Badass Film Tour 2 – Day 18: NYC slow crawl

November 27, 2010

3:31 PM – BOB
I’m currently sitting in the NYC Public Library, Mulberry Branch, writing the tour journal. I’m acting like it’s Day 06. If you go back and read “Day 06,” you can get yourself an eyeful of time-traveling lies.

6:14 PM – BOB
The library closed.  I’ve moved to the Whole Foods down the street.  I crapped out an entry for Day 07.  I’m currently writing this sentence that you are reading at this very second.  In a minute, I’ll try to find a place to sleep for Providence, Boston and all points beyond on the post-NYC leg of the tour.

10:22 PM – BOB
We ended up hanging out with Raphael, Lara, Eric and Bryant.  We headed up to a fancy-ass building up near the Mayor’s mansion.  In the lower level of the building was a private screening room that seats maybe 50 people, a game room with video games, a billiards room and then this:

10:38 PM – CHAD
We spent this night way uptown… like further uptown than I had any business being… at the building where Payson’s parents live. There was a big ass game room and private movie theatre in the lobby and that’s where we spent the evening. I remember the first thing that struck me about the neighborhood was that 6-packs of tallboys were starting around just under fifteen bucks a pop in the corner stores. At first I thought that must really suck for the people who lived around there, but then I realized the beauty of it: The people who live there are rich anyway, and making sure that all the goods and services in the neighborhood cost twice as much as anywhere else in the city ensures that riff-raff such as myself that ends up there by chance will know that it doesn’t belong. Anyway, it was me, Bob, Payson, Lara Pan, Raphael, and Bryant. The game room was equipped with a golf simulator, which I’m sure Bob has ample video footage of, so I needn’t get into how one of these things works, but don’t worry, I’d never seen one before, either. Not everything was on the up-and-up, though. In perhaps the greatest tragedy of the entire trip, there was a video game system that had every arcade game of yore that you could possibly imagine… Battle Zone, Dragon’s Lair, all the Donkey Kongs… I’m not going to sit here and bore you with a fucking list, trust me, they had everything but the controllers were broken! I couldn’t play a goddamn one of them. I felt like that guy in the episode of The Twilight Zone who is an avid reader and goes down into his fallout shelter during a nuclear war with all of his books, but then breaks his reading glasses. We had a good time on the golf simulator, and I remember Payson nodding off in the private theatre watching The Blues Brothers. The private theatre, by the way, was nicer than about 90% of the places we screened the movies at on either of our two trips. Next place I move into, I’m going to make sure they have one. The golf simulator, I can take or leave but goddamnit, the video arcade better be in working order.

3:03 AM – BOB
Later, we did this:

Badass Film Tour 2 – Day 6: Jacksonville

November 15, 2010

11:38 AM – CHAD:
We went with Doss and Shelly to eat oysters and see the beach before we left town for Jacksonville this morning. Here’s some video of Doss (and the beach) for all you back in Austin. He appears to be doing really well out in Florida and says they’ll be in town to visit during SXSW…

12:42 PM* – BOB:
*[It’s really day 18 and I’m sitting in the Mulberry Branch of the NYC Public Library.  Exciting, eh? But, for your reading pleasure, I’ll act like it’s still day 6 and I’m writing this as I’m driving.]
I drove about four and a half hours to Jacksonville.  Here’s proof:

6:45 PM – CHAD:
Ok, so we rolled into Jacksonville on Monday. If you want to know anything about me at all, you have to realize that I’ve spent every Sunday and Monday of the last eight NFL football seasons glued to a television set and a microphone “calling” play-by-play of the games on pirate radio. Along the way, I’ve always played fantasy football and been in betting pools, so I’m constantly abreast of the scores, stats, facts and figures that roll in on game day. Much like my kids, my pets and my job as a career criminal, this was something I had to leave behind in order to go on this trip. Why am I telling you all of this? Two reasons, really. For one, I’m now doing the show with my son on Sunday mornings… the noon games as we call them in the central time zone, but basically the first round of games wherever you live. I want to tell you that this has been the most rewarding thing I have ever done in the entirety of my creative endeavors. Not the most noteworthy, not the most successful, maybe not the coolest, but the most rewarding, personally. It really hurt me deep down inside to leave him in the middle of the season and miss doing a whole bunch of shows with him, but I got him set up with all of the equipment he needs, and he has continued doing the show by himself and I’m very proud of him.

Now, enough of that faggot shit. Let me tell you the real reason I’m bringing all of this up: You’re not going to fucking believe what happened to me in fantasy football this weekend…  I’m playing in the Mucky Duck league against my hated rival, Darrel Maudlin and his Nancy Boys fantasy team… it’s The New Oilers vs. Nancy Boys. I’m not going to get into the way fantasy football works for those of you not familiar, so you will just have to rely on the fact that I’m such a good writer, I could be talking about anything and you will enjoy it. Anyway, my team was riddled with so many bye weeks, I was going to have to drop my kicker, Sebastian Janikowski, who was leading all other kickers in the league by 30 points. The Mucky Duck League, I might add here, is one of those leagues that will give you more than three points for a fucking field goal if it is of a certain distance… you know, the four and five point field goals that make the entire league’s scoring a total fucking joke. Even though I’m complaining, I’ve been reaping the rewards of that with Janikowski this season and have even called him single handedly winning games this year for me on the radio with my kid. I decided I was going to ride out the matchup and see how things went before I dropped Janikowski (who would have been immediately snapped up by the wolves on the waiver wire) because I had the option of picking up the Cowboys kicker during the late Sunday game or the Redskins kicker on Monday night. I figured if the fantasy matchup was a blowout either way, it definitely wasn’t worth losing Janikowski over. Well, worst case scenario happens. I go into Monday night trailing by 19.18 points (yes we use fractional scoring) but I still have LeSean McCoy (eagles running back) and Santana Moss (redskins wide receiver) left to go, not to mention the kicker spot that still remains empty with Janikowski on his bye week. This was just enough of a deficit to warrant dropping the kicker, but I decided to risk it. Right out of the gates, LeSean McCoy gets me a touchdown and a decent amount of yards in the first half to where I’m well on my way, points-wise… He had me about 12.

I do notice, however, that Santana Moss has been practically unheard from and this is no big surprise to me. You see, Santana Moss is on at least one of my fantasy football teams every year. He is the premier wide receiver for the Washington Redskins and is perfectly capable of putting up solid if not huge numbers, but will always come tits up with a shitty game for me when I need him most. You know why? Because Santana Moss knows when I need him to do well for me in fantasy football and he plays shitty on purpose in order to get me back for slavery. You know how you’ll be at an intersection and a black person will be crossing the road in front of you and then they look over and see you’re white so they quite visibly, purposefully slow down even further to punish you for slavery? Well, Santana Moss does that to me in fantasy football every fucking year and I keep picking him up because, even though I don’t want to admit it, I somehow feel guilty about slavery and secretly desire the punishment. Now that I’ve brought up this controversial topic, I’d like to expand on it a little further. It’s widely known that black people can run faster than everybody else and they get all the credit they deserve for this feat but what is often overlooked is that they are also able to move slower than any other human beings on the planet. Black people walking in the mall or out in the middle of the road, especially when they know white people are waiting on them, are able to move at such a slow and undetectable pace, that if like a white person or a mexican tried to walk that slow, they would fall over face first. So yeah, Moss ends up with twenty-eight total yards for the fucking game and those 2.8 points added to McCoy’s 15.4 left me exactly .98 of a point short and I lost to the Nancy Boys. Obviously, either kicker that I could have picked up would have won the game for me with just one PAT. Incidentally, if you’d like to listen along to my son’s radio show, you may do so at noon central time on sundays by going to www.kaosradioaustin.org and clicking on “SPORTS” in the upper left quadrant. You can also listen to Bill Davis and Daniel Timmins do the Sunday and Monday night games the same way, if they get the proper equipment and programs in order and put the show back on the air. Unfortunately, you have a better chance of getting around Santana Moss and his family in the food court that you do of that ever happening.

9:25 PM – BOB:
Tonight, we screened at the 5 Points Theater. We had a pretty big crowd for Hell on Wheels.  About 6 m’f’ers braved the Total Badass experience.

9:30 PM – CHAD:
I’d like to thank everybody who came out to see Total Badass in Jacksonville. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Is that six? Ok, we’re good….

11:00 PM – CHAD:
I’m not sure what went wrong, but Bob and I seem to have missed the Q&A for Total Badass in Jacksonville, Florida. I mean, granted, there were only six people there, but we were at a bar right next door and really shouldn’t have had any trouble getting back in time. As it was, there was just one guy hanging around when I walked into the theatre. Needless to say, he won both of the door prizes. Here is some video of driving in Jacksonville at night, in case you’ve ever wondered:

4:03 AM – BOB:
If I remember correctly (and I’m struggling to recall the details from 11 days later as I sit in an NYC library and write this tour journal entry), we partied well into the night with the Jacksonville Rollergirls.  I hope that is enough detail for you and my struggles were worth the wait.

Film Tour Page:
http://www.badassfilmtour.com