“If you’re going to spend all of your life working on something, it’s nice
that it be difficult.” – Greta Gerwig
(Excerpted from Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast, Episode 869.)
Category Archives: Uncategorized
IFB’s Top 10 Movies of 2016
10. Elle
Men have been violently sticking it to women for so long that it almost seems like business as usual. But what if, in the interest of assimilating, a fiercely independent woman begins to morph into the leviathan that she has been endeavoring against?
9. Arrival
Time is a flat circle, and effective communication can bridge the gap between lost worlds.
8. La La Land
Emma Stone works hard; sometimes, too hard. This movie offers several winks and nods to classic Hollywood, and it arrives exactly five years after The Artist, which makes sense.
7. Everybody Wants Some!!
Viewers can feel the college throughout this movie in the same way that they could feel the high school throughout Dazed and Confused.
6. Zero Days
Jiminy Cricket! A future-present that even Orwell couldn’t have predicted.
5. Manchester By The Sea
Audiences will spend the first half of this movie wondering why the screenplay seems so fragmented. And then the answer will creep up and bite them like a snake. Manchester is the most well-acted movie of the year, thanks to Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, and Lucas Hedges.
4. Captain Fantastic
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get from one end of this life to the other with your integrity intact? This movie does, and, by all appearances, so does Viggo Mortensen.
3. Silence
Martin Scorsese’s 160-minute epic requires a commitment, but that commitment will be rewarded, and the questions that it inspires will stir inside of you for months.
2. Sing Street
This is the best musical of the year.
1. Nocturnal Animals
Selfish choices have dire consequences. The scars run deep and leave us cold.
Moving On: The Acknowledgments
These are my people. Without them, Moving On would not be the series that I had set out to write. I owe each of them. Group hug:
Sean Baker, Mike Beck, Megan Jordan Bennetta, Joe Boylan, Dave Brown, Jenny Chang, Ray DiClaudio, EJ Dougherty, Sean Dougherty, Therese Eiben, Dave Fox, Kevin Franchville, Mark Havens, Bobbi Jean Race-Heil, Pat Hill, Sam Hill, John Higgins, Mike Higgins, Stacy Gonzalez-Higgins, Jack Huff, Dave Imbrogno, Joe Kennedy, Lori Lane, Sara Lippmann, Jesse Lundy, Marci MacRone, John Manion, Joanna Martin, Alex Kinnear-McClure, Kerry McElrone, Ed McNamara, Tara Murtha, Jason Palombaro, Stacey Loke-Pelle, Bill Salerno, Trish Sammer, Michelle Sergio, Nick Sittineri, Brian Smith, Melanie Audette-Smith, Jim Stewart, Mike Strickler, Vesna Sukalo, Joey Sweeney, Gerry Vessels, Donna White, and Jen Zawacki.
The final two installments of Moving On will be posted on December 14th & 15th.
(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB)
©Copyright Bob Hill
“People in your life can be threatened by your intense concentration; your complete immersion in what you’re doing: ‘My true wife is my movie, not you.’ ”
Brian De Palma, Excerpted from De Palma (2016)
“Everybody likes to think this idea that we’re, like, born done.”
– Ethan Hawke, Excerpted from Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast (2016)
“Raphael was right to destroy all the evidence of who he was as a little kid. Nobody wants to be reminded of what they could have been. If there was a time machine invented and we could all travel back in time to see ourselves as children, we would never recover.”
– Heather O’Neill, Excerpted from The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (2014)
“Break the water. Make a ripple once in a while.”
– Laura Marling, “Divine” (2015)
IFB’s Quotations Page, General Index
Moving On: The King of All Dimes
I had been working on a microphone for seven years now, since the summer of 1992, arriving at a point where I felt extremely confident and in control. On the best of nights I’d set to rambling for six-plus hours, diving up and off and over counters until my ankles hurt and my throat went dry. I would engage hecklers. I would receive – and then tear up – any of the incoming complaint cards. The summer tourists would acknowledge me from motel porches. They’d buy me drinks at corner bars. They’d call me Dime King, or the Dime Guy, or that dude who works the Lucky Strike on Surfside Pier. And yet, despite all this, I had ignored the most refined part of my role.
I was a manager, promoted originally to be an assistant. For the past two summers I had been reporting directly to Bill Morey, Jr., a man with whom I shared an utter dearth of communication. Once, during an August stretch in 1997, I had referred to Bill over the microphone, pointing him out to a counter full of people. Bill had responded by walking toward me. “Do not ever speak my name across that microphone again,” he’d said. Bill Morey, Jr. was reserved, and, as an employer, it had been my experience that he resented my flippant attitude, my drunken lifestyle, my rejection of authority, and the evidentiary sense that I was immune because I was a draw. The animus was palpable, and it began to mutate during the summer of 1998, amidst a period when the year-to-year receipts kept tumbling. Bill had phoned down to the games one afternoon, dissatisfied with the Ring Toss’s performance. His solution: I should take down all of the existing stock in the Ring Toss, replacing it with a series of Tasmanian Devils. “That’s not gonna work,” I asserted, insisting that the Ring Toss was a choice game, and, as such, it needed to provide the winning customers with a choice. My objection was overruled, and six days later, when Bill requested that I reflash the stand, I bristled. “I told you we couldn’t run a choice game without providing the customers with a choice.” To which Bill responded, “Look, Bob, you can either do it, or I can fire you and hire somebody else to do it instead.”
***
One day toward the end of August (1998), I got a call in the offices above Surfside. There was a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer waiting at the Dime Pitch to see me. I hurried down, assuming that there must have been another accident along the pier. As it turned out, that reporter, Jacqueline Urgo, was working on a piece about the boardwalk’s games. “I was told you were the most talented microphone operator along these planks,” Ms. Urgo offered. The two of us spoke, and I welcomed Jacqueline to use any or all of my quotes. When the accompanying article was published, featuring a full-color spread on page one of the South Jersey section of that Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer, I felt validated. There was no official word from Bill Morey, Jr., however, and my sense became that I had taken yet another leap of post. Urgo’s piece was complimentary, referring to me as both a “guru” and “the best.” But it also traded in the level of superlative that burns people, particularly those who are zeroing in upon what isn’t being said.
The next two weeks, they passed by slowly, and midway through September I received word that Bill had mentioned wanting to go in a “different direction” with the games. My girlfriend, Talia, was taking classes back at West Chester, and I would call her from the office, complaining that if I did get fired, I’d forfeit any chance of collecting unemployment. I missed Talia, I was in love with her, and when she confirmed that she would be returning to attend the Irish Fall Festival the final weekend of September, I decided that I would be attending the Irish Fall Festival, as well. The Festival was a three-day event – a monument to excess that all-but dominated Lower Anglesea. I was afraid of Talia cheating on me, which was why I had decided to take that weekend off.
Sunday, September 27th – the last day of the season. I wandered up to Surfside, hoping to collect my annual bonus. As I rounded the Dime Pitch, I was directed to Guest Services, where an emissary stood in wait. My belongings had been collected and they were handed over in a trash bag. There would be no end-of-season bonus, I was told. I remained there, dejected, ostensibly stunned. I completed a perp walk, off the pier, and then down the ramp at 26th Street, where I kicked a wall and clenched my fists. I took a breath, then kept on moving. Crass thoughts came cycling fast now, arguments both for and against what had just taken place. I was out of a job … a job that had become my identity; that had balanced out my shame; that had allowed for me to live in a tourist town, to blow off college, to hibernate through winters. I was out of a job that had allowed for me to meet not one, but two of my long-term girlfriends; that had connected me to an ever-growing network of people. I was out of a job that had provided me with access; that had transformed me into a spectacle. I was out of a job that I had coveted ever since arriving on Five-Mile Island way back in 1992. I was out of a job now, and my lease was expiring. I started packing my things. I saw no reason to return.
Day 1,500
(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB)
©Copyright Bob Hill
Member, American Authors Guild
“Few who build a base camp have no ambitions to reach the summit.”
– Norman Mailer, Excerpted from Oswald’s Tale, 1995
Moving On: Like a Bridle Over Shipwrecked Waters
If you were from or of the Wildwood scene during the early 1990s, chances were you knew of an urban legend involving a whistling man who haunted midnight sands beneath the boardwalk. There were variations on this theme with each of them agreeing on this much: The Whistling Man was white, he preyed on girls who were distraught, he would whistle as he shadowed victims underneath the boardwalk, eventually luring them below, where he would rape and then strangle them before disappearing into the dark. The Whistling Man had been born out of a germ, the kernel of something that had persisted without check. Women had been strangled underneath the Wildwood boardwalk. There was Carol Hill in 1970, Patricia Thompson in 1982, and Bonnie Marks in 1986 – each of them sexually assaulted, without any of their cases being irrevocably removed. That is until July of 1998, at which point DNA evidence (unavailable during the spring of 1986) allowed investigators to charge Kenneth Mann with the rape and murder of Bonnie Marks. Mann was a convict, serving 45 years for the strangulation of a prepubescent girl in Ocean City. Mann’s rap sheet was long, and it included – among other things – an arrest for making lurid phone calls to teenage girls along the shore.
News of Mann’s indictment arrived on the heels of an unsettling assault in North Wildwood. According to The New York Times, seven Staten Island teens had been detained in connection with the gang rape of a 15-year-old at the Grey Manor Motel (located at 21st and Surf). This story raised eyebrows, particularly because the mass attack had taken place in the exact same room where a nearly-identical assault had taken place one season prior. During the initial assault, a 19-year-old from West Deptford had been drugged, and then handcuffed, before being violated by at least two of her attackers. During both occurrences, the perps had taken photos of their victims in the nude.
Early on during 1998, the Grey Manor’s owners had been threatened with a lawsuit alleging negligence (by way of premises liability). The plaintiff in that action, Brian Blair, had gotten cold-cocked outside of the Grey Manor during prom weekend of 1997. Blair’s assailant was a 17-year-old whose BAC had risen to an approximated .45 in the hours leading up to the attack. The incident, a series of police reports asserted, was less an aberration than the norm. Compounded by a second multi-party sexual assault, rampant word began to spread that the Grey Manor might not only need to settle, but shutter its doors.
The fear was that a cancer was incrementally spreading throughout town. Wildwood Crest remained dry, essentially removed. North Wildwood, on the other hand, was situated between the bars of Lower Anglesea and The Pacific Street Mall. That mall was open to traffic now. Its clubs had taken to closing at 3 AM. And yet its walkway was still a major area for concern. One night in June I came across Mike Strickler, Surfside’s Director of Operations. Mike was laid out on the asphalt, his jaw completely broken. Mike had gotten jumped along the north end of the mall on his way home from The Fairview. An ambulance was approaching to attend to him as I arrived.
The two cities – North Wildwood and Wildwood – kept twisting the truth into equivocations. One could see it in the way a North Wildwood police captain felt compelled to tell a New York Times reporter, “This type of attack is a rare occurrence,” amidst describing a repeat sexual assault at the Grey Manor Motel. One could sense it in the way a local prosecutor very quietly ignored the open murder case of Patricia Thompson, citing an unofficial confession made by an anonymous suspect who had been deceased since 1991. Both municipalities had become entrapped by multi-generational legacies. Obfuscation became the name of the game, the bedrock of a campaign designed to recast Five-Mile Island as a 1950s paradise. The hands kept moving backwards, fueling notions that the only true means of reform might be upheaval; something like the Hurricane of 1938 or the breakneck Storm of 1962; something raw and unavoidable that would jettison the bile, laying waste to old-school promises, replacing cronyism with honor, and rededicating a people via one cause.
Day 1,486
(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB)
©Copyright Bob Hill
Member, American Authors Guild