Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about directors ripping off one another, overcooked chicken wings, football, and more.
Your letters:
Dan:
The other day, I badly misjudged my commute to work and overdid it on the coffee. Stuck in stop and go traffic on I-90 with another 30 minutes to go, I knew I wasn't going to make it. So I pulled an executive maneuver, dumping my coffee out the window and using the cup to relieve myself. Normally, I think this is grounds for throwing a cup away, but this was a nice Stanley tumbler I had just gotten for my birthday, so I triple washed it and put it back into rotation. Do I need to let my wife know the cup has been tainted just so she knows to avoid it?
Ah, the precious Stanley tumbler I’ve heard so much about. You can fetch a pretty penny for one of those out on the black market! I’ve made some appalling confessions in this column, but here’s a surprise for you: I’ve never re-used a cup/bottle I’ve pissed in. It’s true. I’ve prepared food in mixing bowls that my kids have barfed in. I’ve blown my nose with printer paper. I’ve even had to unclog a toilet with my bare hands. I’m not scared to get my hands dirty.
So you might think I broke the “drinking out of a pisscup” seal long ago. Alas, I haven’t. Whenever I’ve had to piss in an emergency, I’ve either done it into a disposable receptacle or, of course, directly onto the ground. If I ever had to piss into my own travel cup for lack of other options, I’d do so. But would I reuse that travel mug? A difficult, and strangely erotic, question. Knowing me, the answer is PROBABLY. After all, if I cleaned the cup thoroughly, it’s back to just being a cup. My piss didn’t hide in the crawlspace and then pop back out when the coast was clear. It’s gone from premises, and therefore I can drink freely. I just wouldn’t tell anyone.
My wife included. Dan, don’t tell your wife that you pissed in the Stanley mug. She’ll make you toss it out and buy another one, and then you’ll be out a cool $30. A fate worse than drinking piss!
Varun:
You had a column after the AFC title game where you waxed poetic about the Chiefs’ greatness. As a fan of a bitter division rival (Broncos), it was particularly depressing but reasonable. Obviously the story of the Mahomes’ Chiefs isn’t over, but I’m wondering what your thoughts about them are now after the Super Bowl.
I’m just relieved that someone other can Tom Brady has now proven they can beat Patrick Mahomes in a Super Bowl. Brady lost three Super Bowls, but his team never got its ass kicked in any of them. That’s happened to Mahomes’s Chiefs twice now, which makes good fodder for any tired GOAT argument you wanna start online but, more important, offers reassurance to those of us who openly wondered if Kansas City would spend the rest of this decade smashing daydreams about our own teams into little, tiny bits. Turns out that they couldn’t just skate by with half a functioning offensive line and no running game. If you have the resources to exploit a great team’s weaknesses—you might have to go on a three-year heater at the draft to amass those resources, but it’s possible—you can beat them. Decisively.
That’s especially true if you’re the better team along the line of scrimmage. NFL football has changed a great deal since I started watching it, and yet the most important games are still often decided by the basics. If you hit, block, and tackle better than the other guys, you win. Philly’s title is currently being treated as the harbinger a potential shift in team-building philosophy—maybe running backs are important!—but really, they didn’t do anything new. They just beat that ass. Old-time football!
This cyclical shift will matter a month from now, when free agency opens. Everyone wants to be the Eagles, which means everyone wants linemen. And guess what? The pool of interior linemen available on both sides of the ball is deep, and headlined by none other than Chiefs G Trey Smith. Smith could command over $20 million in AAV, which is bad news for a Chiefs roster that’s currently about a million dollars over the projected 2025 salary cap. Maybe they can keep Smith using all of the usual cap tricks (cutting dead weight, restructuring/extended other contracts, the franchise tag), but they’ll have to make sacrifices to pull it off. And that’s just to keep together the shoddy pass protection they already have.
Meanwhile, LT is still a black hole. If the Chiefs manage to field a better offensive line next season, they’re still gonna have weaknesses elsewhere that other teams can exploit. Like mine can! My team can totally win the Super Bowl next year! THAT’S WHY THEY CIRCLE THE WAGONS! IT’S A FUMMMBLEEEEEE! WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP!
Ben:
My girlfriend and I live on the East Coast. She talks about wanting to move back to the West Coast, where she's from, at some point in the next few years. I am terrified of this. My friends, family, and the life I've built are all on the East Coast. But I know I'll eventually agree to move with her. As someone who's moved a few times in your life, do you have advice about moving to a new place and figuring out a life somewhere new and scary without a social network?
I don’t. My wife and I moved to the D.C. area 22 years ago because she’s from around here. I had no ties of my own to D.C., and in some ways I still don’t. I have my wife and kids, plus a few friends. But working from home left me precious few opportunities to cultivate in-person office relationships, and I’ve often been too lazy to seek out new friendships cold. The fact that I moved a lot as a kid may have left me guarded, ready to pack up and leave when the inevitable moment hits. But I’ve been here for a while now, so that’s not much of an excuse. Sometimes my wife suggests going out for a drink with this person or that and I feel like a kid whose mommy arranged them a playdate. The fact that I’m not physically able to play most pickup sports anymore, golf especially, further hampers my efforts to make new buds.
The twist it that I’ve still managed to build a new social life for myself, except that it’s on the Internet. My digital life has borne many real, face-to-face friendships over the years, but the majority of those friendships are long distance. Somehow I’ve made more New York friends since LEAVING New York than I ever did when I physically lived there. That’s beautiful in certain ways, but online living softens the body and hardens the heart. It absolves you and me of building a greater social network offline, in our physical vicinity. That part of the story isn’t a terribly encouraging one, and the fact that so many Americans have opted out of basic socializing is no small reason that Elon Musk has been able to send out a secret police of virgins to ransack essential government services. Sometime this century, Americans just stopped trying with one another.
But I don’t wanna drive this column into bleak territory, so let me add that I’m GLAD my wife and I moved where we did. My career has flourished, we live in one of the few sane states left in the union, and our kids have grown up happy and healthy. I’ve put real work into both the friendships I’ve made while here and into the existing, lifelong friendships I already had. Add my family and the dog into the mix and somehow I’ve still managed to cobble together a full life for myself. I found my people. Took some time, but I managed. Sometimes I’m unmotivated to get out there, but I forgive myself. I’m happy with what I have, and I won’t succumb to the terminal dissatisfaction that’s become a hallmark of the American experience. Even better, I delight in seeing my people I love find their people. Just this year, we sent our daughter off to college and watched her slowly put together her own crew there. This world isn’t beyond redemption just yet.
So perhaps I do have some useful advice to offer anyone else who’s relocated to a strange, new place. Find your people, online and off, and do right by them. Find them at a pickup game, in your neighborhood, at work, at church if you go to church, or here in the Defector comment section. If you’ve got your people, you can get by. And to Ben: enjoy the weather. Despite the fires, I’m still quite jealous of anyone who peaces out for SoCal. One day I’ll have my own Malibu Dream House. When that happens, y’all are invited over for chips and drinks.
Barry:
At the start of his career, Quentin Tarantino was a visionary, not just because of how he used clever dialogue and intense violence, but because his films really looked different. Then people started noticing how much they looked like other films, so critics started saying he was doing homages to them. Now it seems we are finally at the point where he's just a ripoff artist (who never knows when to end his fucking films!). So anyway, is Coralie Fargeat headed in the same direction already? The Substance was super fucked up, but it was also absolutely gorgeous. But it had parts that didn't just look inspired by Kubrick, but looked like a straight up copy/paste of The Shining and such. Is she brilliant, or just really good and reproducing others' brilliance?
Fargeat is clearly inspired by Kubrick, and definitely used a lot of his techniques, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say The Substance was somehow a direct lift of The Shining, or of any of Kubrick’s other movies. It stands as its own work, even if you disliked it.
There’s nothing people online love more than accusing other people of stealing, but art isn’t created in a vacuum. You have to consume and study other people’s work if you want to learn how to make your own. Sometimes that means heeding Oscar Wilde and stealing in bits and pieces, as Tarantino has from Sergio Leone and other past directors. But the best thieves, like Tarantino, know how to take stolen merchandise and refashion it into something that’s distinctive in its own right. This is true across every art form: film, writing, painting, music … especially music. This is how art evolves over time. Every good work of art has a lineage of influences, and taking cues from those influences matters more than ever, given the current war on art being conducted in this country. The powers that be don’t give a fuck about good art, and the citizenry isn’t much better about it. When everyone is an influencer, there are no influences. That’s bad. I’d much rather see people trying to rip off their favorite director than post a five-minute YouTube vid about their favorite salad hacks.
So I don’t consider Coralie Fargeat a fraud, and I don’t consider Tarantino one, either. The latter still wins a Best Screenplay Oscar every time he deigns to release a movie, and his stature within the film community hasn’t diminished to anywhere near the degree that Barry here assumes. No matter what shitty '70s exploitation flicks Tarantino has cribbed from, he’s still a major artist. I’m as disillusioned by the late entries in his filmography as any picky fanboy, but that man still makes his films with a great amount of skill and care. You’re making art, not product. When you do that, I’ll forgive whatever liberties you might take with existing material. Better to let Tarantino stage a gonzo alternate history of the Kennedy assassination than to finance a millionth Batman reboot.
HALFTIME!
Andrew:
I like to cook wings and thighs to death. Wings shrink up and get crispy skin, while thighs eventually lose connective tissue and come apart like braised oxtail. Also, 165-degree cooked legs and wings can be rubbery and the meat will resist coming clean off the bone. Where do you land, former Chopped champion? Do you have an irrational of fear drying out the bird, or are you a reprobate like me?
I don’t want my dark meat overcooked. When that happens, the skin fuses to the flesh and turns the exterior into de facto jerky, especially the wings. I love jerky as much as anyone who’s had to shop for lunch at a gas station, but it doesn’t make for an optimal dinner plate. Chicken is better when it’s nice and juicy, so I always try to hit the sweet spot when I’m cooking it. As with steak, I’d rather undercook my chicken than overcook it, because the juice is where the flavor is. If I tear off a thigh and see some pink, I’m still eating it. My wife will object, but I always refuse to cede victory. I meant to cook it like this, dear. It’s fine. Don’t make me stick it back in the oven. I’m hungry.
In fact, I’ve been quietly ruminating over this article I read in Slate last year about the upside of cooking your chicken medium rare. My brain screamed SALMONELLA at Luke Winkie’s headline, but he cited J. Kenji Lopez-Alt to back up his thesis and then dropped this paragraph on me:
Undercooked chicken will change everything you believed about cooking poultry. The chicken was unbelievably soft. Almost gelatinous, with the physical consistency of an overnight brisket. It was juicy to the point of being disorienting. Slicing into the breast meat was like puncturing a water balloon—ultra-indulgent and almost sinful, you could peel off splinters of white meat with your fingertips and let them melt in your mouth.
I would like to eat chicken like this every time I eat chicken. Winkie’s column was almost enough for me to spring for a sous vide cooker (I’ve never owned or used one), but I’m still holding back. I lack the GUTS to ask for my chicken served bloody as hell. One of you will have to do it first, as a test subject. If you suffer a rectal hemorrhage later that night, I’ll know that I was right to hold off.
Lea:
For someone with an average American adult life, is it overall better to be very tall or very short?
How tall/short we talking? Because I’m 6-foot-3, which counts as tall but doesn’t condemn me to needing custom-made pants and shoes and all of that shit. I’m happy at my current height, even if it makes sitting in coach snugger than I’d prefer. I never have my view blocked at a movie theater, I can help old ladies at the grocery store who can’t reach that box of cereal on the top shelf, and small children look up at me like I’m a fucking giant. It’s pretty cool, but I wouldn’t wanna grow any taller than this. I already have to mind my head when entering low spaces, know what I mean?
As for being super short, I can only go by my childhood experience there. I didn’t like being shorter than everyone else. Had I stayed that diminutive, I might have ended up the founder of Barstool Sports. Horrible. With that in mind, I vote for being tall. If you prefer sticking out to being ignored, and not everyone does, tall is the way to go. I was even able to touch rim 28 years ago! I should’ve been drafted!
Francisco:
What do you make of people who routinely call professional athletes by a restricted nickname? I watched the playoffs with a friend, Vikings fan, and he talked about "Gilly" and "Hitman.” It took me a while to figure out he was referencing Stephon Gilmore and Harrison Smith. It's ok to use Big Papi or A-Rod because those are widely known nicknames, but every time I hear someone reference Lionel Messi as just Leo it's like dude, you're not his cousin. Too tightassed on my part?
I only use certain athlete nicknames out loud. KD is the perfect example of an athlete whose nickname is so well known and so frequently used (especially by the media) that fans can’t help but address him similarly. Ditto Leo Messi, who’s widely beloved across multiple continents. This gets thornier when you start wading into relatively lesser known nicknames, like “Hitman” for Harrison Smith. I’ve never called Smith that out loud. Same goes for Gilmore, who only joined my team a year ago. He and I haven’t spent enough time together for me to suddenly start dropping terms of endearment. But if some fans like going that deep, I’m not gonna tell them to back down.
Fantasy plays a big role here. I’ve known Christian McCaffrey as “CMC” for most of his pro career. Why? Because that’s what fantasy players call him, likely because they’re too lazy to spell out the name “McCaffrey.” Then I drop a “CMC” into work chat and people are like, “Drew, who the hell are you talking about?” That’s when I’m suddenly exposed as the kind of sports bro who lapses into nickname usage on reflex. Hitman Harry would be appalled.
By the way, I know I’m rapidly approaching 50 because I automatically think of puns and cheap pop culture references to make whenever I see an athlete’s name. I saw Stephon Castle at the dunk contest and my brain immediately adopted Miracle Max’s voice and said, “Have fun storming the castle!” It’s concerning. Apparently, you either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the Chris Berman. Someone punch me if I ever start using these puns out loud or in print.
Ben:
I've seen two drug ads that are just WTF. One declares that there is a bulging eyes epidemic that is sweeping the land causing people to wear to wear huge sunglasses because of the shame, but now we have a drug for that. And I know the drug companies have to list every effect they see during their trials, so why doesn't someone going into a coma not cause anyone to say, "Maybe we should rethink this”?
Because pharma companies make more money when their products get approved by the FDA, so they push through medications that haven’t necessarily been properly vetted, and then they pay your doctor to prescribe them. Anyone who dies or contracts terminal diarrhea is considered collateral damage in the exchange.
My wife is one such patient. She had a really bad reaction to one of these meds, which has driven her close to distrusting all prescription medications. I’ve made a concerted effort to prevent her from becoming a full-on truther regarding modern medicine, but she’s also justified in being wary of meds that left her temporarily blind. Not all truthers are created equal, but they’re growing in number because this country’s healthcare system is so fucked up that you can’t trust anyone who runs it. Thank God we have a REAL expert running the show at HHS now! Bullfrog Kennedy will get all of this sorted out. I’m certain of it.
Jeff:
How different would football be if they didn’t allow offensive/defensive coordinators sitting in booths above the field? Does it make THAT much of a difference to have teams of dudes up there watching every play?
I doubt it would make a huge difference if you forbade OCs and DCs from working up there. Most of them prefer working from the sideline anyway, because it’s worth compromising your vantage point if you can talk directly to your players about what’s happening out there and what adjustments you need to make. Every team still wants/needs lower rung coaches up in the booth to get an all-22 view of the action, but I have no way of proving there’s a significant advantage to it. I simply assume there is, even if I just told you that the Eagles won a title by hitting the other guys harder. Maybe I just enjoy pretending that football is more complex than it is. Or maybe I just love moments like this one.
How could deprive us of this, Jeff? Isn’t this what sports are all about?
Larry:
Should I start a Substack? I've always loved writing and have been doing it for as long as I can remember. I've only ever freelanced for a local music rag like a decade ago, but it has remained a passion and recently I've become interested in sharing some stuff. I have no delusions about becoming a household name or anything, nor would I want to. I'm just curious if you personally think it would be worthwhile, or if said potential Substack would be any more or less therapeutic/anonymous than the personal journals that I have and will continue to pile up.
If you’re interested in putting yourself out there, do it. Substack has its problems, but you can find a less objectionable self-publishing platform if you sniff around a bit. Did you know that blogger.com is still active? Did you know that I can still access the Kissing Suzy Kolber dashboard there? I didn’t know that until I looked just now. Wow, there’s some pretty wild shit on this dash!
I know some writers are happy to keep a private journal and leave it at that, but a lot of us are eager (too eager, in many instances) to share our work with the outside world. I’ll never discourage anyone from doing the latter. Once you start putting your writing in front of an audience, it changes the dynamic. Now you’re writing to connect with other people, mind to mind. Now there’s an element of performance involved, which is the reason I started up my first blog in 2006. I had all of these ideas in my brain and didn’t want them gathering dust, so I put them out there and had a blast doing it. Even if my career hadn’t taken off after that, I still would have loved blogging anyway. The world needs more art, so make some.
Email of the week!
Mark:
I am a public defender. I had a very stressful day last week, followed by a challenging drive to a rural night court amid a winter storm. My evening turned around COMPLETELY with an unexpected treat. The prosecutor and I got to Remember a Guy, live and in person. I will not name the Guy (he was not my client). He is a former NFL special-teamer and the subject of a memorable Peyton Manning sideline interview. I will add that he was not charged with a crime- merely a minor traffic ticket. The Remembering lasted for at least ten minutes, thanks in part to his highly rewarding Wikipedia page. The Remembering began while he was up talking to the judge on the record, and I was standing five feet away. Do you have any stories about Remembering a Guy literally right behind his back?
I don’t, but one day I hope that I too am standing in court next to my liquored-up kicker.
