One year later: my pituitary surgery recovery, as told by Simpsons screengrabs

If you’re a regular follower of my misadventures, you may recall that last summer some guys sliced my head open in order to rid me of an unwelcome intercranial growth. I chronicled the lead-up to that surgery in a blog entry entitled “The story of my pituitary tumor, as told by Simpsons screengrabs.” That post proved surprisingly popular, so I figure I might as well commemorate the surgery’s one-year anniversary with a grossly derivative sequel about my progress ever since.

I went into surgery early in the morning of May 21 and woke up later that evening, surprisingly free of pain but dogged by an intense pressure in my sinuses. That only made sense, as said sinuses were packed tightly with gauze.

Over the course of the night, I was visited by my wife and a hazy rotation of doctors who explained that I hadn’t had a pituitary tumor after all. Instead, they’d removed something called a Rathke’s cleft cyst, a weird little pustule that is apparently virtually indistinguishable from the tumor they’d originally diagnosed until one is actually inside the patient’s head. When I heard of the misdiagnosis, I was initially concerned that I’d just had an extraneous, incredibly invasive surgery.

But it turned out the cyst carried all the same risks as the tumor, so it didn’t alter much about the procedure. The worst part of the entire process was the night after the surgery, during which I was allowed no liquids by mouth. Not being able to drink for 24 hours is a drag no matter what, but when your nasal passages are blocked off and mouth-breathing is your only option, you start wondering whether it’s physically possible for someone to die of cottonmouth.

I eventually complained enough that my nurses allowed me some ice chips, but I overdid it and wound up vomiting up my scanty water supply. After that they cut me off from water and left me to brief, uneasy dreams, most of which involved me guzzling unholy amounts of sodas, juices and other potables. It got so bad that when the nurse in charge of my sponge bath left the room so I could wash my genitals, I quickly stuffed my mouth with alcohol wipes and sucked out as much of the vile, burning liquid as I could. This was not one of my prouder moments.

But I got through it and quickly regained my ability to drink water. I spent a week in a hospital bed watching 30 Rock and Better Off Ted reruns and the NBA playoffs, pining away for my wife and son. My bed afforded me a lovely view of the bluffs of Saint Paul, a nice perk that also enhanced my loneliness and cabin fever something fierce. 

Finally I was discharged to the comfort of my home. As wonderful as it was to be back, I still had a lot of recuperation ahead of me. For one thing, I was ridiculously easily fatigued. For the first couple of weeks I could only write in short bursts, as anything more pushed me to the verge of passing out. Even watching movies was physically taxing. I also left the hospital with a case of diabetes insipidus, a temporary form of diabetes that affects how the body processes liquids. Basically, I was on a constant cycle of being desperately thirsty and then desperately needing to urinate. As the toilets in my house are on the second floor and in the basement, I counted myself lucky that I never passed out from the exertion of peeing.

Eventually all of that passed, and the only lingering effect I was left with was considerable weight gain. This was a real downer to me, as I’d dropped 30 pounds the previous summer via dietary changes and a tough workout regimen. Banned for three months from any kind of physical exertion more strenuous than walking, I was more or less helpless against my appetite and packed 15 of those pounds right back on. I know that’s not that big a deal at all, but I felt pretty grotesque by summer’s end.

And here we are a year later, and all is well. Looking back, that’s really not all that much of a narrative. I had some surgery, it took a while for me to recover, but eventually I was back to normal. Whenever I run into people I haven’t seen for a while, they ask how I’m feeling. It always takes me a second to figure out why they’re asking, because the surgery is so far from my mind. It makes me feel silly and a little embarrassed, to tell the truth. I know plenty of people who’ve been through much worse in the past year. But the fact that people still ask just reminds me that I’m lucky enough to have a lot of folks who care about me. All I can do is say thanks, everybody, for your support and thoughts. It was a life-changing event to be certain, and one year later I’m happy to say I’m

Big ups to LardLad.com and their invaluable cache of Simpsons imagery.

Zager & Evans’ “Mr. Turnkey”: the awesomest sophomore slump of the '60s

I’ve never really understood the widespread animosity toward Zager & Evans’ “In the Year 2525.” It was a small-label single by a couple of guys from Nebraska that came from out of nowhere to top the charts in 1969. Almost immediately thereafter it became a fixture on those “worst song ever” lists people never tire of publishing. Personally, I appreciate it for being one of the weirdest damn songs ever to hit it big on the Billboard charts. How can you not have at least a little love for a pop song that’s nothing but sci-fi speculation about mankind’s trajectory over the next seven (seven!) millennia?

What I find most interesting about “In the Year 2525,” though, is the way Zager & Evans opted to capitalize on their success. Their follow-up single “Mr. Turnkey,” released later in 1969, is the folksy, first-person confession of a Wichita Falls rapist who commits suicide by crucifying himself in his jail cell. Seriously. That’s not only something they wrote and recorded, it’s a song they thought the American people would want to hear crackling over the airwaves on their transistor radios. It’s as though the duo surveyed the unexpected success of “In the Year 2525” and said, “Well heck, if it’s grim, dystopian, non-commercial dirges they want, they ain’t seen nothing yet!”

It isn’t just the subject matter that makes “Mr. Turnkey” so fascinating. The tune is actually fairly catchy, which only accents the lunacy of the lyrical choices. I’ll give Z&E this much: their rapist comes off legitimately creepy. “I need a woman and I ain’t gettin’ far / I never was the kinda man a woman looked for,” he mopily self-assesses before bemoaning that his victim “led me on” with her “flirtin’ eyes.” Of all the similes one could apply to a comely lass at a bar, Zager & Evans went with “She was lovelier than oil rights.” Yes, oil rights, that eternal standard-bearer of feminine beauty. Perhaps that was intended as some sort of comment on capitalism? Environmentalism? I guess you could make an argument about the whole thing being a metaphor for the rape of the land, but I can’t imagine why you’d bother.

And then there’s the crucifixion sequence. Everybody knows that the awesomeness of a bad lyric is directly proportional to the passion with which it’s delivered. Zager & Evans sing the hell out of “I’ve nailed my left wrist to your wall / I’m a-goin’ home” and “I’m cryin’ / Hangin’ here dyin’.” Sadly, pop audiences inexplicably failed to embrace rape and self-mutilation and Zager and Evans quickly faded into obscurity. (“Mr. Turnkey” did briefly crack the Hot 100 in Australia, which seems appropriate for some reason.)

Through the miracle of YouTube, I’ve been digging into the Zager & Evans catalog. Their other material isn’t quite as bananas as “Mr. Turnkey” or “In the Year 2525,” but there’s still plenty of weirdness to go around. In between standard ‘60s stuff (the bleeding-heart call to action of “Help One Man Today,” the sardonic hippie gobbledygook of “Little Kids” and “I Am”), you get the insanely melodramatic anti-war ballad “Fred,” the ironic, horn-laced hate anthem “Taxi Man”  and the queasily specific love hymn “Less Than Tomorrow.” All of these are of a piece with Zager & Evans’ unique brand of madness.

It’s easy to see why the pair never scored another hit, but it’s inspiring to know that this stuff existed in the first place. Like the best worst art, it’s steeped in sincerity and completely of its time and place. “You ain’t never seen nothin’ like this before,” the rapist assures the titular Mr. Turnkey. I certainly ain’t never heard nothin’ like it before or since, but I’m delighted that I’ve gotten to know “Mr. Turnkey” in all its deranged glory.

Lou Reed in the movies: The actor comes home late

Lou Reed has logged a fair bit of time on film throughout his career, be it filming an Andy Warhol screen test, making a controversial Honda scooter commercial or dropping by Saturday Night Live to confirm rumors of his death. From time to time, he’s even dabbled in cinematic acting. Nobody’s about to suggest that Lou made a bad call choosing rhythm guitar over improv classes, but his acting résumé is just as interesting and iconoclastic as you might assume.

Blue in the Face (1995)
Wayne Wang’s agreeably tossed-together movie is a peculiar jumble of skits, man-on-the-street interviews and loose narrative threads all about how cool it is to live in Brooklyn. The whole thing is a mess, but it’s a pleasant mess whose highs pretty much balance out its lows. Lou’s running monologue is among the highest of those highs. Leaning nonchalantly on a cigar store counter and sporting a truly inspirational wall of kinky black hair, Lou rambles about his love of New York, his fear of Sweden and his homemade sunglasses. It’s a mesmerizing performance that suggests Lou should really get into the spoken word business.

Get Crazy (1983)
This is a delightful little “let’s put on a show” movie about a legendary rock club in dire financial straits. The underlying plot has club owner Allan Garfield scrambling to throw together an all-star New Year’s Eve benefit bash before Ed Begley, Jr’s evil suit can shut the place down, but it’s mostly an excuse for a bunch of goofy set pieces and killer musical performances. (Lee Ving’s hardcore take on “Hoochie Coochie Man” in particular is one of my favorite musical movie moments.)

Lou plays one of the biggest names on the bill, a spaced-out singer-songwriter named Auden who’s trying to work his way out of a crippling case of writer’s block. He’s introduced in a visual parody of Bob Dylan’s Bringing it All Back Home LP and then spends most of his screen time confined to the back of a taxi cab that careens around New York while Lou nonchalantly strums a guitar and mutters. As it turns out, Lou Reed’s muted deadpan makes him a perfect straight man for zany comedy.

Lulu on the Bridge (1998)
A ponderous, pretentious Paul Auster production is exactly Lou’s bag. This is a murky little late ‘90s indie film about jazz man Harvey Keitel recovering from a gunshot wound with the help of Mira Sorvino and a magical floating rock. Yep.

Lou shows up in struggling actress Sorvino’s demo reel, playing an actor playing a john trying to pick up Mira’s fast-talking prostitute. Lou doesn’t have a lot to do except look snazzy in a goldenrod jacket, but he has a few facial reactions that are bizarrely humanizing. The credits list his character as “Not Lou Reed” – When he pops up on the demo tape, Keitel excitedly says, “Hey, that’s Lou Reed!” Sorvino replies, “No, it’s not. It… it just looks like him.” It’s that kind of movie.

Rock & Rule (1983)
OK, so some time in the future mankind finally drives itself to extinction, at which point cats, dogs and rodents evolve into humanoids and follow the same trajectory as their forebears, up to and including establishing their very own late ‘70s arena rock scene. There’s also a dose of magic or sorcery or some such  mixed in there. If you’re down with that premise, you might be able to handle Rock & Rule, a Ralph Bakshi-aping adult cartoon with admirable ambition but fairly shoddy execution.

At least the soundtrack boasts the talents of Cheap Trick, Debbie Harry and (very briefly) Iggy Pop, among others. Even with that estimable roster, Lou cuts the strongest figure as the singing voice (Don “Dr. Claw” Francks provides the speaking voice) of Mok, the villainous pop superstar who wants to rule the world with music. While most of the songs in Rock & Rule are good-not-great – I’d guess the headliners didn’t want to squander their A-material on a cartoon about rock & roll dog people – Lou’s “My Name Is Mok” is a bracing, stomping little slab of sleaze that forces the viewer to sit up and damn well pay attention.

Prozac Nation (2001)
Elizabeth Wurtzel’s professional writing career was launched by an essay about her love of Lou Reed’s music, so it’s pretty cool that Lou agreed to play himself in this shrill movie adaption of her memoir of mental illness and addiction. On the other hand, watching Christina Ricci get herself in the mood by fantasizing about a barely legal Jonathan Rhys-Meyers morphing into a 60-year-old Lou Reed is unsettling on several levels.

Far Away So Close (1993)
An invisible angel eavesdrops on Lou Reed’s creative process, then turns human and attends a Lou Reed concert, then becomes a derelict and gets a few bucks and some words of encouragement from Lou Reed. A lot of folks would argue that Wim Wenders was foolish to make a sequel to his revered Wings of Desire. I can see where they’re coming from, but do we really want to live in a world where a movie about German angels starring Lou Reed, Peter Falk and Mikhail Gorbachev doesn’t exist?

Arthur and the Revenge of Malthazar (2009)
Apparently this Luc Besson-written series of live action/animated kids’ movies is rather a big deal in Europe, but it hasn’t quite caught on over here. The trailers I’ve seen look sort of obnoxious, but I can’t deny being intrigued at the notion of Lou Reed as a cartoon super villain working alongside Mia Farrow, Snoop Dogg, Selena Gomez, Jimmy Fallon and half of the Black Eyed Peas.

One Trick Pony (1980)
“Hey, we’re already banking on a feature film with Paul Simon in the lead. Why not go for broke and cast Lou Reed as the vaguely Phil Spector-esque producer who insists on ‘sweetening up’ Simon’s gritty new sound?” The weird thing is that it mostly works. Simon proves a capable anchor for a ‘70s-style character study of an artist in crisis, and Lou hits just the right blend of cockiness, creepiness and charisma to make him a believable bully of a record producer. That the schmaltzy sound he imposes on Simon is so far afield from most of Lou’s real-life work is a nice little in-joke for hep viewers. If nothing else, this movie allows us to see Lou Reed share a scene with Rip Torn, and for that we should be forever grateful.

Final Weapon (2010)
I haven’t been able to track down this Minnesota-made short film, but the trailer tells me it’s a martial arts movie with a score and guest appearance by Lou Reed. Why is Lou Reed in a low-budget, 15-minute, Minnesotan martial arts movie? I assume it’s because the film involves t’ai chi, and Lou loves t’ai chi. Judging by the trailer, his role requires him to sit quietly and look portentious. I have to admit he’s good at that.

All told, that’s not a half-bad acting résumé. Still, Lou’s finest performance in front of a camera will always be this:

The Great Unheard: The Dick Nixons - "Paint the White House Black"

Welcome to the first installment in a sporadic series of posts about some of my personal favorite albums that somehow never caught on with the public at large. I'm writing about them because hey, somebody oughta. First up: The Dick Nixons' 1992 LP Paint the White House Black.





The Dick Nixons may be my favorite politically conscious punk band ever, inasmuch as fanatical dedication to Richard Nixon counts as political consciousness. How a Louisiana-based garage punk quartet with a singer who sounded like a more manic Bobcat Goldthwait and a lyric book devoted almost exclusively to the 37th president failed to conquer the early 1990s music scene is beyond me, but those were different times.

 

On paper, The Dick Nixons sure sound like a novelty act, but in practice… well, they were pretty much the definition of a novelty act, but a damn good one. I was a dorky teenager when I discovered a cassette copy of 1992’s Paint the White House Black (their only full-length album, so far as I can tell, and one whose title predates the George Clinton song of the same name) in a cut-out bin at Sam Goody in the Mall of America, of all places. As a kid who counted The Dead Milkmen and They Might Be Giants among the five greatest bands on Earth, 15-year-old me was pretty much obligated to gamble three bucks on a funny-named band with song titles like “Do the Dick Nixon” and “Ping Pong Ball Head.”

 

What little fame the Dick Nixons attained was largely due to the promotional efforts of Mr. Mojo Nixon (no relation), who took an understandable liking to the band. There’s definitely something of the Mojo touch to the Nixons’ style, but with less country/rockabilly influence. They also owe a lot to the goofy punk sounds of The Ramones, the trash-rock clatter of Sam the Sham and The Pharaohs, the smart-ass pop knock-offs of John Fred and his Playboy Band and the sardonic sociology of Frank Zappa. That’s a pretty lofty pedigree, but I think The Dick Nixons are worthy of it.

 

Over the course of half and hour or so, the Nixons wax joyfully nostalgic about Richard M. Nixon, painting him as an eternally hip, unfairly maligned victim of a shadowy political conspiracy. In the universe of Paint the White House Black, Nixon stands tall as “an honest man who brought the boys home from Vietnam” and “the one true, pure American.” It’s all tongue-in-cheek, obviously, but it’s delivered with such conviction that you almost believe they believe it. Singer and lyricist Kirk “The Jerk” Springstone (who died in 2009, sadly) squawks every line in that aforementioned Bobcat Goldthwait voice, tinged with a swampbilly accent that sometimes sounds like a foreign language. The homemade trashiness of their sound was no accident – multi-instrumentalist Johnny Radical incorporated a wide range of found objects, and drummer “Professor” McCormick’s kit included a literal trash can. It’s no surprise that most of the mentions of the Dick Nixons that I’ve found online are fans gushing about the band’s ‘80s live sets.

 

Even a single-issue political cult can’t be all-Nixon, all the time, and so Paint the White House Black is padded out with some apolitical material. The Nixonless originals are a little too jokey for my taste (although “MTV” has its charm as the band’s blatant attempt to “Cover of the Rolling Stone” themselves onto 120 Minutes), but the covers are pretty fun. I’m partial to any band that fills out an album with loony punk renditions of “Red Red Wine,” “Knock Three Times,” Kenny Rogers’ “Lucille” and an old Chef Boyardee jingle, especially in the pre-Me First and the Gimme Gimmes era.

 

Paint the White House Black is long since out of print, but it can be found online pretty cheap and it’s streamable on Grooveshark. One more special note of personal resonance before I sign off: my first kiss was set to The Dick Nixons’ “Tricky Dick (Was a Rock-N-Rolla)” squalling out of the speakers of my 1986 Chevy Caprice Classic. I didn’t plan it that way, but I’ll be damned if I could have picked a better soundtrack.

 

The four most Minnesotan moments in 'Fargo'

When folks from other parts of the country learn I live in Minnesota, they usually ask three things: 1) Does it really get that cold there? 2) Do you know Prince? 3) Is it just like Fargo? The answers are, of course, 1) Yes. 2) No. 3) Sorta. The Coen brothers’ classic isn’t a documentary by any means, but it gets a lot of things exactly right.

"Well, that don't sound like too good a deal for him, then." 

I know quite a few Minnesotans who resent Fargo because “we don’t really talk like that.” It’s true that some of the accents are far broader than you’ll usually hear in the Twin Cities metro region, but some are so spot-on that all is forgiven. No performance is more Minnesotan than Bain Boehlke as the deadpan Mr. Mora, the bartender who takes a break from shoveling to tip the cops off to a funny-looking guy “goin’ crazy out dere at da lake.”  My mom’s family is from Coon Lake, a rural community about 30 miles north of Saint Paul. If one of her uncles had ever been a vital witness in a murder case, the police interview would have sounded almost exactly like this.

Good Company

Steve and Sharon Edelman are members of the Minnesota Broadcasting Hall of Fame for good reason. Their dopey, cheery chat show Good Company was a local institution throughout the ‘80s, an oasis of gentle good-nature in the desert of daytime TV depravity. In other words, it’s exactly what a suburban housewife like Jean Lundegaard would be chuckling softly at over her knitting on a snowy weekday afternoon.

“It’s always more!”

The most unsung hero of the Fargo ensemble is Gary Houston as the frustrated customer trying to cut through Jerry Lundegaard’s car dealer double-speak. He embodies Minnesota Nice stretched to its breaking point. Everything about his delivery of “You lied to me, Mr. Lundegaard. You’re a bald-faced liar. A… fffucking liar!” is Minnesotan to the core. As angry as he is, he still addresses Jerry as “Mr. Lundegaard” in a show of respect for his position, and of disappointment that Jerry isn’t earning that respect. And then there’s that brief pause. That split second of silence tells us that this is a guy who never curses. Even here, in a situation that obviously calls for it, he has to psych himself up before pulling out the big guns. (Jerry has a point, though. In a Minnesota winter, you’re gonna want the Tru-Coat.)

Jerry’s frozen meltdown

Granted, Jerry is venting frustration with something a little bigger than a Minnesota winter here. Still, there’s not a motorist in the upper Midwest who can’t sympathize with this scene. The misery of chopping away at a thick-caked windshield, knowing that the immediate reward for your labor will be a soul-killing commute down ice-slicked highways, is enough to make anybody flip out. What makes this scene quintessentially Minnesotan, though, is Jerry’s follow-up to his brief tantrum. He picks up the scraper, collects himself and gets back to the loathsome task at hand. That’s what you do in these parts, mainly because it’s all you can do.

5 pop-culture baby names my son almost got stuck with

My son Selby was born three years ago today. His name was inspired by Selby Avenue, a major thoroughfare in our neighborhood of Saint Paul. My wife and I chose it because we wanted to give our boy a constant reminder of his roots and the city that spawned him. As he’s grown older, our strategy seems to be working. Now that he’s a cognizant toddler, he is delighted to know that there’s a street with his name.

Many of my writerly friends assumed that the name was a tribute to the late author Hubert Selby, Jr. I’ve never been a huge fan of that Selby’s work, but I can see why they’d think that. For one, Hubert Selby was a major influence on Lou Reed, and my dedication to all things Lou is well documented. For two, Mr. Selby was writer in residence at Columbia College Chicago not long before I started grad school there, and served as a mentor to many of my most beloved and respected colleagues. For three, I’m exactly the kind of pop-culture spewing dweeb who would saddle his kid with a sly tribute to some book, TV show or movie. As proof, here are five baby names that got strong consideration before Selby was born.

Gobias

In its original airing, Arrested Development was something like a religion in my household, so it was only natural that it would come into consideration when baby names were on the table. We talked about “GOB,” we talked about “Tobias,” and then we remembered that duo’s ill-fated business partnership, Gobias Industries. (“As in, ‘Gobias some coffee!’”) I don’t  recall the specific reason that this delightful portmanteau got bumped from the list. I suspect it was mainly on grounds of sheer goofiness, and the knowledge that no one would ever pronounce it correctly.

Omar

My wife will tell you that she immediately vetoed this pick, but I still spent a few weeks brainstorming ways to win her over to naming our innocent newborn after The Wire’s shotgun-toting anti-hero. Now that I’m a few years removed from watching The Wire, I can admit that I’m glad she prevailed, especially since seemingly half of my friends have named household pets after Wire characters. At the time, though, I thought we were doing a serious disservice to the boy’s future street cred.

Jasper

Jasper is a fine, old-fashioned name with a certain elegance about it. It’s also the name of a weird old man on The Simpsons, which is what brought it into serious contention for us. Unfortunately, it’s also also the name of a character in the Twilight novels. When we added that connection to the current upswell in old-timey baby names, we decided there was just too great a chance of a Jasper boom. (I do frequently employ Jasper’s immortal quote, “Sidewalk’s for regular walkin’, not fancy walkin’” when we take the boy out for strolls around the neighborhood.

Bachmann

My wife introduced me to the music of Archers of Loaf during my freshman year of college, and our admiration of Archers front man Eric Bachmann only grew when he launched the incredible Crooked Fingers. “Bachmann” looked like a clear front-runner for roughly one afternoon. Then we remembered that we lived in Minnesota, where people would almost certainly assume our son was named after another, considerably less awesome Bachmann.

Venture

My wife and I are both huge fans of The Venture Bros, Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick’s reliably brilliant action-adventure parody cartoon. Even though 90% of the characters on the show are reprehensible failures, the series – as well as the word “venture” itself – still maintains a sense of wonder, innovation and excitement that we wanted to instill in our son. 

This name actually made our final two. It wasn’t until we were all alone with our brand new baby boy that we were able to make a decision. Looking at that weird little lump of wrinkly pink flesh taking his first nap on his mother’s chest, we both agreed that he was Selby, not Venture. In the end it was the only name that fit, and now I can’t imagine calling him anything else.

"Goodbye, Mr. Phipps" or "My Life With The AV Club"

One summer day in 1996 my pal Nathan came home from a trip to Madison with a stack of hard-to-find CDs, all-natural cigarettes and free alternative newspapers. While we listened to the CDs in his parents’ living room, I flipped through the papers. It was mostly the usual political ranting and ponderous stabs at art that I’d come to expect from college-town publications, but one paper grabbed my attention and wouldn’t let go. It was, of course, The Onion.

I’d never seen anything like The Onion. It was satire so well-written and straight-faced that it took me half an article to realize that it actually was satire. I spent the better part of the afternoon cracking the hell up and quoting lines at an increasingly annoyed Nathan, who had already read and had his own laugh at all of the articles.

Not long after that I started dating a girl who owned a huge stash of Onion back issues, sent to her by a friend at the University of Wisconsin. I started making a habit of dropping by her house when I knew she had violin practice so I could head up to her room and dig through the stack of homegrown comic genius uninterrupted. Somewhere around the middle of that stack, I launched my love affair with The AV Club.

If you’ve only come to The Onion in the internet age, let me explain the workings of the old print edition. In its earliest days, the paper was available only on newsstands in Madison, Wisconsin. (I believe it expanded to a number of metro regions and the internet some time in the mid ‘90s.) The front half of the paper featured the now-familiar satirical news articles and doctored photographs. The back end was dedicated to comics like Red Meat and Pathetic Geek Stories, Dan Savage’s “Savage Love” column and an assemblage of pop-culture reviews, interviews and features known as The AV Club.

At first the sudden shift from the twisted comedy of The Onion to the funny but straightforward arts journalism of The AV Club was a bit jarring. Before long, though, the writing in The AV Club became every bit as revelatory to me as that of its flashier counterpart. I was 18 and just starting to think seriously about a future as a film critic. Up until this point, my only real influence was Roger Ebert. I read and re-read my local library’s scanty selection of Ebert’s film essay collections until I could quote them as readily as I could the films he wrote about. I learned scads about the craft of arts writing from those books, but it wasn’t until I discovered The AV Club that I saw film criticism as something I might actually be able to do.

The writing in The AV Club was briefer, more sardonic and generally less self-referential than Ebert’s. Ebert wrote thoughtful, passionate essays drawn from years of life experience and an endless font of cinematic knowledge. I loved reading it, but it was more than a little intimidating. The AV Club, on the other hand, was almost as brilliant yet still felt like something I could write myself.

Their reviews in particular struck me as utterly fearless. Their Happy Gilmore review, for instance, just read (and I’m paraphrasing) “Fuck golf, fuck Adam Sandler and fuck this movie.” That type of dismissive scatology is par for the internet course nowadays, but at the time I’d never seen anything of the sort. Likewise, I can’t say for sure that the AV Club writers coined the now ubiquitous practice of referring to all ill-conceived movie sequels as “[Movie Title] 2: Electric Boogaloo,” but I know I first saw it in their write-up of Lawnmower Man 2. (The review itself was just a non-verbal jumble of letters, another brilliant touch.)

I elevated the names of the regular AV Club contributors – Keith Phipps, Nathan Rabin, Scott Tobias – to my personal pantheon of writerly heroes. I’d even say their work played a big role in emboldening me to go out and grab my first paid writing gig. A week or two after graduating high school, I strolled into my local newspaper and asked the editor for a weekly movie review column. To my surprise, he accepted my demands, and my career was thus launched. In hindsight, my first reviews were a shameless, shoddy pastiche of Roger Ebert and the AV Club house style, but a fair number of people in the greater Sparta, Wisconsin area read them and liked them.

I’ve been writing about the arts professionally ever since – film, music, books and now theater – and I’ve never let The AV Club out of my sights. It’s grown along with me, moving from an afterthought for Onion fans to a stand-alone site to something of a pop culture juggernaut. Stephen Thompson’s expert editorial guidance gave the site its unique voice in the early years before giving way to founding writer Keith Phipps. On Phipps’ watch, the Club quickly evolved beyond its irreverent roots and became one of the web’s most dependable fonts of thoughtful, readable cultural analysis. The staff too moved beyond that early house style and developed distinctive voices. Nathan Rabin took a page from Roger Ebert and started to blend personal essays into his reliably hilarious film analyses. Noel Murray got even more personal as he used pop-culture as a jumping off point for insightful penetrations into American identity. Donna Bowman introduced a more scholarly tone that ripped open familiar entertainments and exposed the complex, fascinating inner workings that made them tick. (Her enthralling analysis of all five seasons of NewsRadio remains perhaps my favorite bit of pop culture writing ever.)

Heck, the AV Club comments section even led me to a vast network of online friends, many of whom I talk to nearly daily on Twitter and Facebook. Those interactions have confirmed for me that the AV Club attracts one of the wittiest, most intelligent fan bases on the web – in other words, people like me (he said humbly). I can’t think of another community that would have brought together so many people who can engage me in debates about the best David Bowie album (It’s Diamond Dogs, obviously), take my advice on what book to read next (some good Faulkner or Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter) or actually derive mild amusement from my jokes about Robert Altman’s Quintet.

Even though The AV Club brought us together, there’s a sizable contingent of folks who have drifted away from the site. There are a few who never miss a chance to denigrate the direction it’s taken in recent years. The standard roster of complaints holds that the writers spend too much time navel-gazing, that the site leans too heavily on side projects like podcasts and videos, that corporate sponsorships have tainted the arts coverage, and that the expansion of the writing staff has watered down the overall quality of the journalism.

I suppose I can see where they’re coming from, but I mostly chalk it up to the American tendency to attack greatness for not being perfection. For one thing, I know how hard it is for anyone to make anything like a living in the arts-writing world, and it makes me happy to see some of the good ones pulling it off. For another thing, I’ve seen a lot of changes in the AV Club world over the past decade and a half, but never anything that made me think the site was losing its luster.

When Keith Phipps announced last week that he was leaving his editorial position with The AV Club, it marked the undeniable end of an era for me, as it know it did to thousands of other loyal readers. As both an editor and a writer, Phipps steered the site smoothly through an era of unprecedented journalistic change, building it into a thriving online enterprise while hundreds of similar publications crumpled into obscurity. He leaves it in as strong a shape as it’s ever been in.

I don’t know what direction the site will take in Phipps’ absence, but I have faith that it’ll remain on the straight and narrow. Sure, not everything they publish is to my tastes, nor should it be. But so long as they keep producing inventories that guide me to previously undiscovered films and music, so long as they provide thoughtful, thought-provoking analyses of the artistic endeavors that color my world, so long as they run ridiculously engaging features like Will Harris’ incomparable “Random Roles” interviews, the AV Club will have a home in my bookmarks.

Goodbye, Mr. Phipps, and thanks for all you’ve given me.