I hung out with this dude Z--- all day. He's a longtime internet friend of E---, who I was first introduced to when he rented out a punk club downtown and showed all his AMVs set to The Velvet Underground and Tim Buckley. He lectured about beating off, and J---, who I stupidly brought out, got in a notorious argument about it with me. It was pretty rock and roll. I hated the guy for a while. But today, we went record shopping.
I've hung out with him before, since he's buddies with E--- and Blaze. He's shockingly the coolest, sweetest guy, which I learned the hard way after he took us out for hipster sandwiches and watching YouTube Poops in my apartment the first weekend I moved here. I've never gotten alone time with the guy until today, though.
E--- described him to me as "Ben without inhibitions," which I kept in mind, spending a day driving around the city with him.
He works as an engineer by day (he's three years older than me), but his job somehow gives him a bunch of free time, so half of his time is spent making videos, programming stuff at the one arthouse theatre by the university, and shenanigans. He's traveled quite a bit. He just got back from a trip to Boston, where he saw Death Grips and Black Country New Road, and also hung out with film critic and scholar R.C., who I guess is kind of an iconoclast. He wrote Z---'s favourite book ever: "Cassavetes on Cassavetes," which is a collection of interviews with John Cassavetes. If you didn't know, he effectively invented American independent cinema. I don't know where I'm going with this. I guess the point is that buddy is getting up to a lot, and I saw a lot of myself in him. He's not as severe as E--- can be. Conversations with him sprawl out warmly with him. He's the kind of guy who would probably be naturally really good with children (despite the fact that my first introduction was him getting in front of an audience and describing his porn addiction). He's extremely fun to talk to, which lends really well to him possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of film and indie rock. Talking with him is this quiz in the history of moving images from D.W. Griffith to Skibidi Toilet. I could barely keep up, but he never grills you unless he catches a whiff of bullshit, which he'll slap you with the intelligence he holds back most of the time. It stings, but it only happened to me once today, where he subtly accused me of attention-seeking to purely ball-bust. He seems too eager to help you to care about the possibility of a bruised ego.
In the Kingsway mall, we dreamed about making a movie together over shitty Ukrainian food and my third cup of coffee. He told me about him wanting to love, despite him never being given much a chance to, which he spoke without any resentment. He mentioned being afraid of never loving, given that all his record collector buddies - decades our senior - are in their golden years unwed. This made me blurt out, "Like Steve Buscemi in Ghost World!" He then told me,"That's one of R.C.'s favourite movies."
"No fucking way. I love that movie. My dad turned me onto that, actually. I like it better than the comic."
"I've actually never read the comic. I'm too manga-pilled."
"Yeah. I don't want to be one of those douchebags who are like,'Erm, the book is better than the movie!' And I'm literally not. But Ghost World was serialized in Eightball, so Daniel Clowes's comic is a series of unrelated anecdotes. It's a lot more ambient than the movie. They can't really be compared, but I somehow like the movie more. Zwigoff seems to do more with Clowes's stuff."
It was life-affirmingly cool. Still, E---'s observation that this guy is me without self-hatred is nagging at me. Everyone seems to think of that side of me as a cancer. It is, I think. I don't want to hurt anymore. I want to be free. I'm going to be free.
Teenage me would be psyched to hear that he would be hanging out with these people in a few long years after high school. On Tuesday, N----- and I are going to hang out with some noise music people at that same club Z--- screened at.
