Father Robert Gannon was my senior guidance counselor and later the pastor at the catholic church for the parish where I grew up and where my parents live. He was tall and thin and clean cut. His haircut was always very 1962, which was out of date for the end of the hippie era when I was a senior in 1980. But the look came back later which was good. He was a guy who was too clever, too shrewd and funny to look behind the times.
Fr. Gannon was a great person, a terrific teacher, and a very good priest. I stopped believing in God when I was about 15, which I told him. He never pressured me to "be a good Catholic" or guilted me in any way. My father on the other hand flipped out when I stopped attending church, tried to force me to go, and angrily told me that the only reason I didn't want to go was so I could sleep late on Sundays. Fr. Gannon would ask me why I felt the way I did and we engaged in many civilized debates about the issues. He even once said to me, "You know, Jimmy, I usually don't like to go against what a parent says to their kids, but I think maybe your Dad is actually doing more to push you away than bring you back to the church." He was right. I had said as much to my Dad. Gannon knew that you need to respect people's basic dignity and that included their beliefs, even if they were different from yours.
He was a big influence on me in high school and afterward when he was pastor at Our Lady Queen of Peace (even though I wasn't in the parish or a churchgoer/believer anymore). Even before I was a senior (which was the year he was guidance counselor for) I used to hang out in his office and talk to him when I had time between classes. He was smart, caring, and had a great, upbeat sense of humor. He was someone who I looked up to because he was really intelligent but also just a good human being. He really gave a damn about the right things.
There are a lot of high school teachers who treat you without any respect just because you're younger, but Gannon never did that. I never thought of it till now but for a long time I felt that he was a good friend. The real evidence of my trust in him was when someone I knew confessed a serious crime to me. I knew I wanted to go to the police but was afraid that the guy might find out if I did it officially and come after me. He was a dangerous, erratic character who liked me well enough but I had no illusions he wouldn't turn on me if he thought I had betrayed him. I didn't know what to do and then I realized -- I should talk to Gannon and ask for his help. He gave the information to a cop he knew and took care of it for me. I would never have done that unless I trusted him completely, which I did. That's a pretty high compliment in my book.
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Days After the Shooting, It's the Media That's Tragic
I guess I'll say what's on my mind -- the deaths of the children in Connecticut are tragic, but they are a handful, a mere droplet in the bucket of deaths this year caused by things we can actually do something about -- revisiting our drone attack policies, cracking down on drunk drivers, making the food we eat safer, hell -- stop more people from smoking and we can save MANY more lives than we can going on about gun control and even mental illness, which is what I was posting about the other day.
This was a random attack by someone who had a psychotic break. How are you going to prevent that in the future? Anticipate psychotic episodes among .001 percent of the population? In the grand scheme of things, in a country with over 300 million people, think of all the energy spent on this one tragedy that affected a handful of people. Let's let this go, let these people bury their family members and get out of the incessant spotlight. Let's tell the media by our lack of attention to the event that the nation can't afford to ignore the rest of its business and the business of the world.
This was a random attack by someone who had a psychotic break. How are you going to prevent that in the future? Anticipate psychotic episodes among .001 percent of the population? In the grand scheme of things, in a country with over 300 million people, think of all the energy spent on this one tragedy that affected a handful of people. Let's let this go, let these people bury their family members and get out of the incessant spotlight. Let's tell the media by our lack of attention to the event that the nation can't afford to ignore the rest of its business and the business of the world.
You want gun control? You could send money to the Brady bill people, who spent what they could last year on their campaign to change gun laws, which was less than $6000, compared to the NRA's $24 million. That's $24 million dollars. I heard those numbers quoted yesterday. I don't mind an uphill battle, but liberals are going to need to knock over Fort Knox to even try and compete with that.
And this is really going to make me popular -- gun sales are up in the last five years or so -- but gun crime is down. Everyone can rail on all they want and cry about these children but the reality is that less people are getting killed with guns with the laws we have now.
People need to realize when they're being egged on by the media into a feeding frenzy that changes nothing. Enough about the shooting. People want an issue? Let the news go back to pushing the world's leaders to do something about Syria, where there are HUGE, enormous numbers of tragic deaths. Are people obsessing over one psychotic killer because they're fascinated and feel like it's a real-life version of Dexter or CSI? That's what scares me.
Jim Higgins
December 18, 2012
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
An Excerpt
"He saw the futility of life, yet felt amazingly clean, like a dying ant on a bar of soap."
From my forthcoming novel, The Lugubrious Goober
From my forthcoming novel, The Lugubrious Goober
Dark Chocolate
Nobody loves me. Why don't I have a girlfriend? I wish I had more nice things. I want a big couch with comfy cushions that are nice and soft but not too soft because then they get all squishy and you just wind up resenting them. Why doesn't someone go out and buy me some candy? I want chocolate. The kind that's 70% cocoa or higher. I want no less than 70% or I was will throw it at the wall. Look at all these piles of books and comics and magazines in the bedroom here. It looks like the NY skyline. I should get organized. I should get bookshelves. I should pay that big-ass fine I have so I can get my van back on the road so I can buy bookshelves. I saw cheap bookshelves at a used furniture place down the block for $40 that looked nice, not like you're thinking right now because you read "$40" and thought "probably cheap and crappy."
I think I bite my nails too much. But you shouldn't bite your nails at all so I guess anyone who bites their nails bites them too much. Of people who bite their nails, I am probably among the more high-frequency biters. I should cut down. I want to take a big trip. I either want to go to Tokyo and see all the Japanese people and the toys and lights and the shops and the comics and then go to Hong Kong or I want to go to Europe and see David in Madrid, Lilith in Barcelona, and my mother's cousins in the little Tyrolean mountain village where they live in northeast Italy called Val di Non. Lilith pronounces her name "Leeleet." She is little and funny and has pink hair. Like some people from Japan. I stay up too late and don't read enough. I still want chocolate. I'm waiting.
I think I bite my nails too much. But you shouldn't bite your nails at all so I guess anyone who bites their nails bites them too much. Of people who bite their nails, I am probably among the more high-frequency biters. I should cut down. I want to take a big trip. I either want to go to Tokyo and see all the Japanese people and the toys and lights and the shops and the comics and then go to Hong Kong or I want to go to Europe and see David in Madrid, Lilith in Barcelona, and my mother's cousins in the little Tyrolean mountain village where they live in northeast Italy called Val di Non. Lilith pronounces her name "Leeleet." She is little and funny and has pink hair. Like some people from Japan. I stay up too late and don't read enough. I still want chocolate. I'm waiting.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Heal! Heal!
You haven't lived until you seen televangelist Robert Tilton. He sits at a desk, speaks into the camera, reads prayers viewers send in, speaks in tongues over them ("Afllaalllaa, Aabbllittalla, Fllabbabala"), and eventually builds up to his pitch where he suggests that God will give you what you want if you just send in $1000 to him.
My favorite is when he heals people via TV. He'll read a letter where he mentions that "a woman in Dirtybutt, Georgia has a stomach ail-uh-ment." He'll then say, "Ah wont you to put yore hands on the TV screen and puh-ray to God. Okay." He then puts his hands up, squeezes his eyes shut, and then yells, "Heal!! Heal!! Heal!!" He's great. He's better than the circus.
I remember the prayer cloths that he would hawk. You would send away for the cloths, pray into them, get'em really soaked up with your prayer, then send them back. Tilton would pick a few out and pray over them to heal your goiter, or get God to pay your Aunt Tillie's mortgage. Unless of course he just threw them in the dumpster as Diane Sawyer and Primetime Live discovered when they did an expose on him.
Check out this link -- it's Tilton speaking in tongues. Either that or singing, "Oye Como Va," by Santana.
After Primetime exposed him he went off the air for a few years. But you can't keep a good man down. He was back on TV by the late 90s and is still there, still owns multi-million dollar homes, and is still asking for cash. I used to say to friends that when he would yell, "Heal! Heal!" into the camera it may not have cured anyone but that because of the force of his voice, dogs all over America sat down as one.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Yukiko's Spinach by Frederic Boilet - My Amazon Review
Frederic Boilet has created an amazing work about a French artist living in Japan (like him) and his Japanese girlfriend and muse (apparently like his gal at the time). It's lyrical, beautiful, haunting, and like very little else out there. The art is lovely, photo realistic, and extremely inventive in it's visual storytelling i.e. how the distance from us the viewer (close-up, long shot, etc.,), lighting, and angle of the point of view of each panel works with all of these factors in the panels before it, after it, and on the whole page (whew! For more on this See Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud).
But the story is the real star here. This is another one of the increasingly growing list of graphic novels that someone who's never read one can enjoy to the fullest. It's hard to portray a wonderful relationship without getting maudlin and Boilet shows us a love between two people that is, though not without problems, beautiful.
One last thing -- as beautiful as the art is here, this type of slavish photorealism is becoming tiresome. It seems that anyone with Photoshop can become a comics artist these days whether they know how to draw or not. And artists like Tony Harris and Alex Maleev deprive us of their ample drawing skills by using photo reference in every panel they draw. Rant over.
Buy this and anything by Boilet you can. Highly recommended.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Longing for Impeachment
Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al, have done things that are just illegal and it's already out in the open. For one, Bush authorized wiretaps without getting permission from the courts. Incredibly, authorization could even have legally been gotten AFTER the taps were done so there wasn't anything preventing them from doing them -- they just didn't want what they were doing to be known. The Army officer who did the Abu Ghraib investigation found out that Rumsfeld knew it was going on months before it was made public, meaning he willingly allowed illegal acts to be done. And I believe there's evidence that Cheney eats babies and kills old ladies. Well, maybe that last one's not exactly a sure thing...
There's plenty of reasons and evidence to impeach Bush and maybe Cheney, but some Democrats have said that they know they wouldn't be able to get anything through Congress and that it would derail a lot of the things they are trying to do that directly affect the country.
It's sad. The Republicans pursued Clinton like he was Idi Amin because he fooled around with an intern but the present Congress won't go after a president who ignores and breaks the law.
There's plenty of reasons and evidence to impeach Bush and maybe Cheney, but some Democrats have said that they know they wouldn't be able to get anything through Congress and that it would derail a lot of the things they are trying to do that directly affect the country.
It's sad. The Republicans pursued Clinton like he was Idi Amin because he fooled around with an intern but the present Congress won't go after a president who ignores and breaks the law.
Friday, June 08, 2007
White Castle, Spinach Pie, and the World's Best Dumplings
I've been having memories come back from high school and from a few years afterwards. This was a time where I was a regular bar-goer and an avid drinker. When I was in high school, there were many late nights that ended with a run to Bay Ridge for White Castle. I'd go with my friends who all worked at Bonanza, a fast food steakhouse that was next to the old Hylan Cinema in New Dorp, where The Gap is now. It was a quick jump over the bridge (the Verazzano) after a night of drinking -- and not eating for about six hours -- so it became a guilty pleasure and a habit for a while. With those guys most of the time we'd head to the Victory Diner in Dongan Hills.
We hung out in Park Hill at Studio B or "Popalice's" (sp?) as it used to be called, a neighborhood that was almost exclusively black with some Hispanic people and a small percentage of others. Every weekend, the bar was packed with white kids most of whom went to the local Catholic high schools. The drinking age was 18 at the time -- this was around 1980 -- so the place had plenty of 16 and 17 year olds in it (including me). It was this weird white enclave. Park Hill was a high crime area (and later was the HQ of the Wu Tang Clan) and most of us had so few black students in our schools that you knew the two of them by name. Sometimes, when I would introduce him to people, my friend Tony would say, "Hi. I'm the black guy." So with the combination of the reality of the crime in the area and the suspicion/paranoia that a lot of the bar crowd had toward the people who lived in Park Hill, it sometimes felt like being in West Berlin during the Cold War, especially when we hung outside the bar. But inside it was our home base, the most comfortable place outside our own homes, or, for those like me, much more comfortable than the constant turmoil of the house where I lived.
So typically, three am would roll around and my soft-spoken friend Jim would say, "Anybody up for the VD?" Then a chant would start amongst us slowly and build in tempo and volume until the entire bar thumped and resounded (girls clutching their boyfriends, pieces of the ceiling chipping and falling away, mice in the empty field next door running for cover) with the sound of, "VD! VD! VD! VD!," our affectionate name for the place with the best fries (well-done, of course) and cheeseburger deluxe around and a particularly oily and excellent spinach pie.
About six years later (circa 1986), I'd be hanging out at Jim Hanley's Universe, the comic book store I worked at, with the rest of the crew and a rotating cast of friends- of -the -store special guest stars. The shop was in Eltingville, which is in the end of Staten Island farthest from Brooklyn. We'd close the store around 10pm and head off like a shot to Wo Hop, an all-night Chinese joint on Mott Street in Chinatown which is still there and is still a favorite late night haunt for those in -the -know. We had to trek across most of the Island, through Brooklyn, and then right over the Manhattan bridge. For the weak and faint of heart, this might have seemed like a long haul. But we knew that at 10:30 at night we could zoom over there with little or no traffic and on a good night (or if Paul, with one of his dreaded Falling -Apart -Mobiles and his frighteningly heavy foot, was driving) we could get there in 40 minutes flat.
We'd walk in and be loudly and cheerily greeted by Steven, our friendly, favorite Chinese waiter (not that they had waiters that weren't Chinese) in the upstairs part of the place. We'd pig out on the good, cheap food and finish with big grins on our faces, happier than any dinner at The Four Seasons could make us. The dumplings, wrapped with a thin noodle instead of wads of doughy nonsense, were inevitable and tasted like heaven.
We hung out in Park Hill at Studio B or "Popalice's" (sp?) as it used to be called, a neighborhood that was almost exclusively black with some Hispanic people and a small percentage of others. Every weekend, the bar was packed with white kids most of whom went to the local Catholic high schools. The drinking age was 18 at the time -- this was around 1980 -- so the place had plenty of 16 and 17 year olds in it (including me). It was this weird white enclave. Park Hill was a high crime area (and later was the HQ of the Wu Tang Clan) and most of us had so few black students in our schools that you knew the two of them by name. Sometimes, when I would introduce him to people, my friend Tony would say, "Hi. I'm the black guy." So with the combination of the reality of the crime in the area and the suspicion/paranoia that a lot of the bar crowd had toward the people who lived in Park Hill, it sometimes felt like being in West Berlin during the Cold War, especially when we hung outside the bar. But inside it was our home base, the most comfortable place outside our own homes, or, for those like me, much more comfortable than the constant turmoil of the house where I lived.
So typically, three am would roll around and my soft-spoken friend Jim would say, "Anybody up for the VD?" Then a chant would start amongst us slowly and build in tempo and volume until the entire bar thumped and resounded (girls clutching their boyfriends, pieces of the ceiling chipping and falling away, mice in the empty field next door running for cover) with the sound of, "VD! VD! VD! VD!," our affectionate name for the place with the best fries (well-done, of course) and cheeseburger deluxe around and a particularly oily and excellent spinach pie.
About six years later (circa 1986), I'd be hanging out at Jim Hanley's Universe, the comic book store I worked at, with the rest of the crew and a rotating cast of friends- of -the -store special guest stars. The shop was in Eltingville, which is in the end of Staten Island farthest from Brooklyn. We'd close the store around 10pm and head off like a shot to Wo Hop, an all-night Chinese joint on Mott Street in Chinatown which is still there and is still a favorite late night haunt for those in -the -know. We had to trek across most of the Island, through Brooklyn, and then right over the Manhattan bridge. For the weak and faint of heart, this might have seemed like a long haul. But we knew that at 10:30 at night we could zoom over there with little or no traffic and on a good night (or if Paul, with one of his dreaded Falling -Apart -Mobiles and his frighteningly heavy foot, was driving) we could get there in 40 minutes flat.
We'd walk in and be loudly and cheerily greeted by Steven, our friendly, favorite Chinese waiter (not that they had waiters that weren't Chinese) in the upstairs part of the place. We'd pig out on the good, cheap food and finish with big grins on our faces, happier than any dinner at The Four Seasons could make us. The dumplings, wrapped with a thin noodle instead of wads of doughy nonsense, were inevitable and tasted like heaven.
The Molly Ringwald Story
About seven or eight years ago I was on the R train going downtown during the winter. I believe it was around 12 midnight on a weeknight. Either at 8th St or Bleeker or 14th St, this tall, cute woman got on the nearly empty car I was in and sat down about 12 feet away in the next section of seats. She was wearing a short white down jacket or vest and a combination of white and bright red clothes (red sneakers, white pants, red shirt, red, wool, dorky-girl hat with never-used chin ties hanging from the sides). I briefly thought I'd chat her up but then said, "Fuck it -- it's late and I'm tired." I then noticed she was looking at a schedule for The Anthology Film Archives. I thought, "Hell, I'd talk to a guy reading the schedule."
I slid over and asked her if there was "anything good in there." She turned and answered me and I saw that it was Molly Ringwald, totally beautiful in person.
Now, I've met some celebrities including some people who are kind of heroes of mine, and I don't usually get flustered. But this was so unexpected, and let's face it -- it was Molly Ringwald -- I struggled not to be tongue tied but I was. We chatted for a minute or two and it was pleasant enough but I felt like I was sweating like Chris Farley and Meatloaf on a rain forest marathon race.
Anyway, I happened to get off at the same stop as her (Prince Street) and I saw her give me that look over her shoulder that said, "PLEASE don't try to follow me and talk to me, I HATE THAT." I skulked away in the other direction, lumped together with stalkers, heavy breathers, and the Legion of Socially Inappropriate by one of my favorite celebrity crushes. "No ice cream for you," I thought.
I slid over and asked her if there was "anything good in there." She turned and answered me and I saw that it was Molly Ringwald, totally beautiful in person.
Now, I've met some celebrities including some people who are kind of heroes of mine, and I don't usually get flustered. But this was so unexpected, and let's face it -- it was Molly Ringwald -- I struggled not to be tongue tied but I was. We chatted for a minute or two and it was pleasant enough but I felt like I was sweating like Chris Farley and Meatloaf on a rain forest marathon race.
Anyway, I happened to get off at the same stop as her (Prince Street) and I saw her give me that look over her shoulder that said, "PLEASE don't try to follow me and talk to me, I HATE THAT." I skulked away in the other direction, lumped together with stalkers, heavy breathers, and the Legion of Socially Inappropriate by one of my favorite celebrity crushes. "No ice cream for you," I thought.
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