Flip You for Real: Am I Crazy?

My Books

I was Assistant Editor on Paul D. Miller a.k.a DJ Spooky's Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, about which Laurie Anderson said, "What a marvelous collection! I love this book!"

My first book, Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes, is an anthology of interviews with all kinds of minds. Disinformation named it "among the most important books published in 2007," and Erik Davis called it "a crisp and substantial remix of the major memes of the last decade or so."

I have a little piece in Disinformation's first book, You Are Being Lied To, a compendium of dissent, which also includes essays by Noam Chomsky, Howard Bloom, Douglas Rushkoff, Howard Zinn, Richard Metzger, Alex Burns, and Mark Pesce, among many others.

Flip You for Real: Am I Crazy?

February 11th, 2012 | One Comment | Category: Marginalia, Videos

Bear with me for a second here… A couple of years ago, my friend and longtime skateboarding partner Greg Siegfried lent me the Thelonius Monk documentary, Straight, No Chaser (1988). Wait, let me back up: I’ve watched The Usual Suspects (1995) dozens of times. It’s one of those heist movies that rewards you with something new upon repeated viewings. So, while watching the Thelonius Monk joint, I saw a scene that freaked me out in its similarity to a scene in The Usual Suspects. Benicio Del Toro’s character, Fred Fenster, talks in an English so broken as to be blurred with a day of beers. During the interrogation montage early in the film, which serves to introduce “the usual suspects,” Del Toro seems to be channeling Thelonius Monk. I have embedded both clips below so you can assure me that I’m not crazy.

Thelonius Monk [runtime: 0:28]:

The Usual Suspects [runtime: 0:11]:

So, am I crazy? Does anyone know if Benicio Del Toro was deliberately channeling Thelonius Monk for this role? It flips me for real.

Further Posting:

One Comment »

Roy Christopher (author) said:

My friend Mark Wieman found this on Dusted Magazine:

Thelonious Monk in the movie Straight, No Chaser:
Have you guys noticed that Benicio Del Toro based his character Fenster from The Usual Suspects on Monk in this film? He totally did, check it out. There’s even one point where they both say “I’ll flip you- flip you for real.”

I am now officially sanguine that I am indeed sane.

# February 12th, 2012 at 10:27 am

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I marshal the middle between Mathers and McLuhan.

My main interests are figurative language use and the social impacts of technology. My main goal as a writer is to entertain and as a scientist is to find novelty. I’m more of the former than the latter and more of a fan than a critic.

I'm currently a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Communication at The University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as a doctoral student in Communication Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. I'm also working on a book called The Medium Picture, which is under contract with Zer0 Books and will be out in the near future. This site is where I think aloud about all of the above. Read on »