Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about overly chatty coworkers, Hunter S. Thompson, buying a new car, and more.
Your letters:
Todd:
What happened to The Daily Show's Jason Jones? He was very well known when he was on The Daily Show, and I always thought it would translate into a big post-DS career for him, the way it has for others like Colbert, Carrell, Helms, Munn, and Corddry. I really miss that guy's comedy stylings.
Awwww, let’s remember some Daily Show correspondents. Jason Jones is married to Samantha Bee, who herself became a big star after getting her break as a TDS cast member. So I assume Jones has been content to act as househusband while his wife serves as chief breadwinner in the family. Or his agent never gets calls anymore.
That can happen, because virtually every fake news reporter from TDS is a working actor, same as every Saturday Night Live cast member. Olivia Munn was already famous before being cast on TDS, and many others (Colbert, Carrell, Bee) were obvious stars the second they got the job. But others have fallen by the wayside. In the same way that not every former SNL cast member became Adam Sandler, some TDS correspondents were forced back into the audition grind after their respective stints. My favorite example of this is Beth Littleford, who was one of the original TDS reporters back when Craig Kilborn was the host. Littleford was funny as shit, then she left the show and seemingly disappeared. Know where I saw her next? As the mom on Disney’s Dog With A Blog. I was like, “Holy shit, that’s Beth Littleford!” Everyone still stuck in show business is overqualified for it.
Jeremy:
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas hit one of my streaming services this month. Somehow, neither my wife nor I had ever sat down and purposefully watched it the whole way through, so we did. But while watching, it triggered a memory. One of my buddies got denied admission to our college’s journalism school back in the late ‘90s, and he has always blamed a surge of applicants who had watched the movie and wanted to be the next Thompson. Then I realized you’re just a little older than us. Were your writing dreams inspired by having seen Fear and Loathing?
I have never seen that movie. It came out when I was in a personal “Johnny Depp sucks” phase that has since returned with great force. My greater sin is never having read the orignal book. In fact, I’ve never read any Hunter Thompson book. I’ve only read his eulogy for Richard Nixon, which is the peak of the form.
Otherwise, Thompson’s oeuvre is one of many glaring voids in my reading history. In my mind, he mainly exists as the original bad-boy journalist, emphasis perhaps on “bad” because Thompson was an incredibly sloppy writer—hard to believe for a guy who took all the drugs in the world—who needed a passel of editors and proofreaders, many of them unsung women working underneath him at places like Rolling Stone, to make his pieces even mildly coherent. Every writer needs an editor, but I’m talking about Thompson faxing raw notes to his editors and forcing them to essentially write his shit for him. As such, the only thing I really have in common with Thompson is that I always end up making everything I write about myself.
Back to me: My writing dreams were inspired by reading Catch-22 for the first time, back in high school. That book made me want to be a writer, one of any sort. My journalism career just happened to be a pleasant side result of that ambition. I don’t believe that the Fear and Loathing movie, which was a notorious flop that only made $10 million at the box office, somehow triggered a mass surge of j-school applicants. I just think that students back in the '90s believed that all journalists made a shitload of money. I know I did. If you had a byline anywhere in any print newspaper or magazine, I blithely assumed that you were a millionaire. I assumed wrong.
Oh, and I also assumed that journalism would still exist when I was older. I was wrong on that count, too.
Justin:
What is your stance on the Friday the 13th movies? Sneaky good, terrible, or do you adhere to the Siskel and Ebert view they are a sign of the downfall of Western Civilization?
I’ve never watched any of those movies, because I don’t like slasher films. I think I once stumbled into watching a scene in one of them where Jason pops out of an overhead bin on a bus and cuts some teen’s head off. That was all the confirmation I needed that the series wasn’t for me.
My parents did have all of us watch the original Halloween once, though. I was roughly 4 years old. My siblings and I still yell at our mom about it. Great movie, but you should probably watch it later in life than I did.
Will:
Where do you prefer to stand/sit at concerts? I like a good balcony with a railing to lean on.
I like that idea in theory, except that every balcony railing is occupied either by VIPs or people who got their spot on the rail by getting there when the club doors open and then never moving. So it’s pretty rare for me to enjoy that vantage point.
Which is fine, because I usually prefer to be on the floor of the club/arena/stadium anyway. I’m tall, so I rarely have worry about my view being obstructed (unless some dipshit in front of me tries filming the entire concert on their phone). More important, I want to get as close to the band as possible, and I want to be facing center stage. I’m a child of the '80s, when nearly every music video was a performance clip and the luckiest people in that video were always the fans standing in the middle of the front row. I wanted to be one of those fans, and I still do. I wanna get so close to the band that I can brag, “James Hetfield spat on me!” to my buddies afterward.
I also like the contact down on the floor, especially in a club that has general admission. I like being in that big, hot, sweaty mass of bodies. I like assuming an isosceles stance so that any nearby moshers won’t accidentally spill my beer. I like standing where I can feel the energy of the music, as if I’m physically inside of every song. I can’t do that if I’m sitting in some fucking opera box 20 feet overhead, you know what I mean? I even liked moshing back in my spryer days. I can’t slam dance anymore for old man reasons, but you better believe I’m staring at all of the moshers and crowdsurfers wistfully. That shit’s rock 'n roll, brother.
Barry:
I need a new car. I'm eyeballing some Kias, and I really like the vehicles themselves, but that K-backwards-N logo annoys the ever-loving shit out of me. Is not buying one because of the logo a principled stance, or just shallow bullshit?
I got used to the bad Kia logo a while back, so I’m immune to its repellent qualities. It helps that I drove a Kia Soul for roughly a decade and still kinda miss it. That’s because, in my opinion, Hyundai and Kia surpassed their Japanese rivals, Toyota and Honda, in product quality many years ago. I don’t mean aesthetically; universal safety regulations have made it so that every car looks pretty much like every other car. But when it comes to designing an attractive cabin and engineering a smooth ride, I’m biased toward the Korean manufacturers now. But you, Barry, will have to get out on the test drive circuit to decide that for yourself.
When you do, go ahead and throw out the idea of rejecting a car on a “principled stance” like the fact that it has a poorly conceived logo. No car brand has decent advertising anymore. And going by logos is parallel to shopping for a car as a status symbol, like a yummy mummy who buys a BMW to look rich, or an exurbanite who buys an oversized pickup truck to signal their Republican bonafides. If you’re like me, all you want is the best car. The one that fits your budget, your practical needs, your legroom/headroom specs, and your desire for an easy Bluetooth connection. Throw the logos out and shop as blind as you possibly can. You’d be surprised how many Kias end up meeting your criteria.
Also, think about an EV, because gas isn’t getting cheaper anytime soon.
Stephen Rodrick:
A dream dies for a fifth round pick.
That’s what one of the best longform writers in the game emailed me yesterday after the Vikings sent J.J. McCarthy to the Giants for a fifth round pick. Given that Minnesota spent the 10th overall pick on McCarthy three drafts ago, a fifth in return feels pretty weak. But if you watched McCarthy attempt to play NFL football last year, as I did, you know that the Vikings were downright lucky to get that much for him. He was a bad pick, and I made peace with that after the second Bears game last season. Better to cut bait now than fritter away more seasons seeing if you can magically turn a shitty QB into a great one.
The only thing that annoys me about this particular trade is that it gives the internet’s armchair scouts another chance to brag, “I knew he was bad when he was at Michigan! Jimmy Harbaugh never let him throw the ball!” Yes, we’re all very impressed with your magical foresight. Now go subscribe to Mike Lombardi’s Substack, because you’d fit right in with the crowd there.
HALFTIME!
Jesse:
I'm 41 and one of the managers that reports to me is 63. He is a decent guy with a lot of technical knowledge in what we do; I'm his boss, but we work well together. However, in the past week a new worrying habit has developed. Twice, he has come into the office bathroom and asked me a work question WHILE I AM ACTIONING MY TO-DO LIST IN THE STALL. How do I put a stop to this without making a big deal out of it? Can't I have a moment's peace???
Why not perch your feet up on the toilet seat and pretend you’re not there? That always works in movies … for five seconds, until the assassin hears a rustle.
If you’re like me, you react to an attempted shitter chat-up by activating all of your Upper Midwestern impulses and answering any of the proposed questions as quickly and curtly as possible. “Mmhmm. “No.” “I dunno.” Things like that. I’m very good at making my disinterest plain when I speak. Push me too far while I’ve got pushing of my own to do, and that might force me to engage East Coast Drew. “If you don’t mind asking me that when we’re back out in the office,” I will tell you brusquely. If you can’t take the hint after that, and you work under me, you will be transferred to a different office floor.
This is why I work from home.
Craig:
What are some of your favorite under-the-radar film tropes? Mine are (i) if a scene is shot outside at night, the street must be wet, (ii) characters must never say "good-bye" at the end of a phone call and (iii) when standing next to a car, a character must always tap its roof before it drives away.
That last one is probably a cheat cue to the stunt driver, right? That occurred to me only just now. Wow. Thought in motion, only here at Defector dot com.
I’m not sure I have a favorite film trope, aside from the fallacy of the talking killer. Sometimes the hero will talk back before shooting said villain, so that you get the entire plot explained in full before one guy kills the other. Very helpful.
But let’s go to film tropes that irritate me, because they are legion. Here’s one that appears in virtually every suspense film, even really good ones: The villain spots our hero in an enclosed space. There’s nowhere for the hero to go, so they take flimsy cover behind something—a box, a desk, an HVAC unit, etc. The villain isn’t tricked in the slightest. He knows exactly where his quarry is hiding, so he pulls out a big gun/knife/halberd and goes in for the kill. He walks past the desk and suddenly OMG THERE’S NO ONE THERE! Yes, it’s another magically disappearing hero, who used that three seconds of time off camera to somehow find an even better place to hide/escape. The victim could be an amputee child in the middle of a severe asthma attack, and they’ll still somehow gain Houdini powers in that specific moment. It gets old, man. Someone please invent a new way for cornered characters to get away.
Ben:
I read Heat 2 and Mann did a pretty good job, but this movie is going to SUCK, right? The stars have either gotten way too old or have died. Dicaprio stepping into the role Kilmer played?!! What the fuck? My hope is the tech bros that run Hollywood now tell Mann to pound sand and I despise all the studio heads.
I will not tolerate any slander of the Heat 2 novel in this column, and yes I consider light praise to be slander. I will only accept emails that declare that book to be an utter masterpiece on par with The Brothers Karamazov, you understand? CLEAN UP, GO HOME.
Anyway, they are indeed making a film adaptation of Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner’s book, and Leo DiCaprio has already been cast as Chris Shiherlis, a role once occupied by Val Kilmer. Seeing as how Kilmer wasn’t available due to a scheduling conflict (he died a year ago), I have no problem with Mann tapping DiCaprio to fill his shoes. A lot of people despise Leo, much in the same way I irrationally disliked Johnny Depp before rationally disliking him. We all have our silver screen enemies.
But I am not a Leo hater. Sometimes he’s badly miscast (Gangs of New York comes to mind), but otherwise he’s a great actor with excellent taste in material. I’ve seen Leo DiCaprio appear in too many awesome movies to quibble with the casting selection here. Meanwhile, Christian Bale has been cast as coke-addled homicide detective Vincent Hanna (originally played by Al Pacino), and motherfucking Stephen Graham, the best screen Capone, has been cast as master thief Neil McCauley (originally played by Robert De Niro). Oh, and Adam Driver has been cast as Otis Wardell, aka Smart Waingro. If you’re expecting me to complain about this cast, you have emailed the wrong Funbag. I’m gonna watch that movie as many times as I’ve watched True Romance. Bank on it.
(Also, Heat 2 as a story improves upon the original Heat film in dozens of ways.)
Joey:
Do you raise your butt to fart? My wife and I both do this.
Sure do. KABOOM!
Monte:
I got a Reel where some food media person said the most important ingredient in a sandwich is air. I mean, I would argue the most important ingredient is ingredients. But to their point, a poorly assembled sandwich can be dense and disgusting. You've shared your lunch meat stacking methodology before. How much of that is just the pursuit of air space to create a good bite?
I get the idea behind the take. I don’t like dense bread; this isn’t Norway we live in. And I want there to be enough space within the sandwich for me to taste all of the ingredients stuffed within it. It’s like how Ted Allen once wrote that the most important ingredient in a cocktail was water. He was referring to icemelt when he wrote that, discouraging you from using whiskey cubes or any other bullshit novelty mixologist product. Diluting the cocktail just a hair opens up the flavors. In the same vein, an airer sandwich elevates all of the ingredients. But that’s all the credit I’m going to give to some random dipshit on Reels. The meat remains the headliner in most any sandwich.
Email of the week!
Jon:
As someone born and raised in Syracuse, whose parents and brother still live there, and who had season tickets to SU football throughout my childhood (think Don McPherson, Marvin Graves, and Donovan McNabb who's senior season was my senior year of HS), I can acknowledge there are many things wrong with the Carrier Dome. But they are unimportant, and the lack of AC is largely meaningless except for a couple games in September (it's fucking cold in Syracuse).
As for what is right, the Dome is almost entirely made of concrete so crowd noise echoes and reverberates. Watching Kirby Dar Dar's reverse against Florida on the opening play of their game in the Dome in 1991 was one of the highlights of my sporting life. I was 10 and it was so fucking loud and the crowd never stopped after the touchdown. Florida could not respond and the game was literally over after one play.
Also, the Dome is now known as the JMA Wireless Dome. Do some research on how Carrier paid SU $1 million to the naming rights in perpetuity in 1980, then basically moved their entire manufacturing plant out of Syracuse to North Carolina about 10 years later. Carrier moving away weighs into why Syracuse sort of sucks, as you put it. Think NAFTA and the economic stagnation of former manufacturing hubs throughout the US. Syracuse was up and coming in the 70s and 80s when the Dome was built and my parents moved there. However, the population has essentially remained unchanged since.
One other great Dome factoid: it is the ONLY on campus facility that offers beer. When they tried to stop selling beer in the second half, the constituents almost rioted. They compromised with just ending beers sales at the beginning of the fourth quarter. This means it gets pretty damn sloppy and with about 5 minutes to go in the third quarter. Syracuse is cold. We drink a lot.
Also, troughs in the men's bathroom.
Anyway, for a kid, nothing beats the Dome. Fuck modern facilities.
Well said.
