The latest #SethBuyMeLunch lunch transpired on an objectively perfect Los Angeles day at The Trails in Griffith Park, which would be a wonderful place to hang out, if it weren’t filled with attractive, successful people. Andrew Lee Richey and I ate healthful and inoffensive sandwiches (avocado and egg salad, respectively) on a concrete picnic table in 76-degree shade, and for a while all was right with the world.
Andrew opened with the risky gambit of asking if I was familiar with the company that makes a vegetarian substitute for human flesh.1 He went on to propose a name in the event that anyone ever creates vegetarian sheep testicles: “fauxnads.” I considered setting something on fire to create a diversion and escape, but by then we’d already ordered.
In truth, Andrew’s a smart, friendly guy. He showed up in a T-shirt reading “Deep Thinker,” excusable because he holds an actual masters degree in Philosophy from Florida State University. I was unaware that Florida had legalized philosophy. Born in Detroit, raised in Tennessee, educated in Florida, a few years ago Andrew decided to become a professional writer. So he drove from Boston to LA in three days, alone and tweaked on Adderall. He’s one of those comedy types who can actually recognize TV writers when he sees them in bars,2 and he endeared himself to me permanently when he said that he wrote a spec for Doctor Who (Tenth Doctor). He says he “will go toe-to-toe with anyone on Seventies-era Doctor Who knowledge,” so if you’re up for it, you know where to find him.
Andrew admirably makes concerted studies of film genres and artists that he wants to learn about, say by watching 20 French New Wave flicks in a row, so we ended up spending most of the time talking about movies. I had a proud, shining moment when he asked me if I’d ever seen David Blair’s 1991 experimental video Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, and I replied “oh sure” before he’d even finished saying the title. Andrew was taken aback and claimed that I’m the only person he’d ever met who’d seen it, barring those he’d forced to watch it. My good friend, the New York playwright and performer Tom X. Chao, insisted we go see at MoMA in the late Nineties and, even with my very own film-school degree, it’s one of the few experimental films that’s stuck with me. Turns out it’s a personal obsession of Andrew’s. He owns two copies on VHS and claims that Wax comes closer than anything else he’s experienced to replicating “the effect of hallucinogens on the brain.” An effect enhanced, I assume, by the consumption of imitation people meet.
Since it’s Halloween, I’ll end with a line from Wax that I wrote down immediately after getting home from that screening 14 years ago and for some reason have always remembered: “Because they were the dead, they wanted only vengeance.”
Follow Andrew on Twitter at @staircaseghost, And if you live in LA and want a free lunch from me, just tweet #SethBuyMeLunch on Monday. Details here.
----- For the record, I wasn’t. It’s the defunct Hufu, as in “human tofu.” [↩]
- Tip: they’re the ones who can’t figure out how to split the check. [↩]
