Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Category: Personal Anecdote

Trick-or-Treating Is Canceled? Why Disrupted Halloween Traditions Are Nothing to Fear

October 26, 2020 / / 32 Comments

Owed to my Romantic proclivities, the most spiritually challenging aspect to living in Los Angeles is its seasonal monotony.  I am never so acutely aware of it than at this time of year, when my biorhythms, still calibrated for the East Coast after nearly two decades, anticipate the cooling of the air and coloring of the foliage.  With only gentle reminders, at best, from Mother Nature of the Earth’s shifting axial tilt, a greater metric burden is placed on holidays:  Celebrating St. Patrick’s Day is how I make the mental transition to spring; Fourth of July reminds me summertime has commenced in earnest; Thanksgiving heralds the coming Christmas season, when those who are dear to me will be near to me once more.

In that way, holidays do more than merely mark the passage of time—another birthday, another Mother’s Day, another New Year’s Eve—but in fact give the year its very structure.  With the exception of August, which itself is traditionally a time for family vacations, every month has at least one official holiday that helps define it.  The particular aesthetics of one over the other, from its foods to its music to its very color palette, conjures a fully immersive sensory experience all its own.  Sure, we may prefer some holidays over others, or celebrate some more than others, but where would we be without them?

I guess we’d be in 2020.  I don’t know about you, but the only friends I got drunk with on St. Paddy’s were Sean Penn and Gary Oldman; the only baseball games I got out to this past spring featured Cleveland Indians starting pitcher Charlie Sheen; the only beach I visited this summer was out on Amity Island.  My cousin’s son turned twelve this past May, and I couldn’t help lament he wouldn’t be spending what will likely be his last summer of innocence on the streets with his friends as I did; I sent him a copy of Stephen King’s The Body so he could at least have a vicarious boyhood adventure.  We’ve all made due however we must this year, “celebrating” seasonal occasions in our living rooms or backyards, clinging to the semblance of normality those traditions provide in these traumatically abnormal times.

But when the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health prohibited trick-or-treating last month, that was a bridge too far.  Parents—not kids, mind you—went apeshit, and the very next day L.A. softened its position substantially, merely recommending against the time-honored practice, so cease-and-desist with the hate-tweets, please!  Banning trick-or-treating was perceived as canceling Halloween—an unacceptable sacrifice in a year full of previously unthinkable compromises.

The Peanuts gang goes trick-or-treating in “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” (1966)

It’s impossible to imagine my own parents, who always made the holidays special, reacting so histrionically.  The first decade of my late father’s life, after all, coincided with the Great Depression; I don’t think he would’ve felt particularly sorry for us had trick-or-treating been suspended on account of a major public-health crisis.  And not because he was unkind or unsympathetic, but rather because he wouldn’t have viewed it as an impediment to celebration.

Continue reading

Age of Innocence: On the Bygone Pleasure of Being City Kids

February 28, 2019 / / 24 Comments

Contrary to common misconception, city kids do indeed have backyards.  We even had a name for ours:  New York.

My little grade-school gang and I enjoyed a free-range childhood we exploited with an adventurous spirit influenced in equal measure by the intrepid curiosity of Indiana Jones and the gleeful tricksterism of Axel Foley.  We discovered secret subbasements hidden in the cobwebbed bowels of the Bronx’s mammoth apartment complexes.  We explored the abandoned housing/condominium developments commissioned during the 1980s building boom then subsequently left to rot and ruin after the ’87 Wall Street crash.  We scaled the vertiginous understructure of the Henry Hudson Bridge.  We even dressed up as Boy Scouts and sold candy in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria.  (Karmically, we never got to spend our ill-gotten gains.  Of our quartet, we selected the guy whose mother was least likely to find the cash—we made over $70 in profit, an astronomical sum for four kids in 1990 who couldn’t afford a slice of pizza between them—and stashed it at his place.  She found it anyway, though, and blew it on booze.)

There’s so much I could say about those days, but I could in no way express my sentiments more truthfully or concisely than Stephen King’s plainspoken summation from The Body:  “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve.  Jesus, did you?”

It didn’t take age and perspective to recognize how special our fellowship was—I knew that and cherished it even then—but I can’t say I fully appreciated just how lucky we were to have the Biggest City in the World as our personal playground until I’d lived elsewhere.  Take my home of the past seventeen years:  L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, population 1.77 million.  Every square block of it (that isn’t a strip mall) looks exactly like this:

No hidden facets.  No winding streets or towering edifices, no sidewalk cellar doors or obscured alleyways promising adventure to those willing to probe parts unseen.  Hell, by this vantage, the Valley doesn’t look much different from a Monopoly board, with all its identical houses tidily arranged side by side on rectangular lots.  Maybe it’s shamefully condescending of me, but I feel sorry for kids who have to grow up here.  What about the above inspires or invites exploration the way New York does?

Or should I perhaps say did?  It’s possible, upon recent observation, that culture is irreversibly changing.

Continue reading

“Almost” Doesn’t Count: On Trying and Losing (Repeat as Needed)

November 28, 2018 / / 26 Comments

In the event you don’t keep track of these things, the Los Angeles Dodgers lost the World Series last month, four games to one, to the Boston Red Sox.  It was both the Dodgers’ second consecutive World Series appearance and defeat.  From the point of view of many a long-suffering fan here in L.A., collapsing yet again mere inches from the finish line amounts to nothing more than another season-long strikeout, a yearlong exercise in futility, a squandered investment of time and emotional support.  “This is where baseball breaks your heart,” someone said to me in the waning days of the season.  To be sure, I share the sentiment:  It’s hard as hell to get so frustratingly close to the Golden Ring only to go home empty-handed.  A miss is as good as a mile, after all.  Close only matters in horseshoes and hand grenades.  “Almost” doesn’t count.

As recently as a few years ago, I wouldn’t have known, much less cared, who won or lost this Series—or even who played in it.  I came to baseball relatively late in life—around forty—as I recounted in “Spring Fever,” the gist of which was this:  For whatever reason, neither I nor any of my boyhood pals were born with the “sports gene.”  We were all pop-culture fanatics, more likely to be found at the local comic shop than Little League field.  When we saw the Bronx Bombers play the Indians at Yankee Stadium in 1986, none of us knew what the hell to make of that abstract experience; when we watched them face-off again in David S. Ward’s Major League in 1989, in the context of a Cinderella narrative, suddenly the rivalry had meaning.  We loved movies and comics; sports we simply had no use for.

A few years later, I found myself formally studying comics (under legendary Batman artist and DC Comics editor Carmine Infantino) and cinema (in college) in preparation for making a career in those fields.  What they don’t tell you in school, though, is that when you turn your passions into your profession, you often do so at the expense of the joy you once took in those pastimes.  Worse still, so many of the things that directly inspired me to be a screenwriter, from Star Wars to superheroes, I eventually grew to disdain.  And what Dodgers baseball restored in me, outside my conscious awareness as it was happening, was the innocent pleasure of being a fan of something again; it’s been a welcome, even analeptic, reprieve from the tyranny of passion.

Game 2 of the 2018 World Series

The Dodgers’ reentry into the World Series this fall, and the collective hope it kindled of their first world-championship win in precisely three decades, coincided with a sobering anniversary of my own:  It’s been exactly twenty years—October of 1998—since I signed with my first literary manager off a screenplay I’d written called BONE ORCHARD.  It occurs to me only now, as I type this, that the project was something of a creative precursor to Escape from Rikers Island, trafficking in many of the same themes and concepts:  an urban island left to rot and ruin, overrun with supernatural savages (demons, not zombies), with a neo–hardboiled detective at the center of the action.  (I’d studied Raymond Chandler in college and have since been heavily influenced by his fiction.)

Anyway, there I was, twenty-two years old and only a few months out of school, and everything was unfolding right on schedule.  The script would be taken to the spec marketplace and I would soon join the ranks of working screenwriters.  You study for a career in the arts, and you get one—simple as that.

Christ, if only.  BONE ORCHARD didn’t sell.  And while I was halfway through writing my follow-up, the management company repping me shuttered.  Young and naïve though I was, I nonetheless intuited I wasn’t likely to move the needle on my screenwriting career in New York—an ambition I was resolute about fulfilling—so I left the comforts of home behind for Los Angeles.

When you first arrive in Hollywood, good luck getting anyone with even a modicum of clout to give you the time of day.  Not gonna happen.  What you do—and what I did—is seek out aspiring filmmakers at the same level and pool resources.  In addition to screenwriting, I’d had experience as a film and video editor, so I started cutting USC thesis shorts pro bono.  Within a year or two, I’d established a circle of friends and colleagues, all in our twenties, who were collaborating on “portfolio projects.”  I was editing by day and writing by night, hoping to network my way to new representation—an objective that would, to my slowly percolating astonishment, take another half-dozen years to realize.

Continue reading

Counter Culture: Over the past Quarter Century, a Small Specialty Shop Became a Bronx Institution

May 31, 2018 / / 24 Comments

Before the geek underground went mainstream—before the Internet exposed its numbers as legion; before corporations fully understood that superheroes were woefully underexploited billion-dollar assets—there was no better place to both talk and learn about pop culture than the neighborhood comic shop.

When it opened in 1991, Magnum Comics & Cards wasn’t the first direct-market specialty store in the northwest sector of the Bronx where I grew up, but it was inarguably the liveliest, the one with the most personality.  That was owed, in no small part, to its colorful proprietor, Neil Shatzoff.

A photo of the shop I snapped on December 30, 2010

Holding court from behind the register, Neil would speak with juvenile exuberance and encyclopedic authority on pop esoterica:  why Brian Dennehy would’ve made for a better Commissioner Gordon than Pat Hingle (I agree, but, hey—at least we eventually got Gary Oldman); why Joel Schumacher’s track record for dark-skewing commercial cinema (The Lost Boys, Falling Down) made him a promising candidate to take over the Batman franchise from Tim Burton (well, it seemed like a good fit on paper…); why Kevin Smith’s unproduced Superman Lives script was budgetarily impractical and narratively quixotic (turns out, it was twenty years ahead of its time).  His disquisitions were all the more entertaining for his impish, whip-fast wit; reflecting on the Academy’s arbitrary predilection to honor films over movies, he once noted:  “Gandhi won an Oscar for Best Costume Design, and all they did was throw a couple of towels over him.”

 

COMIC ESCAPADES

All throughout high school, I’d pop by the shop every Wednesday to get my weekly fix of superhero soap opera—the now-classic Death of Superman and Batman:  Knightfall storylines were unfolding at the time—and, more to the point, to listen to Neil wax pop-cultural.  A decade my senior, he supplemented my cinematic education—the way an older sibling’s musical tastes might rub off on you—by introducing me to genre essentials that were just a little before my time:  The Thing and An American Werewolf in London and Thief (the feature-film debut of Michael Mann and spiritual precursor to Heat) and the Dirty Harry series.  (Though I can’t say for certain, it’s possible the first Dirty Harry sequel, Magnum Force, influenced the name of the shop itself).

It was by way of the file cabinet–mounted TV behind the counter that I first became aware of things like aspect ratios and audio commentaries and director’s cuts; Neil was an early adopter of LaserDisc, and would dub them onto VHS and play them in the store.  Imagine my surprise to learn there was a “secret” longer version of Aliens (by seventeen minutes!), or a definitive two-hour documentary on the making of Jaws.  In the days before such things were standard-issue features on DVDs, there was only one guy I knew who had access to all that amazing arcana, and he delighted in sharing his zeal for it with his customers.

Continue reading

State of Grace: How a Movie No One Saw Heralded the Last Days of Old New York, Old Hollywood—and Even My Own Innocence

March 28, 2018 / / 40 Comments

Last month, we talked about the subject of creative inspiration:  that an artist’s many influences affect his worldview and sensibilities in ways totally unique to him, and that they, along with his particular life experiences, constitute his voice.  In time, those influences become so embedded in his subconscious that he is no longer necessarily aware of the sway they hold over the art he produces, and as his confidence in his craft intensifies, his intellectual capacity to identify them in his work diminishes in kind.

As it happens, a week or two after posting the treatise, I received an object lesson in its very proposition.  The experience was an acutely emotional one for me, though not at all unpleasant or unwelcome, and a reminder of what storytelling at its best can do:  A story can comment on its times while reflecting timeless truths.  It can depict a very specific world that is nonetheless universally relatable.  It has the power to preserve a moment or an episode in all its emotional complexity, serving as a time capsule that can continue to yield new insight with age.  A good story changes the course of history, in some unquantifiable measure, influencing subsequent real-world events and artistic works in ways that, I think, go mostly unconsidered.

Here’s how one movie no one’s ever heard of exerted appreciably more impact on my personal and creative evolution—and even on my forthcoming novel—than I’d heretofore considered, and how it had something profoundly meaningful to say to me, both then and now.

Two years ago, I published a post with recommendations for Irish-themed movies to help celebrate St. Patrick’s Day; among them, a long-forgotten crime drama from 1990 about the Irish Mob in Hell’s Kitchen called State of Grace, which had the cosmic misfortune of opening the very same week as Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas.  The latter, as I’m sure you know, was a box-office hit that deservedly claimed an immortal place in the cultural consciousness, while the former—starring no less than heavyweights Sean Penn, Ed Harris, Gary Oldman, Robin Wright, John Turturro, John C. Reilly, and Burgess Meredith—quietly disappeared from theaters within two weeks of release and promptly faded into obscurity.  No one really saw it, and the bankruptcy of its studio, Orion Pictures, soon thereafter assured that it mostly remained unseen in the years to follow.

Sean Penn (as Terry Noonan) and Gary Oldman (as Jackie Flannery) in Phil Joanou’s “State of Grace”

My cousin’s husband owned a video store out in Jersey at that time, and he was always bringing by screener copies—sometimes even bootlegs—of current films, which was how I first experienced both State of Grace and GoodFellas when I was fourteen.  For a kid that had up till that point subsisted on a cinematic diet of almost exclusively Spielbergian fantasy, the comedies of John Hughes and Eddie Murphy, and the action extravaganzas of Stallone and Schwarzenegger, those two movies—‘cause I hadn’t yet seen The Godfather—were nothing short of revelatory.

State of Grace was a particular favorite, and I even managed to score a copy of the promotional one-sheet from my local video shop in the Bronx when they were done with it, which hung in my bedroom throughout high school.  The movie was my introduction to newly minted Oscar-winner Gary Oldman, and he delivers a searing, unsettling, heartbreaking performance that made me a fan for life.  But by the mid-nineties, my secondhand VHS of Grace had gotten misplaced, and given the scarcity of the film’s availability, I haven’t had occasion—despite trying in 2016 for that best–of–St. Patty’s post—to see it since.

Until this month, when I found a wonderful Blu-ray reissue, limited to 3,000 units, and, like the story’s troubled protagonist, I ventured back into Hell’s Kitchen to reunite with some very old faces…

Continue reading

Home for Christmas: (Not) a Hallmark Presentation

December 15, 2017 / / 25 Comments

I’ve spent a somewhat embarrassingly disproportionate share of my free time this holiday season watching those endless made-for-Hallmark Christmas movies.  Good God—the scripts come off like bad first drafts banged out over a weekend, though somebody is probably making a handsome living writing them.  (Any chance you’re hiring, Hallmark?)  There are a few variations on the formula, but most play out something like this:

A work-obsessed city gal—typically a “marketing exec,” though clearly zero research has been conducted as to what precisely that entails—finds herself stranded in provincial New England, British Columbia, at the heart of the holiday season (kindly disregard the lush summer foliage in the background of every wide shot), where an earnest Bill-Pullman-in-While You Were Sleeping clone, far too manly and pragmatic to have ever participated in something as frivolous as an acting class, teaches our heroine, often with the aide of a precocious (and fortuitously motherless) child, the true meaning of Christmas—read:  small-town livin’ in the real America.  Twirling gape-mouthed in an obscenely production-designed town square—brought to you by Balsam Hill!—blanketed in a freshly fallen silent shroud of SnowCel, our newly enlightened protagonist declares, “This is what Christmas is supposed to look like!”

And that got me thinking:  What should Christmas look like?  I mean, if each of us could put the holiday season on a postcard to serve as the perfect representation of what it evokes in our hearts, what would yours depict?

Perhaps this?

Continue reading

Different Stages

October 31, 2017 / / 25 Comments

In the time we’ve been together, my wife and I have taken some of our greatest pleasures from live concerts:  all kinds of acts at all manner of venues—from Aerosmith at MSG, to Chris Cornell at the Beacon, to the Black Crowes at Radio City, to Cher at Jones Beach, to Prince at the Staples Center, to Ray LaMontagne at the Greek, to Pink at the Wiltern, to Billy Joel at Dodger Stadium.

We share a love for U2, and have pretty much seen the band on every tour since we started dating.  So when they came around this past summer to play the Rose Bowl for their thirtieth-anniversary Joshua Tree show, we didn’t so much as hesitate the moment tickets went on sale.

The Joshua Tree Tour 2017

The Rose Bowl, if you don’t know, is an enormous pain in the ass to get to.  (We’ve seen U2 there before, on the U2360° show they recorded for home-video release.)  It’s an outdoor football stadium in Pasadena, tucked away in a morass of winding residential roads where the streets have no name, and like damn near everything else in Los Angeles (Downtown, for instance), you can’t really fathom why this particular location was selected over, say, any other.  And once you’re down there, you’re there to stay for the duration, as the ways in and out are limited whether you’ve come by car, bus, or shoe leather.

This past May 20, the day of the concert, we arrived early, having taken an Uber to the stadium.  It was hot as blazes as we waited on three long lines:  first for T-shirts, which were all several sizes smaller than advertised, then for printed tickets at will call (the concert was “credit-card entry,” but the card I’d used to purchase our admittance months earlier had since been replaced due to fraudulent activity), then finally to wend our way into the sprawling venue itself.

By the time we made it inside, we were fatigued from the adventure, sticky with sweat.  Guzzling our Guinness Blondes—what else?—it was pretty clear we both wished we’d stayed home, and the question on our minds at that moment practically voiced itself:  “Have we finally gotten too old for this shit?”

Continue reading

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Follow me on Twitter

© 2024 Sean P Carlin

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑