Catching up with the Goodwill Geek

You know, I never take time to just get on here and just... like... talk about stuff. I have a lot of blogging friends who focus their blogs on all aspects of their lives, not just the junk they buy in the course of a month.

I know. It's shocking.
But stay with me.

I thought I'd give it a try. But... if I'm not going to be blogging about the crap I've bought and brought home from Goodwill... or Mardens... or Dream Catcher Antiques... or some other store... I thought I'd take a post to talk about some of the stuff I've been doing, some of the stuff I watched/read/listened to in August, etc. I think I might try to make it an-end-or-maybe-the-beginning-of-every-month kind of thing from now on.

So here goes. Don't expect content any deeper than "Guess what I bought!" by any means.

I've just finished reading Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman. It's a collection of essays on pop-culture, and some of them border on enlightening. It's been slow going for a number of reasons. I don't get as much time to sit down with a book as I used to for one. But for another, I have a hard time buying Klosterman's tone in many of his essays. In so many of his pieces he derides egotistical hipster high-brows for poo-pooing on certain subcultures... but it really just comes off as a hipster (who considers himself above the other hipsters) pointing at a bunch of hipsters and going: "Don't you just hate those guys?" BUT I did especially like the essays he wrote on The Sims, Pamela Anderson, Breakfast Cereal, Serial Killers, Saved By the Bell, and I especially love the parallels he draws between The Empire Strikes Back and Reality Bites (He postulates that they are essentially the same film).

I finally got around to watching Paolo Sorrentino's "This Must Be the Place". It stars Sean Penn as Cheyenne, an aging emo rocker who I imagine MUST be modeled after Robert Smith. I really, really like almost everything about this film. It has the road-trip element that so many of my favorite films do, and also the outsider/misfit as protagonist that covers the rest of my favorite films. I think my main complaint about the film has to be that Penn's portrayal of Cheyenne occasionally just seems impossibly unreal. He completely OWNS the character, but it's so hard to imagine this flesh-and-blood Muppet of a man existing and interacting with other human beings. It's obvious he's supposed to resemble the aforementioned Smith, but elements of another aging rocker: drug-addled, wife-dependent Ozzy Osborne bleeds in there as well. It's a coming of age journey story for men with Peter Pan syndrome, and it uses a Nazi war criminal angle to get there. So much emphasis is put on Cheyenne and his interacting with the world that the Nazi angle didn't feel especially important. It was more an ends to a means that could have been almost anything else as long as it got the ball rolling. Overall I really liked the film though. I liked the pacing and the character development, and the little vignettes that get us from point A to point B. I'll be watching it again sometime in the future for sure.

In other news, my daughter is obsessed with doing make-up FX work. She's been watching SyFy's Face-Off with her grandmother since last year sometime, and now she's been experimenting on herself. I've been doing all I can to encourage her. Above you can see a number of her experiments. I hope she sticks with it because she has a lot of natural talent and she's just starting out at 13. I could see her making a career of this. She'll randomly poke her head into my Geek Cave and look at me with one eye (because the other one is apparently torn from its socket) and ask me to take some pictures for her. She's having fun and she's being geeky and I couldn't be more proud. 

Finally, I've been listening to a handful of podcasts lately, and I wanted to highlight a handful that I've been enjoying. 

Nerd Lunch Podcast

The Nerd Lunch Podcast just recently hit its 100th episode. They're a trio of guys, CT, Pax, and Jeeg who discuss everything in the interest of "nerds" although in my opinion, I really think it's more of a "geek" show than a "nerd" one. They cover topics ranging from fast food, movies, comics, classic geek books, and "other" stuff. It's the "other" stuff where the magic happens... like deciding who the "Expendables" of other movie genres would be. Or what foods you'd choose if your replicators on the Enterprise were broken and you could only have 10 choices for the next several decades. The thing I love most about this podcast is the pseudo-professionalism balanced with fun... meaning, the guys have a great time but take their topics seriously. They don't meander off topic the way a lot of pod-casts do, and while the occasional swear can be heard, for the most part the guys treat their listeners with respect. While I have no problems with profanity when I'm disciplining my kids*, I hate foul-mouthed podcasts that just wander all over the map when what I really want to hear about is what horror movie icons are going to bite it first during a zombie apocalypse.

Stuck in the 80's Podcast

Stuck in the 80's is a podcast that I just recently discovered. Like as in I've only heard about 3 episodes. But I'm hooked already! they mainly talk about 80's music that I can see, with a healthy smattering of 80's films mixed in. These guys were a little bit older during the 80's than I was... but it's all still pretty relevant stuff to me. And like the Nerd Lunch podcast above, these guys stay on topic and have fun while taking their topics seriously.

Thrift Store Movie Score Podcast

The Thrift Store Movie Score is another podcast I discovered recently. It's... interesting. There's none of the polish you see in the above two podcasts. The hosts Justin and Christine tend to be a bit... distracted from time to time, but they have a certain kind of goofy charm. They mostly talk about goofy VHS films they've found in thrift stores. They go into great depths analyzing the plots of the films they've watched, and pull in pop-culture references from their own past experiences. Again, it's not super polished, so a lot of times it feels like the hosts have done zero or less preparations to discuss some of their films and they ramble on at times about details I can't even begin to fathom the reasoning behind... but honestly, it works. Justin and Christine are a bit younger than I am so again there's some gaps between what they're nostalgic for and what I would be. But the podcasts are fun and still manage to bring back some memories. I especially liked the podcast about the Elijah Wood film "North" and another film "Motorama" I'd never heard of.

The Cult Film Club Podcast

The Cult Film Club podcast is one I actually discovered through Shezcrafti. It is the podcast that inevitably led me to discovering the Nerd Lunch podcast. Jaime Hood teams up once a month with Shawn Robare and Paxton Holley (the same "Pax" from Nerd Lunch above) to discuss a cool cult movie. But they don't just "discuss" a movie. They discuss their favorite parts, they discuss the terrible acting. They discuss where they have seen the actors in the cast before and since. They also recast the movie with their own casting choices. In other words it's not just some dry analysis of old weird movies you've never heard of... it's FUN with weird old movies you've never heard of. It's like those bizarrely in-depth discussions you used to get into with your friends at like... 3 o'clock in the morning about the Mortal Kombat movie. 

It was nice catching up with you guys, but that's it for me tonight! I'll be back soon with more Geeky Goodwill Goodness! Until then, Happy Hunting!

*Maybe I'm kidding... maybe not.**

** I am.