Noisy Balloonist Blog is the apprentice

This is an unlikely re-post but it’s public radio, so don’t subtract any of my echo chamber credits. Listen to this manic, highly conceptual debridement of the Zac Efron tween stimulator 17 Again, as rendered by film critic Henry Sheehan on Larry Mantle’s FilmWeek on 89.3 KPCC FM. At first, fellow critic Peter Rainer wants a piece of the joke, then grows silent and finally, selflessly, steps in front of Sheehan’s mouth when he offers to send potential viewers a picture of some holes in the ground as a substitute for the film. I would have accepted a sketch.

FilmWeek on AirTalk excerpt, 4/17/08

One morning in pre-PATRIOT act America, I was playing The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask when I heard a wet thud outside. Thirty seconds later there was a knock at my door. It was my upstairs neighbor, prone on the cement step, his breath catching in his throat. “Could you call 9-1-1?” he asked. “I fell and broke my ankle. I can’t walk.”

His position, lying on his stomach with his elbows propped against the threshold, reminded me of a teenage girl chatting on her bedroom laptop. He was dazed by the pain but quiet. Quiet was all he was since I moved in, until the moment he landed in the bushes in front of my house. I called emergency services and blabbed nervously into the phone. “They’re coming,” I said, and looked at him. I was unsure what to do. He asked for water and I brought him some in a UCLA Restaurant-issue plastic mug. EMTs arrived and packaged the upstairs neighbor (I’ll call him Chet) into an ambulance and drove away.

A week later, with skewers of metal protruding from his leg, Chet explained his fall. He had locked himself out of his apartment while doing laundry and attempted to climb onto his balcony by using the wooden trellis surrounding my patio as a ladder. This was ridiculous. One glance at my 1961 stucco Lego-block apartment building and you’ll recognize that scrambling from ground-floor fence to second-floor balcony is equivalent to a rock climber leaping free of a face and clutching an overhang with nothing but fingertips. Chet never managed a shot at this class-five maneuver anyway; one of the rotted trellis timbers gave way and he dropped, perhaps four-and-half feet, into the soil beneath. Both bones in his left calf plunged downward and destroyed his ankle, like punching a nail through tile. Chet was an older man somewhere on either side of 50 and not especially fit; still, I was shocked a short fall onto soft ground could do so much damage. He no longer drives his stick-shift BMW 5-series; it’s been sitting under the carport for nine years and there are cobwebs inside the cabin. Passerby routinely scrawl offers to buy in the grime on the windows. A scaffold of implants substitutes for his ankle. He wore a brace, then walked with a cane and limps to this day. This is a particularly severe penalty for forgetting your keys.

These two conversations—the accident and the explanation of the accident—are the only significant contact I’ve had with Chet. He’s an inoffensive sort who lives alone and works from home. He minds himself and no one else. We have neither grievance nor friendship. He does his laundry in the wee hours of the morning when he is least likely to encounter other tenants, which strikes me as sadly penitent. I’m fairly certain he takes intermittent visits with a prostitute. He’s a nice guy, but I don’t know him. He broke my fence and I called him an ambulance.

Lately, he has violent coughing fits that escalate into spastic wretching. This occurs multiple times throughout the day and night. I wonder if he’s ill. He likes cigars, but that’s my only lead. It’s difficult to listen to Chet’s dry heaves, which last for minutes at a time. My physiology is empathetic; the sound makes my stomach itch and I have to quell the urge to vomit. I wish he was stricken with compulsive yawns. Invariably I wonder what sounds emanating from my apartment are so publically available. I recall two occasions when I bellowed into the phone so ferociously that everyone on the block knew my mother was welcome to look elsewhere for a son. The birds are loud; also the persistent thwack of the Rock Band drums.  This is where I’m expected to mention enthusiastic masturbation, but that doesn’t really happen. At least not audibly.

We are a bitter and vindictive bunch. We purveyors of haute confiserie, I mean. Sunny pointed me to this dispatch from the UK’s Telegraph newspaper, via BoingBoing, and it absolutely made my day. An excerpt:

Barry Colenso, the master chocolatier at Thorntons, was watched by baffled staff as he roamed the Hotel Chocolat store in Nottingham, handling various truffles. When they inspected his handiwork after he left, it was discovered that he had mutilated £63.50’s worth of chocolates.

This man, this sticky-fingered dessert-defiling man, is personal chocolatier to Queen Elizabeth. I suppose knighthood is out of the question. However, I almost sympathize. Visit Hotel Chocolat’s site. Turns out what you really need to properly experience quality chocolates are an open-mouthed brunette in a backless dress, a grand piano and a blindfold.

Also, an administrative note. Noisy Balloonist is under construction. Soon I’ll be implementing a new theme and trying to collapse disparate posts, photos, copywriting, etc. into something a little more coherent. Things may be broken, but then they will be fixed. In the meantime, read this book.