I was reminded recently how much easier it is to remember facts and arguments if you explain them to someone else after reading them yourself.1 So, when I read a Streetsblog article about transportation nerdery recently, I decided to summarize its argument—partly for the half-dozen people who end up reading this, but mostly for myself.
Today’s nerdy topic is BRT, which my computer wants to autocorrect to “Be right there!” but actually stands for Bus Rapid Transit. I’ll get to that in a bit, but first I’m going to back up—way, way up.
The point of any kind of transit, whether it’s a bus or subway or giant MAGA pickup truck, is to move people from one place to another. Since we operate within the laws of physics, we can’t fit everybody’s personal vehicle onto the roads at once without making highways infinitely wide (and yes, they’ve been trying that in Texas). The only way, and I mean the ONLY way to efficiently move city-sized numbers of people around is with some kind of mass transit.
Pictured: 1,000 words.
Once you’ve gotten over that mental hump (and some people never will), the practical question is which kind of transit—to use the terminology, which “transit mode”—is best for a particular situation. As seen above, even a boring smoggy city bus is orders of magnitude more efficient than individual cars. Then you’ve got commuter rail, light rail, subways, and even weirder methods. To decide which one to use, how much it’s going to cost should be at or near the top of your list of considerations.
I see you lunging for the Comment button, because every time I talk about the cost of mass transit, there’s an automatic response: “Mass transit isn’t supposed to make money, Kevin! It’s a public good! Down with capitalism!” I agree with all of that. But it still costs money, and in our underfunded country, it’s extremely important to be smart about spending limited public funds.2 Subways are cool, but also hyper-expensive, and you can probably imagine how a subway might bankrupt a city if it didn’t have a LOT of daily users to help pay for it. In a less extreme example, an under-used commuter train can cost so much to run that it passively drains money from the rest of the city’s transit system, no matter how popular it is. (This is sadly the case with Austin’s Red Line, but that’s a topic for another day.)
There’s a name for this math problem: “transit-supportive density.” You need a certain number of people living and working per square mile for it to make sense to run any kind of transit through that area.3 And the more expensive the transit, the more people you need to support it. Check this table:
Transit mode
Cost per mile
Pop. density (people per acre)
Bus
<$1M
10+
Light rail
$150-$350M
28+
Subway
$300M-$2B
47+
Those estimates vary *widely* but you get the idea. A plain-vanilla bus line costs very little to build (buses + stops) and doesn’t need much population density to be financially viable. Light rail costs much more to build and operate; a subway, even more than that. This is, in a nutshell, why a city like Austin can never have a NYC-style subway system—it just isn’t built for it.
Finally, I’m getting to the subject! Somewhere in between normal buses (cheap) and light rails (expensive) you’ve got something called “bus rapid transit,” or BRT for short. The definition of BRT is a bit flexible, but boils down to a bus line that’s been built for speed and efficiency. Most often this includes some or all of the following:
A dedicated bus-only lane for at least part of the route
“Signal priority,” ie. traffic lights that let buses go before cars
Higher frequency (10–15 minutes) so you don’t need to check a schedule to use it
Self-payment terminals so you can just tap your card or phone to pay the fare
On top of this, the bus itself might be sexier—extended lengths with multiple entry points; “level boarding” so wheelchair users can roll on; Wi-Fi networks; and so on.
And sometimes it’s green!
It’s all very cool stuff! And even if your BRT includes everything from the wish list above, it’s still way cheaper than installing the complicated infrastructure (rails, power lines) you need for light rail. That means the “transit-supportive density” for BRT is way lower. Since most American cities have very low population density compared to the Amsterdams or Copenhagens of the world, that means BRT can be an attractive option.
So the point of the Streetsblog article is that BRT is, or should be, a very useful Goldilocks option—“BRT often can cost 20 percent of a light-rail system but can capture 80 to 85 percent of light rail riders.” That’s a sweet deal that brings a lot of mass-transit benefits to cities or areas that otherwise wouldn’t qualify for them, financially or logistically. If it’s “real” BRT—meaning most of the checklist items above, instead of just one or two—then it’s a viable alternative for a lot of applications.
Explainer done! Back to your regularly-scheduled whatever-this-blog-is.
I know proposing marriage isn’t a creativity contest, no matter how much YouTube culture has tried to convince us otherwise. But special girls need special treatment, and when I decided to ask Kiki to marry me, I couldn’t help but put some pressure on myself. I had the ring in hand—pink tourmaline, gold band—but a month or more after deciding to do it, I was still mulling how to actually do it.
Then one night we rewatched “Yesterday,” a movie about a guy who realises he’s the only person in the world who remembers the Beatles (goofy premise, I know). Ed Sheeran plays himself in a supporting role, and the end of the movie features one of his ballads, “One Life.” Here it is:
You’ll note the competent musicianship and on-key singing.
As we watched, it hit me: this is it. This song is how I’ll propose. That was a half-burst of inspiration, but how exactly would I sing it? In a karaoke bar? With a hired musician playing backup? Then the other half-burst arrived: I’d play the guitar myself! How romantic!
An important caveat: I have never, ever played the guitar.
In late 2015 I was living contentedly at my house in Austin with my housemate Robby and two pets, a dog named Lola and a cat we just called Cat. Then one day, my friend Cat Drago made a plea on social media: her father could no longer care for his cat, and he (the cat, not the dad) needed a new home in short order.
Like my existing fur-babies he was an indoor-outdoor cat, a key selling point in that I wouldn’t be adding a litter box to my operation. Without thinking about it much further—hey, two cats isn’t much different than one—I volunteered. Cat gushed her thanks and a couple of weeks later arranged to bring over the new resident. She’d never actually mentioned his name at any point, but her last text before arriving said: “by the way his name is Cat.”
Yes, thanks to my friend Cat, I now owned two cats named Cat. I don’t even need to think of a joke here.
Cat 2, as we called him, settled in nicely. He was a HUGE boy, 15 or 20 pounds, whom I would pick up and bounce in my arms while chanting “Big! Fat! Cat! Big! Fat! Cat!” His size was most evident when he affectionately rested his full body weight on my chest. It was much like a heart attack accompanied by a comforting purr.
He had an adorably broken meow and a habit of sleeping on his back, legs splayed, which I dutifully shared on Instagram with the hashtag #deadcat.
Robby and I had no issue with the “Cat 1” and “Cat 2” names. Bachelors are low-effort like that. Our friend Billy eventually decided Cat 1 should be named Suitcase, and then at a party awhile later, one of my Latino friends declared of Cat 2: “His name is Sábado. Because he’s Gigante.” (Link, if you don’t get the reference.)
He was an impressive mouser, able to move his giant body with superhero speed when one of the rats around the chicken coop came within range. (He once brought a rat he’d caught into the house. Not cool!) He got along well with the chickens—one time, two chicks imprinted on him and followed him around the yard.
“…Dad?”
For most of 2020 I was plotting my big move to Amsterdam. It was always part of the plan for Sabado to join me on the flight, with our friends Cortney & Jonathan fostering Suitcase for a few months. I bought the travel carrier and collected the right paperwork, but fate had other plans: Sabado abruptly lost a bunch of weight and was diagnosed with liver disease. Desperate for him to eat, I bought every kind of cat treat they sold at HEB, working out what ones he’d still stomach. Something he loved was cooked chicken breast, which Kiki would have delivered constantly from a nearby restaurant, surely a memorably strange order for them. As you’d expect, this made him permanently spoiled.
It made no sense to move a sick cat across an ocean, and so on impossibly short notice—I think it was a week or less—Cortney & Jonathan agreed to foster a second, very ill, cat. Fortunately for everyone involved, the foster parents *loved* their new charges, and when we gently floated the idea of keeping the cats permanently in Texas, their first response was relief at not giving them up.
Sabado kept on trucking for another THREE YEARS—ironically it was Suitcase who crossed the rainbow bridge first. His faulty liver finally and suddenly gave up the ghost, and on Wednesday morning Kiki and I woke up to the sad news that he was in kitty heaven. Eleven years is too short a life for any cat (my preference would be infinity years) but he lived his best life in three different households, and I was lucky that one of the three was mine.
Twice before, my sister Margaret has called me over FaceTime with no advance warning. The first occasion was to tell me she was getting married; the second was to tell us she had cancer. (She’s fine!) So when a third FaceTime came in last month out of nowhere, I knew instantly that the news would be either very bad or very good. I could’ve made a thousand guesses either way, but “her movie got into the Cannes Film Festival” would not have been on the list.
Now, Margaret is my favorite person in the world. She’s already quite accomplished, improbably making it from a rural Texas high school to the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU—then later, all the way to Dublin for a master’s in playwriting.1 That being said, I’m not always sure what my sister’s *deal* is. Some artists apply their creative talents with laser-like focus. Margaret is more like a creative fire hose. She’s worked on everything from a radio drama to a one-woman stage production to a short documentary about cow costumes. She’s lived everywhere from New York to Nashville to our Granny’s old house near Fort Worth. At some point she and her husband Stephen moved to Louisville KY, and I would need to pause my writing and go ask them to remind me why they did that.
Apropos of nothing, here we are circa 1981, drunk AF.
So it’s both surprising and unsurprising that she’s lately drifted toward filmmaking, writing a sci-fi short and then directing her first-ever production—a little ten-minute movie called “Poof.” As is typical with short films, Margaret’s producer submitted “Poof” to a ton of film festivals. To everyone’s absolute shock, out of some 5,000 short-film submissions, hers was one of the dozen or so to be selected to Cannes.
Traveling to Cannes on a few weeks’ notice is wildly expensive, but to miss it was out of the question. We yelled at booking.com to shut up and take our money2 and on Friday the 26th took the two-hour flight to Nice, my first visit to the fabled South Of France™. There was a minor tragedy when we realized we wouldn’t arrive until after Margaret’s official screening on Friday afternoon. But we had a consolation prize: Margaret had been invited to a special ceremony for women filmmakers, and so could offer us her tickets to that night’s gala screening, complete with red carpet and formal-wear dress code.
Like a Star Trek convention, the Cannes Film Festival is both impossible to describe and exactly what you would expect. This small French town on the coast had been temporarily overrun by selfie-takers like it was the Influencer World Championships. (Of course, much like my favorite bumper sticker—“You’re not in traffic; you ARE traffic”—we, in our bow tie and velvet dress, were part of the circus.)
On the red carpet we paused for the dozens of photographers, only to laugh very hard when we realized NONE of them were taking our photo and continue up the steps into the theater. Since we were using Margaret’s festival-nominee tickets, our seats were just ridiculous, fourth-row center and DIRECTLY in front of the film’s cast and director who entered to sustained applause.3 The movie was a biopic about French national hero Abbé Pierre; very well-made and well-acted, but schmaltzy and overlong. It hardly mattered—the movie could’ve been terrible and the red-carpet walk would have made it worth our time.
We paraded out of the theater. In any sane universe, that bizarre experience would be the high point of our entire year. As it turned out, it wasn’t even the high point of our night.
At a beachside bar we rendezvoused with Margaret, Stephen, and a few others to debrief our respective evenings. Within moments, we realized we had the less interesting story; Margaret’s involved Kate Fucking Winslet, who cornered her after the ceremony and gushed about how great “Poof” was. This is really Margaret’s story to tell (or not), but suffice it to say, we were dizzy with excitement for her. Just like the Cannes selection in the first place, I felt prouder and happier than if it had been my movie getting all the praise. (I don’t even have a movie! And I’m the one with the film degree!)
The awards ceremony was the following evening. Kiki and I watched the YouTube broadcast and spotted Margaret among her fellow short-film nominees on the red carpet (slotted in the procession between Wim Wenders and Orlando Bloom), then met Stephen and some other “Poof” cast and crew in a hotel bar to watch the rest.
Compared to the Oscars, the Cannes awards are mercifully short. Alas, “Poof” didn’t win the short-film award. We could hardly be more biased, of course, but everything so far had been such a fairy tale that I felt genuine surprise that it didn’t. I mean, why WOULDN’T it, ya know?
To add to the improbabilities of the whole weekend, Sunday was Margaret’s birthday. We went with two of Margaret’s friends for a nice dinner down on the water4 and then walked back into town, sunlight fading over the hills as tourists lingered on the beach and workers under spotlights began to disassemble the film-festival infrastructure.
In all of the insanity we somehow still hadn’t actually seen “Poof,” and so our final stop on the trip was their Airbnb, where Margaret opened her laptop and showed it to us.
It’s hard to write a review of a ten-minute short film in which I’m so emotionally invested. The various luminaries had it right, though: “Poof” is a charming and thoughtful short story with brilliant comic timing, quirky characters (Catherine Curtin channeling Jennifer Coolidge; Andrea Rosen channeling Shelley Duvall), and verbal and visual jokes that gave me several belly laughs. I’m excited to see it again, and if/when it becomes broadly available, we’ll of course share it widely and loudly.
As Kiki and I walked back to our Airbnb for a few hours’ sleep before flying back to Amsterdam, I suddenly chuckled. “Of course it doesn’t take anything away from how great that was,” I told Kiki. “But I can’t believe all this”—I mentally waved my hand at everything from Abbé Pierre to Kate Winslet—”came from that little movie.”
Of course, that was a lie. I could believe it. Movies are powerful things.
You’ll see a dozen movies better than “Avatar: The Way of Water” this year. But you’ll see none that are more worthy of taking a trip to the movie theater.
That’s my main point; you can stop reading if you want. As a movie the second “Avatar” doesn’t merit a lengthy review, especially if you saw the first one (and statistically, most of us did). It’s still blue aliens vs. capitalist mecha-robots. It’s still overlong, overwrought, and underwritten. As a story, this sequel doesn’t innovate much more than “2 Fast 2 Furious.”
Not only that, but “The Way of Water” arrives at a really awkward time. COVID and the streaming wars have joined forces to deliver a deeply compelling argument against the entire movie-going experience. Why should we drive to a theater to experience the hell of other people—with their germs, their voices, and their glowing phones—when we can pause Netflix and grab a beer from the fridge any time we want? Have you seen the size of TVs these days?
But betting against James Cameron has been a sucker’s bet for his entire career. “The Way of Water” is his rebuttal to the Netflix argument, and boy, is it a doozy. In all its 3D, high-frame-rate glory, “Avatar 2” reminds you of the power of film on the big screen. Not in the “shared experience” with the audience; not in the nine-dollar popcorn; but in the social contract that, for the next 192 minutes, the lights will dim and the images in front of you will be your entire world experience.
What an experience it is. More than once, I found myself grinning like an absolute idiot at how fucking gorgeous this movie is. Whether it was a menacing fleet of spaceships or an alien reef teeming with invented fish species, the visuals had my ADHD brain in their firm grip. As visual effects, they’re so perfectly executed that they disappear—I can’t recall a moment where the movie looked anything less than filmed footage, even though it’s hardly less CGI than a Pixar movie. (The occasional human actor pops up, like Eddie Valiant visiting Toontown.) James Cameron famously waited a decade before making the first “Avatar” so that technology could catch up to his vision; the additional decade’s wait until this one has paid similar dividends. It’s just stunning.
I don’t give these compliments to minimize the film’s flaws. There’s a bunch, and many are the result of a rich white man telling an indigenous-peoples fable.
A tiny aside: sci-fi can, and should, rhyme with reality. If you’re going to depict future-humans hunting a whale in space, it’s not only valid but compelling to match the beats of real humans hunting a whale on earth. Science fiction is allegory.
But! If you’re depicting alien indigenous cultures, the shortest route to cringe is to have them resemble human ones. When seafaring aliens don facial tattoos and stick their tongues out menacingly like Maori warriors in blueface, it’s embarrassing as hell. Smaller details, like the feral white boy sporting an impressive set of dreadlocks, don’t help one tiny bit. It’s a blind spot that’s roughly the size of the entire damn movie.
And it’s not only cringe—it also speaks to a lack of imagination, which is fucking bizarre for a movie that’s so imaginative in other ways. James Cameron will invent an entire planetary ecosystem—right down to the biomechanics of the aforementioned space whale—only to have his teenaged aliens call each other “bro” and “cuz” with hilarious frequency.1 You wonder whether he even *realizes* his film is set 200 years in the future.
So in short, “Way of Water” can make your jaw drop with its beauty in one scene, and its clunky casual racism in the next. “Avatar” contains multitudes.
I’m still recommending it. While I wish he hadn’t self-exiled to Pandora for the latter third of his career, James Cameron remains one of the great action-movie directors. The climactic battle amidst the floating mountains in “Avatar” was about as good as Hollywood action set pieces can get. The equivalent battle in “Way of Water,” with its more-than-slight resemblance to “Titanic,” is almost as gripping. And the ensemble cast—including Sam Worthington, our Most Forgettable Movie Star2—turns in solid acting performances despite never showing their human faces. (That feels surprising to type, but really shouldn’t—Gollum was over 20 years ago!)
But, just to end where I started, the big-screen experience is essential. This isn’t the only movie begging you to schlep to the Cinemark—movies these days can feel demoted, in a straight-to-VHS way, when they can only be viewed in your living room (“Greyhound” comes to mind). Once upon a time I was a film major, and it was refreshing to be reminded that theaters still have a useful, beautiful purpose.
I’ve never fled a country before. Well, besides the US.
This post describes a traumatic experience, and I dealt with the trauma by writing about it in exhausting detail. The result is an overstuffed blogpost that you really do not need to read in full. I’ll even help you cheat with this bullet-point summary:
We were in Cairo to perform at a cultural festival…
But it was poorly run and the organizers put us in a nightmarish hotel…
After enough grumbling, we were finally upgraded to a very nice one…
But then we saw a play that depicted such brutal misogynist violence that we decided to cut our trip short and come home…
And then a scary encounter with Egyptian morality enforcement caused us to race to the airport in the middle of the night and buy the first tickets home.
We’re home safe now, and won’t be going back.
That’s the short version. If you’re so inclined, read on for the gory details.
Extremely Obvious Foreshadowing
Kiki and I felt ambivalent when our friend Laura asked us to join her improv group, the Lelijke Eendjes, on a trip to Egypt for the “Cairo International Gathering for University Theater.” The invitation was very kind, and performing in exotic locations is exciting, but we wondered if we were tacitly endorsing Egypt’s icky track record on women and human rights by participating. But we know the Egyptian people aren’t the same as their government, and this was a great chance for a cultural exchange with people who’d largely never even heard of improv. Our show format was “Fantastic Women of History,” which offered a progressive message about women while still following the Egyptian rules for performances (no kissing or sex, no mocking of Islamic governments, etc.)
So despite the apprehension we booked flights, scheduled rehearsals, and refined the cast list to a troupe of six improvisers: myself, Kiki, Nardje, Laura, Guru, and Bart. A French improv trio called The Fraltons joined the festival too, making us a Tolkein-esque group of nine.
Dibs on Gimli.
Early in the trip planning, we ran into a big hiccup: Egypt has laws against unmarried couples sharing a hotel room. But we had it on good authority that non-Egyptian couples who said they were married weren’t scrutinized too carefully. We procured cheap wedding rings and a fake Dutch wedding certificate for show, but were assured from multiple quarters that it wouldn’t be an issue. You can guess where this is going.
Bad omens about the trip began to emerge. The festival organizers were cagey about key details, most notably about which hotel they’d be putting us up at. When part of our group arrived in Cairo a day early, the penny dropped: we’d been placed in an incredibly shabby hotel. We were anxiously searching for better options as we waited to board the plane, never a good way to start a trip. “I don’t want to go,” Kiki told me in utter seriousness as our plane rolled up to the gate. I sympathized completely. And I should’ve listened.
On Second Thought “Indiana” is a Perfect Name, ZING
Nardje, Kiki, and myself landed without incident in Cairo. The wild variety in cultural costumes made it a striking experience from the moment we stepped off the plane—women in hijabs and burqas, men in extravagant uniforms, tourists in shorts and baseball caps. We met a festival volunteer who walked off with our passports (not a fun feeling!) but returned with tourist visas and took us to a hired car, which drove us into the rambling maze of the city.
Like Graceland or a Star Trek convention, Cairo is somehow both exactly what you’d imagine and impossible to describe. Its famous traffic is a good example: cars, buses, motorbikes, and pedestrians flow like a school of fish, passing within inches of each other at high speed, punctuating every moment with hundreds of horn beeps. Wanna walk across a busy highway? Just walk across! It’s terrifying for visitors, but since the chaos requires drivers to be hypervigilant, things end up moving kinda smoothly. (Kinda. On our second night, one of our festival guides was bumped by a taxi while demonstrating how to cross the road. He was fine.)
Cairo itself was the closest thing to “Blade Runner” I’ve ever experienced (admittedly, I’ve spent very little time in Asia1). Glowing billboards competed for space with enormous guarded compounds of unclear function. Hundreds of nearly identical sand-blasted towers stood in various states of construction or decay. A bizarre number of them seemed to be completely empty, and we encountered more than one that housed a colony of enormous bats.
More bats in this photo than people, probably.
The car got us into the city center and across the Nile to the cursed (and oddly-named) Indiana Hotel, where we met our friends and some disinterested staffers. Having failed to find any place better online, we were doomed to spend at least one night there. After some haggling with festival staff—no, we would NOT share a room with other performers we didn’t even know!—we got a key and took the rickety elevator to our room.
It’s difficult to know where to begin in describing the Indiana Hotel experience, though the fact that the stain on our bathroom wall was “probably not blood” might do. The handle to the bathroom door had been smashed off, as had the towel racks; the bedside lamp was unplugged, with no outlet to plug it into; everything hanging, from art to mirrors to wall sconces, was so consistently crooked that it felt deliberate. There was no phone. There were no towels. There were no SHEETS ON THE DAMN BED.
We begrudgingly passed a single, restless night laying clothed on top of our sheetless beds. The next morning we noped out of there without even informing the staff and checked into a two-star hotel on the opposite side of the Nile with acceptable cleanliness and friendly service. The Wi-Fi was still spotty (a country-wide problem) and we were paying out of pocket, but we had sheets on the bed and were situated for the moment. We visited the Egyptian Museum (SO MANY MUMMIES), found a great Lebanese restaurant, and made the best of our situation.
Meanwhile, Laura was doing a phenomenal job negotiating with the festival organizers for a fix: “Sure would be a shame if we didn’t perform,” basically. Her hard work paid off when we were moved to our third hotel in four days, a four-star resort hotel out by the airport with a fountain in the lobby and a pool out back. The *absurd* jumps in hotel quality from one day to the next to the next only made the whole trip feel more surreal.
After a nice filling lunch and a half-hour lounging by the pool, our myriad problems with the festival genuinely seemed to be behind us.
What could possibly go wrong?
Nardje, Kiki, and myself boarded a chartered bus back into town to watch the first show of the evening, and I was charmed by Cairo all over again as it swam by the window and the sun slowly set. This was my first unqualified good mood of the trip.
You can guess what happened next. …No, that’s not true, you can’t possibly.
We Thought the Late Start Would Be Our Complaint
We got to the venue at 5:15—45 minutes before the play’s scheduled 6pm start time—and in an especially egregious example of Egyptian time-keeping, loitered in the lobby until after 7pm.2 Finally they let us in, with a striking announcement: the performing group was requesting that men and women use separate entrances to the theater. (We grudgingly obliged, and then sat together anyway.) The performance was a two-person play depicting one long argument between a man and his wife. Being in Arabic, we could only guess as to the particulars, but our running joke was that it was “Arabic Marriage Story.”
Then things got serious. I feel like I need a trigger warning here for misogynist violence: because you have a soul, the next paragraph will be uncomfortable to read, and you genuinely might want to skip it.
The 40-minute scene crescendoed with the husband, increasingly unhinged, tying his wife to a chair as she screamed objections. Then he doused her in gasoline. Then he lit her on fire and burned her alive. Then he stood on a chair over her dead body and addressed the audience in a shouted monologue. And this is what elevated the moment from horrifying to traumatizing: as he did, at least a dozen audience members, including one man seated directly in front of us, enthusiastically applauded and whistled.
(I weirdly want to clarify that this is what happened in the *play*, not in real life. Absolutely insane that this doesn’t go without saying.)
The three of us—almost the only white people in the audience—sat stone-still, suddenly feeling like we were in genuine danger. If the audience had reacted to this moment of baroque violence with silence (or preferably booing), then this would *still* be one of the more disturbing things I’d ever seen. But the rabid cheering put us in a very dark place. To use the banal truism: knowing these kinds of things happen is one thing, but seeing them depicted and cheered at a cultural event is something else.
In stunned silence we boarded the festival bus to depart the venue, exchanging shocked glances with a number of other attendees—no, we weren’t the only ones who were repulsed. But who was who? The man who had applauded the onstage murder in front of us was on the bus too, cheerfully chatting with others. I can’t speak for Nardje, but Kiki and I both felt panic-attack symptoms coming on. I was almost involuntarily imagining scenarios resulting in our deaths. (Remember, our show the following night was meant to praise and elevate women.)
The bus took us to another venue where our friends Gael, Cédric, and Morgan were about to perform as The Fraltons. We decided not to tell them about our experience moments before their own show, so instead we sat in the second row (panic attack symptoms and all) and had the polar opposite experience: a silly, delightful, hilarious performance that was JUST what our traumatized brains needed in that moment. This is a strange moment for me to offer a hot take, but The Fraltons is one of the best improv acts in the world.
Back at the hotel, we gathered the European gang and tearfully shared our story. Kiki and I were finished with a festival and a country that, as Kiki put it, would allow a man to burn a woman onstage, but not to kiss her. We got the kind blessing of our castmates to find our way home and feel no obligation to be at the show.
And for the record we don’t judge our friends for performing—presenting a positive message for women is courageous and important in the face of such reckless misogyny. But we couldn’t perform ourselves while in fear of our audience.
After hugs all around in the hotel lobby, we said good night and finally got back to our room shortly after 2 AM. Kiki brushed her teeth while I looked up potential flights home; it was fucking maddening how I was googling for last-minute travel options from beginning to end of this trip. Then there was a knock at the door.
The “Argo” Sequel Nobody Asked For
In the hallway were a trio of hotel employees whose professionalism disguised their menace like friendly face paint on a killer clown. As Kiki aptly put it: “If you want to check on something, you send one guy. If you want to intimidate someone, you send three.” The time was 2:30 AM.
They explained that “visitors were not allowed” in the room we’d booked, which made me think there was a genuine mixup. I told them that we were a married couple (a lie, but one we’d been telling consistently the entire trip). They then asked for “proof” of the marriage, and for the first time in the trip I got out the fake marriage certificate we were told we wouldn’t need to show.
The root cause for this dust-up was apparently the fact that we’d swapped our two-bed hotel room with Nardje, who had a single bed. I surmised that even married couples are assigned rooms with Bert-and-Ernie beds, and two people sharing a single bed wasn’t permissible under any circumstances. Unclear if this was hotel policy or Egyptian law, but either way, we were being hassled about it in the middle of the night.
The staffers said they were satisfied and left, but not before taking a photo of our forged certificate. We’d already been committed to leaving the country very soon, but the moment we closed the door, we agreed in unison to leave right fucking now. With something nearing panic we packed our things and called an Uber; there was a 9:50 flight to Amsterdam and we were determined to be on it. At about 3 AM we fast-walked out of the hotel, carrying our bags instead of rolling them to be as quiet as possible. The Uber had us at the airport in 15 minutes. I told Kiki: “I have never in my entire life wanted to see the Great Pyramids less than I do now.”
Because fleeing a country is never a simple operation, we had to pay for our changed flight in cash—13,725 Egyptian pounds extracted across four ATM transactions and counted out by the EgyptAir cashier like casino winnings.3 We waited in the terminal for three hours until check-in, not even thinking of sleep, imagining unlikely but not unrealistic scenarios where the hotel staff notified the police and the police red-flagged our passports. I withdrew another 2,000 pounds in cash (about €100) in case I needed to offer a bribe. Even when we got past customs and security with no issues, I spent the remaining time thinking of the phrase “detained while attempting to board.”
But our run of bad luck was finally at an end. Right on time, and precisely five days earlier than scheduled, our 737 headed out over the Mediterranean. Heck, we didn’t even spot the pyramids from the plane! I’m sure they’re… great.
In Conclusion, We Can Kiss in Public Again
After this experience you might expect us to embrace a whole bucket of negative stereotypes about Islamic countries. I want to state clearly that we don’t. Yes, it’s deeply troubling that people who cheer a woman’s violent murder would be welcome at an arts festival. It’s also troubling that Nazis are welcome at Trump rallies. Garbage people abound across all languages and cultures. But the festival is responsible for its content, and we’re in no mood to forgive it for that, or for the hotel clusterfuck.
We’re safely at home now, reunited with Percy and enjoying our vacation-turned-staycation. Our friends apparently did a great job onstage without us and we were bittersweet about missing it. But I haven’t had a moment’s pause about getting the hell out of Egypt, and I HATE flaking on things. With only a few changes, the story of this trip might’ve been wildly different; but we got the worst of the worst, which is a damn shame.
I just saw “Last Night in Soho,” Edgar Wright’s new movie about a young London girl who forms a psychic bond with her counterpart from 50 years ago and quickly gets in over her head. THIS WILL NOT BECOME A MOVIE-REVIEW BLOG, but lo and behold, I formulated some disjointed thoughts about this one too.
No big spoilers.
As a director, Edgar Wright has an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary that’s immediately recognizable, like Wes Anderson without all the twee. One of his favorite toys is the smash cut, which is a natural fit for horror movies; really it’s a surprise he’s never directed one before. (Oh, you want a jump-scare? Hell, Edgar’s been filming jump-pouring-pints-of-beer for almost 20 years.) And like Jordan Peele, he’s not so far removed from his comedy roots that he won’t sprinkle some jokes throughout the script.
This movie shows Wright’s advancing maturity, not least in that it centers on female characters with agency (new territory for him!) and thus easily passes the Bechdel Test (perhaps his first film to *ever* do that?). His so-called Cornetto Trilogy films are ageing much better than the other bro comedies of the mid-aughts, but are still fundamentally about guys being dudes. In contrast “Last Night in Soho” attempts to be really about something—the fearful lives of women navigating the patriarchy; the crippling effects of mental illness—though it all feels a bit unfocused, especially at the end (see below).
While all movie reviews are subjective, I will state one objective fact: this film is gorgeous. The director of photography is Chung-hoon Chung, whom I was surprised to learn was also DP for “Oldboy” way back in 2003.1 The screen is soaking in dreamy reds and blues that reminded me (both visually and thematically) of “Eyes Wide Shut,” and you could have a decent moviegoing experience watching the thing on mute. I mean just look at that poster! It’s a visual love story to the swinging 60s that doesn’t ignore what was awful about them. Heck, what was awful about them is the PLOT OF THE MOVIE.
Horror movies aren’t historically the place to extend your acting chops, but many recent actors haven’t gotten that memo—see Florence Pugh in “Midsommar” and Lupita Nyong’o in “Us.”2 Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy didn’t punch the camera in the face quite that hard, but they do a great job portraying two sides of the same demented time-traveling coin.
It gets messy in the third act, as Edgar Wright movies often do.3 At one point the protagonist seems so deep in the horror-movie shit that you assume the film is at its climax, but… it keeps going. The actual climax, with its big reveal, follows the rhythm of the equivalent scene “Hot Fuzz” so closely that it’s hard not to think of it as comedic. And just like in “Baby Driver,” the final scene is so cheerfully tidy (including, literally, a giant bow!) that I wondered if we were meant to think it was a fantasy.
But it’s a good dang movie, stylish and scary and well worth overlooking a few lumps and bumps.
While writing down my long list of pros and cons for moving to The Netherlands, I never thought to include “Seeing movies early” in the pro column. In fact I don’t know when or why it became the norm for blockbusters to debut in other countries before the US. I can’t get HBO, but I was able to see both “Dune” and “No Time to Die” over a month before my American friends get the chance. I thought I’d flaunt my new-movie privilege by writing a tiny review for each.
(And yes, the theaters are open; at the door you display a QR code certifying your vaccination status, and in you go. Sorry for flaunting my functional-government privilege, too.)
No Time to Die
We saw the new James Bond at Theater Tuschinski, which at least one outlet has called the most beautiful cinema in the world. Half a dozen signs around the lobby included the iffy hashtag #NoTimeForSpoilers—for good reason!—and I won’t be squawking here. But I will be warning you about the goddamn runtime: TWO HOURS AND FORTY-THREE MINUTES, easily the longest of the Bond films. (What ever happened to 90-minute movies, huh?) Be sure to use the bathroom.
This review isn’t nearly so long, so I’ll cut to the chase and say I liked it. That was no guarantee; I’m convinced people like the idea of James Bond movies more than the movies themselves. Much like Star Trek, the concept is often more appealing than the execution. I didn’t even see the last one, “Spectre,” which put me at a mild disadvantage knowing what was going on in this one. Fortunately, Bond films are NOT subtle about identifying the bad guys.
And that’s perfectly fine. Nothing wrong with going to a Bond movie expecting a charmingly passé number of hallmarks: theme-song-music-video opening credits, world-spanning postcard locations, scarred villain with a secret lair and a truly bizarre number of machine-gun henchmen. “No Time to Die” hits em all. Its most subversive move is introducing Lashana Lynch as a Black female 00 agent, which is really only “subversive” to MAGA snowflakes.
Daniel Craig has said this is his last outing in the tuxedo. It’s no controversy to call Craig the most self-serious of the James Bonds—that’s certainly thanks to his acting, which would have a certain ruggedness even if he were bottle-feeding a baby raccoon1. But I’d say the larger issue is the steady slide of all blockbuster movies towards a detached stony-faced seriousness—no matter how silly the characters and locales onscreen—which was previously the exclusive domain of Batman. This doesn’t always work; when Bond finally gives us a quippy one-liner, darn near the end of the movie, it feels like a huge relief. But ever since the end of the Cold War (ever since Goldeneye, by the Bond calendar), the premise of a white man fucking and killing his way around the world in the name of “freedom” has felt increasingly icky. A pinch of gravitas seems appropriate, and Daniel Craig can summon a wheelbarrow’s worth.
Dune
Speaking of icky premises, how about a white messiah bringing spiritual leadership to the unwashed masses living in the untamed desert? Cause that’s the unexaggerated proposition of “Dune,” a 1965 sci-fi epic novel that is such a direct influence on “Star Wars” that you feel like George Lucas should have shared royalties. But whereas “Star Wars” is a svelte missile of storytelling, “Dune” and its sequels are famously sprawling and complex—think “Game of Thrones” in space—and, despite two previous adaptations and one infamous near-miss, have frequently been called “unfilmable.”
I was terrified for “Dune” precisely because it looked so good; I thought frequently of the 2005 “Hitchhiker’s Guide” adaptation, which ticked every box you could hope for in adapting the beloved book, yet turned out devastatingly mediocre. Likewise, everything about “Dune” looked just about perfect, from the cast and director on down the line. But, given Hollywood history, it was entirely possible that it just wouldn’t work.
Well, it works. By limiting itself to the first half of the book, “Dune” manages to be a tolerable length—at 2h35m, somehow SHORTER than “No Time to Die”—and less of a confusing rat’s nest of characters and plot lines. (No joke: for the 1984 David Lynch adaptation, they handed out a double-sided cheat sheet to help audiences follow along.) The production design is exquisite, particularly the costuming. You could still be completely mystified by the plot (you might yet be!) but still greatly enjoy the look of the movie. The cinematography demands to be seen in a proper movie theater, though your local COVID situation might demand otherwise.
And yet… I cringed visibly multiple times throughout.
Most or all of the cringing was thanks to the 56-year-old source material. There’s no such thing as a good white-messiah narrative, no matter how many times the white messiah (Timothée Chalamet) pouts about it. Similarly, the idea that the cishet patriarchy will be well in place over 8,000 years in the future is suuuuper depressing, no matter how much the cishet women are shown to be scheming behind the scenes. This adaptation does an okay job at granting some much-needed agency to the oppressed native people2, but like your awkward uncle at Thanksgiving dinner holding forth about “what the Arabs think,” I feel like this isn’t necessarily a white man’s story to tell. Or anyone’s story. The time to tell it might be past.
I really am trying to recommend the movie! What it’s good at, it’s VERY good at. I’ll be seeing it again. But the more I think about the asterisk on my recommendation, the bigger the asterisk gets. I’m very interested to hear what people of color think about the whole thing.
Yesterday we made the sudden, awful decision to let our cat Suitcase cross the rainbow bridge. As we speak, she and Lola are giving each other a single, friendly sniff and then napping on opposite ends of the great Ikea couch in the sky.
She showed up unannounced at my friend Ryan’s apartment complex back around the beginning of 2013. I declined multiple suggestions that I adopt her before agreeing to house her for a weekend while Ryan was out of town. Well, that did the trick.
She went without a proper name for a surprising amount of time. For a good long while her name was Cat, because when she had her 4am meowing concerts, only yelling “CAT!!!” would shut her up. Even when I adopted a second cat—only to discover after agreeing that the cat’s name was also Cat—they quickly became Cat 1 and Cat 2. Finally at the end of 2016, when Billy Kissa visited from Greece, she (the cat) slept on top of Billy’s suitcase the entire week. Billy flatly declared that Suitcase was her name; Billy was right. (Cat 2 was eventually named Sabado, which is a different story.)
She was extremely low-maintenance, even training herself to poop outside instead of needing a litter box. Her flop game was strong. She was approximately 70% fur with a possibly-illegal amount of floof between her toes. She successfully trained me to leave the faucet dripping while I brushed my teeth so she could drink from it. (I explained to her how wasteful this was and spent $50 on a pet fountain, but she was undeterred.)
Letting go of the cats was, no surprise, one of the hardest things about my move to Amsterdam. What made it a LOT easier was Cortney and Jonathan, who became amazing foster parents to Suitcase, and—at the last minute—Sabado as well. They fell madly in love, and when I made the call that it was best for the cats to remain in Texas, they were only too happy to drop the “foster” from their titles. I’m sad that they had to handle the hardest part themselves, and that Kiki and I could only say goodbye over the phone, standing outside Mike’s Theater in Amsterdam after a Coach Rookard show. But seeing her cuddled up against Jonathan in the Zoom window, feeling loved and comforted, was a great comfort to us, too.
Editor’s note: There are a lot of Star Trek references in this entry. I’m not gonna explain them all.
It’s a given that I’m a Star Trek fan1, although with a healthy ironic distance. I’ve long said that Star Trek is better in theory than in practice. For every “Measure of a Man” there’s a “Rascals.” For every even-numbered movie there’s an odd-numbered one. For all its idealistic futurism and exciting technobabble, Star Trek is often extremely… oh, what’s the word… silly.
I say all that not to present myself as “cooler than Star Trek”—that ship sailed on the day I got a fucking improv tattoo—but to acknowledge that the things we love, however unconditionally, have their flaws. And yet, from the debut of “The Next Generation” in 19872 to “Lower Decks” today, my love has persevered. I vividly remember my mom explaining to me what a “clifffhanger” was when Riker told Worf to fire and the chyron said “To be continued.” (I reliably get goosebumps any time I think about that episode, including just now.) Silly or not, Trek is in my blood… and, to come around to my subject matter, Trek has brought me to some truly, deeply weird places in life. Here are the greatest hits.
The USS Legoprise (2002)
My passion for Lego is equal or greater than for Star Trek, and worlds collided in 2002 when I embarked on a slightly quixotic goal to build the Enterprise-D out of Lego.3 Unlike 99% of such projects I undertake, I saw this one through to completion, ordering Lego from Bricklink (then an upstart little website; now a Lego-owned subsidiary) and tinkering on and off for the better part of a year. Then I made a rudimentary webpage with a gallery of images and emailed a link to a couple dozen friends whom I thought would be interested.
“Going viral” wasn’t yet a term, but that’s exactly what happened next.
My little webpage was featured on Slashdot and Fark, the closest things we had to social media in 2002. Tweets and comments didn’t exist, but emails poured in from around the world for months (at least one written in Klingon). I even got a message from Wil Wheaton, who told me the Legoprise was “the coolest version of the Enterprise I’ve ever seen.” By the time my 15 minutes of Internet fame were up my page counter (remember those?) topped 50,000, truly impressive for the time.
As Lego’s popularity has multiplied exponentially in the last 20 years, I’ve had to remind myself that I was far ahead of the curve with this whole project. Nowadays you can find many, many renditions of the Enterprise in Lego which (I say with no hurt feelings) are much better than mine. But, as far as I could tell in the days before Web 2.0, my Legoprise was darn near the first.
Star Trek Las Vegas (2004)
Right around the same time in my life I had discovered improv, which I somehow loved even more than Lego or Star Trek. (I was a straight white man in my 20s. Of course I discovered improv.) At the Hideout Theatre I was fortunate enough to be a part of Start Trekkin’, the Original Series-flavored show that was a sporadic production there for years afterward. My timing was lucky, because in 2004, Andy Crouch somehow snagged an invitation for the Start Trekkin’ cast to perform two shows at the official Star Trek convention in Las Vegas. A whole gang made the trip.
I don’t remember too much about the shows (besides the bad acoustics) but to this day it was the largest crowd for whom I’ve ever performed: perhaps 500 on the first day and maybe 1,000 on the second. I played the villain, Captain Kronkite, in the first show and was a nameless supporting player in the second. We earned enough fans to get us stuck in the convention hall for 20 minutes posing for pictures. One boy, perhaps confused, asked our “captain” Ben to autograph his 8×10” glossy of William Shatner.
On our last day in Vegas I was riding the elevator alone down from my room, and after a couple of floors a woman got on with me. We rode in silence for a few seconds, and then she respectfully nodded at me and said: “Captain Kronkite.” I blushed.
Mortified (2018)
Wrong franchise, but you get the idea.
When I was younger I wrote my diary entries like they were Star Trek-style captain’s logs. That’s not even a mild exaggeration.
It’s the sort of nerdery that nobody should ever find out about, that even I myself might only half-remember as an adult. Fortunately for us all, though, “Mortified” exists. That’s a live show where people read their actual childhood diaries onstage—it’s hilarious and cathartic, and as you’re realizing already, my Trek diary was “Mortified” gold.
I received multiple invitations to perform at “Mortified” shows in Austin. As if that weren’t enough, in 2014 they flew me to New York for a special performance at New York Comic-Con where I shared the stage with Amber Benson, Pete & Pete, and other nerdy luminaries. As if that weren’t enough, the performance was recorded and later became episode 3 of the now-popular “Mortified” podcast. (Listen now!) And as if THAT weren’t enough, two years later, I had a TV crew in my goddamn house to film the reality series “The Mortified Guide”. (Alas no longer on Netflix, but you can rent it on Amazon; I’m in episode 5.)
Decades after I’d put pen to paper, my nerdy love for Trek earned me another quick 15 minutes of fame. I was recognized twice by strangers on the street!
Star Trek Las Vegas II: The Wrath of Kevin (2021)
Just when I thought life might be done throwing me Star Trek curveballs, after 17 years, Vegas (or more literally, my friend Eric) came calling again. Improbably, it was the exact same gig as before—improvised Trek at the big Vegas convention. There were a few key differences though: the troupe was now “USS Improvise” out of Portland; the performing genre was TNG rather than TOS; it was musical improv, my first such show since the pandemic; and, most incredibly, I was going to play Captain Picard.
Don’t sleep on drag queen Lwaxanna Troi back there.
This silly one-hour show opportunity felt like the culmination of all my life’s Star Trek nerdery. I’M PLAYING CAPTAIN FUCKING PICARD AT A STAR TREK CONVENTION. Finally, I understand why I went bald.
Of course the pandemic made this a more muted affair than it’d otherwise be. (In fact, this was my second invitation to perform with USS Improvise; the first was in March 2020, and we all know how that went.) As the Delta variant and anti-vaxxers have tag-teamed their way across America, this show too balanced on a knife’s edge, with literal last-minute changes. But on Saturday night in front of a couple hundred enthusiastic Trekkies, it happened. My Portland castmates did a great job supporting their jet-lagged guest captain as we improvised a tale about the Enterprise crew dealing with a species of sentient furniture. Data decided he wanted to live in an armoire, Riker did a sexy tango with a chair, the chair’s husband got jealous, and so on.
And I can’t prove it, but I like to think there was at least one person in the audience who saw me onstage and thought to themselves: “Hey, that’s the Mortified guy!”
