BNAT 5

OK, Harry, here’s the scoop. This is me:

And this is my good pal and partner in crime Jamie:

You can see why I’m in black and white and he’s in color. It’s just one of those things.

OK. You wanted a picture that expresses who I am. There’s a lot of places I could go with that, but what the hell… here’s St. George-in-the-East.

What the hell? Am I British? Why an old church?

I took this photo while I was in London in 1999; an important part of my visit was my pilgrimage to every single Nicholas Hawksmoor church in London. Hawksmoor was a dangerous man, for his time, building all these funky churches with Grecian mathematical ratios and suchlike pagan homages. You could read Alan Moore’s From Hell to get the low down on old Nicholas, and Moore does it better than I could, but suffice it to say I think Hawksmoor’s sense of proportion and form was rebellious and angry and that his buildings are punk architecture. Never mind the Sex Pistols, here come the 18th century architects. I dig a guy who did his own thing and made it beautiful no matter what anyone else thought of him.

Ever onward…

I live in Boston, Massachusetts. I’m 33. I want to come to BNAT because, frankly, I made it to #2 and it was a total blast. I’ve never had so much fun at the movies. I didn’t get any sleep, I freaked out at the weird Busby Berkeley musical with watermelon, and I generally had a good time. Plus I want to find out if that breakfast was as good as I thought it was, or if I was just starving my ass off and anything would have tasted good.

It was special, to me, flying into Austin for no reason other than to see movies. It was like a little time capsule taking me out of my everyday job and putting me someplace I’d never been before. I want to recapture that feeling, that sense of discovery. Cause in the end, that’s what makes me happy — seeing things I’ve never seen before. (There’re the Hawksmoor churches again.)

All right, what else I got? Favorite movie? Brazil, without question. It’s not the best movie I’ve ever seen but it changed my eyes forever. Before Brazil, I didn’t understand that movies could be transgressive horrible compelling life-changing experiences. I didn’t get that movies weren’t safe. I mean, I’d been seeing family flicks and good Disney animation and all that nice teen stuff and WHAM holy shit what the hell is Terry Gilliam doing? Good times. It will always be my favorite movie. It was the first DVD I bought, in the holy Criterion three DVD case.

What do I do? I’m the Director of Technical Operations for Turbine Entertainment. We make MMORPGs — and I gotta say, my job is a geek’s dream.

And, um, I dunno if you’re cooler than Moriarty. Didn’t really sit down with either of you last time. That may blow my chances, but what the hell, it’s true.

That’s me. On to Jamie Lewandowski, depraved film student.

Whoops, I guess I gave away what he does. He’s studying communications at USF — I used to live in California, during the dot-com boom, which is where I met the guy. He’s around my age, 32. Genuinely good guy. You know how a lot of people will make with the little lies to smooth things over? Jamie is the kind of guy who says “Dude, your girlfriend is kind of a dog.” Not to insult me, but just in case I hadn’t noticed, in a friendly kind of way. This is making him sound terrible, isn’t it?

But I’d rather hang out with him than just about anyone. He came along with me to that BNAT so long ago, and now every year we have this tradition where we do whatever we gotta do to submit our names to you and pray we get in and call each other when we don’t get in and make disappointed noises. It’s been good times so far, but we’re hoping you screw up our plans this year and let us in. I’m not sure how we’d react.

Oh, and I will once again do the puppy eyes thing and point out that he’s in California and I’m in Boston (which I whined about last year, but what the hell) so this is like our big chance to get together in a cool fulfilling film geek kind of a way.

He says, on the phone, “I don’t know what my favorite movie is — that’s a really tough question. This year? Lost in Translation was really good. All time? Um… Big Trouble in Little China is always a good fallback, but I dunno… crap. Tell Harry it’s Jackie Brown. I just watched it again and it was better than Pulp Fiction and I liked it a lot, so tell him Jackie Brown. But tell him the question is ass, there’s no way to answer that one.” See what I mean about how he doesn’t hold back?

Of course, he doesn’t like Geena Davis, so what the hell does he know?

So. That’s me, and that’s Jamie, and there are the pictures, and there’s what I think is important about us. He’s without Internet right now, so he had to go scramble all over San Francisco to get me that picture. OK, that’s not really all that much of a hardship, but — we wanna go to BNAT.

Magic word?

Please.