John McCoy

Hello (again) World!

I was feeling a bit down the other day, what with (gestures at everything), and I said to myself, what I really need to do is some old-fashioned blogging, the kind from 1999, when the Internet was a wild an wooly place and SEO meant typing your search terms a few hundred times into your website’s <header>.

I still had an old Blogger site, but I wanted to move to something more contemporary. So here am I at my new WordPress home! Maybe having to pay for hosting this will spur me to write more often; anything’s possible. I have imported the old blog’s content but some of it glitched out, and some of it embarrasses me, so I am pruning a lot of the old content, and will continue to. Sorry if you are a completionist? I guess your best bet is the Internet Archive.

Anyway, to reintroduce myself: I’m John McCoy. I am married (for 35 years!) to a beautiful philosophy professor who is smarter than me and dad to two kids who are a biochemist and a medical student and will therefore be richer than me. On the Internet I’m best known for being older brother to my more famous sibling, Dan, of the comedy Flop House podcast. But I am second best known for my own, only occasionally funny podcast, Sophomore Lit. The tagline for this podcast is “where we re-read your 10th grade reading list,” and in the beginning my goal was to focus on stuff you only read in high school, like Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mockingbird. Also I wanted it to be silly. But as time went by two things happened: first, I ran through the obvious list of books, and second, I found that my guest hosts and listeners were genuinely interested in having a podcast that discussed formative literature sincerely. So these days episodes might be about kids’ books, like The Twenty-0ne Balloons, or things you might have read in college, like the Bell Jar. Anyway I’ve been doing this podcast since my mid-forties and now…I’m not in my mid-forties.

Speaking of kids’ books, Phil Gonzales of the Deep in Bear Country podcast and I did a podcast called Klickitcast, where we read through the entirety of Beverly Cleary’s books. It took a few years but we made it all the way from Henry Huggins (1950) to Ramona’s World (1999) in 33 episodes. This podcast was always going to end, but it has a special place in my heart and I miss it.

What else? I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder in early 2020, just before the pandemic. Getting a late-life diagnosis was weird enough, but then there followed a sudden explosion of ASD discourse online as folks who became introspective during lock-down got diagnosed, or self-diagnosed, so I guess I was a trend-setter? A lot of people my age would have been clocked as autistic if we knew then what we know now. But self-knowledge is both liberating and anxiety-producing, and I’m still figuring this all out, as I probably will until I die (what we ASDers call “the Great Shutdown”).

Off the Internet, in the real world, I am an Assistant Director at an art museum. This probably isn’t as glamorous as it sounds to you, especially if you are a fan of The Da Vinci Code. But it does mean I get to work with art, and write about art, and plan exhibitions, and help produce exhibitions, and other art-adjacent things. So I am a lucky man.

That’s way more than you need to know about me! So what will this blog be about? Well, anything, I guess, but likely topics are: my podcast, literature, art, comics, autism, typography, art history, traveling, my dog (who I haven’t mentioned yet), creativity, intellectual property, web design, history, parenting, and, I don’t know…maybe a recipe or two?

I hope you’ll find something to think about here, either in the archives of posts I’ve migrated from Blogger or in the posts yet to come. You can also subscribe and get new essays in a convenient e-mail format! I think. I am still figuring that out as well.

There are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven't started wondering about yet

One summer’s day when I was nine or ten I walked into the children’s book room of the small public library in my small midwestern town. The children’s room was in the oldest part of the library, which used to be a single-family Victorian house, and in spite of renovation the space still felt homey in a way I couldn’t express. A shaft of light streamed in through a high window, catching motes of dust and falling on an old wingback chair. There was no one else there—my town had a dearth of readers, at least of my age. On top of a shelf was displayed a copy of James and the Giant Peach; the original edition with the real illustrations by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. This was a book of whose existence I was aware (from lists in Roald Dahl’s other books) but which I had never read. I took the book to the chair and leafed through it and for just a moment, Burkert’s luminous, gauzy illustrations coupled with the sunbeam and I had a sensation of flight and of being unmoored in time. I was entirely alone, and I sat there, a long while, until my mother came looking for me.

Ever since, I have chased after that emotion, whatever it was. I haven’t found it, but I have found other moments as profound and as hard to categorize. When I was a teenager I spent an afternoon walking through snow following rabbit tracks farther and farther out of town. When I hit a stand of trees I looked up to see a flaming sky, more red than I could imagine, as the sun hovered low between branches; it was past dinnertime, and I felt acutely aware of the earth’s rotation. There have been other moments.

Early this year, looking for some answers to depression, lack of direction, and some other troubling personal issues, I had a psych evaluation. I was suspecting a diagnosis of ADHD. Instead, the analyst told me I have a High-functioning Autism, formerly known as Asperger’s Syndrome (before the publication of DSM 5). This came as something of a shock to me. I was 52 and had never suspected. Asperger’s has only been a diagnoses since 1992, and I was in graduate school by then. When I relayed this information to friends and family, I found that some shared my surprise, but other shrugged and said it figured. I thought about my social anxiety, my tendency to be quiet and then speak in stuttering bursts, my inability to hold eye contact, and eventually I realized that yeah, it pretty much figured.

The thing I think about most is the number of times in my life people have said to me, “John, I passed you in the hall and you didn’t even look at me,” or “John, I sent you an email and you never responded,” or “John, is something wrong? You’re not looking at me, and you look upset.” Actually these observations have often been made by others to my wife, Marina, who has dutifully and patiently told everyone that yes, John likes you, it’s nothing you did, that’s just how he is. When you get to know him, he’ll talk your ear off.

I worry about my diagnosis. I don’t want to be rude to people, I want them to like me. I don’t want to be awkward. Why did I never suspect this basic fact about myself? Is it something I can compensate for, or is this just me? Can I be present for friends and family, or am I always going to live in my head?

I was discussing my anxieties to a good friend over Zoom—he was one of those who was entirely unsurprised by my revelation. He had for many years dated a woman with HFA, and he found her delightful. “It’s a wonderful gift you have. You have all these interests and ideas and you live this interior life that is rich and expansive. You give everyone else a different perspective.”

Yes, I said, but I also confuse people. And I push them away, and I need so much time to myself.

“But you care about other people. And they can feel that. And the rest you can work out.”

Shortly after this conversation I was on a morning COVID walk with Marina—we have spent the long days of pandemic isolation becoming minutely familiar with local parks—and I through the trees I had a fleeting glimpse of the library and the sunlight and the peach, and something like the memory of flight. I realized that my solitary childhood reveries were also a gift from this condition, and I realized that whatever challenges my mind may pose, it has more moments to give.

Live fast, fight well, and have a beautiful ending

In spite of being a tiny town surrounded by endless fields of corn and soybeans, Eureka, Illinois used to have a small movie theater, the Woodford, whose Art Deco stylings dated to 1937. It had once been charming (or at least serviceable) enough, seating 400, but the time I knew it in the 70’s the theater had become a sad thing, with patches of the original carpeting replaced here and there by linoleum, haphazard electrical conduit tracing the walls like vine, and a semi-functional bathroom the size of phone booth (all my references date me) whose pull-chain toilet had seen the end of tens of thousands of movie-goers.

The Woodford Theater had settled to the bottom of the distributional food chain, showing second-run movies three times a week and softcore exploitation films late Friday nights. Within a few years, VCRs would kill the market for both of these services.

In 1980, New World Pictures released Battle Beyond the Stars. Today I know all about Roger Corman and his infamous studio and that this film was conceived as a prestige project for the company, a retelling of The Magnificent Seven but with its cowboys in space (there is an actual character in the movie called “Space Cowboy”). It even has a screenplay by indie darling John Sayles. But at the time I was 12 and all I knew was that an article in Starlog was calling this a more adult version of Star Wars and Star Wars was the Best in Life. The movie did star John-Boy from the Waltons, and I was not a fan that show, but probably he wasn’t so important, right?

My brother and I went to see it on “opening” night, which was probably a month or so after it had been in release. The crowd of maybe 60 or so was mostly bored kids who didn’t have a license or a car and couldn’t make it to Peoria and so were stuck sitting here in the theater’s torn, creaking seats. The audiences at the Woodford were always noisy, but for some reason that night the movie was late in starting, and stray pieces of popcorn were already being lobbed in lazy arcs. Twenty minutes past screentime, the house lights were still on. A chant went up: “Lights! Lights!” The lights went down, but still no picture. The audience booed. Then at last the credits began: cheers! But why was there no music? Some ugly murmuring. The first scene, involving the destruction of a peaceful spaceship by a looming alien warcraft played out in complete silence. “Sound! Sound!” went a new chant, but no sound came through the expository sequences, which consisted mostly of a scene of a futuristic city where John-Boy and his compatriots stood around in robes and stared at the invaders’ ship. As it became apparent that no dialog would be forthcoming, the audience began to yell questions: “What’s even happening?” “Why are they just standing there?” and “Where’s Jim-Bob?” Someone started to sing the Star Wars theme and many people joined in.

About ten minutes into the movie, the sound abruptly came on with a deafening crack of static, and the audience cheered. John-Boy was in a spaceship: a bulbous, sagging form that looked as if it could use a space bra, flying away from his besieged planet, adjusting some instruments and talking to his ship’s computer, which had a sassy woman’s voice and calls him “kid”—and then the image froze, followed by the classic bubbling and melting of scorched celluloid, and there was a riot of teens and pre-teens jumping out of their seats and tossing Jolly Ranchers at the projection booth. The lights came up and an usher walked in, half-heartedly held up his hands in a gesture of quieting, and then shrugged and left. The lights went down again and now there was a scene involving a lizard man talking to a captive woman strung up by her hands in some futuristic cell. “What the F—K?” yelled an older kid from the front row and the usher reappeared. “No language. Watch the goddamn movie,” he barked.

Every character had a defining tic or phrase that the audience picked up and responded to. Space Cowboy would mention at every opportunity that he came from Earth and so whenever a scene cut to him someone would shout “from Planet Earth” before Vaughn could. The sound continued to die for minutes at a time and during these moments the crowd yelled out catchphrases, sound effects, and expletives, but the usher did not return. There was no need; the atmosphere had changed from surly and combative to giddy, engaged, and even strangely affectionate. We had long ago given up on the movie as a movie and had moved on to the movie as a Happening. To be honest, I don’t remember much about the movie’s second half. I remember people cheering whenever Sybil Danning or Robert Vaughn showed up to chew more scenery; mock-sobbing whenever one of the ragtag group of defenders met a violent end; and jumping out of their seats in delight whenever the sound cut or the film broke, which it did many times. Eventually the film ended and the audience rose to a standing ovation.

The plot of Battle Beyond the Stars, such as it is, involves John-Boy’s character traveling through space to secure the aid of mercenaries to fight back his planets’ invaders, since his home world is aggressively pacifistic, as befits an alien culture based entirely on white robes and large crystals. He meets aliens wearing space-clown makeup who have third eyes, as well as an intergalactic trucker named Space Cowboy, played by Space Robert Vaughn (space slumming it). But most memorably for the crowd reaction, he meets a Space Valkyrie portrayed by Sybil Danning, a warrior in a metal bikini and winged headpiece who lounges reclined in her fighter ship with the camera shot straight up her heaving bosom. When she delivered her lines about the glories of the warrior life in as low a register as she could manage, her chest rose and fell with such force that the audience began to breathe loudly along with her in an imitation of Darth Vader.

In this post- Mystery Science Theater world we are familiar with the joys of bad movies, of Troll 2 and The Room. Battle Beyond the Stars is not a great film, nor do I think that it’s hilariously awful—it’s just a hack job from a time when there was a theatrical market for knockoffs of other, better movies. I wouldn’t recommend watching it today on DVD or YouTube, even ironically. But that experience, in that sad little broken-down movie house was one of the most joyful I have known.

Within three years of this screening, the Woodford Theatre closed. Today the building is a thrift store.