The session: From Krimmi to Gialli -- Evolution in Four Sessions Keith shows us four films that show the evolution from one genre to another
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.
Week 1: The College Girl Murders (1967) Directed by Alfred Vohrer
My Level of Prior Knowledge: Completely unfamiliar.
Plot Synopsis: When students at an exclusive girls’ boarding school begin dying under mysterious circumstances, Inspector Higgins investigates a bizarre series of murders involving poison gas, a hooded monk wielding a deadly whip, and a shadowy criminal mastermind. As the body count rises, Higgins must unravel an elaborate conspiracy linking the school, a prison, and a network of killers.
Reaction and Other Folderol: Despite my low expectations, The College Girl Murders, a 1967 German murder mystery, was really good.
The plot involves a series of murders at an exclusive girls' boarding school, a mysterious hooded killer, poison gas, and a criminal conspiracy that turns out to be considerably more complicated than it initially appears. It's a murder mystery, but in some ways it felt like an episode of Scooby-Doo crossed with the 1960s Batman television series crossed with a James Bond movie. And somehow, that combination worked beautifully.
There were plenty of twists and turns, lots of action, and a healthy dose of humor. I particularly enjoyed the various betrayals, as characters turned on one another with delightful abandon. You never knew quite who was working for whom, or how long any particular alliance was going to last.
One thing I appreciated was that the mystery actually made sense. Toward the end, I found myself thinking, "Wait a minute. They've explained a lot of things, but they still haven't explained why those other girls were being murdered." And then, sure enough, they explained it. I love it when a movie anticipates my objections and answers them before the credits roll.
I was initially puzzled by the killer's costume. Why was someone running around dressed like a member of the Ku Klux Klan, only in red? Keith explained that it was actually based on an old-fashioned monk's habit. The pointed hood, which Americans tend to associate almost exclusively with the KKK, has a much longer history in European religious traditions, particularly among Catholic penitential brotherhoods. So what looked to me like a bizarre wardrobe choice was actually a perfectly reasonable bit of Gothic imagery. Although I still think "the guy in the red KKK outfit" is a pretty good description.
The movie was also beautifully photographed. The cinematography was striking, with atmospheric settings and carefully composed shots that gave the film a visual elegance beyond what one might expect from a relatively low-budget murder mystery.
And then there were the actors. One of the women looked remarkably like Yvonne Craig, best remembered as Batgirl on the aforementioned Batman television series. Another character looked like George Clooney. I don't know whether either resemblance was intentional, although in Clooney's case, given that he was only six years old when the movie was released, I rather doubt it.
What impressed me most was how consistently entertaining the movie was. It started strong and just kept going. There was always another murder, another revelation, another betrayal, or another bit of absurdity to keep things moving. At no point did I find myself checking the time or wondering how much longer we had to go. It held my attention from beginning to end.
In short, The College Girl Murders was a delightful surprise: a genuinely engaging murder mystery that managed to be suspenseful, funny, stylish, and gloriously ridiculous, sometimes all at once.
And, of course, Joe was back in form. He gave it a ten. Some things in life are reassuringly predictable.
I'm about to embark on a project that I suspect will earn me the enduring, red-hot enmity of a great many people, including some whose opinions I respect.
I'm going to use artificial intelligence to make music.
More specifically, I've been experimenting with Suno, an AI music-generation platform, to create "recordings" of songs I've written. And I'm planning to take those "recordings" and distribute them through DistroKid, which will make them available on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and other streaming services.
I realize that, for some people, this puts me somewhere on the moral spectrum between a scab and a puppy strangler.
But hear me out.
First, a little background.
I'm a songwriter. I'm not a musician.
Well, that's not entirely true. I play guitar (badly), and I can sing (badly). Whether anyone would want to listen to me doing either is another question. My talent, such as it is, lies primarily in writing songs: coming up with lyrics, melodies, chord progressions, and the occasional musical idea that I think is worth sharing with the world.
But there's a problem.
Writing a song and making a good recording of that song are two very different things.
If I want a professional-quality recording, I generally need to hire musicians, singers, producers, and engineers. And those people, quite reasonably, expect to be paid for their work.
I've done this before. In 2023, I released an album called Music No One Else Can Hear, consisting of fourteen songs (seventeen tracks, as there were a few alternate versions) that I wrote or co-wrote. I hired people to turn those songs into recordings I could be proud of.
It was a wonderful experience. It was also expensive.
And there's another complication. Sometimes I want to hear a song performed in different ways. Maybe a song I originally imagined as folk-rock would work better as country. Or punk. Or a big, overblown theatrical production featuring a singer who sounds as though he's trying to cough up a carburetor.
With human musicians, every one of those experiments potentially costs money. Sometimes quite a lot of money.
With Suno, I can experiment to my heart's content, or at least until I exhaust my monthly allotment of credits.
I can provide a song I've written, complete with its melody and chord structure, and ask Suno to produce a "recording" in a particular style. I can revise the instructions, change the arrangement, try different vocal approaches, and generate multiple versions until I find something I like.
Is this creative?
I've heard the argument that AI-generated music involves no creativity. And I think that's wrong -- at least in my particular case.
The creative work I'm primarily interested in is songwriting.
When I hire a musician to record one of my songs, I don't cease to be creative because somebody else is performing it. I wrote the song. I made decisions about how I wanted it to sound. The musician contributes his or her own creativity, skill, and interpretation, and the result is a collaboration.
When I use Suno, I still wrote the song. I still make decisions about how I want it to sound. I still listen critically, reject versions that don't work, revise my instructions, and try again.
Obviously, there's a difference. A human musician brings judgment, experience, imagination, and an individual artistic sensibility to the project. Suno is software. I'm not suggesting that those contributions are equivalent.
But I don't see why using software to realize my musical ideas somehow invalidates the creativity that went into writing those songs in the first place.
And, frankly, I don't think anyone would object if I used Suno strictly to produce demos.
That's one of my motivations. I'd love to have good-quality demos of my songs that I could send to performers, producers, or publishers who might be interested in recording them. A good demo can help someone hear the potential in a song, and Suno makes it possible to create one without spending hundreds or thousands of dollars. In fact, I have cowritten a couple songs for movies that are now in preproduction, and used Suno to generate "recordings" that I could use as proofs of concept.
But here's where things get more controversial.
I'm not planning to stop at demos.
I'm planning to distribute some of these "recordings" commercially.
I know. Fetch the pitchforks.
Why?
Because I like my songs, and I'd like other people to hear them. And if I can produce a version that sounds good to me, why shouldn't I make it available?
I'm not under any illusion that I'm about to become a streaming sensation. I have no expectation of making a fortune. Indeed, based on my experience with streaming royalties, I suspect that the financial rewards will be sufficient to purchase a moderately priced sandwich, provided I don't insist on cheese.
But that's not really the point.
The point is to get the songs out there.
Now, I understand that there are legitimate objections to AI-generated music. There are serious questions about the material used to train these systems, the rights of musicians and other creators, and the potential for AI to displace people who make their living creating and performing music.
I don't dismiss those concerns.
In fact, there's an obvious tension here. I'm a songwriter. I believe songwriters deserve recognition and compensation for their work. I would be understandably unhappy if someone used my songs without permission or compensation. So I can't simply wave away the concerns of other creators because this particular technology happens to be useful to me.
But I also don't think that every use of AI in music is inherently illegitimate.
I'm not asking Suno to write my songs for me. I'm using it, primarily, to create performances of songs I've already written. There may be occasional exceptions where I provide lyrics and experiment with AI-generated melodies, but the project is fundamentally about getting my own songwriting heard.
And I'm not pretending that I assembled a band, hired a singer, and recorded these tracks in a studio. I'm perfectly happy to tell people exactly how the "recordings" were made.
Which brings me to the quotation marks.
You'll notice that I've been putting the word "recordings" in quotes throughout this post. That's deliberate. These are not recordings of actual musicians performing actual music in the traditional sense. They are computer-generated audio tracks that simulate such performances.
They may sound like recordings. They may serve the same purpose as recordings. But I think the distinction is worth preserving.
At least for now.
Ultimately, I don't know where this experiment will lead. Perhaps I'll create a few "recordings," distribute them, and discover that nobody cares. Perhaps I'll discover that some of my songs work much better in genres I'd never previously considered. Perhaps a performer will hear one and decide to make a real recording of it.
Or perhaps I'll simply have a collection of versions of my songs that I enjoy listening to.
Any of those outcomes would be fine with me.
And if the whole project earns me the enduring, red-hot enmity of musicians everywhere?
The session: The Dead are Alive! Keith shows us four Italian ripoffs of Dawn of the Dead
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.
Week 4: Zombi 3 (1988) Directed by Lucio Fulci & Bruno Mattei
My Level of Prior Knowledge: Completely unfamiliar.
Plot Synopsis: In the Philipines, soldiers and tourists struggle to survive a growing outbreak of a disease that turns people into flesh-eating zombies. Meanwhile, the military tries to contain the spreading disaster.
Reaction and Other Folderol: Zombi 3 (1988), an Italian horror film, combines the zombie genre with the action movie. The result? Kind of crappy, actually. But not entirely without its charms.
The plot involves a deadly experimental virus that gets loose in the Philippines, turning people into flesh-eating zombies. Naturally, the military's efforts to contain the outbreak only make things worse. From there, we get a lot of people running around, shooting things, getting eaten, and occasionally doing things that make absolutely no sense.
I thought the acting was pretty bad, but the others pointed out that much of what I was reacting to might have been the dubbing. Fair enough. Bad dubbing can make a perfectly competent performance look ridiculous. On the other hand, it doesn't explain the numerous things that simply didn't make sense. There were plenty of moments when I found myself wondering why someone was doing something, how something had happened, or whether the filmmakers had simply decided that explanations were an unnecessary luxury.
And then there was the flying zombie head.
WTF?
At one point, a severed zombie head actually flies through the air to attack someone. This happens exactly once, which is once more than it should have. I don't know whether the filmmakers thought this was frightening, exciting, or just a really neat idea they had come up with over lunch. Whatever the reasoning, I would have been happier without it.
Then there was the pregnant woman whose abdomen produces a zombie baby that comes flying out, in an obvious attempt to borrow a little magic from Alien. Except that Alien managed to make its chestburster scene genuinely horrifying. Here, it was mostly gross, ridiculous, and derivative.
Still, I don't want to suggest that the movie was a complete waste of time. There was a lot of creative gore, and some of the effects were quite impressive. Whatever else one might say about the filmmakers, they certainly weren't lacking in imagination when it came to finding new and disgusting things to do to the human body.
And the movie was relentless. There was always something happening. Even when I couldn't quite follow what was going on, I was generally interested in seeing what would happen next. In that sense, the combination of action movie and zombie movie worked reasonably well. These weren't your traditional slow, shambling zombies, either. They were fast, aggressive, and energetic, anticipating the sort of zombies we'd later see in 28 Days Later. There wasn't much opportunity to get bored.
The ending, however, was a major disappointment.
As the movie progressed, I had worked out an elaborate scenario for how everything would end, involving nuclear weapons and a suitably spectacular conclusion to the escalating catastrophe. I was rather pleased with my idea. Unfortunately, the filmmakers apparently hadn't consulted me. Instead, we got an understated non-ending that seemed particularly anticlimactic after all the mayhem that preceded it.
So, ultimately, Zombi 3 was a pretty bad movie that nevertheless managed to be entertaining in spots. It had lousy dialogue (or lousy dubbing), questionable logic, some absurdly stupid moments, and a disappointing ending. But it also had plenty of action, some inventive gore, and enough energy to keep things moving.
And, of course, Joe gave it a ten. If they had used the ending I concocted, he would have given it a twelve -- if Bobbo would have allowed it, which he wouldn't have. But that's another story.
One of the things that has long fascinated me about music is the subject of cover songs. What happens when one artist takes a song recorded by another artist and makes it their own? Sometimes the result is a fairly faithful reproduction of the original. Sometimes the arrangement changes dramatically. And sometimes the new version changes the entire feel of the song, even though the lyrics remain essentially unchanged.
But what happens when an artist covers himself?
For this Tunesday, I want to look at two Simon & Garfunkel songs: "Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M." and "Somewhere They Can't Find Me."
They're really two versions of the same story. And while they have an awful lot in common, the differences are fascinating.
Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. (1964)
"Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M." was the title track of Simon & Garfunkel's first album, released in October 1964. It's a gentle, acoustic folk song, built around Paul Simon's guitar and the duo's beautiful vocal harmonies.
The story is told from the perspective of a young man lying in bed beside the woman he loves. It's the middle of the night, and she's sleeping peacefully. He's awake, contemplating his actions and his future.
He's robbed a liquor store, and now he's a fugitive. He knows he has to leave before the police catch him, and that means abandoning the woman he loves and the life they've shared.
What makes the song so affecting is its sadness. The protagonist knows he's made a terrible mistake, and he knows that mistake is going to cost him the life he had. He's made up his mind to run, but there's no excitement about the prospect. Instead, he seems overwhelmed by the enormity of what he's losing.
There's no bravado here. No thrill of being an outlaw. Just a man lying awake in the middle of the night, mourning what he's thrown away, even as he prepares to flee.
Somewhere They Can't Find Me (1966)
In January 1966, Simon & Garfunkel released their second album, Sounds of Silence. By then, their musical direction had changed considerably.
Their first album had been firmly rooted in the folk tradition. But after producer Tom Wilson added electric instrumentation to "The Sound of Silence," turning it into a major hit, the duo moved toward a more contemporary folk-rock sound.
And on that second album, tucked between "Kathy's Song" and the instrumental "Anji," is a song called "Somewhere They Can't Find Me."
If you've heard "Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.," the lyrics will sound awfully familiar.
In fact, the verses are essentially the same. We have the same man, the same sleeping woman, the same liquor store robbery, and the same impending departure.
But Paul Simon has rewritten the music and added a chorus.
And the result is an entirely different song.
Gone is the gentle, mournful acoustic arrangement. In its place is a driving, energetic folk-rock number. The rhythm is more urgent, the vocals more forceful, and the new chorus emphasizes the protagonist's determination to escape.
The man in "Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M." sounds devastated by what he's done and what he's about to lose. The man in "Somewhere They Can't Find Me" sounds determined to get away.
Both men are planning to run. Both are leaving behind someone they love. And both presumably have reason to regret the circumstances that brought them to this point.
But the emphasis has shifted.
In the original, we hear the sorrow of a man who has to leave.
In the remake, we hear the determination of a man who has to escape.
Same Story, Different Man?
What's particularly interesting to me is that the underlying story hasn't really changed.
The facts are identical. The protagonist committed a crime. He's lying beside the woman he loves. He knows he has to flee, and he's going to do it.
But the music changes how we perceive him.
In the first version, I hear a man overwhelmed by regret. He knows he's destroyed something precious, and the music invites us to share his sorrow. His decision to run is already made, but that doesn't make leaving any easier.
In the second, I hear a man whose attention is focused less on what he's leaving behind and more on getting away. The sadness may still be there, but the music pushes it into the background. What comes through most strongly is urgency and resolve.
It's almost as though we're hearing the same man at two different emotional moments in the same night. In one, he's consumed by the sadness of leaving. In the other, he's focused on the practical necessity of escape.
Or perhaps they're two entirely different personalities responding to the same predicament.
Either way, the transformation is accomplished primarily through the music, not the words.
And that, to me, is the fascinating part.
Why Did Simon Revisit the Song?
I don't have a definitive explanation from Paul Simon himself for why he decided to rewrite "Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M." Of course, I'm not searching for one.
But the timing offers a plausible explanation.
The first Simon & Garfunkel album was not initially successful, and the duo temporarily went their separate ways. Then "The Sound of Silence" became a hit after being transformed from an acoustic folk recording into a folk-rock single.
Suddenly, Simon & Garfunkel were back together, recording a second album in a musical environment very different from the one in which they'd made their first.
Reworking an earlier composition in their new style would have made a certain amount of sense. And "Somewhere They Can't Find Me" fits comfortably into the sound of Sounds of Silence.
Still, I wonder what Simon was thinking. Did he believe the original song had untapped potential? Did he simply like the story and want to try telling it differently? Or did he think the new arrangement was a better way of expressing what he'd wanted to say all along?
I don't know.
But I'm glad he did it.
Covering Yourself
I tend to be fascinated by cover versions. In fact, when I first had a radio show in college, it focused on covers. I would play two versions of the same song back to back. Then two versions of another. My listeners, assuming there were any, got an hour and a half of that.
But artists also revisit their own material. They change arrangements, rewrite melodies, alter tempos, and sometimes produce recordings that bear surprisingly little resemblance to their earlier versions.
This particular example has always fascinated me because Simon & Garfunkel didn't simply record a faster or more heavily orchestrated version of "Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M." They effectively created a new song out of the old one.
And the result demonstrates something important about songwriting.
The lyrics tell us what happened. The music tells us how to feel about it.
Here, Paul Simon gave us two different emotional interpretations of the same events.
In one, we hear a man preparing to flee, heartbroken over the life he's destroyed.
In the other, we hear a man preparing to flee, determined to make his escape.
Same crime. Same woman. Same decision.
Two very different songs.
And that's what makes this particular musical makeover so interesting to me.
The session: The Dead are Alive! Keith shows us four Italian ripoffs of Dawn of the Dead
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.
Week 3: Nightmare City (1980) Directed by Umberto Lenzi
My Level of Prior Knowledge: Completely unfamiliar.
Plot Synopsis: A bunch of stuff happens -- Presumably a lot of it has to do with zombies or somesuch. The trailer makes it look really good!
Reaction and Other Folderol: I missed this one, as I was with my family celebrating Asher's 18th birthday. So I really don't have anything useful to say about this. But I'm posting this for the sake of completeness. I assume that Joe would have given it a 10 if he had been there.
Oh, and Keith will be pissed off at me for even posting this.
I'd like to get back in the habit of posting something musical every Tuesday. And what better way to start with "Heaven Was Saving You for Me"? Of course, no promises that I'll keep it up? What's next? The return of Zmedsday?
This is a song I wrote for Sharon and Josh for the first dance at their wedding. I'd been sitting on the title for over thirty years, not sure what to do with it. I really liked it, but every time I tried to use it as a song title, I couldn't get something that I liked. It seemed like a good first dance song title for a wedding. But it also sounded like it could be a great bit of Meat Loaf bombast.
Then Sharon and Josh got engaged. Then they started seriously talking about dates. Then they had a date and venue booked. Then I thought -- "Hey! I have a song idea!" What made it really super is that the title suggested an angle for the song -- something that is perfectly appropriate for Sharon and Josh. She's a Jewish kid from suburban Queens. He's an immigrant who spent his formative years in rural Guyana. So when I wrote the song I leaned into the fact that they managed to meet and work together despite their differences. The challenge was in making it personal and yet general enough. Like, I wanted to reference her research without something as literal as "I was studying what happens as human hands decompose." I think I succeeded.
As for the actual performance? A big shoutout to JT Curtis and Emily Seibert. Heck, a shoutout to Eytan Mirsky for putting me in touch with JT. JT produced the track and did the arrangement (in consultation with me) played all the instruments and sang the male vocals. Emily Seibert did the female vocals. I also note that Emily was JT's recommendation. I have to tell you, JT was very professional and easy to work with. He was reliable, and turned in a great finished product. I never actually met Emily, but I was thrilled with her vocal performance.
If you find yourself having a song in need of recording, I can't recommend them highly enough. JT's Bandcamp site is here. It's just too bad he's not hawking downloads of my song. And Emily's website is here.
The session: The Dead are Alive! Keith shows us four Italian ripoffs of Dawn of the Dead
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.
Week 2: Doctor Butcher M.D. (1980) Directed by Marino Girolami
My Level of Prior Knowledge: Completely unfamiliar.
Plot Synopsis:
A New York City hospital is rocked by a series of gruesome murders involving cannibalism and stolen body parts. Investigating the killings, a doctor and an anthropologist travel to a remote tropical island, where they discover a mad scientist conducting horrific experiments to bring the dead back to life.
Reaction and Other Folderol:
A New York City hospital is rocked by a series of gruesome murders involving cannibalism and stolen body parts. Investigating the killings, a doctor and an anthropologist travel to a remote tropical island, where they discover a mad scientist conducting horrific experiments to bring the dead back to life.
This is a movie that's mostly boredom punctuated by moments of creatively graphic gore. And when it comes to the gore, it can be a pretty good movie.
Unfortunately, there's all that other stuff in between.
The acting is bad. Really bad. And the movie doesn't do a particularly good job of connecting its New York City prologue to everything that follows. It's almost as if they started making one movie, got bored with it, and decided to make another one instead. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much how I felt watching it.
And then there's the music. I assume the idea was to create an atmosphere of tension and unease. Well, it certainly made me uneasy, but mostly because I wanted someone to turn the damn thing off. Rather than enhancing the action, the score was frequently distracting and annoying.
But let's talk about what the movie gets right: the gore.
The makeup effects are excellent, particularly the zombies, whose decaying flesh is wonderfully disgusting. And the filmmakers certainly aren't shy about showing us the good stuff. An outboard motor to the face? Check. Cannibals enthusiastically munching on freshly harvested internal organs? Check. Yum!
And as the movie approaches its conclusion, things actually get better. The gruesome effects become more frequent, more imaginative, and more effective.
Two scenes in particular stand out. One involves a zombie wearing the hair of a murdered reporter, an image that's genuinely horrifying. The other involves an eye, and let's just say that anyone who's squeamish about eye injuries might want to look away. Or perhaps keep watching, because this is exactly the sort of thing the movie does well.
Which makes the whole experience rather frustrating. Clearly, the people responsible for the makeup and special effects knew what they were doing. If only the people responsible for the acting, pacing, music, and storytelling had been equally competent.
Ultimately, Doctor Butcher, M.D. is a movie that rewards patience with some spectacularly disgusting moments. The problem is how much patience it demands.
It's a pretty good gore movie trapped inside a pretty bad movie.
Joe gave it a 7. I'm not sure whether that says more about the movie or Joe.
A little bit ago I posted about my quest to get on IMDb. The reason for that post was that my acting career was making progress. Glacial progress, but progress nonetheless.
Well, it finally happened. I'm on IMDb.
Sort of.
Last night, Lindley Farley held a screening of Lost 9, the movie in which I have a small role -- the first speaking role of my career. Blair, Asher and I were on our way to the screening when Lindley sent texted that the movie was now listed on IMDb. And, along with it, me!
At last! After all these years! After hours in snowy Connecticut listening to Lance Henriksen deliver a speech (over and over again) about God and fear! After hours one evening in a bar on the Upper East Side (or was it the Upper West Side?) trying and mostly failing to be visible! After gawking in the subway as one man attacks another for an umbrella! After all my struggles to get IMDb to acknowledge my existence, I had finally broken through!
Naturally, I immediately looked it up.
There it was. Lost 9. And there I was, listed among the cast as "Internal Affairs Detective #2."
Okay, it's not exactly a starring role. Hell, I didn't even rate a character name. I'm not even "Lady Who Has Her Car Stolen by Ape." I'm just Internal Affairs Detective #2. But it's a speaking part, dammit! I have actual lines! And now I have an IMDb credit to prove it! Strictly speaking, in the credits in the movie I am listed as "Investigator Reevs" which sounds better.
I was delighted.
Of course, I wanted to make sure everything was correct. My first name was spelled with a C. Good. You'd be surprised how many people get that wrong. My last name had the H in it. Excellent. That's another thing people sometimes miss.
Everything looked good.
And then I noticed something.
The E.
My name was listed as Marc Whinsten.
Whinsten.
Not Whinston.
Whinsten.
FUCK!
After all these years of trying to get IMDb to acknowledge my existence, they finally did it. They finally admitted that I was in a movie. They finally gave me a credit.
And they gave it to somebody named Marc Whinsten.
I suppose I should be grateful that they got nine out of ten letters right. That's 90%. A solid A-minus in some grading systems. But somehow, when it comes to my own name, I expect a little better.
Anyway, we went to the screening. I got to see myself on the big screen, which was fun. A couple of my colleagues from work even came to see the movie, which I appreciated. It was a very enjoyable evening. Also, I tried "mushy peas" for the first time, since they came with the fish and chips. But that's a whole other story.
And, to be clear, I'm not actually upset about the misspelling. I think it's pretty funny. After everything I wrote in my previous post about trying to get onto IMDb, there's something almost poetic about finally succeeding, only to discover that they got my name wrong.
I did get a chance to mention it to Lindley, who assured me that he could get it corrected. Hopefully, he will. And if he doesn't, well, I've had bigger frustrations in life.
Oh, and there's one other thing. I also received an Associate Producer credit on the movie. That's pretty cool, too. Unfortunately, my name is misspelled there as well. And IMDb doesn't list that credit at all.
So, to recap: I'm an actor with an IMDb credit under somebody else's name, and an Associate Producer whose producer credit isn't on IMDb.
Still, I'm making progress.
Maybe someday IMDb will acknowledge that Marc Whinston exists.
In the meantime, congratulations to Marc Whinsten on his motion picture debut. I hear he was pretty good.
The session: The Dead are Alive! Keith shows us four Italian ripoffs of Dawn of the Dead
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.
Week 1: Hell of the Living Dead (1980) Directed by Bruno Mattei
My Level of Prior Knowledge: Completely unfamiliar.
Plot Synopsis: When an accident at a chemical research facility in Papua New Guinea releases a mysterious toxic gas, the dead begin returning to life as flesh-eating zombies. A television news crew investigating the outbreak joins forces with a team of commandos sent to the region. Together, they travel through the jungle, encountering increasingly gruesome scenes of carnage as the infection spreads. As they struggle to survive, they discover that the disaster may be connected to a sinister international effort to address overpopulation.
Reaction and Other Folderol: There's a lot wrong with this movie. A LOT.
The plot is bizarre, the storytelling is messy, and some of the proceedings are downright silly. There are moments when the movie is ugly, and not necessarily in the way a horror movie is supposed to be ugly. And the whole thing feels like it was cobbled together from pieces of other movies.
The influences are pretty obvious. There's more than a little Cannibal Holocaust in here, along with a generous helping of Apocalypse Now. And, of course, the obligatory George Romero zombie influences. It's almost as though the filmmakers watched a bunch of movies they liked and decided to make all of them at once.
And then there's the stock footage. Lots and lots of stock footage. I understand the desire to establish an exotic jungle setting without actually having to film everything in an exotic jungle. But did we really need all those shots of birds? What was the point? Were the birds somehow involved in the zombie outbreak? Were they conducting surveillance? Did somebody get a terrific deal on a reel of bird footage and decide they were damn well going to use every frame?
Another problem is the storytelling. It reminded me of something that bothers me about a lot of modern action movies. Within any given scene, it's usually perfectly clear what's happening. You know who the characters are, what they're trying to accomplish, and what's standing in their way. But how one scene connects to the next, or how all the scenes fit together into a coherent story, is another matter entirely. The individual pieces make sense. The movie doesn't always.
And the ending? Let's just say I don't think anyone is going to be terribly surprised by how things turn out.
So why did I give this movie a relatively high rating?
Because somewhere in the second half, I noticed something strange.
I was watching another scene in which a group of living people was desperately trying to escape a bunch of zombies. I was still bothered by the movie's incoherence, its silliness, and its general messiness. But I was also completely absorbed in what was happening. I wanted to know how these people were going to get out of this particular predicament. I was on edge. I was genuinely interested in what happened next.
Somehow, despite everything the movie was doing wrong, it had grabbed me.
And that's not nothing.
I should also give credit to the makeup effects, which are excellent. The zombies look appropriately revolting, and there's some genuinely impressive gruesomeness on display.
Ultimately, Hell of the Living Dead is a badly assembled, frequently ridiculous, sometimes irritating movie. But it's also a movie that managed to hold my attention and generate real suspense, even while I was mentally cataloging its many shortcomings.
I can't call it a good movie. But I can't dismiss it as a bad one, either.
Sometimes a movie doesn't have to make much sense to work. Sometimes it just has to make you want to see what happens next.
And, against considerable odds, this one did.
And the strangest thing of all? Joe...Joe, of all people, gave it a 5!
My acting career continues to advance at a breathtaking pace.
On October 13, I’ll finally get to see Lost 9, a new short film by Lindley Farley in which I have a small role. We’ll be screening it at a bar in the East Village. Lindley tells me the finished film will run about 15–20 minutes. If you’re interested in coming, DM me for details.
I don’t want to give away much of the plot, other than to say that it’s about a New York cop who loses his gun.
Lindley has made a bunch of shorts, as well as the feature The Bulls’ Night Out and The Fez Belcher Show, a web series. I was also an extra in his short Infer Red last year. I was officially listed in the credits as one of two "subway gawkers."
This is only the latest chapter in my distinguished screen career.
My film debut came in the 1999 indie film Auditions, where I was credited as “Man in Bar.” I was indeed a man in a bar. I was also barely visible. If you knew exactly when and where to look, and squinted, you could see me. Despite receiving an actual credit, I did not make it onto IMDb.
Twenty years later, I appeared in the straight-to-video film Being. I was not credited, but this time I was clearly visible, as one of a group of frightened townspeople gathered to hear what the preacher, played by Lance Henriksen, had to say.
I didn’t make IMDb for that one either.
There is a much better story about how I wound up in Being. After my father-in-law died, we were selling his kitchen table. The guy who bought it turned out to be one of the producers of the movie, who was running around acquiring props and other things they needed for the shoot. One thing led to another, and I wound up as an extra. In fact, I wrote about that experience here.
The table made the movie too. A couple has sex against it. But, sadly, the table also did not make IMDb.
Last year came Infer Red, and now Lost 9, where I have finally achieved the next great milestone in my acting career: Lines.
Only a couple of them, near the end of the movie, but actual lines.
Filming my little scene was also an education. There are three of us talking, and the finished scene will probably last only a couple of minutes. I naively figured we would go in, have the conversation in front of the camera, and that would pretty much be that.
Nope.
We did the conversation over and over and over again while Lindley shot it from different angles: close-ups of each of us, wider shots, different perspectives and everything in between. I assume the finished scene will be assembled from bits and pieces of all those takes.
Which, of course, is how movies are made. I knew that intellectually. It was something different to actually participate in it and see how much filming goes into producing a couple of minutes of finished conversation.
I was also around for the filming of a bar scene early in the movie. The very top of my head is visible in that scene if you know where to look. Fortunately, it is not recognizable as the top of my head, because having me visibly appear as two different people in the same 15-minute movie would probably raise questions that the plot isn't prepared to answer.
But the most fun I had on Lost 9 may have been helping Lindley shoot a car-chase sequence.
I’m not in the chase, but I did a surprising amount to help make it happen. I scouted around looking for a dumpster that Lindley needed in one sequence. I drove with a camera mounted on the hood of my car. I drove while Lindley filmed out the back. I rode in Lindley’s car shining a light on the driver. I drove parallel to other cars involved in the chase.
At first, Lindley would explain five shots we were going to do and how they would all fit together.
I would listen carefully.
Then I would have absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
Eventually we developed a much better system. Lindley would tell me one thing we needed to do. We would do it. Then he would tell me the next thing. We would do that.
That worked much better.
And afterward, it was fascinating to see the edited footage and realize how all these little pieces — which often didn't make much sense to me while we were shooting them — came together into something that actually looked like a car chase. Lindley had a vision, but I couldn't see it (until I could).
That may have been the most interesting part of the whole experience: getting a tiny glimpse of how a movie gets constructed. You shoot little fragments from different angles, sometimes in an order that doesn't mean much to anyone except the filmmaker, and eventually those fragments become a scene.
Lindley has also told me he’s going to give me an associate producer credit for my contributions to the film.
The session: Freaky Frankenstein's Keith shows us four oddball interpretations of the Frankenstein story
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.
Week 4: Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971) Directed by Al Adamson
My Level of Prior Knowledge: Completely unfamiliar.
Plot Synopsis: A descendant of Dr. Frankenstein runs a creepy seaside attraction while secretly conducting experiments with the help of his grotesque assistant. When Dracula brings him the original Frankenstein monster and proposes an alliance, the monster is revived—eventually leading to the promised showdown between Dracula and Frankenstein’s creation.
Reaction and Other Folderol: Dracula vs. Frankenstein is an incoherent mess.
And apparently, there was a good reason for that. This feels like a movie made by people who weren’t entirely sure what movie they were making while they were making it. The whole production has that cobbled-together quality: scenes and ideas thrown at the screen in the hope that eventually they might add up to a movie. They don’t.
The dialogue is terrible. The acting is very bad. The story wanders around seemingly at random. Even Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster—the two guys whose names are right there in the title—sometimes seem like they wandered in from some other movie.
I did get a kick out of the cop, who struck me as some weird low-budget version of Harry Morgan in Naked City. And I have to admit that the midget landing on the axe was funny. I’m not entirely convinced it was supposed to be as funny as I found it, but at this point you take your entertainment where you can get it.
Which brings me to the only circumstances under which I can really recommend Dracula vs. Frankenstein: get together with a bunch of friends, get drunk, and make fun of it. Under those conditions, this could actually be a pretty good time. As a movie, though? No.
And then there was Joe.
Joe gave this piece of shit a 10.
I don't understand it.
This was much worse than the last two things we watched, neither of which Joe gave a 10. So apparently those movies somehow failed to meet the exacting standards that Dracula vs. Frankenstein satisfied.
I have spent some time trying to understand Joe's rating system. I shall spend no more.
The session: Freaky Frankenstein's Keith shows us four oddball interpretations of the Frankenstein story
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.
Week 1: Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974) Directed by Terence Fisher
My Level of Prior Knowledge: Completely unfamiliar.
Plot Synopsis: Imprisoned for conducting illegal experiments, a young surgeon discovers that Baron Frankenstein is secretly continuing his work inside the prison. He becomes Frankenstein’s assistant in an attempt to create a new man from the body parts of several inmates—with predictably disastrous results.
Reaction and Other Folderol: I liked this one quite a bit more than I expected to. Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell isn't really the kind of movie I generally go for, but it's a good movie, and visually it's terrific. Hammer certainly knew how to make a period horror movie look good.
Keith's friend Chris Gullo was our guest presenter for this one, and he was particularly well suited to the assignment: he literally wrote the book on Peter Cushing—or at least a book on Peter Cushing, the biography In All Sincerity... Peter Cushing. So we had an actual Cushing expert in the room.
Once again, though, I have questions about the Frankenstein pedigree. The monster doesn't look anything like the Frankenstein monster that exists in my head—the Boris Karloff/Herman Munster/Franken Berry version that has become the iconic image of Frankenstein. Ethan pointed out that this is hardly unprecedented: the monster in Edison's 1910 Frankenstein didn't look anything like Karloff either. Fair enough. Apparently Frankenstein monsters have always been free to do their own thing.
Peter Cushing is great as Baron Frankenstein. This was the final Hammer Frankenstein film and Cushing's sixth and last appearance as the Baron, which made having Chris present it especially appropriate. And Cushing's Frankenstein is quite the workaholic. Put the man in prison, give him access to a few corpses and some surgical equipment, and apparently he just can't resist getting a little work done.
The surgery scenes looked surprisingly good, too. The whole production has that wonderfully elaborate Hammer look, and even when what's happening is grotesque, it looks good being grotesque.
But my favorite bit may have been the asylum patients at the end. The extras playing them were having an absolute blast acting completely loony. That looked like a great day to be an extra: "What's my motivation?" "You're insane. Go nuts." I could have done that.
So, yes, much better than I expected. A good movie, great visuals, Peter Cushing doing what Peter Cushing does, and enough Frankenstein-adjacent mad science to keep things moving even if the monster isn't going to be mistaken for Franken Berry.
And apparently Joe has decided to abandon his longstanding commitment to giving everything a 10. For the second week in a row, he went with something in the nine-point-somethings.
The session: Freaky Frankenstein's Keith shows us four oddball interpretations of the Frankenstein story
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.
Week 1: Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965) Directed by Ishiro Honda
My Level of Prior Knowledge: Completely unfamiliar.
Plot Synopsis: A young American scientist in postwar Japan becomes entangled in an experiment involving a strange, radiation-mutated giant—created from the heart of Frankenstein’s monster—who ultimately battles a monstrous subterranean creature threatening the countryside.
Reaction and Other Folderol: Boy, was this stupid. But I generally feel that way about the Japanese monster movies.
Frankenstein Conquers the World has one of those plots that sounds like it was created by people taking turns adding sentences without being allowed to hear what the previous person said.
Near the end of World War II, the Germans somehow get possession of the still-living heart of Frankenstein’s monster and ship it to Japan for safekeeping. Because apparently, with the Third Reich collapsing around them, somebody decided that relocating Frankenstein’s heart was a military priority.
Then Hiroshima happens.
Years later, the heart has somehow led to a strange feral boy who keeps growing until he becomes a giant Frankenstein. Or something like that. I’m not going to pretend I followed all of it. The movie was surprisingly hard to follow for something this stupid.
Eventually Frankenstein has to fight Baragon, a giant burrowing monster who looks less like a terrifying prehistoric beast than a demented reptile puppy. I kept expecting someone to throw a stick and have him bound happily after it.
The movie was sometimes amusing, although I’m not entirely sure how often that was intentional. And the climactic monster fight was actually pretty good—but that was pretty much standard equipment for Japanese monster movies of the period. Whatever else was going on, eventually two guys in rubber suits were going to beat the hell out of each other while destroying miniature buildings, and the filmmakers knew how to deliver that.
There was also a little something different about this presentation. Keith brought in his friend—and film expert—Joe Cascio as our guest presenter. That meant Keith actually rated the movie, something he doesn’t do when he’s the one presenting.
And, just to avoid confusion, Joe Cascio is not our regular Joe—the Joe whose movie-rating philosophy can generally be summarized as “Why are there numbers below 10?”
Our Joe, inexplicably, decided to deviate from his usual “everything is a ten!” position this time.
Apparently Frankenstein Conquers the World accomplished something I would have thought impossible: it broke Joe.
Anyway, Frankenstein Conquers the World was stupid, confusing, occasionally amusing, and featured a giant demented reptile puppy.
In other words, it definitely lived up to the billing for this month.
The session: Freaky Frankenstein's Keith shows us four oddball interpretations of the Frankenstein story
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.
Week 1: Frankenstein's Daughter (1958) Directed by Richard E. Cunha
My Level of Prior Knowledge: Completely unfamiliar.
Plot Synopsis: A teenager discovers that her uncle’s sinister laboratory assistant has been secretly drugging her and turning her into a monster. The assistant is actually the grandson of Dr. Frankenstein, and his efforts to continue the family legacy culminate in his creating a murderous female monster from stolen body parts.
Reaction and Other Folderol: Frankenstein’s Daughter is pretty good. Not great, but pretty good.
This is classic 1950s science-fiction/monster-movie stuff: mad scientists, bubbling laboratory equipment, questionable science, teenagers, monsters, and people making decisions that no actual human being would make.
It is, however, a decidedly odd entry in the Frankenstein family tree. Especially at the beginning, when the movie seems to have wandered into werewolf territory. Trudy is given an experimental drug and periodically turns into a hairy, snarling creature who roams the neighborhood at night. Eventually we get back to the more traditional Frankenstein business of assembling a human being out of spare parts, but for a while there it feels as though somebody shuffled two monster-movie scripts together.
There is also, because it is the 1950s, a musical interlude. The teenagers have a pool party and suddenly we stop the monster movie so somebody can sing a song. Presumably this was there to fill a few minutes of running time and give the kids something hip to listen to. The annoying thing is that the musical number is actually pretty good. I was prepared to mock it. The movie denied me the opportunity.
Donald Murphy, as Oliver Frank, has excellent crazy eyes. He looks a little like the Professor from Gilligan’s Island if the Professor finally snapped after one too many failed attempts to get off that damned island and decided that building a woman out of corpses was the next logical step.
Bobbo and Keith both agreed that, whatever the movie looks like to an adult in 2026, this thing was genuinely frightening for a kid. And I can see that. The monster isn't particularly convincing by modern standards, but it is certainly grotesque.
Which raises an obvious question: Why is Frankenstein's daughter so incredibly ugly?
Keith supplied the answer. Apparently the production originally intended the creature to be male. They had already designed the monster makeup when somebody decided that, hey, the movie is called Frankenstein’s Daughter, so perhaps Frankenstein ought to make a daughter. Thus the production changed the monster's sex but essentially kept the male monster makeup.
And suddenly a great deal about this movie makes sense.
Anyway, Frankenstein’s Daughter isn't a lost masterpiece of horror cinema. But it is a thoroughly enjoyable specimen of the 1950s monster-movie genre, with enough weirdness to distinguish it from the hundreds of other movies involving a mad scientist and a laboratory full of equipment purchased from the local Radio Shack.
That is a surprisingly difficult sentence to write.
I first met Bob when we were students at Stuyvesant High School. He was a junior when I was a freshman, so under ordinary circumstances our paths probably wouldn't have crossed. But we were both members of Stuycom, Stuyvesant's club for students interested in the subway, and involved with its publication, The Straphanger.
I don't remember much about our interactions then, except that we weren't exactly friends. We weren't enemies, either. We just knew each other. But apparently we made enough of an impression on each other that, when we ran into each other a couple of years later at Queens College, we remembered each other.
And, once again, we had independently gravitated toward the same thing: the campus newspapers.
So we became part of the same extended circle of friends, acquaintances and adversaries. And thus began a friendship that, with periodic interruptions, lasted the better part of four decades.
Being Bob's friend was not always easy.
Anyone who knew him well will understand that this is something of an understatement.
Bob was egotistical. He was opinionated. He generally wanted things done his way. He picked the restaurant, the movie, the coffee shop. He set the agenda. And his ego required regular feeding.
Consequently, ours was an on-again, off-again friendship. There were periods when we went years without speaking. Then one of us would reappear and somehow we'd pick up again.
Once, after a particularly long period without contact, Bob called me. After some preliminary chitchat, we decided we should get together for lunch.
He had a talent for turning ordinary human interaction into absurdist theater.
Back before E-ZPass, whenever we went on road trips—which were invariably in Bob's car, because Bob driving gave Bob more control—we'd pull up to a tollbooth. Bob would hand over the money and then say something incomprehensible in a fake Slavic language.
The toll collector would stare at him.
Bob would turn to me and say something else in fake Slavic.
That was my cue.
"Ahhhh," I'd say, in my own fake Slavic accent. "'Receipt.'"
Bob would turn back to the toll collector, magnificently rolling his R:
"RRRReceipt, please."
Another favorite involved approaching strangers on the streets of Manhattan.
"Do you know what time it is?" Bob would ask, again in some vaguely foreign-sounding accent.
If they didn't know: "Do you know what time it was an hour ago?"
Usually they didn't know that either.
"Because if you tell me what time it was an hour ago, I can add an hour and know what time it is now."
Why?
Because Bob.
There were many other incidents during our Queens College years, when we were young, stupid assholes.
One day, Bob and his friend Howie discovered that the metal chairs in the Student Union cafeteria could be crumpled if a sufficiently heavy person sat in them the right way. So, in an otherwise empty cafeteria, they merrily went from chair to chair destroying college property.
Eventually security arrived.
"Who? Us?"
They were told to leave.
"My good man, we are faculty."
Then, according to the friend who witnessed this, one of them turned approximately 90 degrees, as though breaking the fourth wall in a sitcom, and announced to absolutely nobody:
"Yeah, that's plausible!"
photo by Jeff Cuyubamba
I remember Bob crashing a Student Association awards dinner, grabbing some ungodly quantity of food, and fleeing down several flights of stairs, giggling maniacally, until he reached the newspaper office and could enjoy his loot.
To be sure, there were limits to how much Bob I could take.
For a while I refused to accompany him into 7-Eleven because he'd developed a habit of drinking the chili and liquid cheese intended as hot-dog and nacho toppings directly from the dispensers.
Because Bob.
There are other stories.
Some are funny.
Some are funny only after several decades have passed.
Some aren't funny at all.
Bob had serious flaws, and I don't want his death to magically erase them. There are people who knew him who, even after all these years, have no desire to remember him fondly. Some have good reason. I understand that.
I just don't share their experience of him.
Or, perhaps more accurately, I had some of those experiences too. They just aren't the whole of my Bob.
I saw another side of him once at my wedding.
Years earlier at Queens College, Bob had gotten into an argument with another newspaper editor who, for reasons that would require an entirely different essay, I'll call The Beastwoman. The argument ended with Bob calling her "Schmucko" and storming out.
Years later, both were invited to my wedding.
Another old newspaper associate who, for equally good reasons, I'll call the Pot-Stirring Piece of Shit, approached Bob.
"Hey, Bob! There's The Beastwoman! Why don't you go over and call her Schmucko? For old times' sake!"
So Bob walked over.
"Hello! How are you doing?"
They exchanged pleasantries.
Then Bob walked back past the Pot-Stirring Piece of Shit.
"Sorry. I just couldn't do it."
There was something revealing about that. For all his impulsiveness and all the times he crossed lines that other people wouldn't even approach, Bob actually had lines of his own. This was my wedding. He wasn't going to create a scene there for someone else's amusement.
And when Bob did create a scene, he generally didn't hide behind somebody else.
He'd take the fall himself.
Some of my favorite memories of Bob are from our road trips.
There was a trip to Pennsylvania Dutch country where, among other things, Bob ate two entire shoofly pies. Afterward, we went searching for a restaurant somebody had recommended. We repeatedly stopped and asked locals for directions to "The Black Agnes."
Nobody seemed to know what we were talking about.
Eventually we found the restaurant.
It was called The Black Angus.
Mystery solved.
We went to the New York State Fair once. I remember betting on pig races. I also remember finding a booth where you could sing along with a prerecorded backing track and leave with a cassette of your performance.
Bob and I chose Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson's "Say Say Say."
We sang it badly, off-key and in a variety of fake accents.
It was magnificent.
I would pay good money to have that tape now.
There were trips with our friend Vinnie to see minor-league baseball games in New York and Pennsylvania.
At a game in Williamsport, I said something like "Oy vey."
Bob immediately admonished me. We weren't in New York anymore, he explained. We were out in rural Pennsylvania. People might not take kindly to Jews being around.
This struck me as an odd concern, especially since a few minutes earlier Bob had recognized one of the coaches as a former New York Met and shouted that they should get together sometime and "have a bissel glass tea," using his finest imitation of a stereotypical elderly Jewish man. Because Bob.
Later, he walked into the men's room and announced: "Gentlemen! Start your penises!"
I suggested that, on balance, my "Oy vey" probably wasn't our biggest public-relations problem.
My favorite trip was probably to Geneva, New York, to see the Geneva Cubs.
For reasons I can no longer reconstruct, I had a gorilla costume in the car. Bob and Vinnie persuaded me to wear it.
So there I sat, in the stands, on a hot, humid summer night, slowly cooking inside a gorilla suit.
Then somebody from the team approached me. During the seventh-inning stretch, they had someone in a bear-cub costume run around the field. Would I like to join her?
Would I?
We chased each other around the field. Then I spent the rest of the game wandering through the stands high-fiving people.
It was glorious.
There was also the teenage boy who wanted to know whether the gorilla was male or female and decided the best investigative technique was to reach inside the costume and squeeze my breast.
He was disappointed.
I was somewhat more disturbed.
On another trip, Vinnie and I got into an argument while playing pool—or billiards; I still don't know the difference. Vinnie won.
I immediately declared it a "tainted win." Then a "tainted Vin."
Then I began singing "Tainted Vin" to the tune of "Tainted Love."
Repeatedly.
Vinnie wanted to kill me.
For perhaps the only time in recorded history, Bob was the peacemaker.
Bob and I also spent countless weekends driving around Long Island looking for antiques. Back then, the North Fork seemed to be filled with little antique stores.
Bob could haggle.
I couldn't.
I'd ask the price. The dealer would tell me. Then I'd either buy it or I wouldn't. This caused Bob physical pain.
Once I asked about something that cost $200. I was about to agree when Bob intervened. "How about a hundred?"
The dealer protested that I'd already been about to pay $200.
But Bob had entered the negotiation, and there was no going back. Eventually I let him take over.
I paid $125.
Of course, I had to buy Bob lunch afterward.
Bob was extraordinarily cheap. Pathologically cheap might be more accurate. Eating with him often required either vigilance or a willingness to subsidize his meal.
Once, when we had ordered exactly the same thing, we agreed to split the bill. Then we disagreed over the tip. I wanted to leave one dollar more than Bob did.
Rather than argue over fifty cents apiece, I put in the extra dollar myself.
Bob immediately tried to take it.
His reasoning was impeccable, at least inside the sovereign nation of Bob: we'd agreed on what the tip should be—meaning what he thought it should be—so if I wanted to contribute another dollar, that dollar should reduce his share.
That time I made a scene.
Bob backed down.
But once, wonderfully, Bob caught himself.
We were somewhere on Long Island and stopped for gas. Since we'd been driving around in his car, I asked if he wanted me to give him some money toward the gas.
"Yeah—"
He stopped.
"Don't do that, Moish! You know how I am!"
Antiques eventually became more than an amusement for Bob.
Bob wasn't built for conventional employment.
For a while he had a corporate job doing some sort of graphic-arts work for an investment bank. He also worked for New York City's School Construction Authority, where he frequently complained that he'd somehow landed in the only department where nobody had an opportunity to accept bribes. Neither job ended well.
Eventually he found another way.
He placed advertisements saying he bought old radios. People would call him, and he'd visit homes where old radios and other antiques had been gathering dust in basements and attics. He'd buy things and resell them.
And he became good at it.
Bob had tremendous native intelligence and an ability to become intensely knowledgeable about whatever interested him. He read voraciously about collectibles. Radios and televisions became particular specialties. He could talk for hours about some obscure radio that most of us would have looked at and seen only an old box.
He had reinvented himself.
It wouldn't be the last time.
Bob was always creating something.
He published an underground comic called Comicphobia. Later came Cinemaphobia, a movie magazine for which I occasionally wrote reviews under assumed names.
One of my pseudonyms was "Q. Whinston Brockmoore."
I wanted to make it "Q. Whinston Brockmoore III."
Bob vetoed that because it sounded fake and pretentious.
Thank God he was there to preserve my journalistic credibility.
Bob and some of our Queens College friends also made films.
Calling them "films" may be generous.
My favorite was, I believe, called Mondo Schmondo.
It began with Bob and Howie standing behind a table piled with food, reading from scripts. Gradually they started eating. Then the eating became more aggressive. Eventually the script was more or less abandoned while food was shoved into clothing and soda was poured over people.
At one point Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" played while the camera lovingly contemplated a carton of ice cream rotating on a Lazy Susan.
Then another food item rotated.
And another.
It was horrifying.
I laughed hysterically.
One time Bob, Howie and a third friend -- I forget who -- bought time on a local radio station to put on a comedy show. They had planned it all out well, but somehow disaster struck. I don't know if it started with technical problems or human error, but things spiraled out of control. Blair and I laughed hysterically listening to the three of them argue while "Hava Nagila" played. And then, to top it off, Howie took the mic and informed their audience that "This is the tightest ninety minutes of radio comedy you'll ever hear."
Years later, during Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates installation in Central Park, Bob made Angry Bob Meets the Gates. By then he was performing stand-up under the name Angry Bob and weighed more than 500 pounds.
The film mostly consisted, as I remember it, of the camera lovingly following Bob as he bought a hot dog and ate it while contemplating The Gates. Eventually he offered a short assessment in French which, if memory serves, translated roughly as "pretentious shit."
I wish that film were still online.
Eventually Bob decided to become a stand-up comedian.
Most people who dream of going into show business either start young or eventually conclude that it isn't going to happen.
Bob started late.
He called himself Angry Bob. His explanation for the name was characteristically elaborate: "My name is Bob, and I'm angry."
I watched a lot of his early performances. They were unpredictable. Sometimes he was hilarious. Sometimes he was terrible.
But Bob kept doing it.
And slowly, something happened.
He got better.
Then he got much better.
He attracted some attention. The New York Observer ran a substantial article about him. He appeared several times on CNN's Rick Sanchez show doing humorous commentary on the news. He got parts in some low-budget films. And he appeared in three episodes of HBO's Bored to Death, including a particularly memorable appearance as one of the Rays.
There was even talk at one point of a spin-off built around Zach Galifianakis' character, with Bob as a regular.
It never happened.
That's show business.
At some point, Bob decided that Angry Bob needed merchandise, including an Angry Bob bobblehead.
He found a manufacturer in China and tried to explain what he wanted: essentially a three-dimensional caricature of himself. Fat. Unattractive. Holding a bucket of fried chicken. The lack of flattery was the entire point. A handsome Angry Bob wasn't funny.
This concept apparently did not translate well.
The first prototype came back slim and handsome.
No, Bob explained. He needed to be fat.
Another version arrived.
Still too flattering.
No. Fatter. Uglier.
It took several iterations before Bob managed to convince a manufacturer on the other side of the world that, yes, the customer was actually complaining that the doll they had made of him was too thin and too good-looking.
Eventually they got it right.
I had one of those Angry Bob bobbleheads.
I don't anymore.
I really wish I did.
Bob recorded a comedy album called Stuffed. It had some very funny material, although I thought it was uneven. The last few times I saw Bob perform, however, he had become genuinely good. I repeatedly encouraged him to record another album.
He never did.
And then, for reasons I never completely understood, Bob walked away from comedy. He nuked his online presence. His explanations never quite made sense to me.
I still think it was a shame.
Bob lived much of his life convinced that eventually he was going to become famous.
With most people, you'd politely call that a dream.
With Bob, you might have called it a delusion.
Except for one inconvenient fact:
He actually had talent.
He was funny. He was creative. He was intelligent. He could perform. And he'd gotten just close enough to the real thing that you couldn't dismiss the possibility completely.
I sometimes thought Bob's greatest obstacle to becoming successful was Bob.
There was another struggle running through virtually all the years I knew him.
His weight.
When I first knew Bob in high school, he was what people then called "husky." In college he was fat, but not extraordinarily so.
Later his weight began swinging wildly.
He'd balloon to an enormous size. Then he'd decide to lose the weight and, through sheer willpower and an almost impossibly restrictive diet, lose hundreds of pounds.
Then he'd gain it back.
And lose it again.
At various times I saw Bob go from weights in the many hundreds of pounds to something approaching normal and back again.
On one of our road trips with Vinnie, Bob was in one of his weight-loss phases. We'd stop for lunch. Vinnie and I would order food.
Bob would order a glass of water. He'd mix some nutritional powder into it. That was lunch.
His one indulgence was to ask one of us for a French fry or onion ring.
Not to eat.
To sniff.
So Vinnie and I would eat our lunches while Bob drank his shake and occasionally inhaled deeply from a French fry.
That's willpower.
Or insanity.
With Bob, the border could be difficult to locate.
As we got older, the adventures became less adventurous.
During the on-again portions of our friendship, Bob and I increasingly just got together to eat and talk.
There were pizza places he liked. We'd go to whichever one he wasn't feuding with at the moment.
Then we'd often head to the Panera in Little Neck.
Bob had one of their unlimited-coffee subscriptions, which naturally appealed enormously to him. I'd buy my coffee. He'd get his for free and then try to cajole the cashier into giving him a free cookie.
And we'd sit there for hours.
Talking.
Arguing.
Remembering people.
Complaining about people.
Making each other laugh.
Just shooting the shit.
In some ways, that was the best of Bob.
Not Angry Bob the comedian.
Not Radio Rob the antique dealer.
Not Bob the guy crushing cafeteria chairs or stealing food from college banquets.
Just Bob, sitting across from me over coffee.
It was during one of those outings that Bob told me he had cancer.
He was emphatic that I wasn't to tell anyone.
A mass had been removed from his leg, he said, but the doctors had gotten it all. He had a clean bill of health.
Later, there was more cancer. As I remember it, that time it involved his spine. He was treated and again told me he was cancer-free.
Then something appeared in his abdomen.
Again there was treatment.
Again, apparently, an all-clear.
By then I was worried. I wondered privately whether these really were isolated incidents or whether something larger was happening. But I wasn't his doctor, and I saw no benefit in sharing my amateur medical speculation with him.
In the last several months, the cancer returned with a vengeance.
His decline was frighteningly fast.
Bob and I weren't speaking when that happened.
Our friendship had entered another one of its dormant periods in late 2024, this time at Bob's choosing.
A few months ago, he called me.
We talked.
But we didn't really reconnect.
I wish we had.
There had been so many previous interruptions that perhaps some part of me assumed this was just another one. Eventually Bob would call, or I would call, and we'd have pizza and coffee and pick up the argument wherever we'd left it.
There isn't going to be another round.
That's difficult to absorb.
I know there are people who will remember a very different Bob.
I'm not going to tell them they're wrong. Because they're not.
Bob could be selfish. He could be infuriating. He could be grotesquely inappropriate. He could exhaust your patience. He could make friendship much harder than friendship needed to be.
Death doesn't erase any of that.
But neither do those things erase the Bob I knew.
The Bob who made me laugh until I couldn't breathe.
The Bob of tollbooths and fake accents.
The Bob who ate two entire shoofly pies and then went looking for The Black Agnes.
The Bob who warned me not to say "Oy vey" in rural Pennsylvania and then walked into a public restroom and yelled, "Gentlemen! Start your penises!"
The Bob who negotiated $75 off an antique because he couldn't stand watching me pay asking price.
The Bob who knew himself well enough, at least once, to stop me from offering him gas money because "You know how I am!"
The Bob who dreamed up Comicphobia and Cinemaphobia and terrible movies and comedy routines and radio shows.
The Bob who kept reinventing himself.
The Bob who, despite everything, got up on a stage at an age when most people would have decided it was too late to chase that particular dream—and eventually became pretty damned good at it.
The Bob who sat with me over coffee for hours and made an ordinary afternoon entertaining.
I'll also remember the road trip to Rochester and Toronto. I told that story onstage years ago, as captured in this video. It captures Bob better than another thousand words here probably could: the enthusiasm, the anger, the absurdity, and what it was like to go somewhere with him.
We were friends for a very long time.
It was a bumpy ride.
There were times I was furious with him. There were times he was furious with me. There were years when we didn't speak.
But through all of it, I always cared about Bob.
And whatever else I can say about him, he never made me doubt that he cared about me.
