The Zapruder Film: or, How I Got Over "Al Capone's Vault" and Learned to Love Geraldo Rivera

So, I do think I'm a little weird in one respect: I'm mildly obsessed with the assassination of President John Kennedy. I'm not crazy weird about it, but I do happen to know a lot about it.

Two weekends ago my lovely wife Sarah participated in, along with her mother, aunt, and cousin, a three-day, 60-mile walk to generate a fairly large chunk of money for the fight against breast cancer. It was pretty danged awesome, and it also happened to take place in and around Dallas, where I had never been. I was kinda stoked. I was finally able to visit the scene of what has seemed to me for a very long time to be the shadiest of all shady shit gone down. There in Dealey Plaza, manning a table of pamphlets, books, photo albums, and DVDs, was Robert Groden, the man who had written the book that first intrigued me and got me into reading about all the gnarly crap surrounding that moment. We chatted for a bit and I bought a DVD of his and he signed a glossy little photo-album book he throws in. In the DVD extras you can watch Groden introduce the first public airing of the Zapruder film on the show Good Night America.

All this to tell you that Geraldo Rivera, March 6 of 1975, was a total badass.



For starters, check out that dude's hair. It reminds me a lot of my buddy Ted Kamp's. Ted's is certainly more luxuriant and full than Geraldo's, but Gerry's is pretty dope. He's also got a pretty sweet stash and a bitchin' suit, and he's very poised. I like poise. Ted Kamp's pretty poised. But I digress. The above photo isn't from the particular episode of Rivera's Good Night America I'm referring to, but it's around the same era and gives you an idea of the badassness Mr. Rivera was exuding at the time. Maybe without the same amount of poise as on March 6 of 1975, but hey.

Now let me be clear: I say "March 6 of 1975" specifically because I don't want to get into Geraldo's politics, or motivation, or controversies. And even though I have always been pretty pumped on things like his ability to take a chair to the face and still tell a skinhead to sit down and shut up, I'm not presently prepared to endorse the man as a great figure of journalism. But if you watch the clip of his show on which he airs the Zapruder film for the first time, you see a young journalist who seems very sensitive to his audience, guests, and the subject matter, and who has no qualms about saying things like "That's the most disturbing thing I've ever seen," and using hip words like "heavy" to describe what's going to be shown. He just looks like someone who would have been extremely cool to rap with at the time. Besides, he hung out with this guy:



Wait, let's try that again without the creepy barnacle lady attached to John's back:



Much better! That reminds me... Am I the only one who thinks Double Fantasy would have been infinitely better had it been Single Fantasy instead? If you don't know what I'm talking about, go buy the album and get back to me after a good listen to the songs by both sides of that terribly unbalanced union of "talent."

But again, I digress.

I remember quite clearly sitting in front of the TV with my entire family for hours waiting for Geraldo to bust into Al Capone's vault. The entirety of my life since that night has been colored on some level by Geraldo's colossal failure. We all grew up believing in the monolithic and enduring buffoonery of a man whom we all thought "got his" in the end when the wall came down to reveal nothing more than an old stop sign and a couple of gin bottles.

But having watched the end of that show again, I've got to give it to him: he owns up and takes it like a man worthy of that warehouse-broom of a mustache. Geraldo, twenty-three years later, has proved to be pretty danged okay in my book. And as the world's most famous Puerto Rican Jew, I think we would all do well to acknowledge him as the inspiration for this guy:


"Hey, Charles Manson, I got a note!" Okay, so maybe I made that inspiration thing up, but you never know.

Man, who remembers Dynamite magazine? I used to order that through the Scholastic book club! Sweet! Thanks, Geraldo, for helping me relive my past. Capone and I are both feeling pretty warm and fuzzy right about now.

Amstel Light

I love it.

I really do love Amstel Light. I find more often than not that when hit in the face with an inordinately large selection of beers, Amstel Light is the go-to beer. Typically my troubles when it comes to ordering beer are a result of not knowing what type of beer I feel like drinking, not what brand.

It's interesting the common visibility level of the typical beer which enjoys a very loyal following. This beer is usually young enough to be considered still a scholarly insider's secret, but high-profile and rakish enough to let everyone know you were in on the scholarly insider's secret. Think Fat Tire. Think about it, frat boy. But I digress.

Amstel Light is a lager brewed in Holland and imported in White Plains, NY, one of those places that seem so romantically bleak and oddly rich in characters, as in Rodney Dangerfield and crew in Easy Money. Men who drink High Life out of the gold cans while driving their plumbing vans to the track and smoking cigarette after cigarette. These are men, men. Again, I digress. Amstel Light tastes great! Light beer or not, this is just one of my favorite beers to taste. It's crisp and refreshing, but not flavorless and thin like some bad Mexican beers or light American beers. It's got just the right amount of fizz and hoppiness. It's a Pilsner, so it's got a good amount of hops for me (it's no TAIX Pale Ale, but I could drink many more Amstels in a sitting than those—the TAIX PA is a pretty engaging experience), but, being Dutch, it's a little sweeter than a German Pils. Speaking of hops, I did try one of those too-good-to-be-this-unknown-and-I'm-gonna-make-sure-everybody-knows-it-beers, Dogfish Head or somesuch. It was mighty good. Very hoppy, as I like them. Something about how the beer is hopped for 90 minutes or so, which I thought was just an unnecessarily dramatic way of labeling your different brews by simple terms like mild, hoppy, the hoppiest! I also read that they use some starter yeast that's 1,000 years old or so. That would be odd. What do I know?

At any rate, I've been to Amsterdam, where they originally brewed this stuff. That town was groovy. Clean as hell, beautiful, interesting. Yeah, they're gonna make a good beer. Bier.

Anyway, it's a good beer. It's no Chimay, but hey, that's another post, right?

I'm eating pickles and drinking a Pilsner right now. It must be the Graff in me.

P.S. Can anyone in the Austin area tell me if I can find Amstel Lager (not Light) anywhere?

Masquerade, or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Fact that I Would Never Find the Jewel-Encrusted Rabbit Buried in England

Ever read this book?

Masquerade, by Englishman Kit Williams, was as much a source of pain and frustration around my house when I was a kid as it was a wealth of entertainment and hours of escape into a truly weird, lush, awe-inspiring, and often nightmarish place.

I say pain and frustration because this book is actually a very intricately designed treasure map that led to an ornately jeweled golden rabbit buried somewhere on public land in Great Britain, and although my family was rich with some of the highest levels of intelligence ever assembled under one suburban roof, we just couldn't crack the code of the great lost treasure of Jack Hare.

Okay, so here's the gist: in the book, the Moon Chick falls in love with the Sun Dude (articulate gender delineation mine), and crafts a beautiful gold pendant for him, sending her trusted subject Hare to deliver the amulet to her Apollonian crush. Jack Hare braves many wild and woolly adventures to fulfill his quest, only to find upon his arrival that he has lost the trinket del amor, leaving it to the reader to decipher the clues strewn throughout the magical and befuddling illustrations.

The Treasure

This riddle proved impossible for my family, and I'm pretty sure we had given up on solving it long before it was announced that someone had deciphered the puzzle and found the treasure. Of course, it turned out that the X marking the spot had been located through devious and cunning methods involving the former lover of Williams or somesuch. I'm not sure anyone would have figured it out in a reasonable time frame, considering the solution rested in discovering that clues were revealed by drawing lines from the eyes of animals in the illustrations through the longest digit of the animal to letters on the borders. Or something.

At least it was pretty to look at.

The Most Absurd Brownie

Last night I ate the most absurd brownie. It came from a coffee bar at which I played a gig. I was a little unsure of this gig, considering that it was a coffee bar, not a bar bar, but they sell way more beer and have a much larger variety of beers than they either sell or have a variety of coffees, so I couldn't figure out why, when they had a totally cool building at their disposal, they didn't open a totally bitchin' bar. BAR bar. They'd save a lot of money on lighting.

Anyway, I saw this fat, solitary, obviously-small-business-that-totally-deserves-my-respect-and-uses-such-a-delicious-amount-of-real-butter brownie in the case and asked the price, and the guy working said something like, "aw, go ahead and take it; you played tonight." I kinda still get off a little bit at the even minuscule amount of privilege that being a musician gets me. I also got two free Dogfish frosties (great über-hoppy beer that reminds me a lot of the TAIX Pale Ale back home) and all the Lone Star I wanted for free. Fortunately for them, I only ever want two of the "national beers of Texas" a night at the most. Now, I'm no beer snob, but that is a terrible beer. But... it is a beer I will drink when I really want a beer.

I'm going to briefly and adequately describe this brownie to you. No nuts, no chocolate chips, just an insane brownie. Imagine that a magical baker had fashioned a delightfully delicate box out of seven layers of the crust of a chocolate creme brulee, then filled it with fudge that had been softly and seductively aerated with a golden, diamond-encrusted whisk, wielded by hundreds of the cutest little floating fat people. That was this brownie. Man, was I glad I had picked up some milk a couple days ago.

All that to say, yes, I do still love playing rock 'n' roll, no matter how much money I lose on it, how sore my body is getting, and how few people care about what I'm doing. Because every once in a while, I still get a free brownie.

This bit of baked heaven brought to you by Quack's Neighborhood Bakery, Austin.

Ten-Whenever B.C. Or Something.

Okay, so if you haven't seen the movie 10,000 B.C., you must, you must, you must check out this movie. Well, you must check it out if you are the kind of person who finds great hilarity in the Brad-Pitt-Plays-Achilles-Ha-Ha-Are-You-Effing-Kidding gift to cinema and all it stands for, Troy. Trust me, if you own Troy just so you can get all chill and laugh your face off, you would most likely dig 10,000 B.C.

Okay, so let's start with the title. Most people probably know enough to know that Jesus and the mammoths did not live very near to each other in time (there's a '60s bad-boys-but-not-really band name, "Jesus and the Mammoths"), but I think once you get past, say, 300 B.C., you could probably tell most people anything and they would buy it. So, calling the movie 10,000 B.C. basically knocks most people out of the running for thinking things like, "do you think that it's accurate that this tribe looks like it's made up of two people from each of the people groups of the world?" or, "Why on earth would there be woolie mammoths being used to build the friggin' pyramids?" Why? Because I don't think most of us would know what was going on at that point in time anyway.

Moving on. There's a scene fairly close to the beginning of the movie in which the hunter tribe from whom we draw our protagonist chases a mammoth herd. A herd of mammoths stampeding over rough and treacherous terrain until one of them becomes ensnared in the nets. Seriously. You get to see this. So try to wrap your head around just how insane it would have been to actually witness a stampede of mammoths. It would be like Mr. Snuffleupagus meets I, Robot or Attack of the Clones. Imagine the wind that would have come off of that. Intense.

I have this real obsession with the concept of historical speculation. For instance, ever since we were fortunate enough to receive the great movie that is Braveheart, every movie involving ancient survival is filled with rugged yet beautiful people with weird hairdos that seem to be a mixture of Ren-faire and rasta.* Much of the speculation comes down to ceremonial devices and clothing choices, such as in the HBO series Rome—killer show—in which there features regularly a town-crier type, whom I think is called the "Newsreader", who accompanies his reading of the news with these outrageous hand movements which we are to take, unquestioningly, as an early version of Italian sign language, the vulgar-Latin precursor of Bronx gesticulations. But don't get me wrong—Rome is a very cool show. More 'bout that later.

All that to say that 10,000 B.C. loves indulging in this type of speculation. The hunters carry these absurd spears crafted from what looks like mammoth vertebrae and tusks or something. I wonder what they used to spear the animals they got those bones from. Maybe they found a mammoth graveyard, but their primitive nature-god superstitious religion prevent them from disturbing it (speculation!). They have varying styles of hair with one thing in common: mud and dreads. The dread is brilliant, because it shows itself to be the ancestor to the graceful braid, and it makes the dim-witted viewer feel smart when he can blurt out to his drunk frat bros, "It makes perfect sense! Without access to water and modern toiletries, the hair of the caveman would totally dread up! They were totally the first rastamon! I bet they had some kind herb just growing in all the cracks of the caves and shit! Of course, this was unrelevant before the invention of fire." Yeah, I said "unrelevant" and "invention". Bro.

Then there are the battle scenes. Don't even get me going on the battle scenes. All war movies ended up using the same battle shots after Braveheart. Similar battle scenes are just one thing that made Mel Gibson's Patriot a new Braveheart for the Founding Fathers set. Every battle has a speech (well, at least either the climactic battle in a movie or the catalyst battle) that usually involves some sort of discourse on what "they" can and cannot take away from you (i.e. land/freedom, women/glory), and the choreography is usually pretty similar. There's always chaos, and super slo-mo, and there's ALWAYS some crazy warrior chopping off someone's head with TWO swords or cleavers or whatever (okay, geeks, Claymores and battle axes, you happy?) One recent movie (five years?) that includes many of these devices but is pretty groovy enough to still end up being cool is Oliver Stone's Alexander, but I would like to write a whole spiel on that. So later on that. Or in the words of Keenen Ivory Wayans, "Yo, later to you, Bathead. Your show sucks anyway!" Name that movie.

I'm realizing that I don't remember as much about Ten Grand Bee to the Cee as I thought, yo, so I'm gonna watch some of it right now. Happy hunting. Of woolie effing mammoths. Anyone know how to actually spell "wooly"? I keep getting redlined here. But here's the hilariously meatheaded kind of philosophy that finds itself as the first line of the movie:

"Only time can teach us what is truth and what is legend." Hahaha!

* If you ever get the chance to go to the Commonwealth of Dominica, I highly suggest it. It is one of the smaller islands in the Caribbean, but it has, per capita, the largest Rastafarian population in the world. Bitchin' place. It's hard to believe that the scenery is real. And I ate dolphin there. Not dolphin fish, but Flipper dolphin. It was okay, though, because it was tuna-safe.

In Defence of Over-the-Top-Television Action/Crime Shows. From 2002.

So, Sarah Baby turned me on to this short-lived (22 episodes—is that "short-lived"?) Action | Crime | Thriller TV series titled Fastlane. It's a seriously cool, honestly thought-out, and downright sexy show about a couple of hot young undercover cops who pose as criminals to infiltrate and bust the toughest rings out there. At their disposal is God-only-knows-how-much-money's worth of cars, weapons, clothes, and technology to assume any legitimate persona, but at the end of the day, they solve the crime, restore their honor, and get the girl, using good old-fashioned street smarts and left hooks. And even though personalities rub wrong and emotions run high, again, at the end of the day, they are still best (reluctant) friends. Don't forget, one of them's out for vengeance for the death of his cop brother, while the other is constanly dealing with his fucked-up childhood.

It's like 21 Jump Street grew up, wanted to start shit and look good doing it. You know why? Because that's what we did. I was a kid when Jump Street came out and I was a man when Fastlane appeared. And I grew up, and I wanted to start shit and look good doing it. Sadly, I ended up looking a lot like Peter Deluise.

When I was a child, I used to speak like a man, think like a man, reason like a man; when I became a man, I did away with mannish things. A mannish boy. Spelled B...

A twist on the familiar. I hope that's ok to do. Anyway, Fastlane. It's great. There are bitchin' cars, hot girls, dreamy dudes, all dangerous, most of them (girls and dudes), fistfights, gunfights, and chase scenes resplendent with spin-outs, flips, rollovers, sinkings into the ocean after a pier dive, and most final, explosions. There's emotional warfare, physical warfare, and demonic warfare (the in-the-head kind), and there's usually some small but significant trial by fire in which one or both or all three of our main players learns they have yet another level in them they can handle.

Exactly what you always pictured the Jump Street crew graduating to after they got sick of sitting in history class. The last thing I saw Peter Facinelli in was Can't Hardly Wait, a high-school party movie, in which he plays the handsome-and-stupid dickhead ex-boyfriend of the Perfect Girl, Jennifer Love Hewitt. Bill Belamy's cousin is none other than Shaquille O'Neal for eff's sake (that is not germain to my point, but still), and Tiffany Thiessen even dropped the "Amber" 'cause she was all growds up.

Enough of this; I'm gonna watch an episode.

Broken Lizard

If you haven't had the luck to watch the movies created by the comedy troupe Broken Lizard, please take the time to do so. I was turned on to these talents by good friend McInfly, who told me I seriously needed to sit down and watch the nouveau-keystone cops comedy Super Troopers. This wasn't the first time McInfly had initiated a new and hilarious experience for me, so I trusted his suggestion and watched it. I laughed harder than I had since the last time I had watched Tom Hanks and Jim Belushi in The Man With One Red Shoe (trust me). I followed this with their next movie Club Dread and then Beerfest, the last feature film they have released.

"Man, you must of eaten like, 100 bucks worth of pot, and like, 30 bucks worth of shrooms, man... So I'm-I'm gonna need that 130 bucks... as soon as you get a chance..."

I think that's what College Kid #2 says to College Kid #3 in the opening scene of Super Troopers. This is great writing, as it's sounds and feels just like something we all heard from that one dude we all knew in high school who was kind of a dick. What follows is total fantasy.

Or so it might seem, but how many of us can recall stories, though maybe not quite as intense as the ensuing scene, of crazy happenings when we were in high school and college? The time you almost flipped your car because you took a turn too tight? The time you were followed out of the local miniature golf course by what seemed like all the gang members in town, the time you actually did flip your car... Anyway, in the midst of all their hilarious and sometimes cheap jokes and their healthy use of sex and boobies and drug references, the Broken Lizard crew really knows how to tell a story. These are not necessarily the most complex of plots, but the concepts are ones that utilize to great effect the old technique of asking "what if?" as in, "What if there were a department of highway patrolmen who really knew how to party?" or "What if a Jimmy Buffet-type of has-been musician owned a resort and the employees started getting killed?" or "What if there were a super-secret, global underground beer-drinking competition that considered even the idea of an American team a huge joke?"

These "what ifs" all produce stories that, in turn, produce moments you will never forget once you have watched them. You will never forget them because you and whichever buddy of yours has also seen the movie will constantly quote lines to each other, send lines as text messages to each other, and post them on each other's Facebook walls on a regular basis.

I am especially impressed by Lizard member Kevin Heffernan. Heffernan co-wrote all Broken Lizard films and delivers, IMHO, the most ridiculously funny, dry, and well-acted performances of the entire (extremely talented) crew. Also keep a close eye on auxiliary performances by seriously funny goofy guy Michael Weaver, particularly in Club Dread, and an actor whose mystery and charm lure me and entrance me in every movie he's in-Philippe Brenninkmeyer. Wow.

There are several projects in the works with these guys. Heffernan is starring in some promising-looking comedies. One, Strange Wilderness, a non-Lizard production, puts him together with another comedy great, Steve Zahn. I don't, however, believe that semi-hack Jonah Hill deserves screen time with him, but hey, maybe Hill can continue to rebuild the funny he promised us in The Forty-Year-Old Virgin and started to reclaim in his hilarious, albeit brief, encounter with Ben Stiller in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (yes, I have a four-year-old). It's just too bad that Hill gets higher billing. Oh well, welcome to how it is. I'll have to watch it and report back.

Anyway, back to Broken Lizard. They are poised to release Super Troopers 2 in 2010 (directed, as were the other Lizard productions, by Jay Chandrasekhar), and The Slammin' Salmon (directed by Heffernan-eep!) this year (is it out yet?) Watch them, learn them, take some of what they put on screen with a grain of salt (a couple of these guys can ham it up a bit much), and forever find yourself asking "Who's Barry Badrinath? Who's Barry Badrinath? Who's Barry Badrinath?"

Thanks again, McInfly.