Rigorous Scholarship, Revisited

"You feel my dick fuckin' your mind?" 

It’s a source of continual frustration for me that word ‘nerd’ has suddenly gone from being an insult, hurled at marching bands by jocks since the dawn of time, to a fashion statement that comes bundled with a pair of thick glasses with no lenses in them and an ironic love of Star Wars.

Fortunately, as hipsters try to claw their way into the territory that we actual nerds earned through years of wedgies and late night Dungeons and Dragons sessions, the truest nerds among us have fled deeper from the mainstream with the proliferation of Alternate Fan Theories. I’ll explain in the next paragraph.

An Alternate Fan Theory is what happens when a fan base uses careful analysis and some educated guesses to explain away a film’s plotholes or give a deeper meaning to the story. Popular theories include: The suggestion that the events of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off take place entirely in Cameron’s mind (Cameron, miserable and sick with a fever, invents Ferris as a cool alter ego and imagines the adventures they’d have together, explaining the fantastical elements of the film), the idea that James Bond is simply a codename passed from one 00 agent to the next (explaining why there have been multiple different Bonds over the course of 50 years), and that The Office and Parks and Recreation take place in the same universe.

Yes, you’re reading that right: Not satisfied to simply watch and rewatch the same movies over and over again, nerds have instead begun to create competing imaginary movies running parallel to the real movies to enhance the viewing experience for themselves. I’m scared to think of what the fan theories for Inception must look like.

Last night, somebody on Reddit posted asking for the community’s favorite theories, and, being a nerd, I pitched in with my own personal favorite, which I first picked up from Cracked and then expanded on: The idea that every Quentin Tarantino movie takes place in the same alternate history universe. My theory turned out to be immensely popular, and as of this morning it’s been retweeted by over a hundred people and featured on at least half a dozen film blogs.

Before this whole thing gets too viral, I’d like to post my theory here, in detail, with my name on it. For those of you not interested in taking part in a huge movie nerd circlejerk, feel free to go watch Dance Moms or something. Everybody else, buckle in – it’s going to be a nerdy ride.

INGLOURIOUS HISTERY: THE FILMS OF QUENTIN TARANTINO

THE REALER THAN REAL UNIVERSE

It’s a pretty well established fact that most of Tarantino’s movies take place in the same fictional universe – the psychopath bank robber in Reservoir Dogs, Vic Vega/Mr. Blonde, is the brother of the dancing, heroin addled thug Vince Vega in Pulp Fiction, Mr. White refers to having worked with a call girl named Alabama, who was the lead in True Romance (which Tarantino wrote but did not direct), and Donny Donowitz, The Bear Jew from Inglourious Basterds, is the father of movie mogul Lee Donowitz, again from True Romance.

This isn’t even fan theory yet – this is factual information. Tarantino has confirmed in interviews* that his characters and movies are interrelated like this, and some fan theories go so far as to suggest that the timelines of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction actually overlap to some degree – the reason the police never get involved in any of the various public acts of violence in Pulp Fiction is because they’re completely overwhelmed responding to the botched diamond heist shootout and aftermath in Reservoir Dogs. 

*"The Movie Lover", The New Yorker, October 20th, 2003. 

Now, as you’ll remember, Inglourious Basterds comes to a pretty dramatic, if not factually dubious, ending: During the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film in 1944, the owner of the theater locks the audience inside and sets the building on fire. As screaming Nazis stampede for the exits, two badass commando Jews burst into the box seats and machine gun Hitler and Joseph Goebbels to death, then blow the entire theater up with dynamite. 

So clearly, Inglourious Basterds takes place in a different historical continuity than our boring, whitebread world where Hitler killed himself in 1945 with nary a Bear Jew in sight.

But remember: All of Tarantino’s movies take place in the same universe. Since Inglourious Basterds is a part of that universe, what it means is that Tarantino’s subsequent films - Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, True Romance, et al. – take place in a world where the Allies won World War II by locking the Nazi high command in a burning movie theater and blowing it up.

At first, this seems like a minor, interesting tidbit, but the more you think about it, the more it starts to explain all the idiosyncrasies of Tarantino’s movies.

Why, for example, does everybody seem to have an encyclopedic knowledge of movies and pop culture? Well, probably because they grew up reading in history books about how World War II ended in a movie theater, thanks to the efforts of a Jewish film enthusiast, a British movie critic, a famous German film actress working as a double agent, and the father of a successful contemporary movie producer.* America essentially destroyed fascism and saved the world with the movies – why wouldn’t Americans be obsessed with them?

*Full details about what happened in the theater would’ve survived with Marcel, the theater owner’s boyfriend and a co-conspirator in the plot who lit the fire and presumably escaped, as we do not see him die onscreen.  

You might think this is a stretch, but consider how the real ending of World War II affected American culture: We invented nuclear weapons and dropped them on Japan, and for the next 50 years nuclear weapons played a huge role in movies, music, literature, and art.

"Atomic Bombs", Andy Warhol.

 

This also explains why people in Tarantino movies tend to kill one another so often without seeming especially fazed by it: They grew up reading in history textbooks about how the lynchpin in America’s defeat of the Third Reich was sending 8 angry Jewish American soldiers to Europe on a clandestine revenge mission to ambush and torture Nazis to death as an act of psychological warfare. Talk about being desensitized to violence – along with movies, killing people is practically our heritage.*

*Naturally, Regular America already has a crazy violent history, but I think the difference here is that virtually all public school curricula teaches that slavery and genocide against Native Americans was a terrible mistake made by an imperfect society. The Nazis, however, were the worst people imaginable, and I believe the history books would take a somewhat more lighthearted view of the Basterds’ actions.

This is why, after accidentally shooting an acquaintance in the face in Pulp Fiction, Butch and Jules are more concerned about cleaning up the car and playing the blame game than mourning their friend. Butch learns that he beat his opponent to death in the boxing ring and is unfazed by it; his cab driver, Esmerelda, is obsessed with death and demands that he tell her what it’s like to kill someone. In Reservoir Dogs, Mr. White and Mr. Pink have a fairly pragmatic conversation about killing in their line of work:

Mr. White: A choice between doing ten years or taking out some stupid motherfucker ain’t no choice at all.

Mr. Pink: I don't wanna kill anybody. But if I gotta get out that door, and you're standing in my way, one way or the other, you're gettin' outta my way.

In their words, the ends justify the violent means. Defeating the Nazis justified the Basterds’ Operation Kino.

So, to recap: Quentin Tarantino’s movies are stylized, hyperviolent, pop culture tributes because they’re all set in an America where violence and movies are patriotic. Take a moment to let that sink in.

Good. Now we’re going to talk about the other universe.

THE MOVIE MOVIE UNIVERSE

 

Tarantino has gone on the record and said that his films technically take place in two separate universes. There is The Realer Than Real Universe, above (his name for it, not mine – I would’ve picked something different) and The Movie Movie Universe. The difference between the two is that while The Realer Than Real Universe constitutes ‘reality’, films taking place in The Movie Movie Universe are films that Tarantino characters like Vince Vega or Mr. Pink would go see in theaters.

Movies that take place in The Realer Than Real Universe:

Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, True Romance, Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds, and reportedly Django Unchained, Tarantino’s upcoming Civil War film.

Movies that take place in the Movie Movie Universe:

Kill Bill Volume 1, Kill Bill Volume 2, From Dusk ‘Til Dawn,, and Natural Born Killers - the latter two which were written by Tarantino but directed by Robert Rodriguez and Oliver Stone, respectively.

(Jackie Brown, as an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel, exists in its own universe separate from both of these, hence why it features no characters from other Tarantino films and is generally less violent and more ‘normal’ than the rest of his canon.) 

What stands out about the films in The Movie Movie Universe is that they’re grotesquely violent, even by Tarantino standards. Kill Bill is wall to wall blood geysers, From Dusk ‘Til Dawn features a band of vampires playing rock music on dismembered human body parts, and Natural Born Killers’ stylized hyperviolence was blamed for the Columbine High School shooting.

Keep in mind, within Tarantino’s continuity, these are the films produced by an especially callous and desensitized film industry. If every movie in theaters were that violent, it again stands to reason that ordinary people wouldn’t have as much of a problem with doing horrible things to one another on a regular basis.

This explains why characters from The Realer Than Real Universe never show up in The Movie Movie Universe*, but why Tarantino products like Red Apple Cigarettes and Big Kahuna Burger do – movie characters smoke Marlboros and eat Big Macs, but you can’t go join them.

*Tarantino has stated that The Wolf from Pulp Fiction and the sheriff from Kill Bill can jump between universes, but I think this is complicated enough already, don’t you?

This also makes Kill Bill significantly more interesting, at least for me. As you’ll remember in Pulp Fiction, gangster moll Mia Wallace (played by Uma Thurman) tells Vince about her role in a failed TV pilot called Fox Force Five, about a team of sexy assassins. Kill Bill is a film in The Movie Movie Universe about a team of sexy assassins (and one dude) in which the lead role is played by Uma Thurman – or is it Mia Wallace, returning to her acting career in a loose film adaptation of her failed pilot?

EPILOGUE

A few people on Reddit have called bullshit on this whole theory – they say it’s a stretch, or it’s too speculative, or completely unrealistic.

And to them I say this: It’s a goddamn fanboy theory about an imaginary alternate timeline in a couple of movies! It’s not meant to change the world or cure cancer or hold up in a court of law. It’s just a fun thing I like to think about when I watch Tarantino films, because, like all nerds, I like speculating and thinking about shit I find cool.

For me, it’s really revitalized my interest in Tarantino, who I used to think was a bit of a one-trick pony. Now, I’ve been rewatching his movies, making note of how everything fits into this alternate reality that I like to believe he’s consciously created. 

I’d spend some time musing about whether it’s weird or not that I have to play imagination games with myself to enjoy movies, but my biology study group is meeting soon and I don’t want to be late. Coolcoolcool. 

 

Truman Capps can’t possibly imagine why he’s still single.

Everything I Need To Know About Work I Learned From Grand Theft Auto

Another day at the office. 

I will never take any career as seriously as I take my virtual criminal enterprise

I’m incredibly fortunate because not only am I one of the six recent college graduates in America to have a job, but because I also happen to really enjoy that job. I love what I do – I find it fascinating and I love the opportunity to get paid to be creative.

That said, I’m still as much of a lazy shit as I was at any other job I’ve held: When my alarm goes off every morning, my first thought is, FUCK me, I’ve got to go to work. BULLSHIT. Even though I’m going to end up enjoying what I’m doing, I still hate having to get up and go do it. Likewise, I spend the last couple hours of the day with one eye on the clock, looking forward to going home. I work to live, not the other way around.

However, when I’m playing an up-and-coming freelance thug in a Grand Theft Auto game, I’m an absolute workaholic. Each successive installment in the Grand Theft Auto series has added more and more extra activities to their vast open worlds – street races, stunt jump challenges, minigames like pool – but I eschew virtually all of them in favor of rushing across town to get another mission from whatever bent cop or sociopathic crimelord needs a witness assassinated or a brick of heroin stolen.

My in-game avatar will work mission after mission for virtual days on end without seeing the inside of his apartment or even changing his clothes. If I brought the same sort of enthusiasm to writing that I bring to gangland hits and drug dealing, I’d have won the Nobel Prize for literature by my sophomore year of college.

Networking is everything

These guys probably have kickass business cards. 

Just about every Grand Theft Auto game starts like this: You’re an everyday guy with impeccable driving skills and decidedly hazy morals who shows up, penniless and alone, in a fictitious American city. You’ve got one eccentric friend or relative in the area who inevitably is in a serious pickle that can only be resolved by you killing someone – presumably because it wouldn’t be a very interesting game if you just had to help your friend move a couch into his new apartment or something.

So the way it pans out is that you do a bunch of shitty low level jobs for your friend until, in the course of one of your missions, you meet somebody who’s impressed with your ability to run over a prostitute while simultaneously sniping the fuel line of a pursuing police cruiser with your Uzi, and then that person starts offering you work. You meet people through those jobs who start offering you work and so on and so forth until you’re suddenly the most sought after mass murderer this side of Uday Hussein.

The only way you can get work in Grand Theft Auto is by making a name for yourself on the strength of your talent alone. You never apply for a job or hand some mob boss a resume (JULY 2006 – SAN ANDREAS – SHOT DOWN POLICE HELICOPTER W/ ROCKET LAUNCHER, STOLE ICE CREAM TRUCK, RAN OVER OLD LADY) – you just do good work and make connections.

In my first month in LA I sent out probably 150 resumes and online applications for various entry level industry jobs and didn’t hear back from any of them. Finally, I finagled an unpaid internship, and thanks to my two-pronged method of writing great script coverage and kissing copious amounts of ass, I got the people there to hook me up with about a dozen paid production assistant gigs.

I didn’t blow up a helicopter or run over any prostitutes (quite the opposite – I lived in harmony with about 50 of them for two weeks) but my reputation as a friendly and helpful PA got me a good reputation, which turned into more work.

The downside to that was that, as a production assistant, I was the bottom of the food chain and an easy target for abuse and misdirected rage from the various coked-out producers calling the shots on set. Fortunately, years of Grand Theft Auto taught me that…

It usually pays off to work for a total douchecanoe, at least for a while 

This is actually one of your least threatening employers.

Your employers in Grand Theft Auto exist far outside the realm of normative social behavior. If you try to count how many times one of your employers screams at you, kills one of his underlings in front of you, waves a gun around, threatens to kill you, or actually tries to kill you, you’re going to need a pretty huge abacus. (Or, y’know, a four function calculator.)

Grand Theft Auto isn’t a game that rewards you for making a principled stand regarding your workplace conditions – you can either work for crazy people who routinely threaten and backstab you, or you can turn off the XBox and go read a book or some stupid shit like that. Over the course of the work you do for these nutjobs, you wind up making a lot of money and connections that allow you to move onto more lucrative work, leaving your old bosses in the dust. (Sometimes, you get to kill them later, which is an added bonus.)

The last PA job I ever did was without a doubt my worst. I’d worked with this company once before – they’d gotten my name from the folks at my internship – and they called me back to do three days as an office PA and two days as a set PA for a commercial for a South Korean bank.

The producer – my boss – was a South Korean national with a thick accent, a short temper, and the lumpy build and Communistic-chic fashion sense of the late Kim-Jong Il. He was great at giving vague, unintelligible instructions, and then flipping out when his implied demands weren’t followed to the letter. 

Two people have ever thought these glasses were fashionable, and I worked for the other one.

On day three of working with this cocksucker* he came back to the office from an errand, took one look at the production booklets I’d put together according to his very hazy specifications, and went nuts at me in front of everyone in the office. 

*If you’re a male or female who legitimately enjoys sucking on penises, please don’t take offense – I’ve got no problem with people who literally suck cocks, but I cannot abide a cocksucker.  

He flipped through one of the booklets, tearing pages out, yelling at me and demanding to know why I hadn’t included this table or why I’d used that font or put such and such section ahead of some other section – all things that he’d just assumed, like the shittiest of girlfriends, that I would know I had to do.

Finally, he pointed to an actress’s picture on the call sheet.

“What is her call time tomorrow?” He demanded.

“I… I’m sorry, I don’t know.” I stammered.

He pounded his fist on the desk. “8:30 AM! You should know this! This should be your Bible! If you ask me another question, you’re fired! I’ve worked with you twice now – ask yourself, why would I want to work with you again?”

So we all had to stay three hours late, remaking the booklets to his marginally different specifications. On set the following day, he made so many changes to the schedule that the books were all completely useless within 30 minutes.

Immediately after being publicly humiliated for no reason, I was very seriously flirting with the notion of marching into his office and quitting. In my country, that’s not how we talk to people! I imagined myself yelling in the least racist way possible.

As a general rule, dropping Frank Costello quotes is not a good way to make friends.

But ultimately I swallowed my pride and finished out my week working for The Cocksucker – I hadn’t had a job in months, and I desperately needed the money.

In my second day on set, I wound up palling around with an art department PA. We hit it off and had a great time shit-talking The Cocksucker behind his back at every opportunity. We exchanged information, and a week later the art department PA called me to let me know his friend’s ad agency was looking for freelance copy writers, and would I be interested?

If I’d jumped ship the minute The Cocksucker went all cocksucker on me, I never would’ve met the art PA (JonathanDenmark.com) who set me up with a fantastic job. In all likelihood, I’d still be foraging for $100 a day PA work, getting up at 3:30 AM and breathing cigarette fumes and BO from the grips.

The Cocksucker’s company called me earlier today, offering me a PA gig. I politely declined, and told the person on the phone that I don’t do PA work anymore. I had leveraged my work for the low-level mob flunky into a contract with a friendly and professional major crime syndicate, and I needed him no longer.

Now, I’m making it my goal to become successful enough that I can afford to buy The Cocksucker’s company through an anonymous third party, and then force him to watch as I burn the building to the ground, all while dancing around cackling, flipping him off, and yelling, “Who’s fired now!?” There would probably be an arson investigation, but I could easily elude the authorities by having my car repainted and lying low for a couple of minutes.

At least, that’s how I roll in Grand Theft Auto.

Truman Capps hopes that an inordinately long update makes up for the lateness.  

To Valley Or Not To Valley

Not just any valley. THE Valley.

Here’s what I’ve noticed: If you walk down the street in Chicago yelling, “CHICAGO SUCKS!”, you’ll get your ass kicked. If you do it in New York, you’ll get shot. If you do it in Portland, a hipster on a double decker bike will frown at you. But if you do it in Los Angeles, everyone will either ignore you or shake your hand and say, “Tell me about it, right? Fuck this place!”

Highways, gang crime, smog, etc – I’ve established in great detail the things that people hate about living here. What I’ve found, though, is that even people who hate LA seem to have a militant devotion to the part of town they live in. People who live downtown insist that it’s the best place to live because it’s centrally located; people in West Hollywood say it’s the best place in the city because of proximity to nightlife, and people from Inglewood say the crack prices there can’t be beat.

I’m guilty of this sort of neighborhood-fanboyism too: Now that the lease on my current apartment is up and I’m looking for a new place, I set three simple search parameters for my new home:

1)   That I would be the only occupant

Because after four years of having roommates, I’ve learned one thing, and that’s FUCK LIVING WITH OTHER PEOPLE. I have income now, which means that I can afford the luxury of not finding somebody else’s manscaping clippings all over the toilet bowl.

2)   That there be no roaches

Because if there’s one thing I hate more than other people living in the same space as me, it’s bugs living in the same space as me.

3)   That it be in the general West Los Angeles area, preferably west of the 405 and north of El Segundo

I love this part of town, which I affectionately call We405NoElSe.* It’s marginally cleaner than the rest of LA, crime rates are very low, and proximity to the ocean means we get cool salt air breezes all the time, which serves to both keep the heat down and blow the smog away from us.

*Yeah, it’s no TriBeCa. I can’t help that there’s a number in the middle of it. 

Also, I like living within a couple miles of the beach. I mean, I don’t really go to the beach that often, what with all the homeless people and tourists and prodigious amounts of seagull shit, but as someone who grew up living 50 miles inland, I like the freedom of knowing that, if the mood strikes me, I can go look at the ocean for a little while on a whim. I mean, if I’m living in California, I may as well reap the benefits, right?  

Did I mention dudes in Speedos? Because Venice has those in SPADES.

Before I started looking for a place, I thought finding an apartment that met all these standards would be fairly easy. This was because, in my fresh faced naïveté as a newly minted working man, I assumed that the salary that I found so generous for my cheap tastes would easily net me a classy single occupancy apartment close to downtown Culver City, which sports a bunch of cultural civic bullshit and, most importantly, a Chipotle.

What I discovered was that the income that seems like so much to a cheapskate like me really won’t get me much of anything in We405NoElSe unless I’m willing to compromise one of my rules – I can either live in a decrepit 150 square foot fleabag with no kitchen and pay $950 a month, or I can share an apartment with some person who has noisy fights with his girlfriend all the time and tries to talk to me while I’m in the bathroom, or, if I’m lucky, I can do both.

I’m flat out unwilling to compromise on my first two criteria, which means that the third – living in We405NoElSe – went on the chopping block. Having been priced out of my own neighborhood, I started looking around the rest of LA, and I wound up in the San Fernando Valley. 

Enjoy this handy yet slightly pixelated visual aid! 

The San Fernando Valley is a large basin north of downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood – it’s actually on the other side of the mountain that bears the Hollywood sign. It’s expansive, clean, suburban, home to about 1.5 million people, and universally derided by douches on the south side of the Hollywood sign as being a lame bedroom community for old people with children and mortgages.

I was – and maybe still am – one of those very douches. Remember that neighborhood pride I was talking about earlier? Well, it really burns hottest when you get people talking about the neighborhoods that are inferior to theirs, and the one thing everyone in regular LA can agree on is that neighborhoods in the Valley are about as hip and exciting as Laurence Welk boning June Cleaver.

What the Valley has going for it, though, is that it’s cheap to live there. The money that would barely get me a North Vietnamese prison hut in We405NoElSe would easily land me any number of spacious one bedroom apartments in the Valley, most of which are in complexes with swimming pools, parking, and laundry on site.

What’s more, it makes sense for me to live in the Valley, at least from a purely analytical perspective. Burbank, where I work, is in the Valley, and right now I spend about $200-250 a month on my 40 mile a day commute to and from there.  

I spend two hours a day sitting alone in my car, in traffic, muttering potential blog material/copy lines out loud to myself to see how they sound. Recently, I’ve caught myself unconsciously doing this in my cubicle at the office or in line at Chipotle, which gives me the general air of a guy who thinks his neighbor’s dog is telling him to kill prostitutes. 

It doesn't help that most of the copy lines are about violent video games.

Everything – from common sense to my wallet to my overpowering desire to not be perceived as a schizophrenic – is pointing to it being a good idea for me to move up north to the Valley.

But I don’t want to move out of the neighborhood that I went to the trouble of thinking up a trendy mashup name for, primarily because right now I live less than a mile away from my friends Dylan and Holly. It’s nice, after spending a big chunk of my day in my car, to be able to walk over to see my friends – even if we usually wind up playing a video game which simulates driving cars. As I’ve found out, it’s difficult to make new friends as a responsible working adult, which is why I want to try and stay close to the ones I already have.

Yesterday, I put down a nonrefundable security deposit on a one-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood called North Hollywood, in the Valley. The apartment is newly renovated and clean, and it’s about a block away from a number of trendy bars, restaurants, movie theaters, and highrise condos dubbed the North Hollywood Arts District. It’s four miles from my office and within spitting distance of a Ralphs, allowing me to finally become The Dude.

I didn’t want to move away from my friends, and I still feel shitty about it, and I’ll probably feel shitty about it for the first few nights that I’m alone in my new place, bereft of ocean breezes or muted stylings of Adele seeping through my ceiling, courtesy of the gay guy who lives in the unit upstairs. I also didn’t want to move to a place with a reputation for being sedate and boring, because that’s not the kind of lifestyle I want in my early twenties.

But the simple fact is that I work ten hours a day in the Valley, and spend a further two in the car each day going to and from there. I’m spending essentially half of my weekdays in the Valley, waking up at 6:50 so I can be stuck in traffic by 7:30, getting home approximately three hours before I have to go to bed so I can get up at 6:50 to go back out there, racking up 200 miles a week on a 15 year old used car. Something had to change, and I really didn’t want it to be the transmission in The Mystery Wagon.

I commuted for work five days a week; I can commute for my friends two or three days a week. The close proximity, How I Met Your Mother-style social life I was looking for just really isn’t feasible in the city I live in, nor is the How I Met Your Mother-style ability to sleep with improbable numbers of gorgeous women. 

How does Ted have more game than me!? Is it because he's fictional?

I’d be willing to settle for a Frasier-style social life, though: A pretentious-yet-lovable guy moves away from his old environment to start anew, living alone. There are regular visits from his old drinking buddies, he meets new eccentric people, sleeps with a couple of gorgeous women, and has a scrappy dog that does silly tricks.

I think I’ve got my work cut out for me.

Truman Capps would like to point out that most professionally-made American porno films are shot in the Valley – so the next time you watch one, keep in mind that I’m probably less than ten miles away from that botched pizza delivery.

Six Seasons And A Movie

I'm in love with everything in this picture. Yes, that includes three quarters of Donald Glover's face.

If you don’t watch the TV show Community, you’re doing yourself a grave disservice – both because it’s a spectacular, ballsy, hilarious show with a great cast and a fair amount of Alison Brie cleavage, but also because this update is going to be about Community, so if you haven’t watched the show there’s a good chance you’ll have no idea what the hell I’m talking about.

The gist of the show, for those of you who don’t watch it, is this: A disbarred, asshole lawyer has to take classes at a dysfunctional community college. He winds up in a zany, racially diverse study group, and they proceed to have shenanigans of the highest order, including, but not limited to, sailing a boat on a trailer through a parking lot, throwing a dead body out a window, a paintball war, a massive blanket fort, Dungeons and Dragons, claymation, another paintball war, multiple divergent timelines, and making out with Alison Brie (once, or maybe more than that if we count the divergent timelines).

It’s a great show. In five or ten years, we’ll be talking about it the way we talk about Arrested Development now.

A lot of Community’s brilliance can be traced to the perfect union of a spectacular cast, spectacular-er writers, and creator/showrunner Dan Harmon, whose previous credits include co-creating The Sarah Silverman Program and a pilot for a show called Heat Vision And Jack, in which Jack Black plays a renegade superhero astronaut who gains super intelligence whenever he’s in direct sunlight and has a sidekick named Jack who is a talking motorcycle, voiced by Owen Wilson. (For whatever reason, the pilot did not get picked up for a full season.)

If you didn’t get the hint from the thing about the talking motorcycle show, let me tell you upfront: Dan Harmon is a weird dude, and his weird helming is what, I think, has made Community so great. He never plays it safe and swings for the fences with just about every episode, doing stuff you’d never see on another TV show. One Community episode was an extended parody of My Dinner With Andre - a highly philosophical art film that exactly seven people in the world have seen. Dan Harmon, like the honey badger, doesn’t give a fuck – he just makes the TV show he wants to make, which is why Community is so often groundbreakingly hilarious.

That said, the My Dinner With Andre episode of Community was arguably one of the worst episodes of the series. And, sadly, there have been some real contenders in that department. Community, for as much as I love it, is admittedly inconsistent – some episodes should win Nobel Prizes, some are pretty funny, and a few have sucked harder than [trashy celebrity] at [location – e.g. CMA’s/handicapped stall at Olive Garden].

I, personally, am fine with that. I’d much rather watch a show that sucks sometimes because they swung for the fences and missed than a show that plays it safe and is too tepid to appeal to anyone – commonly known as Don’t Trust The Bitch In Apartment 23 Syndrome.

However, the people writing the checks tend to favor consistency over innovation, and on Friday it was announced that Dan Harmon had been removed as Community’s showrunner, an act that has drawn considerable derision from Community’s cast and the whole Internet.

Now, I’m as pissed as any Community fan that the driving force behind the show has had his baby forcibly removed from him, like the Cylon/human hybrid child in season 2 of Battlestar Galactica, but at the same time I can kind of understand the reasoning behind taking it away, just like I did in season 2 of Battlestar Galactica when they took the Cylon/human hybrid child away.

Dan Harmon is a genius, yes, and I’d love to meet him, but by all accounts, including his own, he’s a pretty difficult guy to work with. His relentless perfectionism leads to a lot of long nights and frayed nerves that often explode into fights during the production cycle. He drinks constantly and routinely threatens to commit suicide. In his defense, if I was in charge of a TV show of my own creation I’d probably be drinking and threatening to kill myself too.

More recently, he’s been rather publicly butting heads with Chevy Chase, who is apparently one of the worst people in the world. Chevy seems to be the one cast member who isn’t BFFs with all the others, and has been openly critical of Dan Harmon’s scripting, which resulted in Harmon delivering a fairly hostile speech at the cast Christmas party, the gist of which was apparently, “SCREW YOU, CHEVY!”

So I can understand why Sony pulled Dan Harmon. He’s a renegade cop who doesn’t play by the rules – Jesus I use that analogy a lot! – helming a risky show with sub-par ratings. In Sony’s eyes, something had to change for this venture to become less troublesome for them.

Regardless of whether Dan Harmon comes back, I think we, as Community fans, should focus on the good:

1) The New Showrunners Are Pretty Good

Harmon got replaced by David Guarascio and Moses Port, who previously worked on critical darlings Happy Endings and Just Shoot Me. Keep in mind, Happy Endings is the show that some critics were saying was better than Modern Family. These guys don’t seem to be idiots, which is why we should be thankful that…

2) At Least It Didn’t Get Cancelled

Community’s shitty ratings have put it in considerable danger of being cancelled from pretty much day one, and it’s a testament to NBC that they’ve kept it around for as long as they did, hiatus and truncated fourth season episode order notwithstanding.

Now, I’m sure a great many fans would rather see the show cancelled then have it continue, Scrubs style, as an unfunny embarrassment that cheapens its former greatness. I, however, still have some hope.

As established, the new showrunners aren’t idiots. They’re good at their jobs, so presumably they know what Community is and why people like it. Community’s writing staff remains fully intact, and I have reason to believe they’ll be allowed to be just as weird as they were being before.

Community will undoubtedly be different under new management, but I don’t take that to automatically mean that it’ll be bad. Community has always been different from everything else on TV, and it’s been great – usually. Now Community is going to be different from previous seasons of Community. On a show this meta, that’s bound to be a comedy goldmine.

Truman Capps would immediately quit watching the show if Alison Brie were no longer on it.

New York Guy

8 million people, infinity roaches.

I have to get up at 6:50 every morning so I can be on the road to work by 7:30 – more like 7:40 if I make the mistake of logging onto Reddit before leaving the apartment. When my phone alarm goes off each morning, I drag myself out of bed feeling like shit, because the night before I stayed up way later than I should have – a problem as old as time itself (or, at the very least, as old as the Internet.)

Each morning as I stumble into the shower I bitterly resolve to turn things around. When I get home tonight, I’ll have a little dinner, watch a couple episodes of Frasier on Netflix, and then hit the hay at around 8:30 so I can catch up on all the sleep I’ve been missing.

And then, every night, I get home, eat, watch several episodes of Frasier, and next thing I know it’s 12:30 and I’m balls deep in a Wikipedia article about the Confederate Postal Service (which was apparently a pretty well run organization when you leave out the slavery parts).

The reason that I was overtired this morning, though, was because I made the mistake of looking up New York City on Wikipedia last night, which led me on an extensive quest through a few dozen articles about the city, its history, and its residents, followed by another half hour of browsing apartment listings in Manhattan and trying to figure out how anybody there is able to pay their rent and eat in the same month.

New York City has been sort of a point of fascination for me recently, particularly since I moved to Los Angeles. You see, I was worried before I came here that life in the big city would be too much for me – which is a legitimate concern, given that killing spiders, talking to strangers, simple arithmetic, drinking milk, and watching Ultimate Fighting Championship matches have all proven to be too much for me in the past.

Since moving here, though, I’ve found living in LA to be considerably easier than I expected. For the most part, it’s just like living in any other city with most of the shitty stuff – traffic, hobos, pollution, absence of an NFL team – dialed up to 11, with the helpful addition of nice weather and an entertainment industry. Sure, the gas prices are insane ($4.49 a gallon yesterday) and sometimes you have to drive to Orange County, but it’s far from the soul crushing grind that I’d feared it would be.

New York, though, is a horse of a different color, and now that I know I can tolerate LA I’ve started to wonder if I could successfully live in the Big Apple.

The short answer, I’m almost positive, is, No. The slightly longer answer is, No, you goddamn moron. Why would you even consider something like that? God, I just want to slap you sometimes, you’re so fucking dumb. (I’m very hard on myself.)

Something I’ve noticed in a lot of TV shows and movies set in New York City is the stock ‘LA Douchebag’ character who shows up from time to time – an ingenuine, coked out sleazebag who’s obsessed with new age wisdom and is constantly at odds with New York’s streetwise, working class culture. Notable examples include Devon Banks on 30 Rock and that fast talking assistant director guy in Scrooged.

If I moved to New York, I’m pretty certain I’d be the epitome of the LA Douchebag. Admittedly, I take a pretty dim view of new age-y trends and have postponed my raging cocaine addiction until at least my late 30s, but in most other respects I’m pretty sure I fulfill the stereotype to a T.

Try to picture me finding an apartment in Manhattan – something that, due to the insanity of the real estate market there, pretty much requires you to talk to a real estate broker:

”Okay, so I’m looking for either a studio or a one bedroom, preferably for under $900 a month – with parking, of course. I’ve got this station wagon I love, I call it The Mystery Wagon… Well, you can read about it on my blog where I write lengthy articles all about myself twice a week. Anyway, I’m definitely looking to live alone, because I’m kind of anal about sharing space with other people. Oh, and no roaches under any circumstances. I totally hate roaches. If I see even one roach, I swear to God, I will probably jump out a window and burn the building to the ground. Okay, that was a bit extreme – I’m still kind of rattled because this crazy person tried to talk to me on the subway. Total nightmare. I’m sorry, I haven’t had a Diet Coke in like two hours; is there a Ralphs around here?”

I’m pretty sure there’s a city funded program to buy Greyhound tickets back west for people like me.

I’ve been to New York two times and I loved it on both occasions, but at the end of both trips I was always very ready to go home. I am West Coast guy, through and through: I’m used to cities that don’t smell like garbage, temperatures well above freezing, no humidity, and a distinct absence of homeless people shitting in public, all of which seem to be core elements of living in New York. I’m high strung enough as it is; the last thing I need is a stressful East Coast lifestyle to push me into my cocaine addiction earlier than anticipated.

All that being said, if I were offered a job in New York City I’d move there immediately, no questions asked.*

*FALSE. I would ask several hundred questions regarding salary, benefits, relocation packages, and the size of New York cockroaches.

Although I’m all but certain that it’d be a stressful and terrifying experience, it’s the sort of stressful and terrifying experience I’d actually be willing to subject myself to. Unlike math, drinking milk, or killing spiders, living in New York would be the experience of a lifetime, albeit a crowded, stinky, humid experience with a greater-than-average risk of catching a hobo masturbating outside my apartment.

Truman Capps would jump at the chance to try and recreate Seinfeld.

Money

Damn, maybe I should sell drugs - these cartels seem to have everything figured out...

Periodically I’ll be on Facebook or Reddit and I’ll see a link to some Mother Jones article about a guy who’s been living completely without money for years and is loving his life, or the guy who, to protest the Iraq War, asked his boss to give him a 75% pay cut on his six figure salary so he’d make around $36,000 a year and thus not have to pay income taxes to fund an unjust war. These articles usually end with the subject talking about how happy and satisfied they are now, and how much richer their lives are without money.

I always wonder if these money-free types are, in fact, miserable, but are just putting on a brave face for the media because they don’t want to come out and admit that their lives are actually considerably worse without money, and the only reason that they haven’t gone back to it is because, after making a principled stand, it’s kind of tough to sit down again without everybody noticing and laughing at you.

Reading these articles makes me feel a little bit shitty, because my initial reaction to hearing about somebody getting rid of all the money they’ve ever had is always, ‘What the hell are you doing, you dope!?’ I mean, yeah, I was against the Iraq War, but I my level of defiance went about as far as writing nasty things about President Bush in the Oregon Daily Emerald. And I know that money doesn’t buy happiness; I read The Great Gatsby just like everybody else.

I just can’t help myself, I guess – I love money. It’s great! Money is probably one of my favorite things, and having money is probably one of my favorite activities. Go ahead and guess what my favorite song from Dark Side of the Moon is. That’s right: Time, followed by Any Colour You Like, followed by The Great Gig In The Sky, followed by Money.

Maybe this makes me sound greedy, but I’d ask you not to cast judgment on me for who (okay, what) I love – I think I pointed out in the last update that we shouldn’t do that sort of thing. Honestly, though, I shouldn’t be feeling this way this soon – 23 year olds are supposed to be fighting the man and soul searching. Presumably, I searched my own soul and found some Gollum-like creature who really loves money.

What I’ve found, though, is that I don’t love money because I can buy things with it. As it happens, I absolutely hate spending money. Whether I’m between jobs or fully employed, every time I pull out my credit card I wince a little bit on the inside and think about the money I’m about to part with like it’s some sort of adorable puppy that I’m about to shoot out of a cannon into the sun. The fact that I’m getting, say, a burrito in return for my puppy doesn’t really sink in until later – usually halfway through the burrito.

So, to recap: I am a terrible person who loves money, hates spending it, and currently does not have enough cash on hand to make a money swimming pool like Scrooge McDuck. If I were Jewish, I’d be fulfilling a really ugly anti-Semitic stereotype. 

I think I hate spending money so much because, as previously established in every other blog I’ve written, I spend a lot of my time worrying about things I have no control over and generally assuming all of the worst things in the world will happen to me. Some of this probably stems from being raised by two parents who’ve spent decades working in the insurance industry.

Money is the ultimate insurance policy; if you throw enough of it at a problem, it’ll eventually go away. So I stockpile money the way that people in Idaho stockpile guns – we’re both preparing for some sort of future disaster. The only difference is that mine is usually my laptop breaking or burglary and theirs is a race war. Likewise, I enjoy parting with my money just as much as Idaho survivalists enjoy parting with their guns.

So, I was at Best Buy on Saturday.

At the moment, I have a job – it’s a freelance job, though, and while the work has been steady I can’t be 100% sure it’ll be there forever. I also blew through most of my savings during my 7 months of spotty employment in LA, so I’ve been even more miserly than usual, outside of my raging Chipotle addiction,* while I try to replenish what I lost.

*There’s a Chipotle basically two blocks from my office. Do you know how many days in a row you have to go to Chipotle for lunch before you get sick of it? Neither do I.

But over the past couple of months, one desire overpowered by desire to not spend money: The desire for a Playstation 3 and a TV in my room to play it on. The way I see it, I’m a nerdy single guy who works 55 hours a week and has approximately five close friends within 200 miles – if I’m not going to have a social life, at the very least I can build some hand-eye coordination with a rigorous video gaming schedule.

So there I was at Best Buy, flatly refusing the salesman’s attempts to upsell me to a slightly larger and significantly more expensive TV and feeling nauseous as I watched him ring up a cheap HDTV (on sale), a Playstation 3, and all three Uncharted games. I declined all financing options, forked over my card, and minutes later was driving back to my apartment, hating myself for how much money I’d just parted with.

I recently listened to an interview with Louis CK in which he talked about living in New York and working as a standup comedian when he was in his 20s. At that point in time, standup was somehow really lucrative, and Louis was making upwards of $500 a night. One night, he explained, he’d come home on his motorcycle from a show with his pockets bulging with cash and consciously thought, “This is amazing. I’m kicking ass at life.” The next night, he got into a motorcycle accident and nearly killed himself, and in that same week two of the most profitable comedy clubs he’d been performing at closed, ushering in an era of poverty that lasted for years and an era of self-doubt that continues today.

I took that, like most things Louis CK says, very seriously – as soon as you get comfortable, life throws you a disaster-shaped curveball to fuck it all up. This is why, after bringing my TV and PS3 into the house, I sat on the bed and stared blankly at the boxes for God only knows how long, eying my receipt and considering taking them back.

What if the agency I’m at closes tomorrow? My advertising resume isn’t impressive, and I doubt the incredible luck that got me this job could get me in the door elsewhere. Once the money I’ve made – less what I just dropped on a PS3 and television – runs out, I’d have to go back to being a production assistant, which is infrequent, low paying work that I hate. And God forbid I should get paid very little to do a job I don’t like, because we all know nobody else in the world has to do that.

I eventually unpacked my TV and found that it actually looked quite nice sitting on the stand in front of my bed – same with the PS3 beneath it. Then I started playing these Uncharted games I’d been hearing so much about, and next thing I knew it was Sunday and I was making the conscious decision not to write a blog so I could keep shooting evil enemy treasure hunters in the face.

It took me longer than most people to get to this point, but I’ve decided I’m very satisfied with my purchases. No matter what happens to me employment-wise in the future, the TV and the PS3 are a sunk cost – rain or shine, work or no work, I’ll be able to play video games. Come to think of it, my PS3 was really just an investment in cheap home entertainment for the next couple of years.

At least, that’s how I’m going to try and spin it when I write it off on my taxes next year.

Truman Capps can see easy access to video games being a real obstacle to his writing career.

The Wrong Side Of History

If North Carolina saw this picture, Amendment 1 wouldn't have passed.

As both a history buff and a big fan of worrying about totally pointless things, I spent a lot of time in high school worrying about just how big of an asshole I would’ve been if I’d been alive in another time period.

For example, I’ve never really given Thomas Jefferson a pass for owning (and fucking) slaves while simultaneously penning the ‘all men are created equal’ parts of the Declaration of Independence. A lot of people in my AP US History class in high school argued that he was alive during a different time, and his actions were reflective of a society that erroneously believed that black people weren’t people, just like how nowadays we erroneously believe that Kim Kardashian is newsworthy.

I always felt like that was sort of a cop out, though – there was an abolitionist movement at the time and all of the other founding fathers eventually freed their slaves, so clearly some people were feeling guilty about the whole deal, but there’s Thomas Jefferson, one of the architects of freedom and democracy, basically acting out the lyrics of Brown Sugar until his last dying breath.

What I think is that he knew, on some level, that slavery was bad news, but that it was such an inconvenient truth that he kept it buried and tried not to think about it that hard, seeing as slavery was making him and his friends very rich. In the end, Jefferson had the good fortune to die long before it became clear that he was on the wrong side of history.

That’s the thing that I worried about – The Wrong Side Of History. I like to think of myself as a pretty open minded guy – a 21^st century liberal looking back and condemning a couple centuries of America’s truly impressive prejudice – but there was always that voice in the back of my head:  

Get off your high horse, asshole. The rude voice would say. If you were born and raised in a time where everyone you knew took some grave social injustice for granted and only an entrenched minority opposed it, you’d probably go right along with the flow. Remember how stoked you were for Snakes on a Plane?

I mean, it’s a valid thing to ask – if, say, I grew up in an upper middle class white family in the Deep South in the 1960s, would I just be cool with racism, or do I, Truman Capps, have some sort of superior ethics hardwired into my DNA that would make me realize the injustice of it all regardless of what society thought?

I’d really like to think that I’d recognize the evil of discrimination and post lots of Martin Luther King Jr. quotes on Facebook or whatever the hell people did back then, but if I’d grown up in a loving family where the Civil Rights Movement was looked on as a bunch of rabble rousing and I had no interactions with black people to teach me otherwise, I can see how easy it’d be to go with the flow and wind up on the wrong side of history.

Now, I don’t want to draw too many parallels between the Civil Rights Movement and gay rights today, because there’s a lot of differences between a thoroughly disenfranchised minority group descended from slaves struggling against a violent establishment for the basic rights to life and Neil Patrick Harris having to go to New York to get married, save for the fact that both are shitty things America has done to people who should’ve been treated as equals.

That being said, I think the gay rights movement now is certainly the closest we’ve been to that sort of upheaval in some time. Unlike abortion, which is going to divide America forever, public support for gay marriage has been steadily growing, and I predict that those of you who have children will one day tell them about when gay rights had to be fought for and weren’t just taken for granted - sort of a How I Met Your Other Mother situation, if you will.

I mean, people at my high school were publicly saying things about gay people that you wouldn’t say now. During a class debate, one of my teachers pointed out that if we legalized gay marriage, next we’d have to let people marry their dogs. When Measure 36, Oregon’s equivalent of North Carolina’s bullshit, was up to a vote in 2004, a girl in one of my classes blurted out, ”Gayness is wrong!” when the teacher called her name during roll call, and most of the class was fine with it.

Hell, one of the most popular people at my high school was openly gay, and his best friend was a conservative Christian girl who I watched argue against gay marriage right in front of him, talking about how it was against God’s will or some bullshit like that.*

*Gay marriage is as much against God’s will as wearing a polycarbon shirt. Leviticus 19:19.

That sort of bigotry is becoming increasingly taboo outside the Bible Belt. Alternative lifestyles are moving closer to the mainstream, thanks to Lady Gaga, Glee, and It Gets Better, among others.

I’m not 100% clean, either – the word ‘fag’ gets bandied around a couple times in Writers, which, while far from a massive affront to the gay community, is still considerably less acceptable now than it was when we wrote and shot the show four years ago. At the time, we didn’t think twice about having Mike call me ‘faggotpants’ in an episode; now, although I may be overly sensitive, I don’t know if I’d write that line again. Yep, 2008 was a simpler time… 

So yeah, what happened in North Carolina makes me mad, and what President Obama said made me happy, and the Republican response made me mad again, but in the end I’m smiling, because I know how all this is going to end.

I try with limited success to present my political opinions as just that – opinions. I can understand why some of my friends will vote for Mitt Romney or post Tea Party images on Facebook, and I they’re not necessarily any more right or wrong than I am for feeling the way they do. But gay marriage is different.

If you’re opposed to gay marriage, you’re wrong.

You’re on the wrong side of history. You may disagree with me, but in 15 or 20 years you’ll know that we were right about this thing and you were wrong. That doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It doesn’t mean you’re stupid. It does mean you might be a little sheepish about admitting your support for a number of contemporary politicians and public figures in your later years.*

*If this offends you, feel free to shoot me a Facebook message. I’d really like to discuss this with you in a rational, profanity free manner.  

Rick Santorum will be the new Strom Thurmond, while the rest of the GOP will, in the coming years, tone down their anti-gay rhetoric and pretend it never happened, just like they do with literally everything else. The next generation is going to be shocked that Rick Perry could ever be a contender for the presidency after releasing a commercial where he says that gays serving openly in the military is destroying America.

”It was a different time,” we’ll explain. ”His actions were reflective of a society that erroneously believed that homosexuality was an unhealthy lifestyle choice. People weren’t too bright back then – Truman Capps’ blog was getting, like, over 100 hits a day at the time…

Truman Capps wasn’t kidding – he’s seriously topping 100 hits a day.