When you live in Europe, you often wake up to the news. I’ll never forget Kiki startling me awake one morning with “Will Smith slapped Chris Rock!” Of course, sometimes the news is bad—occasionally very bad. So it was to wake up to texts from Brad and Lampe telling me Cortney DeAngelo had suddenly, shockingly passed away in her sleep.
When I told my friend Rahel that an Austin improv friend had died, she asked “Were you two close?” I started to type three different responses:
Today’s the five-year anniversary of one of my most secretly amazing nights, and I figure that’s a good enough excuse to end the secret. I think I’ve told this story to fewer than twenty people, which for me is a VERY low number.
So I’d come into possession of a “gift certificate” offering two free nights in a decent Vegas hotel in exchange for sitting through a timeshare sales pitch. Timeshares are a scam, but the free hotel stay felt like scamming the scammers. I booked it in February 2019 and invited my friend Yichao to make the drive from LA and spend a guys’ weekend together.
Yichao picked me up at the airport and we made the most of Vegas for 48 hours (the correct duration for any Vegas trip; no more, no less). We wandered the Strip, went to Drag Brunch, got confused by slot machines, and ate an alarming number of calories. (Did you know there’s a $100 all-you-can-eat buffet? Now you do.) Oh yes, and I dutifully sat through the two-hour timeshare sales pitch and repeatedly told the guy that I was not his target market before finally being released.
This is actually from a different Vegas trip, but I’ll use any excuse to share the greatest selfie ever taken.
When I started telling local buddies that I was bringing my favorite improv format back to Amsterdam, I heard from more than one friend—two, actually—that they felt anxious about it. That seemed like a good reason to jot down my thoughts about Maestro, and why it’s nothing to fear.
If you have no idea what Maestro even is, here’s a summary…
Maestro is a competitive improv format where 12 improvisers perform short-form improv scenes in small groups. The audience gives each scene a score, 1 through 5; at intermission, the lowest-scoring players are knocked out; and at the end of the night, the last person standing is crowned Maestro and awarded the coveted Canadian Five-Dollar Bill.1
To admit my obvious bias, I’ve been playing Maestro for a long, long time. It’s been a weekly show at the Hideout Theatre in Austin since 1999, which I’d bet money2 is the longest such streak in the world. That means it’s been a regular part of my life since I began taking improv classes in 2001. I grew up on this stuff.
Given that history, I wasn’t surprised to hear about the anxiety! There are a few reasons people shy away from this kind of show:
Though it all feels like one big project, visiting and photographing 300 courthouses could hardly be more different than making a coffee-table book about them. The former is mostly a test of endurance and road trip route-planning. The latter is a hugely complicated creative and logistical endeavor. Sure it’s possible to order a simple photo book from Shutterstock, but this idea felt like it needed to be done properly or not at all.
After settling with Kiki in Amsterdam at the end of 2020, I waffled on whether—more importantly, how—I should begin. One of my first actions was to mock up the cover, which started as an iPad sketch and changed surprisingly little over time.
On a 2014 drive from Austin to Denver for an improv festival, David Lampe and I entertained ourselves with a little app I had that listed every historic marker in the cities we drove through. I’d skim through the list as we approached each little town, and if something really piqued our interest, we made a quick stop.
The frequent highlight of these (often the only highlight) were the courthouses, one per county, which gave our long road trip a nice tempo. This bit of entertainment caused us to zig-zag our route and spot as many courthouses as possible, and—starting with Hartley County Courthouse (Channing TX, built 1906)—photograph them.
Hartley County Courthouse, Channing TX
“Wouldn’t it be fun,” our caffeinated conversation inevitably went, “if someone visited every county courthouse in Texas?” Fun might not be the word some would use. Texas has 254 county courthouses3 spread over an area bigger than France, most of it empty space punctuated by cattle herds and Dollar General stores. But, over the following six and a half years, that’s exactly what I did.
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.4 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.
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.5 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 money6 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.7 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 water8 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.9 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 Star10—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.
