s throat but SHE BIT MY FINGERS BECAUSE SHE’S A CANNIBAL, so I spit in her face and kicked her between the legs again and then I ran home so that I could put a band-aid on my fingers and the next day, my mommy told me that I had to go to a new school because I was too good for my old one.
(Same class; this time, the assignment was to use only dialogue. Titled "Not Sure That's Legal, But Whatever".)Timothy: But you said before that it would cost only $15.
Anthony: It’s called ‘inflation’.
Timothy: No, you’re just being a dick.
Anthony: Prices go up. I have to make a living.
Timothy: By changing the price to $150?
Anthony: My little boy needs money for a class field trip.
Timothy: Really? What school is he going to?
Anthony: It’s a private school.
Timothy: Well, all of my nieces and nephews are in private schools, so which one?
Anthony: It’s a private school that I run in my house.
Timothy: Huh?
Anthony: What?
Timothy: Isn’t there a word for—
Anthony: My kid’s taking a field trip to the hospital.
Timothy: Right. Sure.
Anthony: Hey, he’s visiting my sick mother. She’s got cancer. She needs the money, too.
Timothy: What kind of cancer?
Anthony: The one that makes them get chemo.
Timothy: Yeah, that narrows it down.
Anthony: She’s got more than one kind of cancer, you know. Hard to keep ’em straight.
Timothy: Name one.
Anthony: Brain cancer. Her brain got too smart. Didn’t know you could get that, did you?
Timothy: Okay…
Anthony: Bone cancer, too. She was lactose-intolerant. Go figure.
Timothy: That doesn’t make any—
Anthony: Now she’s got titty cancer, too. With a growth. Looks like she’s got a third funpiece.
Timothy: Forget it. No bag of candy is worth $150.
Anthony: Inflation, motherfucker. Inflation.
(The following is my entire portfolio I put together for an online poetry class at NECC, complete with explanations of each poem.)I don’t like Dane Cook. I’ve never liked Dane Cook. Most of his jokes are based around him saying the unexpected, which only works once (twice, at most), and frankly, I don’t see the humor in bee punching. I’m more of a David Cross fan, since his humor never loses its edge to me. (On “It’s Not Funny”, Cross says that he would rather hear the death rattle of his only child than listen to Creed, which always gets a laugh out of me despite having the album for two years.) That said, the dude came up (or stole from somebody who I haven’t heard of—I’m not sure) with one joke that I had to admit was pretty funny. The entire joke goes like this (more or less): “You know, someday, I just want to walk up to one of those people who are wearing the Superman S on their shirt, shoot them in the chest, and say ‘I TOLD YOU SO’!” So that’s why I reference Dane Cook in the title of the poem and then talk about Superman in the poem itself. As it may have come across in the discussions of this poem, I’m not a big comic books fan, but I stay up to date on what’s going on in the world of the big two, while most people don’t stay up to date on either one. (By the way, best DC comic ever was Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman”. Best comic ever:
COUPLET: THE SOURCE OF THE ONLY DANE COOK JOKE THAT I’VE EVER LAUGHED AT
It’s boring to be perfect, isn’t it?
He’s got super super hearing, but he ain’t listenin’.
“Hey, look at me, I came from another planet!
My backstory couldn’t be better if I planned it!”
Yeah, whatever,
You laughed when you saw my arm in plaster.
I mean, yeah, I looked pretty funny with my arm at an angle,
But you wouldn’t be laughing if you saw my limb dangle
Off of my shoulder right after the accident.
But I’ll ask for the millionth time—where were you,
Were you protecting the fosters by throwing the bad corn around back,
Or more important things, like getting Lana in the sack?
I’ve got connections, farmboy; I can send Lois the tape.
“What tape?” THE tape. Your mouth gapes.
Bet you’d be willing to make it disappear?
Ah, yes, but first let’s watch it together—hey, have a beer.
There’s you as a baby—oh, you have your father’s hair!
Here’s your homeworld exploding, AND EVERYBODY CHEERED.
“This isn’t—” And here’s you excelling at pretty much everything
With no asterisks or anything; an alien as prom king!
Luthor? Check. Mxy? Check. Apok? Check.
The tragically misunderstood in need of help Bizarro? Check.
A guy with crystals for bones and immeasurable strength
Who could hop distances of football fields in length
“That doesn’t even—” and doesn’t shy away from beating up women
And has a name that basically means ‘the end’?
“Doomsday?” Check, but it took you long enough
And resulted in a movie starring Shaq. It sucked.
Oh, and death? Yeah, there’s a check, too.
“I didn’t beat—” Yeah, but he didn’t beat you.
Here’s the time you stuck your tongue in a light socket—
WHAT WERE YOU THINKING? No further comment.
Yeah, just try to kill me. No, seriously. Try to bite.
Thought you should know, though, that your can’s made of kryptonite.
HOW DOES MY LEATHER BOOT TASTE, FOOL?
Hmm…drag your carcass over to the pool
OR STICK HOT POKERS IN YOUR EYES?!
I can’t stand to flyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy…
Wow. This one’s dark. So dark, in fact, that I spent the rest of the semester focused on killing alarm clocks and elephants. So yeah, this one’s about my dad. So…yeah. Awkward. I should point out, though, that I included a slight fabrication in the poem, that of him being lowered into the ground. Dad was cremated, therefore, no need for a coffin. Or burial space, for that matter. As for the other references, well, 4th paragraph refers to “Redneck Rampage”, which was a ripoff of “Doom” that my father liked a lot, and the Calvin referenced in the last paragraph refers to the Calvin of “Calvin and Hobbes” fame (specifically, a strip in which Calvin and Hobbes find a dead bird and then wonder how one goes through life with the specter of death hanging over your head, which is one of my favorite “Calvin and Hobbes” strips).
GHAZAL: THE SOURCE OF ALL HAPPINESS
Here comes the ground, all packed and brown
And we see superdad being lowered down all the way.
Scraped knee, but I fly through the garage thanks to the guardian angel
Devilish smile, bandages, anticeptic, he’s here to stay
I asked him what hell was like once, when he visited my dreams
And he said that compared to his time living, he loves living every day.
“Man, look at what video games have become. Rednecks on a rampage?!”
Pops open his drink and sits outside, looking over at the sunset on the bay.
As Calvin sort of once said, “In order to go on with your lives, you can’t think about it.”
Still, though, Downer gets down-er with each passing day.
What a great title for this next piece. “Hmm, this poem is about wanting to kill your alarm clock, and shotguns can kill things, so hey, why not mix the two?” The best poems are the ones that you can relate to, and I’m pretty sure that a lot of people related to this one. The “get the money” line may have had too much going on with it to work (trying to bring up the reasons why one should get out of bed doesn’t work all that well when you are trying to celebrate laziness), but I’m keeping it in because I still kind of like it. Oh yeah, and this one was really hard to write.
ACCENTUAL-ALLITERATIVE POEM: SHOTGUN ALARM
Comes the choice
Can I come out?
Distance to the door
Don’t; too far.
Kill the rooster
Kick the snooze.
Get the money
Get the blanket.
Snooze the day
Snails have fun.
Once I figured out what a rhyming metrical poem consisted of, this was a piece of cake. Encourage me to be silly, and I’ll give you an elephant looking for ice cream. I tried to amuse myself with as many of the lines as I could, which worked out pretty well. I should also point out that I watched the Flash animation “Charlie The Unicorn” shortly before writing this, which may be why I put a mountain in the poem, since “Charlie The Unicorn” sees the title character try to get to
RHYMING METRICAL: ICE CREAM GUPP
The ice cream at the top of the mountain wasn’t going to get itself,
So they left it up to me, Ralphie, to go get it for them.
I gathered my things with my tusk, said goodbye to my pet hen Lem,
And started my trek up
Mountains aren’t good for elephant feet,
But I guess I needed to get some exercise.
Halfway up the mountain, I met a monkey who liked to tell a lot of lies.
After a 15-minute water balloon fight, he admitted defeat.
My food supply started running low about three quarters of the way up,
And I’m not the kind of person who likes to eat ice cream.
While pondering what to do, I dozed off and had a weird dream;
It was about juju beans, sheep wearing wool, and a dog named Gupp.
I made it to the top, but couldn’t find the ice cream that was supposed to be there.
I panicked, and started throwing around everyone who got in my way.
One little boy, bruised and battered, cried out, “Ice cream man leave yesterday!”
In my fury, I think I might have swallowed a bear.
Using a sled that nobody seemed to be using anymore,
I managed to get down the mountain in 5 minutes.
The town, it seemed, had been destroyed; smashed to bits.
Looks like I didn’t have to worry about ice cream no more.
One of my Facebook notes, brought in to pad my grade! No fabrications, either. I really did punch that refridgerator magnet, and I did meet a homeless girl who was way too smart to be without a place to go home to. It’s the least I could do.
FREE CHOICE: COUPLETS (SORT OF)
Why am I friends with myself? Shit, it's not like I have a choice,
But c'mon, gather round, little girls and boys
And see the retard with the silver fingers talk to you about self-doubt
And make sure you've got your earplugs ready, because this could get loud.
When I was 4 years old, I attacked a magnet on the refrigerator.
It was a picture of my brother--oh, how I used to hate her.
Yeah, I know that he's not a she,
But really,
He's not the kind of guy that should be using a lot of pronouns
Because he can get dozens of people to say "Go Downs"
While I've got only a select few biggest fans, they're always in the fronts seats
Braving the smell of yours truly's dank feets
To hear whatever the fuck it is that JED's got on his mind.
All I do is repeat a comedian's act and then add, "Signed,
John Edward" and I'm called a fucking genius
And people make encouraging comments on the size of my...hairline.
And that's what really separates friends from family,
Because my family knows not to be friendly around me
Since it's not as though I could feel it anyway
I mean, sure, I can feel a hug, but at the end of the day
That's still a gesture meant for people who have feelings
And all I've got is some sort of onion peelings
From the layers that I've stripped off, starting at the fingers,
I finish picking at them, but the smell of blood lingers
And my dog can taste it, that's why she's afraid of me,
That's why I like to call her Coffee Downey
Because that bitch gets it, I'm not to be trusted,
My sense of empathy has already rusted
Over the course of the past 20 years
So if you cry, I'll probably just laugh at your tears.
Read my autobiography, it hasn't been written,
But I told it to a stray kitten
That I found while walking around a cold mountain town before being shipped down south
You wouldn't believe the poetry coming out of her mouth;
She described a train as a "lumbering beast",
At which point, my negative thoughts towards the homeless ceased
And I wondered how a girl with a mind like that could fall so far
And I wondered...
I wondered how I could forget her name.
That's enough for now, kids, story time is over,
Now go outside and play some red rover.
I'll just be picking my mind, see if I've got friends in
And ask Sufjan for more words that rhyme with alligator.
NUMBER 2: Most useful learning experience? Heck, that’s every time I get backed into a corner with a poem. Twelve more accentual-alliterative poems and I’ll figure out the meaning of life. I’ve learned that I’ve got a really silly side that hasn’t worn off with age. My favorite part about my work this semester is how silly my work has been, compared to my material last semester. Spill your guts too many times and you won’t have anything to breathe with anymore, I guess. My writing hasn’t changed all that much, unfortunately. I have a better understand of meter now, along with a few new ways to rhyme stuff. The best piece of advice I’ve gotten is when somebody said that they didn’t get one of my poems. I tend to make all sorts of obscure references (or self-references, which are fun to write…right before you delete them), and being told to make things more accessible is a good way to keep your audience. I’m still struggling with the poems that have the most rules attached to them. The most frustrating part of the writing experience is when I have to choose between the great line and the decent line that follows the poem’s guidelines. My goals after this semester are to continue writing poems. I’ve been writing a few of them on my Facebook notes, as a matter of fact. It’s good exercise.
NUMBER 3: Deadlines are more lenient in an online setting, which is good for lazy people like me. The problem with doing creative writing online is that it makes giving feedback harder. Once, I told someone that their poem was too “poety”—which is my way of saying that the work sounded like it was written with the intent of sounding really pretty without care for the content. This person thought that I had misspelled “poetry” and proceeded to give me an undeserved online bitch-slap. In a face-to-face setting, that wouldn’t have happened. The lecture notes and assignments were easy to follow. I didn’t have to read anything more than twice to get it. I barely read the text, to be honest. The discussion questions were fine, and really helped me mold my poems. The instructor should only put in their word in the discussions if we’re all REALLY missing the point. I would like to read everyone’s poems when they post them, so I’m in favor of a whole class workshop. The only people that I really got to know were the ones that I got to know outside of class, which is how it worked with my other online class. In a face-to-face setting, I would know something about everyone. As it is, I know 1 or 2 people in this class. My favorite assignment was the first one; my least favorite was the accentual-alliterative poem. I would like to see an assignment that has one person coming up with a few names, objects, and/or words, and another person has to write a poem using all of the listed words. The only thing that I would suggest that could improve this class is to have more live readings.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
The Downey Obscure Game Report: Week Three
The history of video games has already been covered by people much smarter than me in much more detail than I could hope to, but if I were to write a book on the subject, I would make sure to include a fairly long chapter on how the home computer gaming market changed after video game consoles proved themselves to be both critical and commercial successes in the 90's. This was likely the first time someone meant it when they said, "Consoles are going to make PC gaming obsolete." The only market that PCs seemed to have that the consoles couldn't touch was the point-and-click adventure game market, which was still relatively strong. Then CD-Roms came out, and everything went to hell.
The CD-Rom was a big deal. In exchange for beefing up your computer's hardware and waiting 5 minutes for a game to load, you could experience something that the SNES and Genesis couldn't hope to replicate. The CD-Rom promised a multimedia experience. Everything sounded crisper, everything looked better, and hey, if that's what it can do to a game's look, what can it do to the gameplay?
Um...what gameplay? Geremy Mustard of Chair Entertainment noted in a recent essay that most of the memory used by a video game goes towards art, and not by accident: "Every time I found a way to make the game ("Undertow") smaller, the artists would find a way to increase its size again! By the end of it, they put in 15 custom environments, hundreds of effects, 5.1 surround sound, motion-captured cut-scenes with full voiceover, and subtitles in nine languages." ("Small Is Beautiful", Game Informer, January 2008) "Undertow", by the way, was an Xbox Live Arcade game that weighed in at a little under 50 MB, which was the maximum size for Live Arcade games at the time of its release. Such attention to game art has its roots at least as far back as the CD-Rom days, when full-motion video took up most of a game's memory.
The entire idea behind using full-motion video was to immerse the gamer into a game as much as possible, and there seemed to be no easier way of doing that than to have professional actors perform in front of a blue screen. They're real; they're more relatable than a pile of pixels; they look like you and me. What could go wrong?
First of all, most of the actors employed in such games sucked. Second of all, even if they didn't suck, the material that these actors had to work with sucked. Third of all, even if the actors and material were actually good, the gameplay itself sucked; most of this stuff was a thinly-concealed slideshow filled with hotspots that needed to be pressed in order to get to the next encounter.
Were any good games that incorporated full-motion video released? Well, yes; there has to be exceptions that prove the rule. "Myst" was one. "Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within" was another. "Under A Killing Moon" was yet another. But for every "Myst", there seemed to be two piles of crap. It wasn't helped by the fact that developers seemed to enjoy showing people dying. Yes, having your main character die as a way to reinforce the danger of his/her surroundings is a good thing, but there's a point when it stops being reinforcement of negative behavior and starts being about just grossing people out just for the sake of grossing them out. "Phantasmagoria" was built almost entirely around the appeal of seeing people die--but not just in parts where you've done something wrong. Throughout the game, you see visions of a previous tenant, Carno, killing each of his wives in horrible ways. Rest assured, the following link isn't the worst death featured in the game, and is actually pretty funny, but I still wouldn't recommend watching it while eating: http://youtube.com/watch?v=sNaG-oUMp28 . As any good entertainer knows, though, you can't give away your best material in the first act; you need something for the big finale. In other words, can your character's death be just as gory? Unfortunately, yes. The next link is much gorier, and you'll probably hate me for putting it here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=e3hX0rbw1rA .
The wasted potential here still astounds me, especially considering what they could have done with this technology. As long as you're using live actors, why not make a live-action Choose Your Own Adventure? As it was, most companies were willing to put out live-action Choose Your Own Goosebumps, overestimating their own wit and underestimating the expectations of the average gamer. Why not make a game that's concentrated less on pixel-hunting and more on decision-making?
Which brings us to this week's DOGR. If a version of this game had come out in the 90's, it would have been hailed as a classic and a benchmark. As it is, it was released in 2005, and it's simply a great game.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you...
Developed by Quantum Dream, previously known for making a game featuring David Bowie, and published by the king of good luck, Atari. The game is known to the rest of the world as "Fahrenheit", but there was some concern that consumers would associate the game with Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11", so the name was changed when it was translated for American audiences. The difference in names also helps separate the censored and uncensored versions of the game. We quaint Americans got the censored one.
The game starts off with you taking control of Lucas Kane, moments after killing someone in a diner while seemingly not in control of himself. How you act affects the next scene, when you take control of Carla Valenti and Tyler Miles, two detectives that are assigned to this case. You switch back and forth between these 3 characters (and Lucas's brother Markus on rare occasions), and it never really feels like you're fighting against yourself; all of the characters that you control are good people who are just trying to get by. There's also a vicious wave of snow that's devastated New York City, which means that these characters are going on despite themselves. (It also plays into the original title for the game.)
This game needs to be played with a controller that has two analog sticks, as the action scenes require you to play a version of Simon in order to proceed. The controller also has to have 6 other buttons on it, as two of them are used for tug-of-war contests sometimes played out in action sequences, too. This goes much better with a video example, so here's a sequence in which you get to see both mechanics at work: http://youtube.com/watch?v=v_MLnryT46g . Creative freedom is taken away from the gamer, but in return, you get the closest thing to an interactive movie that I've ever seen. The inner monologue is greatness, too, and reminds me of an even better game that I'm willing to do a column about in the future. Some reviewers say that it's too hard to watch the on-screen action and pay attention to the action cues at the same time, but I never had a problem with it. Maybe I'm just special.
It's got great writing, the choices that the characters (and you) make affect the outcome, and it plays well enough. But in my teaser for the game, I said that it was only awesome for about 3/4 of it. The last 1/4 was just one big disappointment to me, as that was the point in which all of the cards were revealed, and, to quote the cool kids, shit goes down. The problem is, though, that the characters stop acting rationally. There's a two-week space of blank memory for Lucas that is given an explanation that completely lacks inspiration or originality. Oh, and when they do battle, technology kills magic. I'm a bit of a SF nerd, but that ain't right.
It gets more right than it does wrong, though, so this is an easy recommendation. It was released on the PC, Xbox, and PS2, so it's not as though it's a hard game to find. Check the used racks for this one. Also, keep an eye out for "Heavy Rain", which is supposed to be a spiritual sequel of sorts. As long as I'm posting videos, here's the trailer that single-handedly made "Heavy Rain" a big deal: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9133667929405103814&q=heavy+rain&total=3165&start=0&num=100&so=0&type=search&plindex=1 .
If you're reading this, please comment. On anything. Next week (maybe), I'll tackle another adventure game. One that involves Luke Skywalker, stealing gasoline from the police, and fertilizer. Now THAT'S a teaser.
The CD-Rom was a big deal. In exchange for beefing up your computer's hardware and waiting 5 minutes for a game to load, you could experience something that the SNES and Genesis couldn't hope to replicate. The CD-Rom promised a multimedia experience. Everything sounded crisper, everything looked better, and hey, if that's what it can do to a game's look, what can it do to the gameplay?
Um...what gameplay? Geremy Mustard of Chair Entertainment noted in a recent essay that most of the memory used by a video game goes towards art, and not by accident: "Every time I found a way to make the game ("Undertow") smaller, the artists would find a way to increase its size again! By the end of it, they put in 15 custom environments, hundreds of effects, 5.1 surround sound, motion-captured cut-scenes with full voiceover, and subtitles in nine languages." ("Small Is Beautiful", Game Informer, January 2008) "Undertow", by the way, was an Xbox Live Arcade game that weighed in at a little under 50 MB, which was the maximum size for Live Arcade games at the time of its release. Such attention to game art has its roots at least as far back as the CD-Rom days, when full-motion video took up most of a game's memory.
The entire idea behind using full-motion video was to immerse the gamer into a game as much as possible, and there seemed to be no easier way of doing that than to have professional actors perform in front of a blue screen. They're real; they're more relatable than a pile of pixels; they look like you and me. What could go wrong?
First of all, most of the actors employed in such games sucked. Second of all, even if they didn't suck, the material that these actors had to work with sucked. Third of all, even if the actors and material were actually good, the gameplay itself sucked; most of this stuff was a thinly-concealed slideshow filled with hotspots that needed to be pressed in order to get to the next encounter.
Were any good games that incorporated full-motion video released? Well, yes; there has to be exceptions that prove the rule. "Myst" was one. "Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within" was another. "Under A Killing Moon" was yet another. But for every "Myst", there seemed to be two piles of crap. It wasn't helped by the fact that developers seemed to enjoy showing people dying. Yes, having your main character die as a way to reinforce the danger of his/her surroundings is a good thing, but there's a point when it stops being reinforcement of negative behavior and starts being about just grossing people out just for the sake of grossing them out. "Phantasmagoria" was built almost entirely around the appeal of seeing people die--but not just in parts where you've done something wrong. Throughout the game, you see visions of a previous tenant, Carno, killing each of his wives in horrible ways. Rest assured, the following link isn't the worst death featured in the game, and is actually pretty funny, but I still wouldn't recommend watching it while eating: http://youtube.com/watch?v
The wasted potential here still astounds me, especially considering what they could have done with this technology. As long as you're using live actors, why not make a live-action Choose Your Own Adventure? As it was, most companies were willing to put out live-action Choose Your Own Goosebumps, overestimating their own wit and underestimating the expectations of the average gamer. Why not make a game that's concentrated less on pixel-hunting and more on decision-making?
Which brings us to this week's DOGR. If a version of this game had come out in the 90's, it would have been hailed as a classic and a benchmark. As it is, it was released in 2005, and it's simply a great game.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you...
Developed by Quantum Dream, previously known for making a game featuring David Bowie, and published by the king of good luck, Atari. The game is known to the rest of the world as "Fahrenheit", but there was some concern that consumers would associate the game with Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11", so the name was changed when it was translated for American audiences. The difference in names also helps separate the censored and uncensored versions of the game. We quaint Americans got the censored one.
The game starts off with you taking control of Lucas Kane, moments after killing someone in a diner while seemingly not in control of himself. How you act affects the next scene, when you take control of Carla Valenti and Tyler Miles, two detectives that are assigned to this case. You switch back and forth between these 3 characters (and Lucas's brother Markus on rare occasions), and it never really feels like you're fighting against yourself; all of the characters that you control are good people who are just trying to get by. There's also a vicious wave of snow that's devastated New York City, which means that these characters are going on despite themselves. (It also plays into the original title for the game.)
This game needs to be played with a controller that has two analog sticks, as the action scenes require you to play a version of Simon in order to proceed. The controller also has to have 6 other buttons on it, as two of them are used for tug-of-war contests sometimes played out in action sequences, too. This goes much better with a video example, so here's a sequence in which you get to see both mechanics at work: http://youtube.com/watch?v
It's got great writing, the choices that the characters (and you) make affect the outcome, and it plays well enough. But in my teaser for the game, I said that it was only awesome for about 3/4 of it. The last 1/4 was just one big disappointment to me, as that was the point in which all of the cards were revealed, and, to quote the cool kids, shit goes down. The problem is, though, that the characters stop acting rationally. There's a two-week space of blank memory for Lucas that is given an explanation that completely lacks inspiration or originality. Oh, and when they do battle, technology kills magic. I'm a bit of a SF nerd, but that ain't right.
It gets more right than it does wrong, though, so this is an easy recommendation. It was released on the PC, Xbox, and PS2, so it's not as though it's a hard game to find. Check the used racks for this one. Also, keep an eye out for "Heavy Rain", which is supposed to be a spiritual sequel of sorts. As long as I'm posting videos, here's the trailer that single-handedly made "Heavy Rain" a big deal: http://video.google.com/vi
If you're reading this, please comment. On anything. Next week (maybe), I'll tackle another adventure game. One that involves Luke Skywalker, stealing gasoline from the police, and fertilizer. Now THAT'S a teaser.
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