Another op-ed at Torontoist about Rob Ford (which in part incorporates a bit of yesterday’s post, because the editors asked if they could do and why not, but it’s mostly new material).

Norm Wilner, who I like and respect greatly, recently wrote a screed regarding Rob Ford and why he needs to be saved. It’s not an uncommon sentiment among those who do not like Rob Ford. If he’d only get some help is said so often with respect to Rob Ford that it deserves to be acronymized, frankly, and it’s not surprising that this is the case: after all, if you consider addiction to be a disease (which it is), then it becomes harder to assign Ford moral fault for suffering from that disease. Diseases need treatment, not condemnation, and this is why so many political enemies of Rob Ford have been urging him to go seek treatment, even if it only means a temporary leave from office rather than the permanent exile from politics Rob Ford deserves.

The problem is this: addiction is morally neutral, but how a person chooses to deal with that addiction is not. There is a way to live with addiction responsibly and soberly (or at least as soberly as possible – part of addiction is the constant threat of relapse). Rob Ford, as Norm rightly notes, has never dealt with his obvious problems in a responsible manner. Even now, when he publicly admits to having been flagrantly smashed in public, he’s not admitting to any real problem. “I’m just going to stop” is not the answer of someone who admits to addiction. It’s the answer of someone pretending he’s not. This is vintage spoiled-child Rob Ford, and it was what most of us expected him to do.

Here’s the thing: we expected him to do it because Rob Ford is not a good person. I don’t just mean he’s weak – although he is weak, that much is certain – because weakness, in and of itself, could be forgiven. But in addition to being weak, Rob Ford is a bully. He’s mean. He’s not just stupid; he’s proudly ignorant. He’s arrogant. He’s rude. He’s a hypocrite. He’s a liar. He has a pronounced violent streak that he barely controls in public; Norm says Rob Ford is an “accident waiting to happen” but the police have responded to multiple domestic disturbances at Ford’s home over the years and there is a fair case to be made that the “accidents” are potentially not theoretical at this point.

And if you think that last sentence is speculative, you have to understand this: Norm works in journalism, as do I (well, as a sideline), and we talk with our fellow journalists all the time, and here is the thing: what is being said, publicly, about Rob Ford is quite literally only the tip of the iceberg. Rob Ford’s public alcoholism has been an open secret for literally years; drug use falls into the same area, where everybody knows it happens but nobody can report on it because, after all, if the mayor purely hypothetically speaking stumbles out of a bathroom with white powder on his face, you can’t prove it’s cocaine, and if you don’t have a picture then you can’t even prove it happens. If it had happened, of course. Similarly, if one of the videos the police recovered off those hard drives was the newest candidate for “worst four-word sentence in the English language,” by which we mean “Rob Ford sex tape,” then that’s strictly hypothetical too. Completely hypothetical. And we certainly can’t say if Rob Ford hypothetically uses the services of prostitutes.

And that’s just the light hypothetical stuff. I’m not going to go into the heavier stuff. That way lies madness and accusations of open, active criminality.

I understand compassion and most of the time I preach it. But compassion, when applied to the cold hard necessities of politics, cannot and should not be an endless well. (Hell, even outside of politics someone who actively commits harm – and Rob Ford does commit harm, on many levels – cannot be given compassionate treatment when you need them to stop.) Rob Ford does “not need to be saved.” He needs to be put out of his political misery and exiled from public life. Permanently. I have no sympathy for him, no pity; so many people have done so much more with so much less than Rob Ford it is just sort of laughable. He has been given every chance and he has squandered all of them. He deserves only scorn.

My weekly TV series is up at Torontoist.

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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

So, um, right. Where was I? Oh, yes. ‘John Dies At the End’.

Simply put, this is great. It’s great in that weird, quirky, cult way that ‘Army of Darkness’ or ‘The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai’ is great…well, in that way that ‘The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai’ should be great but isn’t in any kind of practical sense, because the screenwriter is so in love with the concept that they never actually bother doing anything with it and the only real difference between it and ‘Leonard Part Six’ is Bill Cosby’s incessant mugging and everyone says it’s full of quotable lines but they all only ever quote the same two damn jokes…

…sorry. That sort of went to a weird place. The point is, ‘John Dies At the End’ is an intensely personal movie. It is someone writing a story that they know is probably only going to appeal to them, but they don’t care because it’s an idea that is flowing so deeply from their soul that they can’t not write it. And if they ever find a second person who enjoys it, then so much the better, but they don’t have a whole a whole lot of interest in changing it for mass appeal.

Which isn’t to say that they didn’t change the movie to making it a little more audience-friendly. There are changes from the book, primarily because a) the book is really long and needs to be condensed a bit to fit it into movie length, and b) the ending is a bit of a downer, and even though the tone is all over the place between Lovecraftian horror and splatstick comedy, it still works a bit better with a happier ending. Oh, and c) when you get Clancy Freaking Brown in your movie, you beef up his role a bit. But it’s amazing how much of the weird, discursive, digressive, occasionally perverse if not outright perverted spirit of the story survives the transition to film entirely intact.

For those of you unfamiliar with the novel or film, it follows the adventures of David Wong and his best friend John, who stumble onto a consciousness-expanding drug called “soy sauce” that makes you aware of the greater, stranger, scarier hidden world beyond normal human perception. It also makes that hidden world aware of you, which is why David is now having to deal with demons made out of frozen meat and ghosts and parallel universes and the kind of weird shit that makes people go find a little rubber room somewhere to be voluntarily committed to, just on the grounds that it makes it harder for THEM to get to you. On that score, it’s a cool and creepy horror movie with some wonderful scare moments.

On the other level, though, it’s a hilarious comedy, because the response of real people to crazy shit isn’t necessarily to go crazy in that classic Lovecraftian “rant and rave and wind up in a rubber room” way. We have coping mechanisms, and sometimes those take the form of laughing at the strangeness of it all and sometimes they take the form of blowing off saving the universe in order to play pick-up basketball with your best friend and sometimes they take the form of combining a nuclear bomb with industrial-grade hallucinogens because it may not kill the Lovecraftian horror-god, but “it will sure fuck his shit up”. And on that level, it’s absolutely hilarious.

So I can’t guarantee that you will love ‘John Dies At the End’ the way I did, because it’s a deeply personal movie and deeply personal movies always have a love-it-or-hate-it aspect to them. But that’s what makes them worth watching even if you wind up hating them, because it’s worth encouraging people who pour their souls out like that and make the world a more wonderful and strange place by giving us their artistic visions instead of mass-produced soulless tripe. Movies like this cannot leave you unaffected, even if that effect is to hate them.

In other words, you may not love it…but it will sure fuck your shit up.

PaulW: in comments previously:

nice artwork, but does it have anything to say about the current reports that the Ford Crack-smoking video has finally been secured by law enforcement?

Not really, but this op/ed I wrote for Torontoist does, so there you go.

This commission (done for a very reasonable price, I might add) by the thoroughly terrific Danielle Matheson. You can see some more of her work here. I highly recommend her services.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

I am not one of those people who harp continually about how the series needs to be cancelled because it’s not as good as when it was one of the best series of all time, but how do you go forward without Edna Krabappel?

One of the more interesting stories during the NBA offseason this year – managing to get basketball fans going “wait, what?” even in a summer where Dwight Howard finally committed to a team1 and where major free agents went all over the place, sometimes in unexpected ways2 and where Toronto finally traded Andrea Bargnani and got a better return than a pile of ’57 Chevy parts in a box labeled “Betty” – was that a minor bidding war erupted for the services of Greg Oden.

Greg Oden, for those of you who are not basketball fans,3 is the rare person who can say despite having received millions of dollars to play sports that he still got a raw deal. See, Greg Oden was Portland’s #1 pick in the NBA Draft back in 20074 after being a ridiculously dominant center at Ohio State, the sort of epic-level big man who is increasingly rare in the NBA these days (because, well, it’s better to have a truly great 6’8″ player than an okayish 7’2″ one) and then promptly blew out his knee with microfracture surgery. He didn’t play until the 2008-09 season and spent the season plagued by injuries to his knees, which just kept getting worse and worse – but despite that you could see the flashes were still there. Multiple 20+point games. Twenty rebounds in a single game. “If Greg Oden were healthy” was everybody’s favorite what-if game.

And then this happened:

That’s Greg Oden’s knee blowing out on what was really fairly routine mid-air contact. That ended his 2009 season. He barely played the next year.

And of course eventually it looked like Oden was done – people basically gave up on him after the third set of microfracture surgeries on his knees – and people mostly forgot about him except as a what-coulda-been story, a modern-day Len Bias but slightly less tragic because Greg Oden at least didn’t die, and that’s something, right? He said in 2012 he was “going to sit out” the season to focus on rehabbing himself, which everybody mostly thought was just a graceful way to prepare for an exit from pro basketball because you can’t play the game without knees.

But he really did work on it. Knee microfractures are extremely difficult to rehab for an athlete but it’s not impossible. And this past summer, he let teams come see him work out (because nobody was gonna buy on Greg Oden without seeing him work out). And almost instantly he had teams expressing interest, and not bottom-feeders either: contenders like the Spurs and the Heat, up-and-comers like New Orleans and Cleveland. Mostly they wanted him as a backup centre, someone who could give five or ten minutes tops when needed.

Eventually Oden signed with Miami, because Oden’s not stupid: you can’t have less pressure on you than playing on a team with LeBron James on it because everybody’s looking at LeBron, not you. This of course left basketball fans perturbed, because everybody wants Oden to come back and have a good career, but on the other hand, fuck the Miami Heat, they’re the worst, they’re nearly as bad as the Lakers (by the way: fuck the fucking Lakers) and Miami Heat fans are some of the most appalling people in sports ever.

Anyway. I mention all of this because last night, in a pre-season game against the Pelicans, Greg Oden played proper basketball for the first time since 2009. He only played four minutes (two rebounds and a dunk), but the basketball internet all lit up because HOLY SHIT EVERYBODY GREG ODEN IS PLAYING ACTUAL BASKETBALL:

It’s visually incongruous seeing that seven-foot giant looking absolutely terrified to go onto the court, but he most certainly is that. You know he’s thinking about things most players don’t have to consider (or at least can easily suppress), including that the last time he was on a basketball court his knee exploded for reasons that seem impossible. But he goes out anyway, because that is what is great about goddamn sports: the desire to never stop competing, never stop trying to be the best you can be, and yes, never stop playing games and having fun, even if you are getting paid money to do so. It’s silly and illogical in all sorts of ways, but that’s mostly what makes us all human anyway, even when you’re seven feet tall. And that’s pretty good to be. Human, I mean, not seven feet tall. Seven feet tall would be kind of inconvenient, really.

1. Until he gets bored or upset, anyway. [↩]
2. Al Jefferson to Charlotte still amazes me. [↩]
3. AND WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU I BET YOU WATCH BORING FOOTBALL INSTEAD [↩]
4. Fun fact: Kevin Durant was second, something Kevin Durant has unfortunately become all too used to being. [↩]

Recently got email from someone asking me to promote Fae Nightmares, a new Savage Worlds-rules-using tabletop RPG Kickstarter project, and their reasoning was solid, so I have backed the Kickstarter and am writing about it here even though it is urban fantasy with faerie overtones and that is, to put it generously, not really my thing at all. (Although the Savage Worlds ruleset is generally excellent, so that’s a plus.) At this writing they’re only about $4K away from funding with twelve days to go.

The reason I’m backing this Kickstarter is because it’s actively advertising itself as gender-neutral and LGBT-friendly. That is, to put it bluntly, pretty goddamn ballsy in the RPG world – which is approximately as bad as the comics world when it comes to queer-friendliness and anti-sexism, and I know that sentence will start a lengthy debate about whether RPG fandom is as bad as comics fandom when it comes to sexism and homophobia, and the answer to that debate is “nobody wins.”

(Someone here is probably going to mention how White Wolf’s games always had gay characters and I don’t want to get into that debate either, but suffice it to say I have been subjected to more than one rant from a gay gamer friend about how White Wolf treats homosexuals as Pokemon. I do not feel equipped to judge that on the merits, but on the other hand it’s White Wolf, who managed to create one and a half truly great RPGs – Mage, and Ars Magica, which only counts for half because Chaosium started that and WW just took it over later on – and so, so, so much that was just awful, so whatever, somebody else can defend White Wolf.)

In short: these folks are banking on RPG fans being willing to pay hard cash for equality in-setting, and I think I have to support that. And given how many of you reading this are the sort to say that [INSERT VARIOUS NERD FANDOM HERE] should be more open and tolerant and non-assholic, I think you guys should too. It’s only $15 for the PDF, and that’s not bad at all as RPG e-books go.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site. And of course please welcome Adam Prosser back to the thrilling world of MGKomix, to which he has not been in some time.

Here in this listicle Cracked includes Space Jam as one of six lousy movies which were completely outclassed by their great soundtracks. This is accurate, because Space Jam mostly sucks (Charles Barkley’s amusing cameos aside) and the album is great, but to demonstrate their point about the soundtrack, they reference “I Believe I Can Fly” by R. Kelly, which is a bad song, a song which was cliched the moment it arrived and is composed primarily of stinking cheese. It’s the worst song on the soundtrack by a country mile.

What they should have referenced is of course this:

Five great MCs at the top of their game, all working G-rated rhymes, all of them clearly having a blast, and the result is a truly epic song. I honestly don’t think Method Man has ever done a better guest MC gig in his career. “Hit ‘Em High” has not left my WinAmp playlist/mp3 player since Space Jam came out, because it is fucking great.