Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by Ian F. King

Part 1: Sometimes the Real Thing is More Than What’s Necessary

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Wait. No, I don’t. I have no idea what you are thinking, because I have no idea what I was thinking. There was no real reason my vacation ended up being spent in the largest “city” in the 49th most populated state in the United States (suck it, Wyoming). The vacation was almost a “staycation,” but the thought of having to use that tedious compound alone was motivation to go anywhere. The decision might as well have been made by throwing a dart at a map, so let’s say I threw a mind dart at a map of cheap places to go for a few days that would also offer some measure of tranquility. And there you have it.

Sometime after crossing the state line, I stopped shrugging my shoulders and decided to embrace my destination. All the green outside the train window was soothing. I forgot about the hot sidewalks and the hot garbage smell that emanates from them. Vermont’s nickname, the Green Mountain State, is half-earned. Its highest point is just over four thousand feet above sea level; the mountains here would only pass for foothills where I’m from. But the color green truly is everywhere, even in Burlington, the aforementioned largest city in the state.

Populated by roughly forty thousand souls, Burlington has the distinction of being the smallest US city to be the largest city in its state. That population is also roughly ninety-three percent white, which is one of many ways it feels like the Pacific Northwest, my home region; particularly the similarly-sized college town of Bellingham. Like Bellingham, Burlington’s population and industries owe a lot to a university that sits uphill from the old city center. It’s lousy with coffee shops and hippies. They are both also situated on the eastern shores of comparable-sized bodies of water, Lake Champlain and the Puget Sound, with the same green-hilled landscape meandering off in all directions.

This visual similarity was so close that, many times over the few days I was hanging out along the waterfront, when I turned my head or looked up from the book I was reading or closed my eyes for a second and then opened them again, I would become confused about where I was. In the weeks before going to Vermont I had become homesick for Seattle. It was a feeling that I hadn’t felt in years, and I couldn’t tell why I was feeling it. After those flashes of geographical displacement in Burlington, it finally came clear. I had been missing the view.

by Ian F. King

Like countless people across the planet, I’ve been trying to readjust to regular life after spending the past month wholly obsessed with the daily excitement and drama of the World Cup. Before I present myself as a knowledgeable soccer enthusiast, it’s important that I admit to unintentional bandwagon jumping. The thing is, I didn’t want to be obsessed, but a few minutes into the USA vs. England match, I became irreversibly so. A soccer fanatic had lain dormant in my heart since 2004, when I was living in a cramped mouse-infested flat in London and my Anglo-Zimbabwean roommate Kieran taught me how to appreciate the game during the Euro tournament that year. During this recent USA vs. England game, I reverted to that manic fan from six years ago, only ten times more so.

The problem was, after the first round of the finals, I was left with no one to cheer for. Being a USA fan first, and England fan second (England being the country in which I learned to love the sport, after all), the weekend of June 26th and 27th was not an easy one to bear. I was almost inconsolable when Germany got their fourth goal against England, and was still mildly despondent at work the next day. Orphaned, my allegiances began to shift wildly. I begrudged Germany their win (though couldn’t muster the same hard feelings toward Ghana), so decided I would cheer for their upcoming opponents Argentina, who also wore stylish jerseys and had Lionel Messi on their roster, a player of extraordinary talent who on at least one occasion has been referred to as “the Little Magician”.
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by Ian F. King

When I showed up to help my friend move apartments on Saturday afternoon, I expected to walk into a work party already well in progress, catching the easy end of a day’s labor after watching the U.S. v. England match in a giant, crowded bowling alley. Instead, as I sauntered up the sidewalk, there he was sitting alone on the back of a U-Haul truck. No one else had been able to make it. His new studio was up three flights of stairs. The humidity had my T-shirt starting to soak through after only a few trips. Aside from the truckload we had, there was a whole second truckload of his stuff back at his old apartment.

Flash forward eight hours and we were finally on the tail end of the second leg of the move. We had done so much walking up and down stairs that, as okay as I felt at the time it was all over, I would barely be able to walk the next day. (When I still couldn’t walk well the day after that, I went to see my doctor at 9 a.m., my legs covered in so much IcyHot that when the doctor wandered into the lobby he asked loudly why it smelled like mint everywhere, and I sheepishly raised my hand.) During one of these final loads, the landlord’s son came in and went knocking on his parent’s apartment, saying something loudly in Polish. I thought he might be concerned we weren’t guarding the front door well enough, so I stayed on full-time watch downstairs while my friend hauled some boxes up.

Soon enough though, the son went upstairs and started yelling, still in Polish, at another tenant on the second floor. Realizing we weren’t the problem, we went back to moving things as a group. As we dragged the top of a heavy steel desk up past the second floor, a wave of steamy heat emanated out of a cracked door. As we turned to go up the next flight of stairs, a heavy-set Polish man, naked as the day he was born, came to the open door shouting into his phone. We kept walking up the stairs, asking each other, “Did we really just see that?” When we walked by later with another part of the same desk, the old man’s door was still wide open, but he at least had the modesty to put on a pair of briefs at that point.

On the final trip up, weak and weary and ready to be finished, we were almost to the top of the stairs when my friend stopped dead still and bent over. He had picked up a small bug and was examining it. There had been bed bugs in the last two buildings he had lived in previously, which had of course brought loads of grief into his life. As shell-shocked from those experiences as he rightfully has been, when moving this time, the first thing he did was check for any bed bug reports about the building online, finding none. As he stood there, grinding the bug slowly in his fingertips, I insisted numerous times it wasn’t a bedbug, though he calmly, confidently said it was. We dragged that last storage tub into his apartment and crashed down on top of it. I went on and on and on about how much he was going to love living alone for the first time. It was just past 2 a.m.

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by Ian F. King

Five days into living in this apartment, I woke up on a Sunday around noon after a very late night, with the midday sun pouring uncomfortably over me. Across the apartment, it sounded like my new roommate was up and watching television. It seemed to get louder, and after a couple of irritating minutes passed I recognized it was the song “Car Wash.” There was no getting back to sleep, so I went to get a glass of water and a handful of aspirin. The living room was empty and the television was off. I went to the windows that look out over Fifth Avenue and saw an entire street fair I wasn’t expecting, including the DJ booth right below my window, now blaring Biggie’s “Juicy” which they would do at least two more times that day.

Since that morning, the annual Fifth Avenue Street Fair, a Park Slope tradition of bouncy castles and overpriced lemonade and sausage stands as far as the eye can see, carries mostly negative connotations for me, triggering an uncomfortable claustrophobia, a feeling like I can’t escape it. Which I can’t—even with all the windows shut, hiding in my room on the quiet side of the building, there’s no peace anywhere in my home for eight solid hours. But not every time has been bad. I spent one Fair so newly and wildly in love that I almost adopted a cat. In hindsight, the cat is probably lucky it didn’t happen, wherever it is.

This past weekend, the presence of the Fair rang in another year for me in the same apartment, and I had every intention of avoiding it, which of course didn’t happen. Everything was the same. The same food stands were right where they always were. The same Beatles cover band was playing a few blocks up. The bouncy castles might have been different, but they looked the same too, at least as far as I could tell. And the same DJ booth was right outside my apartment. However, right in front of the DJ booth was the only thing different I have seen at the street fair in the four times I’ve been. I’m pretty sure they always have a break dancing square, but, this time, one of the kids in the break dancing crew was wearing a full chicken costume.

Obviously, as soon as we saw the kid, there was no way we were going to walk away without watching him dance. Unfortunately, the crew was on “break,” and only a couple of them were doing spontaneous warm-up moves. Then, one of the overweight break-dancers (of which there were two) announced the “show” would start in three minutes. It was closer to six minutes, but once they got going, they were pretty good. The two overweight ones might have been the most impressive, but that might be because you don’t see too many overweight break-dancers. Of course, when the kid in the chicken suit finally put his chicken head mask on, the crowd tensed in anticipation. Turns out we were all waiting for the chicken to dance. The pressure was seriously on, and the crowd couldn’t fault the kid if they ended up being underwhelmed by his reserved and basic performance. The costume looked fairly restrictive, and the mask part of it was surely prohibitive as well. The life lesson he was giving us all was: you show up in a chicken suit, you get an A+ just for being there.

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by Ian F. King

1.
The IRS US Residency Certification division has changed the hold music on their call center telephone line. For at least the past four years, probably longer, when you called to speak to a representative there about US Residency Form 6166 or Form 8802 (which is the form you use to order 6166 certificates for an individual or company) or Form 8821 (which is the form you use to designate me as the person who calls the IRS US Residency Certification division and follows up on your 6166 certification status for you), the hold music was Gershwin. I’m not going to explain any of that for you, except to clarify that the hold music was actually two segments of two different Gershwin songs, two of the best known, one calm and one upbeat, which abruptly alternated every couple of minutes in a bizarrely pleasant looping mood swing that would sometimes be the soundtrack to up to ten minutes of my otherwise tuneless day. This winter, the hold music was changed to an indistinguishably mediocre slice of elevator music.
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by Ian F. King

1.
On a Sunday afternoon I was in my friend’s car, driving to a nearby Montreal-style Jewish deli in Brooklyn. At the base of 4th Avenue, the visage of the Williamsburgh Savings & Loan building rose prominently from the otherwise flat surroundings. My friend remarked on its priapic nature. This was the umpteenth time I’d heard this comparison. Not from him alone, but also from a wide swath of the local population over time, including the occasional person on the subway, gazing on it coming into view as the above ground part of the line bends around the Smith & 9th Street station. It finally struck me why this building in particular, seemingly more than any other in New York City, reminds people of the male organ: it stands alone. The similarity can’t just be its shape. In the bigger picture, there’s really nothing that makes this building more like genitalia than any other. However, no one looks out on the Manhattan skyline and says, “wow, that looks like a big bunch of penises.” Yet there they are, rows of giant phalli filled with the lifeblood of our society, thrusting heavenward.

2.
When my parents recently visited from thousands of miles away, on the other coast of this country, the third place we went on their first day here (after the park and then brunch) was the Gowanus Canal. My father, a photography enthusiast, was eager to take pictures. We saw a dead rat floating in the water, unidentifiable filth drifting along the banks and collecting against the pilings that hold up the stubby two-lane drawbridges. I told them the famous anecdote about the canal testing positive for gonorrhea. My mother and I leaned on railings as my father snapped shot after shot of the graffiti and detritus. There are a great many decaying and decrepit areas in our home city as well, including the Duwamish River, which was itself declared a Superfund site in 2001. They spent the week taking a pass on many of the city’s most famous tourist destinations, skipping the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, among others, mostly because the lines were long. On the morning of their last day I asked them what they wanted to do with their final hours in the Big Apple. “Well, your dad really wants to go back down to the canal,” my mom said.

3.
Before going in to the City Reliquary, I wander down Havermeyer almost to the bridge and weave my way back north through the cross streets, stopping once to go into a corner store, and twice to peruse a menu posted outside though I’m not hungry at all. The museum, no bigger than an average living room, is wall-to-wall clutter with a collection of what basically has been in the homes and garages of New York City residents at some point during the past one hundred years. There’s an old subway token residing under glass that is identical to the one I’ve kept on a thin strand of ball chain in my desk drawer since 1999. In the “special exhibition” room there’s a temporary show about old signage that used to be a defining element of the neighborhood, featuring a foam bull’s head, a foam water tower, and some other fake objects made out of foam, that all used to hang from store facades, but now hang from the Reliquary ceiling. This was a world that no longer lived there, and I had no idea it was missing when I was out walking around those blocks just minutes before. Decades from now, where will they hang our dog bakery and baby yoga supply store signs?

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by Ian F. King

The plain black scarf had traveled three thousand miles and waited three months to be reunited with me, its neglectful owner. The December before, I was visiting my hometown on the holiday break. One night in the middle of the week I was at a small bar—the walls were covered in antlers, the floor was covered in peanut shells, and the dudes were covered in beards—in my old neighborhood with and old friend, Emma. After a while I had to take off to go meet another old friend, and that’s where I first left the plain black scarf, draped on the back of a rickety chair. I didn’t notice it was missing until Emma called me to tell me she had it, though she was driving home right then.

I had to leave the West Coast without it. However, our mutual friend Laura, who happened to live ten blocks away from me, was also visiting there at the same time. The scarf was handed off, and flew back across the country in Laura’s suitcase. Though Laura lived so close, it took me three months to make the time to pick it up. We met up in late March at a bar between our apartments with a couple of other friends. I was reunited with my jet-setting seven-dollar scarf for a whole four hours before I walked out of the bar without it again. It was a warm Saturday night. When I went to check out the lost and found the next day, it wasn’t there.

One year later, I was once again the owner of an identical seven-dollar black scarf. That same year later, I was in the very same bar around the very same time, and lost that very same scarf on the first warm Saturday night of the season. That very same lost and found cardboard box did not have my lost scarf in it the next day.

This weekend, yet another year later, at a different bar, I lost my coat (though it was also black and also very cheap) instead. At least I know it’s missing before I leave; someone’s walked off with it. Assuming it’s long gone like my old scarves, I call the bar first before going there in person. After confirming the coat has actually been returned (me: 1; being fated to lose things: 2), the conversation I have with the bartender ends fortuitously.

Me (mildly thrilled): Wow, that’s great, it’ll still be there tomorrow, yeah?

Bartender (turning inquisitive): Yeah, it’ll be here. Hey, is this Ian from WNYU?

Me (briefly convinced I sewed a slightly-misleading nametag into my coat): Um, well, my name is Ian…

Bartender (thinks he might have the right guy): Ian who lives in the West Village?

Me (oddly bummed I’m not the right Ian): No, different Ian. But close, I guess.

Bartender (unfazed by the coincidence): Ah, never mind. Yeah, it’ll be here, I’ll put your name on it.

Me (pulling it back together after getting bummed for a second there): Thanks.

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by Ian F. King

The most alluring personal ad in the history of the universe is on a white scrap of paper roughly two by five inches, written in hastily scribbled blue ink and tacked up on the far side of a plain wooden bookcase in the corner of a bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It’s pinned up with dozens of others. If you didn’t stop to look for more than a minute, you might miss it entirely. Each of these flare gun love letters follows the same exact template, and you’re given only two qualifiers to judge your potential partners: the books and writers they do like, and the books and writers they don’t.

Naturally, I first gravitate towards the “dislikes” part of the ad. It is amazing. Two of the three dislikes are overrated male writers from the middle of last century. The second name on the very-shortlist is Kerouac, and there is also an arrow that bends like an Allen wrench pointing to his name, at the other end of which is dismissively scribbled “F that dude.” I’m smitten. On the Road honestly never did anything for me, and my father’s shelves were lined with Kerouac’s when I was growing up, so I’ve always seen him as someone to rebel against, not with.

The third and final dislike is even better. “Who was it that wrote Juno? I hate Juno.” The assumption that Juno is based on a novel, even though its biggest accomplishment was winning an Oscar for best original screenplay only two years ago, is such an awesome slap in the face to a film I also didn’t care for that I became briefly transfixed with this short sentence, thinking of how I might have written it better. Then I realized there was no better way to express the sentiment.

Having completely won me over with its flippant-yet-concise criticism, I raise my eyes an inch to the “likes.” It’s here that my heart is grabbed on either end and wrung out like a wet washrag. The ad doesn’t give any specific book titles, but writes the names of a half dozen authors. This in general is a good sign, because it probably means that while the author likes bigger themes and the consistency of great style, she doesn’t necessarily go for the singular beliefs and convictions that people might draw from individual books, and their obsession therewith.

Much more than that, what really does it for me is the fact that, of the six names she writes down, the first one is Raymond Carver. Not only that, but she underlines his first and last name, which she doesn’t do for any of the others. Honestly, I can’t even remember the other authors she wrote down, though one of them might have been David Mitchell, which is cool but predictable (two other qualities I look for in someone: cool but predictable). Carver isn’t my very favorite writer, though he’s high on the list—but that’s part of the point: you shouldn’t necessarily want a lover whose favorite is also your favorite. The hook I’m reeled in on is the realization that this woman has consciously decided to make her semi-anonymous declaration of availability and search for companionship synonymous with her appreciation for the works of a writer famous for his weary, unsentimental portrayals of human connection. If you can subscribe to Carver enough to underline his name above any others’, if you can absorb and understand and align yourself with his confused and battered take on love and then stare it in the face and say, either defiantly or defeatedly, “I still want to try it,” then, my God, I want to try it with you.

Her email is there in corner of the ad, written just as hastily as the rest of it, lines going back over parts of one of the letters where the pen must have started to run out of ink. I almost reach for my own pen to get her email, but decide not to. I rejoin my friends, who are browsing on the other side of the store by then. That same afternoon we end up walking past the store two more times, and both times I don’t change my mind and run back in. If there’s anything I’ve learned about soul mates, it’s that you have to let them go.

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by Ian F. King

My recent joining of Netflix has led to something of a small renaissance in my life, as it enables me to watch obscure old movies of questionable merit at any time. Because of such a miracle of modern life, this weekend I was able to spend dinner with a long-forgotten friend from my youth: WarGames.

If you don’t know it, the film is an anti-nuke/anti-artificial intelligence gem from the tail end of the Cold War, starring just enough of the Brat Pack (Ally Sheedy and Matthew Broderick—a Hughes School grad but not actually a BPer) to give it some level of kitsch value. The premise is that young Broderick, way too boyishly handsome to be the outcast computer nerd he’s playing, accidentally breaks into NORAD’s extremely secret and secure nuclear missile launch computer system while trying to steal videogames from a pre-Nintendo company called Protovision. He then decides he wants to play one of the games the system lists, “Global Thermonuclear War,” even though it sounds way duller than, say, Asteroids.

I’m sure you can guess the rest from here: the “game” turns out to be “real” somehow, and Matthew Broderick has 36 hours to save the world from complete nuclear wipeout by trying to convince an underground bunker full of morons (who don’t follow any other cues aside from what the computer tells them) to not listen to the computer. What wasn’t apparent to me as a child, but which is all too clear in the harsh light of not being a child, is that WarGames might actually be the least realistic movie ever made. Even less realistic than, say, Leprechaun 4: In Space, at least because it’s supposed to be plausible.

The disregard for reality starts small, with the aforementioned NORAD breach, surely possible on some level, but not likely so easy. Broderick has a room full of 1983’s most advanced technology, even a little speaker that projects what the computer says to him in a funny robot voice. Oh yeah, and the computer system (named WOPR, pronounced, yes, “whopper”) that Broderick breaks into can think for itself. A day after Broderick starts up a game of “Global Thermonuclear War,” the computer system contacts him. That’s when the absurdity hits its stride and never looks back.

Broderick and Sheedy live in Seattle, a metropolitan city. When the Feds come to arrest Broderick for hooking up with HAL Jr., he’s inexplicably walking out of a 7-11 that’s clearly off the side of a small forest highway, nowhere near a city. Within seconds he’s whisked away to NORAD’s headquarters in Colorado, as opposed to say, detained in Seattle. He soon escapes custody and calls Sheedy to ask her to send money so he can fly from Grand Junction, Colorado, to Goose Island, Oregon, where Dr. Falken (the dude who invented the WOPR) lives in hiding under a fake name, for no real reason. He’s at the airport when Sheedy surprises him by showing up, cheerfully informing him that the drive only took three hours. Grand Junction is over 1000 miles away from Seattle, so Sheedy was apparently driving 339 miles an hour. Forget disregard; this is serious contempt for reality. Broderick and Sheedy have apparently found a way to transcend the bounds of time and geography as they crisscross the American West.

IMDB cites nearly sixty “goofs” in WarGames, though many of those goofs have to do with sound and visual editing in one scene where Broderick’s playing Galaga in his local arcade—the kind of thing only a level-ten nerd would catch. They do, however, also catch the ferry scene where the two lovebirds-who-never-kiss-even-just-once, going to find Dr. Falken, get on the ferry in the middle of the day; the ferry takes off at sunset, and then they get to the island, just a mile away, back in the middle of the day again.

The increasing continuity failures might all be in there on purpose to wear the viewer down in preparation for the climactic scene. Dr. Falken has now taken the kids all one thousand miles back to NORAD in his private helicopter, and they must convince the WOPR, which is running a war simulation it runs all the time—and is programmed to know is a simulation but now somehow thinks is real—that nuclear war is futile. They do so by having it play tic-tac-toe against itself until sparks start to fly out of the computers in the bunker and the whole system has to reboot. When the lights come back on in the room, the WOPR talks to everyone around it, marveling at the fact that the only way to win the war is not to play, just like Tic Tac Toe. That’s right, we hit that height of ridiculousness, and credits roll without any offer to explain how any of it would actually be possible. Personally, I’ve lost at tic-tac-toe many a times in my youth, but that’s another, much more sad, story.

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From: Ian King
To: C.A.B. Fredericks
Date: Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 9:29 AM
Subject: “License to Drive” reappraisal???

Dude, I know my blogs usually go up on Wednesdays, but if you want to run an obit profile of Corey Haim today instead, I heartily endorse it! Dude was in “The Lost Boys,” all respect is due.

*I

—
From: C.A.B. Fredericks
To: Ian King
Date: Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 9:35 AM
Subject: RE: “License to Drive” reappraisal???

Can I run specifically this e-mail, verbatim?

—
From: Ian King
To: C.A.B. Fredericks
Date: Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 9:44 AM
Subject: RE: “License to Drive” reappraisal???

Yes! But I ask that you also add an asterisk or something that expresses how shocking it is that Haim went before Feldman.*

Could you also please please tweet what Ashton Kutcher tweeted when Brittany Murphy died, “2 day the world has lost a little piece of sunshine.”

*I

*[It's very shocking that Haim went before Feldman. —Ed.]