 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 The Not-So-Easy Chair
After taking a star turn in a documentary, quad rugby player Mark Zupan decided it was time for a tell-all book. By Jenna Schnuer
Phone interviews rarely jack up my nerves. But as my interview with first-time author Mark Zupan — the heavily tattooed, slightly devilish-looking (his beard is straight out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting) quad rugby player — approached, I got a bit of a funny feeling. After all, as was made quite clear in Murderball, the 2005 documentary about Zupan’s sport of choice, the guy slams his custom-made wheelchair into other people’s chairs for fun.
Turns out the devil has a softer side. I interrupted Zupan’s day job (he’s a civil engineer) for a conversation about his new book, Gimp (HarperCollins, $25), which he wrote with Premiere’s Tim Swanson. Though Murderball introduced Zupan and quad rugby to the world — he took up the sport after a drunken night ended up with his getting tossed from the flatbed of a friend’s truck — there’s a lot more to him than the movie offers up.
Can you describe quad rugby? It’s pretty much a full-contact wheelchair smashup derby. The chairs look like something out of a Mad Max film. It’s played indoors on a basketball court, and it’s full-contact chair-on-chair, so if you want to hit somebody as hard as you possibly can, you hit ’em. It’s not for the faint of heart.
You’re a slightly different person in the book and on the phone than I was expecting you to be. Yeah, the book is raw. I’m a different person on the court than off the court. I’m kind of seen in the movie as this tough guy. In actuality, maybe I’m a [jerk], but I have a brain. It’s really kind of fun to break people’s perceptions.
Why did you write the book? It’s an open door to my life. It’s an open door to a lot of people’s lives, to show what people go through. You know, you’re 18, you break your neck, and, we discussed it in the movie, it’s the worst thing. But then you realize that life isn’t over. It’s now just beginning, and to see the transformation from able-bodied to disabled to one of the best athletes in the country in a chair, that’s cool — because I’ve always been an athlete, and I’ve always been driven. It’s cool to actually show people that just because you’re in an accident or something in life goes wrong, it doesn’t mean you have to pack up and say “I’m done.”
What did writing the book do for you? I guess it makes me realize that during certain periods of time in life, people do stuff that goes above and beyond. It makes you see what, and how much, friends mean. You realize it, but you don’t really realize it — to see how people react in situations that they don’t necessarily have to be in. I’ve learned a lot more about myself. I guess you find out what you really mean to your parents. And I’ve learned that … I’ve made mistakes, but hopefully people don’t look at that as bad; it’s just a learning process. It’s a hard one. I haven’t really sat down and thought about it. It’s just weird. It’s weird to see your life and your stories in print.
In the book, you told the story of punching your little brother in, well, a sensitive area when you thought he was pitying you after the accident. Are you treating him better these days? That whole situation, it just pretty much cemented what our relationship is and was. Now, it’s awesome. We have such a great relationship. He’s almost like a protector to an extent, but he still knows I’m his big brother and that I’ll do anything for him. It was difficult for him. I think he looked up to me, and to see that happen, it kind of [messed] him up a bit. As time went on and he saw I was going to be normal and that sports were still important, we sat down and talked. That’s kind of one of the cool things about getting hurt.
Why are you so good at the sport? I’ve always been an athlete. And I’m pretty good with angles, coming from soccer. I’m pretty driven as well. I can direct and say, “This is what we need to do.” You just see stuff. It’s kind of weird. When you’re really on your game, the game slows down. You can see. I’m sure it’s something like what Michael Jordan saw. He’s just that good that everything, I bet you, was really slow. For me, every so often, it’ll just get really slow. You just see where you need to go and how the sport should be played.
What’s your favorite part of the game? Getting turnovers. Making people play your game. When you’re on defense, you want to force the offensive player where you want them. When you can do that, just get a team turnover or what have you, it changes the pace of the game; it changes the game, period. Turnovers are the key to this game, period. A good hit doesn’t hurt either. Somebody is coming down the court, and you light them up; it’s pretty rewarding.
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce,
Culture, and Coolness
By Steven Levy
(Simon & Schuster, $25)
Let
me say it up front: I do not own an iPod. I do not even own a cell
phone. (My adult children and most of my friends own both, so I am not
totally in the dark.) Yet I found Steven Levy’s reporting about the
invention, sales, and impact of the iPod enthralling. He makes a big
deal about an aspect of the iPod that is absent from much of the
coverage — its ability to shuffle the songs loaded into it so that they
play in sometimes surprising sequences. Levy became so enamored of the
shuffling concept that he persuaded his editors at Simon & Schuster
to publish the book with the chapters shuffled. The order of the
chapters in the book I just finished reading might be different than
the order of the chapters in your copy of The Perfect Thing.
After an opening chapter entitled “Perfect,” which will be placed first
in every printed copy, Levy covers, in eight shuffled chapters, the
origin of the iPod, the backgrounds of Apple and its guiding executive
Steve Jobs, how the iPod came to be viewed as a sign of coolness, and
what it means for social interaction that each iPod is such a personal
(and, as such, an isolating) device. Still, hasn’t there been enough
written about Apple’s omnipresent gadget already? Maybe, but that
doesn’t stop The Perfect Thing from being a fascinating book.
Given the author’s track record, that is no surprise. If Levy is not
the best journalist writing about technology, he must be a close
second. A staff writer at Newsweek, Levy has already informed
countless readers about the impact of computer technology on society
with previous books about hackers, manufacturers, and privacy
conundrums. He scores again with The Perfect Thing. I might
never listen to music through white earbuds, but I will almost
certainly read Levy’s book again to absorb his brilliance as a societal
commentator more thoroughly. — Steve Weinberg
 The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk
By Steven Lee Beeber
(Chicago Review Press, $25)
Punk
is Jewish. So begins Steven Lee Beeber’s insightful ethnocentric study
of how punk rock, often wrongly viewed as a British-Protestant
creation, was actually the work of Jews in America. By the mid-’70s,
the first wave of punk bands had staked their territory at CBGB’s, a
run-down dive on New York City’s Lower East Side. As Beeber writes in
his intro: “In that no-man’s land between the old Yiddish theater
district and the ground zero of the Jewish-American experience, they
invented the punk sound that continues to be heard to this day.” This
book shows how that sound cannot be separated from its makers’
Jewishness. In a meticulously researched effort, he goes on to profile
the key figures in the music’s development: from cultural antecedents
like comedian Lenny Bruce (born Leonard Alfred Schneider) to the
decadent poetry of the Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed (originally
Rabinowitz) to the formation of punk’s Jewish Beatles, the Ramones. In
addition to spotlighting the roles of artists like Television’s Richard
Hell, Blondie’s Chris Stein, and the Patti Smith Group’s Lenny Kaye,
Beeber also shows how Jews working behind the scenes — people like
manager Danny Fields, club owner Hilly Kristal, and record mogul
Seymour Stein — all played a part in creating and defining punk’s
zeitgeist. Beeber writes with both a charming wit and a powerful
conviction in his theories, backing his conclusions with a deep
understanding of historical context — for example, he shows how the
flowering of the music in late-twentieth-century NYC actually had its
roots as far back as the 1600s and the first wave of judío
immigrants landing at what was then New Amsterdam. Beeber also traces
how the effects of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, the vaudevillian
tradition, and the cross-cultural mingling of Italians and Jews all
came to have a profound impact in shaping punk. As both a musical and
historical study, Heebie-Jeebies is a remarkably rich and rewarding read. — Bob Bozorgmehr
 We’ve Got It Made in America: A Common Man’s Salute to an
Uncommon Country
By John Ratzenberger and Joel Engel
(Center Street, $24)
Despite
the declaration in the book’s subtitle, Ratzenberger is not exactly a
common man. He has appeared in Hollywood movies (he’s the only actor
who’s voiced a character in every Pixar film), played postman Cliff
Clavin on Cheers, and now is host of the Travel Channel’s John Ratzenberger’s Made in America. And yet his voice throughout We’ve Got It Made in America
is that of a blue-collar guy reared in Bridgeport, Connecticut, who
embodies the virtues that have made the United States first among
nations. The book is a by-product of Ratzenberger’s current television
program, which chronicles American factories that manufacture American
products — some of them economic staples, some of them offbeat. His
core philosophy sounds simplistic, even simpleminded: “Wake up in the
morning, put your hand to something useful, and take care of yourself
and your family,” Ratzenberger says. “It’s simple, it’s direct, and it
works. And for more than a century, that’s how most people in this
country lived.” Simple? Yes. Simpleminded? No. That’s why the text is
quite likely to carry a strange fascination for readers, no matter what
their personal politics happen to be. Just when Ratzenberger’s rants
seem predictable, he changes direction to say something unexpected and
even downright contradictory to the superpatriot persona he adopts most
of the time. He is especially critical of major American corporations
abandoning loyal employees by moving overseas solely for bottom-line
considerations. Ratzenberger’s unpredictability coupled with a modicum
of erudition drives readers to the final word of each chapter, much
like a Wall Street Journal editorial compels even those it angers to read every sentence because the arguments are presented so skillfully. — S.W.
 Across the Great Divide: The Band and America
By Barney Hoskyns
(Hal Leonard, $20)
With the release of last year’s exhaustive boxed set A Musical History
and their continued influence on successive generations of artists, the
Band’s reputation is ripe for reappraisal. Perfect timing, then, for an
updated publication of British music critic Barney Hoskyns’s definitive
1993 bio of the group. An odd combination of four rural Canadians
(guitarist/songwriter Robbie Robertson, bassist/vocalist Rick Danko,
pianist/vocalist Richard Manuel, and multi-instrumental whiz Garth
Hudson) and one dyed-in-the-wool Southerner, drummer/vocalist Levon
Helm, the Band took the various strains of blues, country, and R&B
and created an alternately joyful and haunting hybrid often dubbed
“white soul.” From their early days supporting rockabilly wild man
Ronnie Hawkins to backing Bob Dylan during his epochal electric tours
of 1965 to 1966 to the release of their own masterpieces Music from Big Pink and The Band (Brown
Album), the group quietly became one of the most influential outfits of
all time. Although never a massive commercial success, the appearance
of their late-’60s LPs sent shock waves through the rock world; then,
at the height of outrageous acid-drenched excess, Cream’s Eric Clapton
was moved to famously break up his group after hearing the Band, while
George Harrison found respite from the bickering Beatles by jamming
with the Band at their Woodstock digs. The group bowed out in fairly
spectacular fashion with 1976’s star-studded The Last Waltz
concert and documentary. Various reunions followed — some better than
others, all sans Robertson — but Manuel’s suicide in 1986 and Danko’s
death in 1999 finally put an end to things. The fight for the band’s
legacy has continued to be a rancorous one. Helm, who wrote his own
book, has consistently pegged Robertson as a credit-stealing diva — an
accusation that isn’t entirely unfair. Hoskyns takes a more balanced
view than Helm here, both of the Band’s rise and fall, creating a
portrait of a group whose relatively minor fame never quite equaled
their vast influence. — B.B.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Terrifying 10
’Tis the season to get freaked out.
Halloween always heralds the return of Freddy Krueger wannabes, ghostly
pranksters, and spooky movies. Every year, we rewatch the classics
we’ve all come to love — like Halloween, Night of the Living Dead, and Scream.
That’s fine. But here’s a list of lesser-known films that are equally
(and frightfully) good. Hunt ’em down through Best Buy, Amazon, or
Netflix. By Bryan Reesman
 Burnt Offerings (MGM, 1976)
Summer
rentals are a dicey proposition, especially when you take the wife,
son, and grandma to live on a sprawling estate that has a mysterious
old lady living in the attic, the ghost of a chauffeur haunting the
grounds, and a house that feeds on death. This American flick from the
’70s, which costars Oliver Reed, Bette Davis, and the always-loony
Karen Black, is an underrated haunted-house gem.
 Castle of Blood (Synapse, 1964)
This
black-and-white chiller conjures up a fun premise: Edgar Allan Poe
meets an American journalist in a British pub and dares him to spend
the night in a haunted castle. When our hero finds it occupied by a
couple of hot babes, it seems like a snap, but things turn surreal and
scary pretty fast. This lost classic, now uncut and uncensored, costars
Italian horror beauty Barbara Steele and has been compared to the
original The Haunting.
 The Changeling (HBO, 1980)
Winner
of nine Canadian Oscars (a.k.a. Genies), this is the greatest
haunted-house movie ever. George C. Scott plays a composer mourning the
loss of his wife and young daughter in a gi-normous mansion outside
Seattle. Naturally, the house is occupied by the restless ghost of a
boy reaching out from beyond the grave to demand that he solve a
decades-old mystery. The turbulent séance scene is the creepiest one
ever filmed.
Dagon
(Lions Gate, 2001)
This
movie is a prime example of why you need a good travel agent. When an
American tourist and his girlfriend lose two companions in a boating
mishap offshore of a Spanish seaside town, they journey to the mainland
and become hunted by half-human aquatic mutants. Director Stuart Gordon
is known for the infamous Re-Animator, but this film is every bit as good at making you squirm.
 Dark Water
(ADV, 2002)
While the American remake with Jennifer Connelly was decent, the Japanese original, directed by Hideo Nakata (Ringu),
is superior. This tale of a divorcée and her daughter trapped in a
leaky apartment with a ghost upstairs is one of those films that
doesn’t scare you outright upon viewing it. But you’ll feel really
creeped out after you turn off the TV.
Dog Soldiers
(Artisan, 2002)
You may have seen British director Neil Marshall’s latest epic, The Descent,
about six mountain climbers being stalked by nasty creatures
underground. Its predecessor is this adrenaline-charged thriller in
which six British soldiers are hunted down by werewolves in Scotland
while barricaded in a rural house. This low-budget lycanthropy fest
features towering creatures and tense action sequences, and it easily
outshines bigger Hollywood efforts.
 The House of Clocks (Shriek Show, 1989)
Italian
gore maestro Lucio Fulci toned down his bloodlust and intensified the
suspense in this creepy tale of three delinquents who rob and kill a
sinister elderly couple in a house filled with clocks. Then, when
Dobermans keep the trio trapped inside and time starts turning
backward, their plans of escape go horribly awry. While this
made-for-TV movie has some dramatic flaws, it’s an original concept
amplified by dark and twisted imagery, making it a guilty pleasure for
horror hounds.
Phone
(Tartan Asia Extreme, 2002)
Sometimes
you just don’t want to pick up your cell phone, and this fright flick
proves why: There could be an evil spirit on the other end that will
possess your young daughter and drive other people insane. This Korean
shocker keeps the tension level high as our heroine tries to figure out
what the deadly specter wants. And it ain’t pretty. Director Byeong-ki
Ahn invigorates familiar material in grand style.
 Tenebre
(Anchor Bay, 1982)
When
an American murder-mystery novelist journeys to Rome on a European
promotional tour, he discovers a psychopath is replicating the brutal
murders from his latest book. Even worse, the beleaguered author is
getting pinned with the rap and receiving death threats. Italian director Dario Argento is known for supernatural chillers like Suspiria and Phenomena, but he’s also adept at Hitchcock-esque thrillers like this one, which keeps you guessing until its blood-soaked denouement.
 Tombs of the Blind Dead (Blue Underground, 1971)
When
a young woman abandons her boyfriend and a girlfriend after a fight by
jumping off a train going through rustic Spain, she wanders aimlessly
to an old castle, only to become hunted by the infamous Knights
Templar, who have been resurrected as sightless, skeletal zombies who
ride on horseback and hunt down their victims by sound. Amando de
Ossorio’s haunting film is part of a deluxe box set and available
separately online.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Smell My Feet
As Halloween approaches, we take a look at the month’s movies to see if they’re tricks or treats. And yes, we know most of them have nothing to do with ghouls and goblins. Don’t blow our premise. Packaging these previews is tough enough. By Zac Crain
The Grudge 2
The Stars: Amber Tamblyn, Jennifer Beals
The Skinny: Tamblyn proves that being sisters with Sarah Michelle Gellar (on film, at least) is no picnic, as the curse that troubled Gellar’s Karen Davis in the first installment has now attached itself to her sister Aubrey (Tamblyn). Which obviously means the creepy white wraith with the huge eyes is back too. Unfortunate.
The Verdict: Trick
Man of the Year
The Stars: Robin Williams, Lewis Black
The Skinny: I’d imagine this movie was sold by the following sentence: “The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart runs for president.” (And, as the trailer lets slip, he actually wins.) Too bad Williams is nothing like Stewart. He’s about as subtle as a 10-pound sledge being swung around a room full of Baccarat crystal.
The Verdict: Trick
Infamous
The Stars: Toby Jones, Sandra Bullock, Daniel Craig
The Skinny: Truman Capote travels to Kansas to research his book In Cold Blood and cozies up to two convicted killers. What? No, it’s nothing like Capote; why do you ask? Okay, fine, it covers pretty much the exact ground as the movie Philip Seymour Hoffman earned an Oscar for does. But here’s the thing: Jones is supposedly Hoffman’s equal as Capote. Hey, I’m just the messenger.
The Verdict: Treat
The Marine
The Stars: John Cena, Kelly Carlson
The Skinny: A marine (WWE star Cena) comes back from the battlefield to find his lady mixed up in some sort of kidnapping business. I actually thought this costarred Kelly Clarkson for a second. Not sure if that would make it better. Given her track record (From Justin to Kelly), probably not.
The Verdict: Trick
Fast Food Nation
The Stars: Greg Kinnear, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Ethan Hawke
The Skinny: Director Richard Linklater and writer Eric Schlosser fictionalize Schlosser’s gripping look at the fast-food industry, which is the modern equivalent of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. The film version looks like it could be Traffic with Big Macs. Possible red flag: Wilmer Valderrama is conspicuously involved. Still …
The Verdict: Treat
Saw III
The Stars: Tobin Bell, Shawnee Smith
The Skinny: The Jigsaw Killer (Bell) continues on his mission to teach his victims the true value of life. So, basically, it’s like It’s a Wonderful Life. This is exactly what you need around Halloween. No, I’m not being sarcastic.
The Verdict: Treat
The Prestige
The Stars: Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson
The Skinny: The powerhouse duo behind Batman Begins (Bale and director Christopher Nolan) reteam for this period yarn about rival magicians. The good news is these two illusionists aren’t exactly Doug Henning and Lance Burton. I can’t picture Henning driven mad in a desperate quest to learn the secrets behind Burton’s tricks. The trailer I saw made me so fired up, I almost started clapping. Okay, I might have clapped once or twice. I do that sometimes.
The Verdict: Treat
Lucky You
The Stars: Eric Bana, Drew Barrymore, Robert Duvall
The Skinny: Curtis Hanson directed L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys, two of my favorites. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and 8 Mile were even good for what they were. I doubt this tale of a poker player trying to win a tournament while battling personal problems — more or less the same plot as Rounders, Stuey, California Split, two failed TV series (Lucky and Tilt), and most every other project involving poker — will be remembered alongside those films.
The Verdict: Trick
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |