Unpublished
Temping in Hell – the true and terrible story of the last temp job I ever took back when I lived in Los Angeles in the mid-90′s. Originally it was written for a start-up magazine back when no one had quite figured out that the internet was going to eat their lunch.
The Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot – this was originally written for NY Press but they ultimately rejected it because they felt that it wasn’t ideologically correct enough. It’s a bit like when I covered a Bollywood film awards concert out in New Jersey back in 2000 and my editor at New York Magazine insisted that I only interview “fanboys from the city” (ie, white people) because the readers wouldn’t be interested in “the rest of them” meaning the tens of thousands of South Asians at the event. Things got a bit heated between us and she killed the piece because it wasn’t “relatable” enough. Anyways, this piece isn’t ideologically pure. I’m about as big of a bleeding heart liberal as you’ll find, and I really hate private handgun ownership, but I wrote about what I saw and what I saw wasn’t what NY Press wanted me to have seen. Later, Esquire (I think it was) published a piece on the Knob Creek Machine Gun shoot that demonized it pretty thoroughly which just goes to show that either I was very, very naive or I didn’t have good career-preservation instincts.
The New York Sun
The New York Sun Review Archive – as the lowest-paid, most disposable film reviewer at the New York Sun I spent years of my life reviewing movies that the rest of the critics would not have touched with a ten-foot pole: kiddie flix, black (aka “urban”) movies, romantic comedies, documentaries that played for a week and then vanished into the mists of obscurity, Asian films, b-list action pictures. Now you can read these reviews for yourself and decide if it’s true that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, or if it just makes you irritating.
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Slate
Years ago, Michael Agger wrote a piece for the New Yorker about me. It starts, “Grady Hendrix does not look like the kind of person who enjoys watching a man masturbate inside a burlap bag while chewing on his own arm…but he is!” This made me very popular with the parents of small children, and I made a lot of money babysitting after this. But I think Michael may have felt remorse over revealing my private life in print, and so when he became an editor at Slate he started hiring me to write lots of articles for them. The money I have earned from him has paid for dozens, if not hundreds, of burlap bags and even, sometimes, people to put in them. So thank you, Michael!
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Leave Giant Squid Alone! – the second piece I ever wrote for Slate, begging for science to stop antagonizing giant squid. I still believe deeply in this cause.
The State of the Ninja – in which I make the case that ninjas are a metaphor for Israel. Even better: read it in French!
Happy Birthday, Jean Claude Van Damme – October 18 is JCVD’s birthday and it is a testament to the uselessness of the United Nations that they cannot convince the entire world to celebrate it. Stupid UN. Also, a review of a Jean Claude Van Damme movie that made me cry like a little girl. Twice.
Super Special Features – my favorite piece for Slate, in which I examine the special features on the DUKES OF HAZZARD DVD. The article is a meta-article that includes commentary and a behind-the-scenes featurette on itself. I think I wrote it back when I still cared.
How To End the World on a Budget – a review of the “Left Behind” movie series. Yes, I watched all of them. Yes, my brain still hurts.
The Danger of DVD Box Sets – this piece about the tyranny of DVD boxed sets made a lot of people angry. Really angry. But then again, what else is the internet for but to magnify irritation over minor annoyances into full-blown, life-consuming rage? That, and porn.
Vampires Suck – you know that lazy tendency right now for people to run down sparkly vampires and go on and on about how Twilight vampires are stupid? First!
Comic Books – I like comic books, but you couldn’t tell it from these three pieces for Slate. The first is a takedown of the most tiresome comic book character ever created: Wolverine. What’s really sad is that when I was 11 years old, Wolverine (drunk, hairy, Canadian) was my template for masculinity. Then I wrote a piece about how Alan Moore’s critically-acclaimed and revolutionary Watchmen was an artistic failure – that was popular! The third piece is an obituary for Steve Gerber, creator of Howard the Duck and the man who not only created a supervillain named Dr. Bong but who also wrote a comic book called Giant Size Man-Thing. If my legacy could be so grand I would die happy, almost immediately.
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Movies
I write a lot about movies. When I was a kid my parents had a subscription to TIME magazine and they applied the same principle to TIME that they did to National Geographic. Namely, they never threw out an issue. Because I was a shut-in, I enjoyed nothing more than going through years and years of TIME back issues and reading and re-reading the movie reviews, then convincing myself I had actually seen the movies in question. This prepared me for many, many different careers, but for some reason I wound up spending a lot of my life writing about movies.
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Vengeance is Theirs – Sight & Sound asked me to write an article about violence in Korean cinema. In the second paragraph I accidentally credited a racist quote from Rex Reed to Andrew Sarris. They never asked me to write for them again.
Hong Kong Horror: the 90′s and Beyond – never have I researched so much, and written so exhaustively on a subject that so few people care about.
Zombies Invade Pakistan – the Variety piece that helped launch the inimitable ZIBAHKHANA into the world, a movie that features the first Muslim midget zombies and Pakistan’s first modern day gore film.
Film Festival Programming – as one of the founders and programmers of the New York Asian Film Festival people are always asking about the glamorous life of people like me who bring film festivals to a world that doesn’t actually need them. Twitch interviewed me about it, and I managed to work in masturbation and use a lot of cuss words. Rock n’roll! I also wrote a piece for Slate years ago about the dark side of film festival work. Don’t read it while you’re eating.
Anita Mui Obituary – according to the Village Voice I wrote this piece for them on New Year’s Eve in 1969. I hope that if I mastered time travel I would have something better to do on New Year’s Eve than to file copy. But I doubt it.
