<![CDATA[CHUD.com - A Movie Website and SO MUCH MORE. - Blogs]]> http://chud.com/articles en-us N/A nicknunziata@gmail.com Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:59:42 EST 20 <![CDATA[We Are Going To Blog You: Night Terrors!]]> http://chud.com/articles/blogs/1874/We-Are-Going-To-Blog-You-Night-Terrors.html The Time Machine with my family when I was about 14 I wandered into my mom's room at midnight, asleep, and aked her what year it was. I also tried to get out of the front door of the apartment more than once; the locks always stymied my sleeping self.

The thing about my night terrors is that I rarely remember them in the morning. Sometimes I'll see a pillow across the room and realize I threw it at a phantom invader or beast, but the only times I really know what sort of nonsense I get into while sleeping is when a girlfriend tells me. Thankfully my long term girlfriends have been good humored about this stuff (between night terrors and snoring I'm a real sleepy handful); one of my exes, now my best friend, relishes telling the story of the night I woke up convinced that not only was she Beck but that she was going to shoot me.

I've had at least two night terrors in the last week. The first happened while I was in Chicago at the Nightmare on Elm Street set visit; after the official business was over I spent a couple of days at my father's house in the suburbs. I was sleeping in the basement on a pull out couch, and the family daschund, Rufus, had joined me. I almost killed the poor fucker as I woke up startled, yanking the sheets off of me (and him, as he had crawled under them); Rufus flipped over and blinked about him, confused.

See, I was convinced that someone had poured kerosene all over the basement, and they were about to light a match and turn the room into an inferno. I was completely sure this was the case for about a minute, and then I slowly came to my senses and sheepishly returned to sleep.

That one is rare because I remember it on my own. I have no memory of my night terror from last night, when I woke my girlfriend up in a panic. I tend to do that, and I guess you can look at it as a nice thing - I think a terrible catastrophe is about to happen and my first reaction is to save my girlfriend. Usually my girlfriends just get annoyed and tell me to go back to sleep; I'll get in a huff and tell them that if they want to be blown up/burnt alive/eaten by fire ants/murdered by a prowler that's their decision. And then I'll go back to sleep.

So last night I woke her up in a panic. 'Get out of bed!'

'What is it now?' she asked.

'Can't you see?' I pointed to the foyer between the bed and the bathroom. There was nothing there.

'What am I looking at?'

And here's where it gets good. 'Those cars! They're rolling down the hill towards us! We're going to be crushed!'

There's no hill. There's a bathroom, and that has a window looking out over an alley and the next building over. My block might be a slight incline, but the real hills - the Hollywood Hills - are a half mile up the road.

It's reported to me that even as I was warning about the rolling cars I seemed to realize how stupid it all was and went back to bed.

I'll try to continue bringing you the regular updates from my sleeping, panicky subconscious as further night terrors occur.
]]> no@spam.com (Devin Faraci) Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 EDT http://chud.com/articles/blogs/1874/We-Are-Going-To-Blog-You-Night-Terrors.html <![CDATA[We Are Going To Blog You: The Prettiest Homeless Girl]]> http://chud.com/articles/blogs/1737/We-Are-Going-To-Blog-You-The-Prettiest-Homeless-Girl.html In advance: This is rambling, maybe incoherent, and incredibly self-absorbed. In a lot of ways I wrote this to work out some issues that were bugging me. I didn't work them out, but this is what I wrote.

She was one of the prettiest homeless girls I had ever seen.

I was in the Hollywood McDonald's, just like an hour ago (and no, there was no good reason to be there. I was about to hop a subway home to the Valley and wanted to eat before I did. I had better options, and I haven't had McDonald's in a while, nor craved it. But for some reason those yellow arches just next to the Ripley's Believe It Or Not museum, just steps down from Sting's star on the Walk of Fame, called out to me tonight). The Hollywood McDonald's is pretty shitty; I've been to other gimmick location McDonald's and found them nicer. The Wall Street McDonald's has (or had, at any rate. In this economy who knows...) a doorman, an old fashioned paper stock ticker AND a guy playing piano. The Hollywood McDonald's feels like a remnant of the Hollywood I wish I had been here to see, the rundown and shady Hollywood (well, more run down and shady at any rate), the West Coast's answer to Times Square (the Times Square McDonald's has a weird diorama of New York City on the second floor. Check it out sometime). The only concession to 'Hollywood' is a series of large black and white photos of stars: Grace Kelly near the bathroom, Sidney Poitier and Julia Roberts in the far back right corner.

She was sitting under Poitier, or rather sleeping. The security guard (this is one of those McDonald's that has 24 hour security, not just some teenager playing manager) came over and woke her up. 'You can't sleep here,' he said.

'I'm not sleeping,' she lied through obvious eye boogers. 'I'm waiting for somebody.'

'You're going to have to wait somewhere else.'

In every single  big city in America this scene played out tonight. I've seen it a hundred times; growing up in a big city means that you get pretty familiar with the faces and scenarios of the lowest people living there. The people who order a coffee because it's the cheapest thing on the menu and they need a place to sit for eight hours until they have to find the next place to sit for eight hours. The people who do what little washing they do in fast food restrooms, the kind of restrooms where you need to ask for the key and it comes on a huge piece of wood or something. The people who are nobody.

You get familiar with them and you also ignore them. And more than ignore them you kind of come to hate them. These people are disgusting. And I don't just mean that in the physical sense, but that's certainly true as well. These people - the people sleeping on major boulevards, the people shitting on subway train floors (I have seen this happen more than once in my life), the people nodding off at McDonald's not because they're tired but because they just fired a load of smack into their veins, these people are disgusting. They're disgusting because of what they represent. They're disgusting because they're the living face of failure.

And failure's the worst thing there is, at least in this society. This town is a good example of just how that works: in Hollywood you can do anything, say anything, hurt anyone, as long as you are successful. There are the old stories of stars of the 40s getting into terrible accidents and the studios covering it up. I can tell you that these stories aren't a thing of the past. That shit goes on today. For the successful ones, anyway.

That's a tangent. The point is that when you live in a big city your whole life you get to know these faces, and you learn how to skip over them as you commute to work or as you go to a nice place for dinner. The other day I was on Vine Street and to my immediate left was a homeless person sleeping in a doorway, and to my immediate right was a stretch Hummer with a jacuzzi in the back. That's some Paul Haggis-level extremism there, but it's real. And everybody walked past both the homeless person and the Hummer without a second glance. You get used to this stuff.

But every now and again you'll find one that breaks through. I've had a couple. There was a lady out on the street with kids. Another was an old, battered man with his equally old, battered dog. When I was a kid there was a homeless Vietnam vet near the Union Turnpike E train station who would snap salutes at people who gave him money. Tonight it was a girl with a really pretty face.

She had long black hair, and it looked pretty clean. But it was obvious that she was not living in the best of circumstances. All she had was a messenger bag, and she wore baggy sweatpants and a flannel shirt too big for her. Her head floated out of it, and her face was heart shaped and pretty, with big eyes from which she was still rubbing the sleep. I was sitting a few tables down, reading the New Yorker and listening to my iPod and eating a meal I really, really did not need to be eating, and after the security guard walked away our eyes sort of met.

I guess that's what made her come over to me. 'Hey,' she said. 'Do you have a dollar?'

I'm not even sure why I'm writing this, but I guess it's because of this moment, this little moment of encounter. I've been asked for lots of dollars in my time. Most of the time I'll ignore the request, as though I had been suddenly and momentarily struck deaf and blind. Other times, when I'm in the mood, I'll shrug and say, 'Sorry, got nothing.' A couple of times I've given money. I realize I'm sounding pretty heartless here, and I guess that's sort of why I'm writing this piece, because I'm struggling with that heartlessness. I've done charity work - I worked in the non-profit sector for ten years before joining CHUD full time - but no matter how many food banks I've been a part of in the past, no matter how much fundraising I've done before, the relevant thing is that I usually, almost always say no.

This time I actually dug for the dollar. I didn't have any money on me - I almost never use cash any more - but I really looked. Disappointed, the girl wandered back to her table. She didn't ask anyone else in the McDonald's for money, and left as I left. I turned right on Hollywood Boulevard, she turned left.

Why did I look for the money? It was because she was pretty. Even as I did it, I knew why I was doing it, but there was even more weirdness bubbling under the surface.

I mean, you treat pretty people differently than you treat ugly people. Even ugly people do it; it's a natural thing, and it's the evolutionary advantage of being good looking. There's a part of my lizard brain that automatically responds to all good looking people differently than other people; sometimes I feel like I'm dealing with a higher being. That could be simple self esteem, but in my line of work I have met some of the most beautiful people in the world, and there's just an inexplicable magnetism about them.

But under that, beneath that, was something else. Something that has haunted every single decision I have ever made in my life (and maybe something I should have mentioned earlier in this piece. I'm sort of interested in writing this as freeform as possible, not giving myself lots of opportunities to puss out or hide behind snark, so I likely won't go back and edit the opening to include an intro to this concept. Bad writing!): I see everything like it's a movie.

This isn't a psychopathic thing. I don't believe I'm in a movie. As far as I know I'm fully aware of reality and it's pain and drudgery. But my brain has been permanently altered; not by drugs, not by booze, but by cumulative YEARS spent watching movies. Movies and their conventions color almost all of my perceptions; I'm pretty sure that my personal happiness has been thwarted on more than one occasion by ideas of love formed by movies (and music. Also a dangerous influence).

So while my brain is processing the encounter with this girl in a real world way (which includes a certain amount of hard edged big city cynicism - is this the prelude to a theft, for instance?) there's another level that's happening. All of a sudden this girl is Ally Sheedy in Breakfast Club. All of a sudden - and literally in the space of nanoseconds - I've constructed an entire back story for this girl, one that begins with her being a small town high school prom queen with a dark, abusive home life no one knows about and ends with her here, not yet as fully debased as a girl this pretty can be in a town this ugly, but right on the edge of it. She's waiting for someone and he's going to put her in a Bang Bus movie or he's going to pimp her out to some Middle Eastern business men or he's going to kill her just because he can and nobody will care. All of these movies rush through my head. And in some of them I'm the hero. I'm the guy who shows her the moment of kindness that changes her life. I'm the guy who talks with her in a way that nobody else will and there's a bond that eventually turns into something more meaningful (and don't get me wrong here - I'm not looking to pick up homeless girls at McDonald's. My love life right now is actually fairly complicated and stupid, and I think adding a homeless girl into the mix would be even more romantically self-destructive than I usually am). Maybe she's Zooey Deschanel and it isn't that she's homeless or in the early days of a serious drug addiction but she got swindled and someone stole all of her clothes when she was changing at the youth hostel.

Just in case the movies in my brain weren't complete enough, George Harrison's Bangla Desh, the ex-Beatles' pained cry to help those less fortunate, was playing in my iPod ear buds. That might fly over the heads of the general audience who isn't familiar with his solo stuff, but maybe a Sundance crowd would find the juxtaposition painfully obvious.

The truth of her story will remain a mystery to me, and I'll never be in any of those movies. Maybe if I was a screenwriter I'd be sitting here right now banging out one of those films, using the scene as a meet cute or as the opening of a thriller (a spiritual sequel to Schrader's Hardcore, maybe). I think I'm glad I'm not a screenwriter, because what's bothering me right now, and what I wouldn't want to bury under the pages of a generic script, is the feeling that I failed this person. Maybe for once my stupid movie-influenced instincts were right, and I should have talked to her. Maybe I should have ignored my own second guessing - you're only being helpful because she's pretty. If she was scabby and gap toothed and filthy you'd ignore her - and told her that while I didn't have cash I'd be happy to get her a burger or a coffee or something.

Every time one of these unfortunate people gets through to me I feel like this. I feel the combined, cumulative weight of all the sleeping bodies I've stepped over, all the people I've briskly ignored as I went about my day. Today I spent 30 dollars on new headphones; some of those people will be scrambling to get their hands on 30 dollars total this week. You can't feel every face every day, you can't let all that suffering into your life. Or at least you can't do that and keep your life going; you can't do that and play video games or Twitter about exploitation films or shell out money for art prints based on nerd obsessions. If you felt every face you'd spend all day doing everything you could to help these people.

Like I said, I did non-profit work for a decade; for a while I thought I was helping people but over time the disillusionment became too strong. By the end of my non-profit run I was the writer/editor for a major statewide group that was a large lobbying presence in the state capitol, but for all of the work we did I realized most was bullshit and compromised. The only time I had ever felt like anything I did was making a difference was when I was a low paid field activist, working in poor communities, starting community gardens and running afterschool programs. Not lobbying to get those things happening, not mounting ten thousand person protests to change policy. Being next to someone, showing a little kindness and humanity to them. That was the only thing that mattered.

And tonight I didn't do it. And tonight I failed someone. And tonight I failed myself.

My cinema-altered brain doesn't know what kind of movie to make that.
]]> no@spam.com (Devin Faraci) Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:00:00 EDT http://chud.com/articles/blogs/1737/We-Are-Going-To-Blog-You-The-Prettiest-Homeless-Girl.html <![CDATA[We Are Going To Blog You: Greedy Old Pricks]]> http://chud.com/articles/blogs/1309/We-Are-Going-To-Blog-You-Greedy-Old-Pricks.html
'Blargh blargh taxes,' they say.

Let's ignore for a moment that Obama's tax plan will not raise my taxes and, unless CHUD suddenly overtakes Google in page views, John McCain's tax plan will not benefit me. Let's just focus on this one thing: greed.

Greed is what all non-fundamentalist Christian Republican voters are about. And that's it. All they care about is money.

This maybe made sense a decade or two ago. I mean, I don't think it ever did, frankly, but at least a decade or two ago America was riding pretty high and doing pretty well. Comparatively. I mean, global warming was still just the cute little Greenhouse Effect back then! But anyway, it was a time when things were looking bright and we all had the free time to actually debate whether or not Heather Has Two Mommies belonged in a school library. Oh the frolicsome days gone by!

But now it's all in the shitter. This country has come to the end of its period of dominance. We're about to see the first emigration generation of America, kids moving overseas in search of a better life just as their ancestors once did, but in the opposite direction. We're mired in an unjust, shitty, stupid and evil war, we've lost all of our international credibility, our economy is about to discover if there really are giant alligators in the sewer and our very planet is on the brink of irrevocable environmental disaster. We are about to be in a place so bad that we'll be able to dig up our Depression and WWII era parents and outdo their stories of hardship.

And all these Republican voters care about is their taxes.

They need to be able to buy a big screen HDTV, you know. They need another car (but not an SUV, that's too gauche now, at least until gas prices stabilize). They have to give Ashley and Track the best clothes to wear to school this semester. They have a luxury lifestyle they're accustomed to, and if you threaten that by possibly hiking their taxes so that POOR people can get medical care... watch out! Sure, they bought all those power tools just to hang them in the garage to show off when the neighbors come over, but they're not afraid to use them on you, Karl Marx.

Here's the thing: it's all fucked up. Your taxes are the least of your worries. And it's funny when you tell me that you know how to spend your money better than the government does (although I do assume you won't be spending it billions at a time on an unwinnable, illegal war, so maybe you have a point). You're living on credit card debt out the asshole, so I don't think you know how to spend your money at all.

And beyond that, you're too happy to use the fruits of those tax dollars when it pleases you. You expect the cops to show up right away and the fire department to put out that fire in your den. You get pissed off when the roads are filled with potholes, and you want that border wall built and you don't make a peep about billions being spent on war planes and... Well, let's put it this way:

You only get mad about tax money when it's being spent on someone who is not you.

I'm so sick of people justifying voting for an evil, doddering old fuck and an ignorant backwoods cunt because they want lower taxes (which they will not get from these two, but whatever, you're voting Republican so you've already ceded the War of Intellects). You know what? If paying more taxes meant that this nation could come back from the crumbling edge of that cliff and once again become a world leader, a country that set an example for everyone else and lead the way with a shining torch of decency and optimism, I'd fucking hand those tax dollars over in cash personally.

See, at the end of the day, we're all in this together. When you're voting based only on your own narrow set of interests, you're leaving everybody else out to dry. Maybe you don't care about that today, because you're a greedy, self-centered son of a bitch, but someday you're going to need the rest of society, and you'll have thrown them all away.

Every man for himself politics of greed got us where we are today. They won't make things any better, that's for sure.
]]> no@spam.com (Devin Faraci) Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:00:00 EDT http://chud.com/articles/blogs/1309/We-Are-Going-To-Blog-You-Greedy-Old-Pricks.html <![CDATA[We Are Going To Blog You: Why Do I Keep Buying Doritos?]]> http://chud.com/articles/blogs/1165/We-Are-Going-To-Blog-You-Why-Do-I-Keep-Buying-Doritos.html
Which is weird because I kind of hate Doritos.

First of all, I hate the Dorito dust. It gets all over your fingers and makes you feel gross, and it coats your mouth in the most unpleasant way. And they're so fucking sharp, and the combination of cut up mouth and gross orange dust makes me unhappy.


On top of that, Doritos just don't taste good. They taste like Doritos, and not like the flavor advertised. Living in Los Angeles* I have come to accept eating Dominos on occasion, another food that doesn't taste like what it's supposed to tast like. I don't know that I can afford to enjoy two things that don't taste like what they're advertised to be.

The question, of course, is which Dorito flavor is most disgusting. They're all fucking gross, which is part of why I don't understand why I keep buying them, but the grossest may be the one I have not yet tried: Doritos Quest. That's what they call the MOUNTAIN DEW FLAVORED DORITOS. Good lord, what sort of maniacs work at PesiCo? I will buy The Quest someday and report back to you the horrors I experience.

It would help if they sent 99 cent bags of them to my local 7/11. Like I said, I stand in line and see these things and somehow, for some reason, think it would be  a good idea to buy them. I don't fully understand the thought process that goes into hefting one of these bags (mostly filled with dusty air) and putting them on the counter in front of the one-eyed dude behind the counter**, but it just seems like a good idea. It seems like this bag won't make me sick to my stomach, like this bag will finally fulfill the promise of being an extreme snack for people on the edge.

Part of it is wanting to be thirsty. You know how when you pick up some salty chips you buy a drink knowing that you'll be thirsty after eating them? I tend to go backwards and buy beverages and then seek out salty treats to make me want to drink more of the beverage. It's some kind of self-fulfilling alcoholism, apparently.

But I think it's more than the need to get snacks. There are other snacks. The equally awful Lays BBQ chips sit right beneath the Doritos, and I could just as easily make  myself sick with those. I think its the packaging. The Dorios packaging doesn't even look like it's for a food product; you'd be forgiven for thinking there was some kind of tech item in that bag. I mean, surely people aren't meant to eat the two misshapen triangular things on display. They look like motherships dispatched from the Crust Planet. But the rest of that packaging: so zippy! The Blazin' Buffalo and Ranch has flames on it, which dare me to try it (the good news: these Doritos can be so hot as to render my taste buds useless for a while, leaving me free of the greasy aftertaste of these hideous refugees from Fire in the Sky). And so the Doritos go next to the beer, or next to the Arizona.

And so an hour later I sit here nauseous, wondering why I did this to myself. There's probably another blog in pondering why I finished the fucking bag (hint: I'm fat), but now the damage is done. What freaks me out is that I know another day - not tomorrow, or even next week or possibly even next month - I will again be standing in that line at 7/11 and see those Doritos...


* the other day I called a local pizzeria and asked for a large pie. No shit, the guy on the phone goes 'Pie? Why you calling a pizza place for pie?'

** get an eye patch, guy. That shit is grisly.
]]> no@spam.com (Devin Faraci) Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EDT http://chud.com/articles/blogs/1165/We-Are-Going-To-Blog-You-Why-Do-I-Keep-Buying-Doritos.html <![CDATA[We Are Going To Blog You: Grow Up, Hillary Supporters]]> http://chud.com/articles/blogs/1149/We-Are-Going-To-Blog-You-Grow-Up-Hillary-Supporters.html
Some of this is the media. They need a good story, and Obama being 'down in the polls' and feuding with Hillary is a good story. It makes the election into a race and not a coronation. But beyond that there is friction, and Hillary delegates really are feeling butthurt about the primaries.

Man the fuck up. I can't believe I'm watching ostensible Democrats whining that they might vote for John McCain simply because their candidate didn't win, or because their candidate didn't get the second half of the ticket. Any Democrat who votes for McCain as some kind of a protest is a traitor not just to their party and their ideology but, as far as I'm concerned, to their nation. Unless they've suddenly changed their entire belief system - if they now are suddenly anti-choice, pro-war, pro-plutocracy - they will be giving their vote to someone who they think will do the wrong thing for their country.

And make no mistake, John McCain is going to do wrong for this country. These have been eight terrible years for the United States, and under McCain we will have four more terrible years (although make no mistake, he'll only get four years. He'll probably die in office, the old cocksucker). This election is our last chance to salvage this nation, to return it to the kind of country that you can feel proud to call home and not a redneck right wing religious nut hellhole.

So Hillary supporters, grow up, dammit. Don't cost us the future of this country because you're a bunch of punk-ass bitches.
]]> no@spam.com (Devin Faraci) Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EDT http://chud.com/articles/blogs/1149/We-Are-Going-To-Blog-You-Grow-Up-Hillary-Supporters.html <![CDATA[We Are Going To Blog You: White People, Take Care of Your Shit]]> http://chud.com/articles/blogs/1081/We-Are-Going-To-Blog-You-White-People-Take-Care-of-Your-Shit.html
I knew I fucking hated Albuquerque for a reason. Now I know what it is.


This shit is so rotten that if someone put these guys in a movie I'd assume it was cheap, unfunny satire. This is the worst thing I've seen since I found that pustule on the end of my dick, and it might be the worst thing I've heard EVER. Click here to go to the MySpace page for this travesty.

I feel like white people have been getting away with a lot of bullshit for the last ten years or so - America accepted all this emo nonsense and a whole bevy of All American Assfuck bands have been allowed to lay waste to an entire generation. But this? This is going too far. I refuse to allow the existance of a band that makes me look back on Limp Bizkit fondly.

White people,. clean up your mess or you're going to have someone else clean it up for you.
]]> no@spam.com (Devin Faraci) Sun, 10 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EDT http://chud.com/articles/blogs/1081/We-Are-Going-To-Blog-You-White-People-Take-Care-of-Your-Shit.html <![CDATA[We Are Going To Blog You: On Dating]]> http://chud.com/articles/blogs/380/We-Are-Going-To-Blog-You-On-Dating.html
I'm also sort of pedantic about my dating terminology. I make a clear distinction between seeing someone, dating someone, and going out with someone*. Seeing someone is very casual, and probably not yet sexual/romantic. Dating is still casual, but there's some sort of sexual activity happening. You might see other people while dating someone. Going out is when it gets serious and you're no longer actively trying to sleep with other people.

Since moving to Los Angeles I've been doing some dating, and I keep running into the same situation again and again: women who are kind of amazed that I pick up the check when we go out. Not because I look like a degenerate bum** but because they're used to going dutch on dates.

The idea that a man would ever let a woman pay is beyond me. I mean, every once in a while okay, but generally? That's what the man does. Hell, I'll pay for women friends even when I'm not trying to sleep with them***. I'm not usually an old fashioned guy, but I'm old fashioned on this one, and it's weird for me to think that there are lots of guys out there who don't see how simply picking up a check works in your favor.

Is this some kind of weird reaction to feminism? Like the guys are trying to treat the women as equals? The truth is that no woman wants to be treated like an equal when the check comes - at the very least they want you to make a serious attempt to pick it up. I'm no Casanova, but this is simply an obvious truth. Men: pay for your ladies.

Wait, I didn't mean it like that.

*And an even clearer distinction for just sleeping with someone. But this is about dating.


** I look like a degenerate sex offender.


*** Theoretically.
]]> no@spam.com (Devin Faraci) Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:00 EDT http://chud.com/articles/blogs/380/We-Are-Going-To-Blog-You-On-Dating.html <![CDATA[We Are Going To Blog You: Punching Producers In The Proboscis]]> http://chud.com/articles/blogs/355/We-Are-Going-To-Blog-You-Punching-Producers-In-The-Proboscis.html
When I woke up this morning and found the floor of my bathroom covered in vomit, the details of the night before came rushing back. As is so often the case, I had made a huge, drunken idiot of myself. But this time it was in good faith, for whatever that's worth.

I had gone to the Saddle Ranch at Citywalk for a friend's birthday. This is so not my scene - there's a magazine article hanging on the wall of the joint that explains that reality show 'celebrities' like to hang out there because it's the place in LA where people actually are excited to see them, since Citywalk is like a tourist magnet. But my friend wanted to ride the mechanical bull, so who was I to say no. It was a big group of us and there was a lot of drinking. A lot.

When that began to wind down good old Ryan Rotten brought us to a bar in Burbank. I was already trashed, and my judgment long gone. I drank a whole lot more there. At one point the bartender said, 'You're not driving home, are you?' I was so proud to tell her I don't even have a license!

Closing time came and the group I was with was out on the sidewalk. I don't know all the details of what happened next - the technical term may be 'blacked out' - but there was a scuffle. Being the superhero I am, I ran over and tried to be backup. I punched a dude in the face, bloodying his nose. The dude punched me in the face and I staggered into the street.

Unfortunately, the dude I punched was in my party. And a movie producer who has a high profile genre film hitting this year, and more in the pipeline. He was getting into a shoving match with some random gorilla over a cab, and I thought I was doing a good deed, but I was so drunk I didn't know whose nose my fist was meeting.

Getting punched in the face has a way of bringing you back to some reality and I stood there shocked, realizing I had punched the wrong guy. He was pretty furious, too, and was pointing at the blood running down his face and saying 'You fucking did this!' I stammered my apologies, but he wasn't really interested in hearing it. Not that I can blame him.

This morning I got a call - all was well. The producer had been mad the night before but was laughing it off this morning. Sobered up and away from the bloodied nose (which was swollen this morning - thank God I didn't break it), he understood that I hadn't meant to punch him and that, in my own retarded way, I was trying to be a good samaritan. Next time I see the guy, I'm going to buy him a drink and continue the profuse apologizing. I think I'll probably be buying only him a drink, though - the booze and I may be taking a small break.
]]> no@spam.com (Devin Faraci) Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT http://chud.com/articles/blogs/355/We-Are-Going-To-Blog-You-Punching-Producers-In-The-Proboscis.html <![CDATA[We Are Going to Blog You: I Am Losing My Mind]]> http://chud.com/articles/blogs/349/We-Are-Going-to-Blog-You-I-Am-Losing-My-Mind.html
Working from home at first seems like paradise. Pants? Optional. Jerk off whenever the mood strikes. You can listen to music, watch TV, play a video game. Fuck, I'm laying in bed with my laptop right now - it's more comfortable than sitting at my desk.

But after a couple of months the isolation of working at home begins to take its toll. Back in New York I had two cats sharing the house, so I could at least talk to them. Many an hour would be lost chasing those fuzzy little bastards around. Here in Studio City we can't even have animals visit. I had a visitor this weekend who brought her tiny, adorable dog and getting her out of the house without alerting the building manager took on The Great Escape proportions in my screwy mind.

I get out of the house during the day - screenings, junkets, etc, although I go to fewer than I did in New York for various reasons - but I haven't found a good place to work outside of home in Studio City. Even then, I'm not a huge fan of going to the coffee shop to write; it's too noisy and busy and I drink too much coffee and get cranky. So I sit at my desk (or chill in my bed) and do my work, finding myself actually missing having annoying co-workers stop by my office and bugging me. I imagine how cool it would be to have a CHUD Central office here in Los Angeles. There are even some offices for rent across from my place that I've fantasized about (look, I have a busy internal life).

It's nice having a couple of friends who work from home, or who work evenings, since they can lunch with me, helping me keep my sanity for another day or two. But just a day or two, and then I'm crawling up the walls of my apartment while trying to get some writing done for the site.

When I finally snap you'll know why.
]]> no@spam.com (Devin Faraci) Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT http://chud.com/articles/blogs/349/We-Are-Going-to-Blog-You-I-Am-Losing-My-Mind.html <![CDATA[We Are Going To Blog You: I Have A Competition In Me]]> http://chud.com/articles/blogs/339/We-Are-Going-To-Blog-You-I-Have-A-Competition-In-Me.html
When I walked in to the party I knew I was in luck, though, because they were playing Rock Band. I love Rock Band. If you were to go on Xbox Live and see me signed in, it's 90% certain I'm playing Rock Band.

Things started off well enough. I picked up the guitar and set it to Expert, eliciting comments from a couple of people at the party - most folks were playing Easy, and even the more experienced ones were playing Hard -and I played pretty well on my first couple of songs. I switched around between guitar, vocal and drums, and when I wasn't playing spent some time getting to know Julia's friends, a nice group of people.

Then a new group came to the party, a group of very loud girls. They descended on Rock Band immediately and began playing the modern radio rock songs - The Hives, The Killers, OK Go - again and again and again. They would all scream the OK Go song into the mic together, and the game would fail them... so they would restart the song. Like eleven times.

That was cool. I was in the other room, bullshitting with some people, sharing my deep thoughts on why being on Survivor is an inherently win/win situation. Then I ended up back in the living room and started playing again. But something had changed.

Playing Rock Band in a party seems like a great idea, but in reality it's a pain in the ass. Standing in that living room trying to play guitar made me understand the plight of the Beatles at Shea Stadium - I couldn't hear anything but the screechy girls. I was playing totally by sight, and what was worse is that I was playing Expert on a song that isn't one of my stand-bys.

You're saying, 'Well, you're just having fun, relax.' But that's just the thing: I found the competition in me provoked. I didn't want to just play and have fun, I wanted to do well. Julia had never played before, and it turned out she was something of a prodigy on the drums**, and she wanted to check out her score after every song to see how she had done. Her cool friend Rob was singing, and he had been impressed by how I was playing Expert earlier. These two things combined - seeing the scores, the awareness that I was playing Expert - combined to make me really, really want to show off.

Of course I sucked. And suddenly the game just wasn't fun. It was a task. It was a personal challenge. I realized that a party where most of the people aren't interested in playing Rock Band could be the worst environment possible for playing Rock Band. I had been considering trying to get my local bar to institute a Rock Band night, but this event gave me serious pause. And I started getting sort of mad at the girls screeching right into my ears as I was doing my damndest to play The Police.

In the end everybody else left and we got another song or two in without all the noise, and it was much more fun. And I know that this is actually not a great story because I didn't act out like an asshole when I was being annoyed while playing (as opposed to the scene I created while out on Tuesday night, a story far too embarrassing for this blog). But I'd be interested in hearing your Rock Band party stories - anybody else find themselves suddenly taking this game a little too seriously in a social situation?

*I usually like to have backup in this situation, someone who also doesn't know these people, so that when the group of friends inevitably gets into in-jokes or they fall into their comfortable banter amongst themselves I have somebody else to talk to and not just sort of grin and nod like a dweeb.

** People who play Rock Band with others will know how amazing this is. My experience is that drums is the hardest position to fill in a video game band.
]]> no@spam.com (Devin Faraci) Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT http://chud.com/articles/blogs/339/We-Are-Going-To-Blog-You-I-Have-A-Competition-In-Me.html