IS THIS STILL ON?

Jan 22, 2020

Hello and Happy New Year, my few remaining loyal subscribers who have not scuttled off in search of less fickle newsletters. The end of 2019 turned out to be full of many challenges for me, including my lung collapsing right at the beginning of November and again - just as a final fuck you to the year - right before New Years (more on that in a moment, including exciting new tales from the ER!)

But now it is 2020. It is 2020 and the President is being impeached, the 49ers are going to the Superbowl, Australia has caught fire, Harry and Meghan have absconded to Canada, and the world generally remains topsy-turvy. I hope I can do a better job this year of bringing you fun stories to help us all keep our balance, and for the paying subscribers, who are honestly not getting their money’s worth, more movie analysis and cinematic silliness.

Here’s a quick, low-impact newsletter to get us all back on track:

NOT ONLY CAN YOU BUY MERRY-GO-ROUNDS YOU CAN BUY WHOLE FUCKING FUNHOUSES

Okay, I know I’ve talked about the joys of fantasizing you have enough money to drop on a vintage carousel….Like this perfectly restored 1900s beauty you can STEAL for $880k and act out all your Music Man roleplaying on:

But what if you just aren’t a horse tornado lover? What if spinning in circles in a batch full of animals gives you unfortunate frat party flashbacks? You, I submit, should consider a Funhouse for your Billionaire Madman Mansion instead.

How much is that magical den of iniquity with a dragon and some scantily-clad ladies? Well, I personally don’t think ANY price is too much, but it’s $40,000, less than a Tesla, and I would argue, infinitely better than a Tesla.

Or what about this one?? It’s called Medieval. You know, like the Funhouses of Merry Olde England. The Marvels Of Yore. And it costs $105,000, just a sou to Michael Bloomberg, and a very reasonable price for the glory it promises—

Extremely Medieval. Like on a Medieval scale of Venison Roast to Witch Burning, that Boobular Wing Monster on the right is DEFINITELY a Chaucer Tale. Can you even comprehend how rich people spend their money on saunas and gourmet picnic baskets and, I don’t know, wineglasses carved from sapphires, when these true gems are out there?

Me neither.

THINGS YOU SHOULD WATCH

I am a journeyman thing-watcher, but I will say my strongest recommendation on the streaming networks at the moment is the unbelievably delightful John Mulaney And The Sack Lunch Bunch, brought to you by the denizens of Netflix.

Unlike his previous excellent stand-up specials, The Sack Lunch Bunch features everyone’s favorite Tall Child singing songs, performing sketches, and talking about deep fears with a collection of adorable children, and also Jake Gyllenhaal (spelled that right first try, 20 points to me!)

How can I describe it? Well, if you were a child in the 70s or 80s, it needs no introduction. About ten minutes in, it will tap so deeply into your buried long-term memories of forgotten Sesame Street and 3,2,1…Contact and Square One bits, a balanced breakfast of Lucky Charms and tears will begin spilling out of your ducts. You will have deep, unnerving dreams about being trapped in a game of Double Dare you both yearn to win and fear will end too soon.

If you weren’t born then, you’ll probably be a little confused by its mixture of throbbing childhood pain and absolutely delightful song, but for the Gen Xers and Early Millennials, this is our home.

Other recent stuff I have loved putting before mine eyes:

Little Women (which I have hated in most other versions)

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (the score, the score, the score)

Knives Out (even better the second time)

AFOREMENTIONED TALES FROM THE ER

Yes, my lung collapsed TWICE, which is an exciting and thrilling new record. Also between November and today I got to have an unexpected heart catheter, which is the closest thing to torture I hope to ever experience, and a concussion, which isn’t that bad.

But bad health things in this household are now met with a sort of polite interest, an, “Oh, what has collapsed? My lung? How interesting!” at this point. And while I don’t relish detachment as a general way to deal with the world, it’s a vast improvement over blind, mortal panic that I lived in when my health first started getting wonky. Besides, it frees me up to examine the bizarre fishbowl existence of a hospital, which is a pretty extraordinary privilege.

After the catheter, for instance, you have to lay still for five hours. And I don’t mean “you have to stay in bed,” I mean you cannot, on pain of literal death, move the leg they’ve used for the catheter site, for five hours. Which was deeply painful, but allowed me to observe in growing hilarity happening on the other side of the room.

The situation over there wasn’t funny on the surface: a woman in her 50s who had suffered a stroke a few days earlier. What got me near hysterics (ALMOST to the point of moving my leg) was that every, I believe, 45 seconds, another member of her family walked in. The entire room was about the size of a normal bedroom, which meant that by the end of the first hour, there were about, oh 17 people crowded in to one half of it. And they Just Kept COMING! More than 30 of them! With flowers! And opinions! There was not solemn silence over there - it started to sound like a Stones concert, if the Stones were Armenian and all liked to yell at a woman who’d recently had a stroke.

The nurses were grumpy. My husband couldn’t find a chair. I thought it was delightful; bless that family. I’m glad she had such a strong support system. Several of them rushed to help me when I finally was allowed to stand up and immediately passed out.

A NOTE ON POLITICS

I’m not - to everyone’s relief - going to talk about the election, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the abject terror and uncertainty a California law called AB5 is causing to me, my family, and friends. If you haven’t heard of it, it was a well-meaning law initially meant to crack down on huge corporations like Uber, who can employ people for full-time jobs while dodging giving them benefits and protections. We can all agree that’s very bad.

However, somewhere in the creation process, AB5 became a hydra of a bill, written so vaguely that it may actually end all independent contracting in California. The law is so onerous, in fact, that many companies who employ freelancers have begun laying off their entire California contingents, leaving people without any job and destroying the markets they work in so they can’t find new ones.

Now why wouldn’t you want to have a full-time job with benefits, you might ask? Well, there’s a lot of reasons. Full-time jobs are extremely demanding and rigid about schedules and hours, and there’s a major group of people - including disabled people, those with chronic illnesses single parents, and those with elderly dependents - who cannot commit to an exact schedule or a set number of hours. Freelancing allows someone like me, with a chronic illness that can flare up unexpectedly - to work as much as I’m able, and adjust my work schedule to my life, not the other way around.

AB5 is also endangering freelancing-adjacent industries in ways we can’t full wrap our heads around yet. My husband owns a camera and film equipment rental business. His clients are typically small independent films and short shoots - the majority of which are put together on an independent contracting model (IE, they hire their crew for 2 weeks to shoot a short film.) If AB5 takes full effect, any independent shoot may need to make their entire crew employees, skyrocketing their costs, and making profitability essentially impossible. The entire independent film community in California is under threat as a result, and as you know, we make a few movies here.

If you wouldn’t mind doing me a favor, look into AB5 and consider contacting your CA reps and assembly people to insist the law be rewritten. Here’s some good guides for more information: