Let’s stop beating around the bush. When it comes to the “premier” cable channels, when it comes to *quality*, I think we can all agree on a pretty cemented hierarchy.

Anybody who knows me (or knows TV – zing!) knows that on the top of this tube totem I’m about to construct is going to be HBO. HBO is so good it’s silly. It’s like the paella of premier TV stations: with chopped up Sopranos; dashes of Six Feet Under; slices and hints of The Wire and Tell Me You Love Me; and just when you think you couldn’t fit any more onto your plate, robust and juicy chunks of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Flight of the Conchords, In Treatment… The list goes on.

Showtime, then, would have to be #2. Dexter, Weeds (which everybody seems to love), This American Life, P & T, (and I still haven’t seen Nurse Jackie, or The United States of Tara, or The Tudors)….

Then, all the way down toward the bottom of the list are the channels you sometimes forget the names of. Your Cinemax–which I’m pretty sure is half-porn and original series-less. And Starz, which maybe I never gave enough credit.

Class is in session at the University of Life. Here’s a truth bomb: Nobody nowadays watches “movie channels” for the movies. Boom. Roasted.

It’s just the way it is. Red Box rentals cost a buck a piece; Netflix has in stock basically everything ever transferred to disc; and, most importantly, with any of these cheap and quick alternatives, You get to decide what’s on TV tonight. So the movie channel model has more or less become obselete. Which means that to be taken seriously in the market these days, channels like these have to prove that they can create quality original content, content that’s so good people will spring an extra 10 or 20 spot a month to see it–”premier content.”

What works with this model is, well, a ton of stuff. One thing: channels like HBO and Showtime aren’t bound by FCC regulations, so they can curse and cover their characters in blood and take off their clothes and no one bats an eye. Awesome. But what’s really the seller is the fact that they’re not bound by sponsors. They’re bound by you.

Shows on these channels don’t compete in the same way that shows on Fox or NBC do with other networks. These shows not only have cultivated an air of exclusivity about them, gathering a viewing base that’s willing to commit for 30min or an hour at a time without getting fidgety, but they’re able to do this because they’re able to tell their stories differently, construct differently the very base of their drama. Most shows, they have to prove to you in about 2minutes before the title sequence starts that this week’s episode is worth watching, or else you might change to something else or get up during commercial and forget to come back. So they have to be flashy and loud. These “high cable” channels, though, don’t have to do that. You’re on their time. And that means their plotlines can be more sprawling, less hot-and-cold and punchy. They don’t have to worry about commercial breaks and cliffhangers. They’re allowed to think less about holding your attention and more about keeping your interest. Which is an entirely different thing.

Like everything else, there are exceptions. And right now, the major network exception seems to be AMC. With only 2 original series to its name so far–Mad Men and Breaking Bad–they’re off to an amazing and focused start. And you almost have to wonder if this is so because they simply trust and respect the intelligence of their audience. Mad Men is in a league all its own where it is, but just look where its creator, Matthew Weiner, came from: HBO, late-series Sopranos work. When Mad Men goes to commercial, it doesn’t get frantic and hysterical; it kicks up its feet and lights another cigarette. It’s as if its transitions are only pauses before the start of another scene, even often fading out to them instead of quick-cutting behind noisy, screeching strings (coughLostcough). It goes to commercial break trusting that when it comes back, you’ll be waiting. And then it carries on. What a concept.

What makes Party Down special isn’t so much a sense of anti-sensationalism or freedom; it’s that it’s plain funny, and pretty deceptively smart. It reminds me a bit of a show like Arrested Development, a show that everyone will agree got screwed by its network. Constantly moved from its timeslot, advertised badly and mismarketed, Arrested never settled and found a home on Fox. It had to perform immediately for them and it couldn’t; it wasn’t that kind of show. A show like Arrested Development would have survived on an off-cable brand. Or, if nothing else, at least it would have died gracefully.

I know that in turning this meant-to-be highlight into a pretty-full-fledged essay I’m completely betraying my idea two weeks ago of “one topic, one post” entries, but when it’s flowing you have to follow it. Let me just say to wrap that I absolutely love movies. I love them. But there are very definite things about excellent TV that even excellent film just can’t match. And I think that, in large part, is thanks to these “exclusive” channels and their original content–a phenomenon that probably started as a means to keep up, a marketing gimmick, but somehow flourished in the sink to become a kind of dying medium’s penicillin.

As for Party Down, what’s to say? The videos are there and I wouldn’t want to spoil anything, anyway. It was created by Paul Rudd (Role Models), Rob Thomas (Veronica Mars), John Enbom and Dan Etheridge, it’s hands-down one of the funniest shows I’ve seen in awhile, and up to about three weeks ago I didn’t even know it existed. It’s one of those great, blue moon Netflix finds.

The start of Season 2 of Party Down airs April 23rd @ 10:00PM on Starz. And Season 1 is available now–for free–on Netflix.

Being a psychic and all, you’re obviously wearing a turban or fez, and, rubbing a giant marble, you glance over to me, go all Nostradamus and say: “You know, Mike, in 5 year’s time you’ll be writing articles on litter and the question of climate of change.”

Then sit back. Just wait for it. 10 to 1 I’d laugh at you.

Crack up, actually. Uncontrollably. Laugh you out of your carnie psychic booth. Or maybe I’d just roll my eyes.

Even if you told me this last year I wouldn’t have bought it. It’s funny, how things happen. One day you’re looking for work, the next you land an unpaid internship (if it’s possible to “land” unpaid things), and the day after that you’re working for the company you interned for, pretending to be passionate about global warming and cigarette butts. It’s the game. Get or get got.

Here’s an article I wrote for where I work’s website. It’s about cigarette litter. Note the cheesy title and the obligatory call to action at the end. I also wrote little news-item diddies on the homepage about our move into a larger place and the craziness of the climate debate–those I titled “Movin’ On Up” and “‘Is there a Voice of Reason in the house?’,” respectively.

My goal is to add as many bad jokes and as much of my corny humor into the business as I possibly can. People like that, right? Shows a Human touch.

Anyway, the article’s attached below and the other stuff’s on Ocean’s site. I write pretty much all the tidbits on there. That’s why they call me Mr. Tids.

See? Bad jokes. Can’t be helped.

Oh, and one more thing, the “I” referred to in the piece isn’t actually me. It’s my boss.

This is me ghostwriting. It’s like regular writing, only scary.

—

“No butts about it… THIS is litter, too!”

Did you know that cigarette butts are actually NOT completely biodegradable?

I didn’t. Paper and treated tobacco, that’s all I thought cigarettes were. But their filters, it turns out, contain fibers of something called cellulose acetate, which looks like cotton but is actually a form of plastic. And like any other plastic, these fibers break down in the environment incredibly slowly. Although researchers have not yet determined an exact timeframe, various sources state that to completely degrade, these filters can take anywhere between 18 months and 10 years.

10 years! That’s 120 months! That means that some of the cigarettes you step over on the road or on the beach, the butts you find in your lawn or see floating in lakes can be a whole 3,600 days old. Wow….

What got me started on all of this was my visit to the First Annual Right Whale Festival up in Jacksonville last week. On display were gallons of see-through jugs, each one filled to the brim with soggy old cigarette butts that had recently been collected. Next to them were brochures titled “Cigarette Litter,” from Keep America Beautiful, Inc.

Inside were some facts:

“As one of the smallest pieces of [refuse], cigarette litter represents over 20% of the litter collected in many community cleanup initiatives.”

“18% of all litter dropped to the ground is washed into streams, rivers, lakes and the ocean by storm runoff.”

Beside just the aesthetic and environmental effects of cigarette litter, there’s also the financial hit. Because of their size, picking up cigarette butts is difficult manual labor, and expensive. A recent study from Longwood College, Virginia reports that their cost of cigarette litter cleanup for the year was over $50,000. Which is an upsetting amount of zeroes.

So let’s all make a New Year’s resolution, a pact. It’s not a huge one—certainly easier than dieting—but it could absolutely be life-changing. If all the smokers out there change their habits, just a little—use car and portable ash trays, ash trash receptacles, think about where they’ll discard their butts before lighting up, and stop throwing butts out the window—Ocean will follow suit. Starting in January, we’ll institute and maintain a weekly beach cleanup campaign here on Flagler’s coastline. Personally, I do casual cleanups whenever I’m on the beach, just picking up butts and litter as I happen by it. And sometimes, I come home with two trash bags full of plastic, rubber, balloon remnants and string a week.

Now just imagine the results if there were more people involved.

So what do you say? Are you with me? We can be doing something important here, help the environment, lighten the economic load, beautify our cities—and just by taking a tiny bit more personal responsibility, being the slightest bit more aware. It really is amazing how just a little effort from a lot of people can make such huge differences.

Let’s make 2010 the year when resolutions matter. And remember to write to me about your own projects to help save the planet. I’d love to hear about them and share your stories with others right here.

Broken Flowers

Director: Jim Jarmusch

Release: August 26, 2005

**** 4/5

Movies like this they always mis-market. They put together these terrible trailers, picking and choosing the accessible bits from an entire feature and stringing them together for a neat 2-minute preview. And just like that, everything changes: sad and subtle kinds of humor are made “quirky,” the puzzle-like nature of lost youth and relationships come off like dots on the trail of a cheap mystery novel. What I’m trying to say is, if you haven’t seen Broken Flowers, check out its trailer embedded at the bottom. Then ignore it, forget it ever happened–and see the movie anyway.

In all honestly, this trailer isn’t as bad as it gets. Sometimes previews are so tonally off it almost feels like false advertising. But it just reminds me of a misleading kind of simplicity that’s always bothered me. It’s Goodfellas being in the Action section at Blockbuster. It’s American Beauty in the Comedy, right next to Airplane!, Annie Hall and American Psycho. And I get it, it does makes sense: how exactly do you explain the contradiction of something like Broken Flowers, why it works, what it is–an odd but hyper-introspective and sometimes depressing road movie with a big-time comic actor playing a role so on the fence of comedy that it almost isn’t? Then, on top of that, there’s grappling with the fact that in a lot of ways the movie’s a sort of one-man show. You gotta simplify, maybe even lie a little bit. The term “necessary evil” comes to mind.

But the point is that Broken Flowers truly is a great and complicated film, just like Goodfellas, Annie Hall and American Psycho are. These are not just comedies. They’re funny, sure, but they’re also poignant and heavy and so well shot, so well acted. And you see this all the time: Six Feet Under they call a comedy; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in some circles is a rom-com. And how do you label something like my latest obsession Breaking Bad, a surprisingly funny series about cooking and dealing meth but actually about death and dying? Is it a crime drama, an action comedy?

What’s really weird is that it seems today there’s been a kind of acceptance over genre’s obsolescence, but still a desperate tie to it. I can’t tell you how many people have told me in the past that they haven’t and wouldn’t watch something like Deadwood or The Unforgiven because they “don’t like Westerns,” a genre that first started really changing probably all the way back when Sergio Leone went all Italian on them sometime in the ’60s.

“Genre movies,” it’s a real term, it’s what they call something that doesn’t pull any punches about what it’s trying to be–usually your Kill Bill Vol. 1’s and most of your slashers. They call them that because they’re obvious, because there’s no subtlety to running around with a sword and killing people for 90minutes. Unlike a, say, Punch-Drunk Love, which is a comedy…but kind of a surreal one, and also really sad, a portrait of loneliness–oh, and of love–oh, and of just about everything else. “Dramedy,” I guess Punch-Drunk would fall into that one, another bogus newly-invented sub-genre that fails to clarify or identify anything . Good guys just don’t wear white hats anymore. Bad guys almost never wear black.

In the end, maybe it’s that all the best work just simply can’t be categorized. Maybe the great stuff is great for the very fact that it resists genre, that it’s just too big for it?

(which doesn’t mean genre films can’t be great, too. I love Kill Bill. I also love Suspiria and zombies and blood and guns and a good old fashioned exploding head.)

If I had it my way I’d revolutionize the whole system. First, Westerns+. That’s my new genr e. ©. And in fine print under the label I might even write: “No John Wayne or John Ford Included.” That a piece feature saloons and Sheriffs, that would be the only requirement for getting in. And then all the rest would be divided into 3 categories: Minor, Ambitious and Take My Word for It. And I’d of course have final say in all major categorizing decisions.

This town needs a serious enema.

So ok, all things considered, sure, maybe I’m not the cinema “everyman”–but the entire experience, why I don’t like to interrupt a viewing, what different emotions different scenes bring out in me, the titles that fill out my Netflix list, it’s all about exploration. Yeah, for me that exploration is partly educational, to see what the fuss is about with a lot of these directors and “classics.” But more than that, what’s really gotten me to continuously sit down and commit two hours of my life to something time after time, to risk wasting that time, to risk being disapointed, is all personal. Everything that surprises me, every emotion I didn’t see coming is another molecule of something bigger I find out about myself. They’re glimpses into the future and the past at the same time. They tell my story before it’s even happened yet.

Which is just what Broken Flowers did. And that’s funny, considering I only went in expecting to have a laugh.

 
Other titles I’ve watched recently:

The Iron Giant***3

The Ladykillers **2

Broken Trail ***3

Mulholland Drive *****5

Burn After Reading ***3

Smart People **2.5

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead ****4
 
Shows I’m watching:

Errol Morris’ First Person

Penn & Teller; Bullshit!

Mad Men

True Blood

Entourage

Hung
 
Shows I can’t stop thinking about:

This American Life

Breaking Bad
 

A couple weeks ago after coming home from Sam Raimi’s latest gore-fest Drag Me to Hell, I was all excited and filled with ideas. I whipped out my notebook, jotted down my two-cents and even started a blog post that I’d finish later. It was going to be half-movie review/half-commentary on the greater course of the horror industry. I didn’t have every detail ironed out, but the first part would outline just how much fun Drag Me to Hell is, how it’s got it all: laughs, jumps, gross outs–how it’s the epitome of a good “summer popcorn flick.” Then the other part would go all topsy turvy, likening it to some kind of sad parade or funeral march, a bittersweet goodbye party for horror films the way we used to know them, filled with mood, and seriousness, and actual, you know…horror.

It was all going to be very clever. Because let’s just put all of our cards on the table: Sure, Drag Me to Hell may be bloody and about bad things like hell and curses and demons–and I loved it for all of those reasons–but one thing it’s not, really, seriously, is horrifying. And this is a distinction that more and more seems to be going the way of just about every horror film made in the last, what, 10, 20 years? Which is to say the ones that are now in the “middle” at Blockbuster, not the New Releases, not the Classics, but the ones no one could care less about anymore.

Somewhere down the line, the colors that paint separate genres were mixed. The stark, moonlit black of classic horror faded to a much lighter grey of “slasher,” a guy with a weapon, killing mischievous teens, them running and screaming, always smoking and having sex beforehand (in a way, we always know they kind of have it coming). The horror turns to “slasher,” the slasher to “thriller.” And just like that, there’s a formula in place, a color-by-numbers way to make people jump and plead with the characters on screen not to look in that last closet because if they do… oh God…a cat will jump out of it.

Movies like these–your Final Destinations and I Know What You Did Last Summers and really almost any other franchise horror–aren’t nightmares that we can enter into then shrink down from in our seats. They’re spectacles, hours of release, vehicles to make us laugh and jump and then laugh again. Part comedy, they always seem to be “evened out” with jokes and light-heartedness, as if no one’s willing to make the balls-to-the-wall horror anymore, relentless ones like The Exorcist or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Put all of their chips on the table and say, “I don’t want to give you relief from this. No jokes. No down time. This is my version of hell. And there’s no comic relief in hell.”

What ever happened to that feeling of genuine skin-crawling dread when I was little and had to cover my ears and close my eyes when I’d walk past the TV where my brother was watching The Shining, where Jack Nicholson was slowly losing it, lured into the forbidden room 237 to find a beautiful women bathing, one who gets up and kisses him only to turn into a rotting corpse in his arms, complete with peeling skin and green teeth?

What ever happened to horror films that are committed, and dark, and take seriously the fact that their characters are either going insane or about to die, and they’re scared, and after this, even if they do survive, their lives will never be the same again?

I’m two-sided on Drag Me to Hell and the kind of “scary” movies Sam Raimi makes. Even though I enjoyed his newest like crazy, I was never able to shake the idea that just by paying my money and enjoying the ride as much as I did, that I was somehow helping to welcome in this sensational approach to the genre that I have such an on-principle beef with, topped off with its admittedly silly scare tactics and same ol’, same ol’ plotlines. What Raimi does so right, though–and this isn’t the first time–is never hiding the fact that his movie isn’t about breaking new ground or toying with structures. It’s about having fun, plain and simple, popping eyeballs that break out from your dessert at your future-in-laws’ dinner table. He has no qualms about all that.

But sometimes I want more than fun. I want to be disturbed and shocked. I want to hear something and never see it, feel tension not through violin squeaks and crashes but by really getting to know characters and their world, then being shattered and surprised right along with them. I want to see more unnerving and unusual images, which nowadays seem to come most often in films that aren’t even marketed as “horror”–things like Frank the Bunny in Donnie Darko, or the the creepily over-happy old people in Mulholland Drive.

Yeah, I enjoy the over-the-top “funny” horror just as much as the next guy, the The Evil Dead IIs and Black Sheeps and Leprechauns. But these movies are safe now. Filmmakers know what to do to craft them: Take convention, spin it, make it ridiculous, and keep a straight face. Make sheep your murderer; kill someone with a pogo stick or Power Wheels; shoot blood from a fire hose instead of oozing or spraying it.

But real horror is instinctual and irrational, everything inside ourselves that we don’t understand. Either something’s scary, or it’s not. It’s that simple. It can be anything. A dark version of Hansel and Gretel could be scary. Alice in Wonderland could be scary. There’s no formula. And that’s why I think we see so many remakes and half-comedy horrors like Jason X or Freddy vs. Jason, or Alien vs. Predator, or almost any of the pre-Zombie Halloween sequels. Even with “Director of Spiderman” Sam Raimi’s name attached, Drag Me to Hell paled in box office sales compared to releases like The Hangover, Up or–oh God, forget about it–Transformers.

The blood genre just isn’t celebrated anymore like it used be. So in a way you can’t blame these companies for not taking chances on new ideas or these directors for not carefully crafting their atmospheres or thinking up weird and subtle ways to unnerve you. In the end it just pays to make another tongue-in-cheek 3-D slasher like My Bloody Valentine, or to fuse pieces of The Omen and The Bad Seed and bill it as the menacing one-word-title Orphan (7/14).

It still does happen, occasionally. Last year’s Let the Right One In ignored nearly all vampire lore and convention and made the genre relevant again; The Blair Witch Project and Open Water both took back-to-basics approaches that proved that no amount of red corn starch or special effects can make something frightening, only atmosphere can; even something more on the action side, like 28 Days Later, never winked at the camera or undermined its characters’ plight with comedic downtime. But those are few and far between.

Really, I think I’ll always love horror movies. There’s just something about them, and maybe part of it does have to do with the diamond-in-a-hay-stack factor of it. You have to wade through so much trash to find a good one. But when you finally do, it sticks with you–and then you can pass it on. Loving horror movies means being part of an almost arcane community. Find another fan and you’ll be arguing and making suggestions back and forth for hours. It’s got its charm.

But I just miss the days of the serious and inventive ones. In the ’70s and ’80s the genre really blew up, that’s where their boundaries were tested and it seemed that directors weren’t afraid of taking the chances they are now. But it’s also where they got their cancer, took to their bed and decided to relax–all in the span of, what, 10 years? The Exorcist, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, people liked these so much that studios just kept on pumping out sequels and tie-ins and play-offs rather than following the natural progression of thought and giving filmmakers space to be creative again.

Atmosphere, mystery and helplessness, those are the things of quality horror. You’ve got to figure, at the end of the day, horror is really built on two concepts: the unknown–not knowing what’s out there, not understanding–and, having the impossible to understand staring you right in the face, a huge tank of a man dressed in a woman’s wig and apron, lipstick over his flesh mask, serving dinner to his family and whimpering. With those boundaries you can do just about anything.

Just look at An American Werewolf in London. That’s a movie with humor all over it. But to me, it’s perfect. How do you make a monster, a creature without the luxury of appearing human like zombies, vampires or serial killers do, believable, even relatable? Well, if you’re John Landis you build a world where anything’s possible around it, where characters can talk to their dead best friend who gets more and more decayed every time he sees him, where you joke and are charming–but when the transformation comes, you don’t let up, and you use that rapport against us. Before you know it, your werewolf is more human and tragic than any of the dim-witted, heartless heroes of today’s slashers and “thrill-rides.”

After getting back from the theater and Drag Me to Hell, my blog post ended up on the back burner somehow. One thing lead to another and before I knew it, two weeks had past. So why even bother anymore, right?

Well, today I was compelled to pick it back up after I read on /Film that the Weinstein Co. just bought the rights to remake An American Werewolf in London. This is on top of already buying the rights to remake Hellraiser, and having their upcoming Rob Zombie sequel-to-the-remake H2: Hallowen 2 on the way (H2trailer).

Oh yeah, and a remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria is planned to release next year written by indie poet turned Team Apatow player David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls, Pineapple Express). And Cloverfield director Matt Reeves will be Americanizing Let the Right One In around the same time, renaming it Let Me In.

Oh, and a Michael Bay-produced remake of Rosemary’s Baby was even in talks, too, but seems to have gotten squashed at the end of ‘08. (shucks…)

My take: No more mixed-genre horrors, no more tongue-in-cheek ones, no more remakes. For what it is, Drag Me to Hell is great–and Raimi’s already proven himself, so fine. But I almost literally can’t imagine a movie nowadays playing with colors or using such a direct and unusual soundtrack like Suspiria did. I can’t imagine one having the restraint and professional cinematography of something like 1961’s The Innocents. I want to believe that any one of these days horror is going to make it’s glorious resurgence, that it’s still got a second wind left in it and so many more surprises up its sleeve. But the way it looks from here, from the so few gems we get every couple of years, I really doubt it. And that sucks.

Because I just want to be scared again.

Check this out: The Woman in Black. It’s a 1989 mood-heavy British TV movie. Pretty hard to find, but if you can get your hands on it, I’m sure it’ll surprise you.

Recently I wrote a restaurant review for UCF’s paper, the Central Florida Future, for a kind of end-of-college hoorah. I wrote it on an Italian place in town that a few friends and I always go to for pizza. Great pizza, by the way. Oh, such great pizza.

Anyway, because it’s what I do, I overwrote the hell out of it and had to cut almost half to fit the word count. So, I wanted to post the full version somewhere, get it out there. I’m thinking of it as a bonus. Nothing wrong with bonuses–especially since I can get to keep all the anti-journalistic nonsense in there that I like but couldn’t include in a final: like this version’s ending. I even had a bit about Socrates initially, too, but had to draw the line somewhere. Anti-journalism is just so much more fun.

Just down the street from campus, tucked away in the Publix shopping center next to Blockbuster and Devaney’s, is a sign lit in traditional Italian green and red. It reads: Goodfella’s Pizzeria, Italian Restaurant and Catering, and it burns its words into the night like a proud and glorious flag, soaring in the sky and wafting scents of melted mozzarella, roasted garlic and rising crusts with each flap of its mighty cloth. The scents drift across the map of our college town like a warm and savory version of Pig Pen’s dust cloud, tickling the noses of pizza lovers near and far and drawing them over for, like the slogan says, “the best slice this side of Brooklyn!”

Since moving down from Queens and opening Goodfella’s over 12 years ago, owners Sal Ciaccio and Marco DiIornio have been offering “the best slice this side of Brooklyn” in Orlando. But their well of experience in the business runs deep.

With his family, DiIornio owned a string of successful delis in New York for over a decade—some of which Ciaccio frequented as a child. And Mamma Mia’s in Deltona, Ciaccio’s first restaurant (which he opened at only 18 years old), established itself quickly as one of the area’s premier eateries.

But it wasn’t until each moved to Florida that they became close. Two familiar northern faces in the south, they reacquainted and soon forged a partnership.

Never in it for the grease and glory, making other people dinner, offering them a temporary second home has always been just what the two do. It’s what they were taught from long lines of relatives who took their meals seriously and showed them what it means to build communities around their first-class eats, using only the best ingredients and playing the part in town of the stereotypical Italian grandma, the one who’s always happy to see you, always standing by the stove, scooping more onto your plate and yelling, “Mangia, mangia!”

Before a backdrop of kitchen noise and laughter, the pride with which Ciaccio speaks about that part is evident.

“We make our own dough, and sauces and soups and meatballs…,” he listed. “We use the best of the best, Grande cheese, fresh meat. Everything’s fresh everyday. That’s what we take most of our pride in. And that’s what separates us from the other places. To eat good stuff, you got to use good stuff.”

And the customers can tell. Just ask UCF senior and Goodfella’s self-proclaimed No. 1 fan, Spencer Zierk. When asked what he enjoys most about his weekly dinner visits, he had to stop and think.

“Wow,” he said, smirking and looking at the ceiling. “They’re very fast at taking orders, and making the pies. And their crust is beyond words. And…it’s delicious!”

Third-year student Melissa Smith agrees. She and Zierk have been loyal patrons since they each had their first tastes over two years ago.

“It’s like they have a hypnotic draw,” Smith said, giggling. “I don’t have a least favorite aspect. It’s just a package deal.”

With an intimate yet casual candlelit interior, full wine lists juxtaposed next to walls peppered in mafia shots, food awards and NY sports memorabilia, Goodfella’s offers a nice but not stuffy ambience for dining in. Their menu has everything from Ravioli to Chicken Francese—but it’s the pizza that stands center-stage, and everybody has their pick.

Smith likes the pepperoni. “It’s classic but it’s amazing,” she said, “the way they do it.”

And when asked about Zierk’s pie of choice, he didn’t even blink.

“Eggplant,” he fired back. “Find me another place in town with eggplant and I give you a liar.”

Despite their continued success, though, Sal and Marco have no intention of opening another branch.

“Never,” Ciaccio said simply. “This is the first place. We’re the original. I’m over here, you know? The customers know me. I watched a lot of their kids grow up.”

He listed his employees and how long each have been with him—one cook for nine years, most of his staff for over five.

“Me and my partner, we just focus on this place and be the best we can be here,” he said. “[More locations and] you really kind of lose out on that, you know, base with the customers.”

And it’s a base that customers seem to appreciate as much as Ciaccio does.

“They know me in there now,” Zierk smiled. “This place is only getting better!”

For Ciaccio and DiIornio, serving food isn’t just work, it’s a way of being a part of something bigger, of connecting with people and knowing that what they do affects them.

“When people leave this place and appreciate us and our food,” Ciaccio inflected, “that’s a huge compliment. They appreciate us and we appreciate them. …I sponsor a lot of sports teams. That’s the great thing about this, being able to be a business owner. It’s a part of my life. Almost half of my life I’ve been here.”

Authorial aside: You know the worst part about that phrase, “You haven’t lived until you’ve had …”? It’s the fact that afterward, after you’ve had whatever it is that “…” happens to be, you’re forced to go through the motions of serious self-evaluation. Existential questions start building up: “If I only began to truly live now, then who am I? Who was I? What else have I been missing?”

Before you know it, you’re a rambling, neurotic mess, anxious and always philosophizing, a highlight reel of Woody Allen’s greatest hits. So you might think, “Why bother? Ignorance is bliss.”

But therein lies the existential dilemma: Partake in the “…” and understand that your life until then had been like some kind of bland, half-awake dream—but be truly alive; or stick with Dominos or other mediocre “…s”, continue to live in the shadows, content but a part of you always vaguely aware that something is missing.

It’s enough to force a Sorpano’s-esque “Oh!” out from the best of us.

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You can go to the Central Florida Future homepage for the abridged final cut

Sure, so much of how technology is used today does miss the point. Movies on 2-inch screens can never lend the same experience as one in a theater; mix-tapes can be fun and moody but their affects are fleeting, never deep; and cherry-picking chapters online from a book instead of sitting down with the whole thing is just a tiny bit shy of pointless. But doesn’t this obsession we have technology, this infatuation that spurred the technological explosion in the first place say something about our thirst for knowledge and emotion, our desire to feel? To me it’s proof that we still have it, that it hasn’t gone away or been too drastically distorted. It’s there, we just haven’t figured out yet how to mediate it yet, how to fulfill it and have it make sense in the muddy waters of sensory and information overload. So we’re stuck.

The trouble, though, really isn’t about choosing one or the other: technology or art. It’s in making each work together, taking advantage of all the benefits of the age while still respecting the art and the artist. Because, obviously, all of the effects of technology aren’t bad—and I don’t think anyone is saying they are. No one is crying to go back to the days of road trips without cell phones as safety nets, or even of DOS systems on their computers. But somehow so many book loyalists and media purists still seem to group our overarching culture of change into the simple and one-word scapegoat: “technology,” pitting it against what they see as the truer, less taintable forms of media—while completely looking over the human element in any artist-audience relationship, the driving force behind why anyone seeks out these modes of expression in the first place.

I recently read a quote from a book critic who said that if book reviews were phased out of papers, books would be next—because (and I’m paraphrasing) people wouldn’t have the reminder there in front of them. They wouldn’t’ have the “experts” telling them what to read, so they would read nothing. Almost as if people would turn into deer in headlights, frozen, so stricken with indecision that they would just stand still and forget what they’re supposed to like.

Reviews did start phasing out, though. And then blogs came, and people starting talking more about books than ever before, having running dialogues with amateur reviewers, a back-and-forth with them, following several literary forums at a time.

The whole thing really makes me think of hundreds of years ago when people had to travel to certain pin-pointed places around the country or world to read specific texts. Did anybody then say that information loses its gravity when you don’t have work to find it? Wasn’t the printing press once considered hi-tech, too?

It isn’t technology that should analyzed and criticized here. It isn’t a matter of boundaries that’s the problem. It’s the fact that, right now, people seem to be taking for granted things that they used to cherish, replacing them with just parts of the whole, bells and whistles.

It’s like right now we’re frantic, looking around and seeing everything’s that’s possible and wanting to experience it all at once, a kid at birthday party who runs and runs, then tires out and sleeps while everyone else is blowing out the candles. The phrase “hog wild” comes to mind.

But how do you effectively attack a group’s actions and thought? It’s easier to pick a symbol.
Look at PORCUPINE TREE’s Steven Wilson, for example. Little by little, Wilson seems to be embracing a leader position in the anti-where-things-are-going movement, citing in almost every interview I’ve heard or read of his the bastardization of music, art being smoked down to clips or pieces in a computer’s shuffle, tainted by the flat, metallic sound of iPods that, he assumes, people of this new age don’t even notice or know better from anymore. And this is a recurring theme with him, not just how modernity affects music but the rest of life, as well.

He first took on these concerns directly in PT’s ’07 release, Fear of a Blank Planet, where technology as a theme is explored at length, the fact that screens are growing to replace music shops and the smell of bookstores and the world outside. Everything surrounding us today, he argued, everything that kids are growing up with, is only working to “distract people from what’s important about life—which is to develop a sense of curiosity about what’s out there.” You don’t need to leave your room anymore these days, he noticed. You don’t have to wait for anything.

Then last year he released Insurgentes, his solo album, and it’s said that he produced it in a way where every song had hundreds of tiny digital fractures put through them to make shuffle playback on iPods impossible. But more interesting is how he marketed the record. Along with its release, he went on an iPod-destroying campaign, posting a new video online every few days of him killing another one of Apple’s tiny, white devices, each time in a different and more explosive way (literally: running them over with cars, burning them with blowtorches till they popped, shooting them). And the album’s booklet and accompanying DVD are jam-packed with pictures of crippled pods and footage of him blasting and destroying them.

So, by pumping an iPod’s guts full of lead, he decided to send a message. This is him taking a stand. I’m just not sure it’s a stand a can get behind.

I understand that when he picks up a rifle and shoots iPods on stumps, he’s more shooting at what the iPod represents, its symbol—albums heard piecemeal, art’s presentation simplified—than he is the actual device. I get that. (And it was also probably a bit of a publicity stunt, too). But still, I can’t help but feel that the whole display is a little lost in its own message, that Wilson’s extremist-to-get-noticed stance can’t help but feed the wrong-headed, pick-a-side mentality of all-out technology war.

I mean, let’s not forget that people used to criticize Technicolor when it first got big, saying that real films were shot in black & white. New music mediums in the past got slammed, also, their opponents saying that music just wasn’t music if it wasn’t accompanied by a record’s crackles and buried static.

To me it just comes down to avoiding the black and white. The iPod murders, no matter how cool and funny and attention-grabbing they are, seem pointless and divisive. Because after the pods have been trashed and held up as some kind of contemporary trophy of the musically enlightened, what’s left? Nothing’s accomplished—except maybe convincing kids who missed the point, or Wilson-loyalists who didn’t look for it, that iPods are dumb and dumbing. These people may return to vinyl or take a stand in school by being the one person without buds in their ears on their way to class—because they’d know better—but it’s dancing around the heart of the issue, and Wilson knows that.

In a recent interview, Wilson announced that PORCUPINE TREE’s newest record (planned for Sep.) may just be one long 50-minute track (think: JETHRO TULL’s Thick as a Brick). And this is the kind of thing I can get behind. He, like every musician, releases albums, not songs, and he wants them to be received as such. So with this he’s attacking the issues at their most basic: one long track, one piece of work, one statement. It’s definitely a risky thing to try, but that’s why I like it. He’s seeing what can work and what people actually do want, testing the waters—not just shooting them when the waves seem too big to swim through.

Let’s just be honest: portable CD players suck. They’re bulky, always skipping; but iPods are small and sturdy, and people are listening to way more music now (and more varieties) than they ever used to. A lot of them may be caught up in the overload—a part of the “download culture,” as Wilson calls it—playing through everything on shuffle and never putting in a disc to appreciate its superior audio quality, but not all of them are. There is an up-side to this coin.

No doubt, things are definitely changing, but the real conflict here isn’t between the old and the new, print vs. pixels. It’s about learning how to have each coexist with the other. It’s about taking advantage of the benefits, without tainting what it was about art that made us seek better alternatives in the first place. And I think that’ll happen in time, when the dust settles, this all becomes old-hat and more musicians and publishing companies and everybody else start taking more risks, doing like PORCUPINE TREE and taking the first step toward some kind of compromise. At that point, I think that we’ll catch our collective breath and want a semi-return to the way things were—books instead of blogs (I know. Hypocrite, right?), albums instead of songs, theaters instead of iPod screens. We’ll miss them too much not to.

The search for art and knowledge is buried somewhere inside of us, it’s a part of who we are. We need that reminder that we’re connected to something bigger; we need to find new things and get excited. We crave those packed and heavy emotions that can never really be articulated, the ones that can only come from something whole. Right now we’re trying to get that in things like online social networks and blogs and downoaded songs that we hope will catch our ear on the first listen. But that won’t last forever.

It’s the classic extreme reaction to anything new—like the ‘60s and their rebellion against almost everything, or the ’80, when videos were blowing up and were supposedly going to “kill” music. But soon everyone did start cutting their hair—and now there are more reality shows on MTV than there are videos.

I don’t know if the radio will ever play new and interesting stuff again, and I don’t think that books will ever be as big as they used to be, but maybe Steven Wilson is shooting bullets at the wrong symbol. His iPod murders may be done with the intention of simply bringing attention to the issue, but maybe his reaction is just as extreme and polarizing as his targets’ affect on society.

Take a long look around: it’s not art’s Armageddon; it’s just cloudy and kind of crappy weather. And like any kid who was never allowed to bike ride passed the driveway when they were little and then went crazy in college, drunk off their newly-found freedom and anxious to spit in the face of their oppressors—all these extreme reactions are just fuel to feed a pointless resistance to change.

The league officially started less than a week ago and, after accumlating a couple day’s stats, Spencer (AKA: “The School of Hardknocks”) took a quick and, some might argue, surprising rise to 1st place. But certain parties are crying foul play.

Here’s the issue: After the first day of play, Spencer changed his team name from the default, computer-given “Team Spencer” to a name of his own choosing, the strong yet mysterious “School of Hardknocks.” At this late-in-coming and unfounded identity shift, his stats took a giant leap forward, and the underdog claimed first place.

Spencer says it was nothing more than a stroke of good fortune. But another player, Eddie (AKA: “Lil’”), feels that maybe the pieces fit together just a little too neatly.

Team Spencer’s decision to change his name after the league had started, Lil’ argues, was not only in flagrant disregard of the principles of sportsmanship, but also somehow connected to his claiming of the first place spot–which, coincidently, was held by Lil’ before he was dethroned by the Hardknocks.

Lil’ issued a letter to the public as well as the league’s commissioner and players, and it’s obvious that he wants something done. The letter reads as follows:

“On 4/10/09 I am hereby filing a protest to the Nature’s Noblemen league president regarding the School of Hardknocks. The reason for this protest is when the league was formed, the School of Hardknocks had a different name. I am appalled and quite frankly very upset at this and am asking the League to remove the School of Hardknocks from the league. If for some reason this can not be done then I believe it is only fair that all of the points that the School of Hardknocks earned be removed and that their points will be reduced to 0. Lastly, whatever decision the league decides, I am asking that the School of Hardknocks be reprimanded for its actions.

I realize that mistakes can be made during the course of a fantasy baseball league but I honestly feel that the owner of the School of Hardknocks consciously made the decision to change their name for the sole purpose of coming in first place. This kind of action is not just immoral but is unethical.

In closing, I would like the league to know that whatever decision they make regarding my request will be respected–as long as the league decides to remove the School of Hardknocks.

Respectfully yours,

Lil”

After his letter was published on the Nature’s Noblemen public forum, I was able to get a private meeting with Lil’ and asked him whether he really felt his demands were warranted; didn’t they seem a bit black and white? I asked him.

He looked at me as though he pitied my naiveté.

“Listen,” he said, “this isn’t a witch hunt. I just want something done, that’s all. And I’m not out to take this guy down, either. It would really be best if he resigned. It’d be classy, you know? That way, he’d at least be able to save a little face. It’s a matter of integrity. Let’s all try to walk away from this thing with as little dirt on our hands as possible.”

The league has yet to hear from the Hardknocks’ owner.