Patrick Cassels: Internet Enthusiast

"Don't Point That Gun at Him, He's An Unpaid Intern"

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 23:45:00 -0400

This week, the website I write for hired a new editorial intern named Conor McKeon. This excites me not only because it means I’ll no longer be the only one removing everyone’s yogurt lids at lunch, but also because Conor has been one of the most consistently clever contributers to “105%,” a column of short humor I edit.

Here are some of McKeon’s Greatest Hits (available on 2 compact discs!):

-I figured I had failed my company’s drug test because I put “C” for every answer. Turns it they just wanted a urine sample. I was really high that day.

-I ran into a friend yesterday and he asked me to help him move, but I didn’t feel like it so I said I had other plans. I just hope for his sake someone said yes and he isn’t still in the middle of road, sitting in his wheelchair.

-I was in the hospital and I heard from one of the rooms, “Don’t worry everyone, I’m gonna beat this thing.” Which I thought was a really positive thing to say, until I realized it came from the maternity ward.

Draperism of the Week

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 23:58:00 -0400

“Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe — every woman is one of them.”

—Paul Kinsey, Mad Men

One of the best recurring scenes from one of the best current TV shows, Mad Men, is the moment, present in almost every episode, when Don Draper says to his staff or clients an advertising fact that inadvertently encapsulates some tremendous truth about America, or about humanity in general. Like his American Airlines pitch from a recent episode: “There is no American ‘history.’ There is only a frontier.” Or his teary-eyed Kodak pitch from last year’s season finale.

This week, however, it was copywriter/aspiring poet Paul Kinsey who had the rare privilege of stealing the Draperism from Don: “Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe — every woman is one of them.”

Of course, it’s is a horribly misogynistic and narrow-minded observation, but haven’t most of Mad Men’s best lines always been? (Remember when Roger Sterling called female psychiatry “this year’s candy-pink stove?”) Besides, when your last name is Kinsey and it’s the early-’60s, you’re pretty-much required to make controversial observations about women.

P.S. In other incredibly urgent Mad Men fan news, I finally found a copy of one of Season 1’s best closing songs online: A creepy version of the hymn “By the Waters of Babylon,” specially recorded for the show (which may explain the difficulty in finding an mp3 without buying the soundtrack).

P.P.S. I’m pretty sure the screen-cap above was the reason desktop wallpapers were invented.

The cozy Old Town Bar on 18th Street is fast becoming my...

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 19:37:00 -0400

The cozy Old Town Bar on 18th Street is fast becoming my favorite after-work dive — except for this photo, hung on the Old Town wall, of Dustin Hoffman visiting the bar framed with the VHS box for Ishtar, a movie widely considered to be one of the biggest flops of all time. Couldn’t the manager have chosen Rain Man, or Tootsie, or The Graduate, or virtually any other film in Mr. Hoffman’s near-flawless resume?

Not pictured: Ralph Fiennes framed with an Avengers poster.

Guns! Bombs! Textiles! Web 2.0!

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 01:05:00 -0400

Building ownership is something I’m not generally familiar with, much for the same reason I don’t know the slope difficulty at Gstaad: I’m numerous financial brackets and two giant student loans away from such knowledge ever being relevant to me. On the rare occasion when I do successfully identify a building’s owner, the place usually has a helpful name like Trump Plaza, or Vanderbilt Mansion, or Kennedy’s Chicken.

Earlier this afternoon, however, my co-workers and I conducted a minor end-of-summer cleaning around our corner of the office, which got me thinking about our workplace in a more physical sense than I normally do, which in turn got me thinking about the 19-story Manhattan high-rise on which our office sits.

What a Google-level archival search revealed about my office and William H. Wood, the textile tycoon who built it, was far more fascinating — and depressing — than I could have ever imagined. (Be warned: this story includes both a handgun and lots and lots of bombs.)

According to an online review of Edward G. Roddy’s biography Mills, Mansions and Mergers: The Life of William Wood, the American Woolen Building was commissioned in 1909 by Wood, an ambitious and brilliant businessman. Unfortunately, “ambitious businessman” is 1900’s slang for “worked his underpaid employees like broken mules.” Just look how Wood handled the mill-worker union’s demand for a shorter workweek:

“He did cut the work week from fifty-six hours to fifty-four hours, but he also increased the speed at which the looms ran in order to keep from losing profits. The workers were angry that they were working just as hard and producing just as much as they would in a fifty-six hour week, but only getting paid for fifty-four hours. During the strike, the police found explosives in three different places along the mills.”

Wood’s history ends on an equally intriguing (though far more depressing) note…

“On February 2, 1926 William Wood had his chauffeur take him for a drive. Once they were on a deserted road, he got out of the car, walked out of his driver’s sight, pulled out his revolver, placed it in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and ended his own life.”

Before taking his own life, I wonder if Mr. Wood imagined that the New York headquarters of his 40,000-employee textile empire would someday be populated by (among others) the individuals responsible for this.

P.S. It occurs to me that my office is also home to a website that designs and sells funny T-shirts. So, in a way, BustedTees.com is carrying on the legacy of a suicidal, turn-of-the-century cotton-mill owner.

P.P.S. The building also has a carving of a sheep’s head above the main entrance. If any experts on sculpture or gargoyles can shed light on what (if any) the significance of this is, please let me know. Otherwise I’ll go on convinced I’m working in a building full of Pagans.

Seeing wrtier Robert Smigel in-character as his notorious puppet...

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:32:00 -0400

Seeing wrtier Robert Smigel in-character as his notorious puppet alter-ego Triumph the Insult Comic Dog is like seeing the bottom half of Wilson from Home Improvement’s face. You’re fascinated, but deep down you want the illusion to remain. Still, this somewhat-rare snapshot of Smigel manipulating Triumph at July’s Comic-Con 2008 in San Diego tells us two things: (1) puppeteering CAN be cool, and (2) even though he was born in New York and lived in Chicago, Smigel is apparently a Nets fan.

Check out Triumph’s finished Late Night Comic-Con report here.

If You See Only One British Comedian Named Coogan Playing A Director This Month...

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:50:00 -0400

In the past two weeks, I’ve seen two films featuring British comedian Steve Coogan: Ben Stiller’s action-comedy Tropic Thunder and Hamlet 2. Sadly, this amounts to half the Steve Coogan performances I’ve experienced in my entire life (unless you count his single scene as Larry’s therapist in the most recent season of Curb Your Enthusiasm).

More importantly, however, it occurred to me that in both of his recent films Mr. Coogan plays the very specific character of a delusional director frustrated by the craft of acting – either his own (Hamlet 2) or his performers’ (Thunder). (To go further, Mr. Coogan played an equally clueless filmmaker – himself – in the 2005 meta-comedy Tristam Shandy.)

What does this mean? My theory regarding America’s tendency to cast Mr. Coogan as a director or performer in two movies released in two consecutive weeks is that, since the stereotype of the melodramatic actor who takes him or herself too seriously is almost always imagined as British (think Laurence Olivier, or any A-list cameo on Ricky Gervais’s Extras), UK comedians are the most obvious choice to lampoon artists. Or he’s just a very, very funny dude.

Chilean artist Carlos Sabogal has created a photo-realistic...

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 23:36:00 -0400

Chilean artist Carlos Sabogal has created a photo-realistic rendering of Homer’s notoriously hideous concept car from the Season 2 Simpsons episode “Oh Brother Where Art Thou?” Though you can’t experience the multiple “La Cucaracha”-playing horns or the “extremely large beverage holder,” it’s pretty amazing to see in three-dimensions nonetheless.

jeffrubinjeffrubin: …Next two paragraphs for The Wire fans only, especially those who have...

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:29:16 -0400

jeffrubinjeffrubin:

…Next two paragraphs for The Wire fans only, especially those who have seen the new Hulk…

I’ve discovered a great new hobby: Taking lines from my editor Jeff’s wonderfully bizarre pop-cultural ramblings and placing them completely out of context.

If you know Jeff, than the idea of him discussing something that only fans of both a moderately successful HBO crime drama AND a movie about a radioactive giant could make sense of is actually understandable. If you don’t, his words can sound like something you’d hear a homeless TV critic shout on the subway.

Check out this video of Jeff Googling for more out-of-context Rubin.

Curry In My Favor

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 23:17:00 -0400

Recently, my co-worker Sarah — apropo of nothing, mind you — wrote passionately about “the illustrious career of Tim Curry.” Not surprisingly, her words wound up renewing my own curiosity about Mr. Curry.

I’ve never quite understood the cultish fandom of Curry’s most famous film, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (which seems to me nothing more than a 2-hour version of Meat Loaf’s “I Would Do Anything For Love” music video), but the actor will always hold a special place in my heart for two reasons: (1) For his role as the de facto star of Clue, which is probably the funniest film based on a board game ever produced (unless you count the unintentionally funny Dungeons & Dragons), and perhaps more importantly (2) for making Home Alone 2: Lost In New York fun to watch past the age of 14.

In the sequel to Home Alone, Mr. Curry plays a snooty doorman at the Plaza Hotel where Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) sneaks his way in. In the process, Curry, along with Rob Schneider and Dana Ivey, as a trio of bumbling snobs, deliver one of the funniest comedic threesomes of the 1990s. (Yes, even funnier than Tim Taylor’s three sons on Home Improvement.)

It pains me say now, but Culkin’s kid-on-the-loose antics in the film lose a bit of their luster each and every Christmas I dutifully watch Home Alone 2 on Fox. Curry, Schneider & Ivey’s scenes, however, grow only more entertaining to witness. Their undisputed climax in the film occurs as the three are convinced they’re being held at gunpoint by a vicious guest (in reality the audio from a gangster film) in Kevin’s suite.

You can view the scene in all its zany wonder at YouTube (jump to 1:50).

(Site Note: A brief glance at Ms. Ivey’s IMDb page reveals the woman was a queen of big-budget comedies in the late ’80s and early ’90s — with LOL-worthy performances in not only Home Alone 2, but also Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the Sabrina re-make, Sleepless in Seattle, and both Adams Family movies!)

Me and some friends from college have been holding...

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 17:59:00 -0400

Me and some friends from college have been holding psudeo-regular action movie nights, including screenings of Point Break and, last Saturday, Marked for Death starring Steven Segal. Clearly, the plot of Marked for Death is far too complex to summarize here (save for the fact that Segal breaks more elbows than the X-Games). However, my pal Scott noticed the disclaimer above when it scrolled by in the film’s closing credits, which more-or-less summarizes the movie entirely.

(Watch the Marked for Death trailer in all its glory.)

I was destroyed by my editor Jeff in a Super Chexx bubble hockey...

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 07:37:00 -0400

I was destroyed by my editor Jeff in a Super Chexx bubble hockey best-of-three tournament Friday night, leaving this particular coach stunned before a humiliating 4-0 defeat.

The undisputed MVP of the night (as evidenced above by his obvious breakaway) was the little bastard, No. 0, playing centre. He racked up an easy hat-trick against my goalie (who’ll be lucky if he’s driving a Zamboni in Fargo next season, by the way) before firing a game-winning slap-shot into the threads.

Fittingly, I played as Russia, while Jeff represented the USA, making the match more-or-less the Brooklyn equivalent of the 1980 Miracle on Ice — which means Jeff is Herb Brooks (which I suppose makes me Gorbachev or someone).

The Large Hadron Collider, history’s biggest particle...

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:06:00 -0400

The Large Hadron Collider, history’s biggest particle accelerator, will be switched on in 7 days. This means great leaps and bounds in the realms of physics and understanding the way our universe operates. It may, however, also mean the end of the world as we know it: Apparently — and really, this isn’t THAT big of a deal — there’s a slight possibility the LHC’s massive energy will open a black hole over Switzerland and kill us all. Or maybe just unmake reality.

What can we do about this impending doom? Drink, for one. Me and a few friends from work are planning a New Years Eve-style soiree to celebrate either (a) the midnight launch of an important scientific project, or (b) our impending extinction. You can’t be hung over if the morning never comes. It’s a win-win!

Like most doomsday fears, the LHC threat is unproven at best. But even a slight possibility of galactic annihilation is enough to send me to the nearest bottle. A perfect occasion to celebrate if there ever was one. It reminds me of one of my favorite dark comedies, Last Night — this weird Canadian movie (and really, is there any other kind?) about young Canucks getting drunk before the apocolypse. Makes me wonder why physicists don’t build 27-kilometer particle acceleratiors more often.

Let’s party like there’s no tomorrow. Because there may not be.

Jeepers Creepers...

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 14:38:00 -0400

My editor and I have assembled a montage chronicling movie scenes in which one character digs his or her thumbs into the eyes of another.

I’ve completed four years of undergraduate studies with honors, and can honestly say I’ve never been more proud to put my name on a project. The blue ribbon for dedication, however, goes to my editor, who steadfastly maintained that we would only include eye-gouging that specifically used the thumb. This disqualified dozens of wonderfully gory films (including Hostel, Demolition Man, and both volumes of Kill Bill), but ultimately made for a better (and more disturbing) cinematic history. It’s important to have standards.

I of course love all our eye-gouging scenes in their own ways (they’re like my children, really), but my personal favorite has to be Marked For Death. While the rest of the eye-gougings are done by or on monsters, androids, or other fantastical characters, Marked For Death’s is done by none other than Steven Segal on a petty criminal. And though you can’t tell from the short clip above, gouging his opponent’s eyes out isn’t even close to Segal’s finishing move; he then throws him through a wall, breaks the blinded man’s back over his knee, and tosses him down an elevator shaft onto a rusty spike.

The new season of AMC’s incredible Mad Men premieres...

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 13:58:00 -0400

The new season of AMC’s incredible Mad Men premieres tomorrow. I could talk about how the show is the best new drama on television, or was the subject of a New York Times Magazine cover story, or has racked up roughly a shit-load of Emmy nominations, but any show than can find a way to close an episode with this bizarre Rosemary Clooney song (as Mad Men did in its seventh) hardly needs my support.

“Watch it with someone you love… and then tell the ratings people there was someone else in the room when you were watching it.”

Chandler Bing and the "Subtle Art" of the Mixtape

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:44:00 -0400

Toward the end of the 2000 movie “High Fidelity,” John Cusack’s love-struck record store owner/narrator tells the audience, “The making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art. Many Dos and Don’ts. First of all you’re using someone else’s poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing.”

Cusack’s speech is as good an explanation of the mixtape’s virtues as one will ever find. Back when they were still made, the mixtape really was a kind of art. Unless your father was Quincy Jones, the most advanced piece of audio equipment under your roof throughout your teenage era probably required a lot of devotion, flipping the tape or replacing 2Pac with Joan Osborne when the time came. In other words, the creation of a mixtape was one of passion; it was a project that took up your entire evening. It was how you spent your night.

I found myself pondering Cusack’s speech – and the art of the mixtape – earlier this week while selecting mp3s for Muxtape, a music-sharing site that allows users to create online play-lists of up to 12 streaming songs. The site has (deservedly) been praised for its ease-of-use and striking visual minimalism, but one of Muxtape’s greatest gifts to music (or the one most signifigant to me, at least) is neither technical nor aesthetic. It’s philosophical, and therefore harder to pinpoint, and it is this: Muxtape – with its emphasis on quality (12 chosen songs) over quantity (an entire iTunes library) – has revived that “subtle art” of the mixtape championed by Mr. Cusack.

To the best of my knowledge, the mixtape’s slow death began sometime in the late ’90s, when home CD-burning technology essentially killed the analogue audiocassette. In most ways, this advancement was probably a good thing: CD’s are cheaper, hold more information, and make cooler Xena-style throwing discs than tapes.

But what was lost with the audiocassette was the incentive to put extended thought into self-made albums. No longer did horny adolescents have to spend Sunday night plopped between a stack of Boyz II Men tapes and Dad’s stereo system, meticulously copying “I’ll Make Love To You” onto some audio love-letter to a cute student in their SAT Prep class. Now, a cheap CD-R and 10 minutes on Napster were all that are needed to create “personal” compilations that ensure a 45-minute make-out session in the stairwell.

Of course, a mix CD still took some time, but most of that time was spent booting up one’s Compaq Presarios and telling mom to hang up the phone. However, what used to be the most time-consuming part – selecting the songs themselves – was now, thanks to the dics’ vast data storage size, the quickest. Why the fuck would anyone waste time choosing between “Californication” and “Scar Tissue” when there’s enough room for a half a dozen Chili Peppers singles?

But just because you can fit the entire discography of Anthony Kedis, doesn’t necessarily mean you should. After all, when you can add everything, songs start meaning nothing.

This was where the “art” came into the making of a mixtape: Throughout the Clinton years, the precious 90 minutes of recording time on a TDK compact were just enough for a satisfying lineup of songs, but still exclusive enough that the artistic pros and cons of each track had to be excruciatingly considered before being selected for your epic track listing. Yeah, you wanted to stick all of Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” onto your VALENTINE’S DAY MIX ‘97, but the limits of technology forced you to choose just one of those songs to express the complex workings of your 15-year-old heart to the opposite sex (it was probably “Candle In The Wind,” by the way). The result was a tape that was a truly thoughtful gift – but only out of necessity.

This accidental thoughtfulness helped turn the mixtape into the (pardon the expression) sonnet of “Generation X,” a Bon Jovi-hating demographic way too cool and cynical to ever make something so romantic intentionally. It’s telling that within a month of “High Fidelity’s” release, NBC’s “Friends” (which was more-or-less the GenX “Leave It To Beaver”) premiered an episode (“The One With Unagi”) whose B-plot was primarily about a mixtape that Chandler gives to Monica as an anniversary present. More recently, in Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof,” a group of young ladies insist a mixtape is a far more romantic gift to receive from a guy than a CD. While they don’t go into detail on the matter, it’s fair to assume the women were swooning over the Cusack-like dedication necessary for a man to make a woman a mixtape. And who better to take our pop-cultural cues from than the dude who (briefly) made John Travolta cool again?

But it was – who else? – John Cusack himself, as Lloyd Dobler in 1988’s “Say Anything,” who stood outside Ione Skye’s bedroom window with a boombox over his head blasting “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel, successfully pulling off the single most romantic use of the mixtape in history.

Take That, Christian Slater!

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:09:00 -0400

My old roommate Robbie shot a movie in Phoenix over the summer (co-written by Logan Antill). It’s called Couchgarden, and is sure to be the best film set in Arizona since Pump Up the Volume (although with admitedly less Sonic Youth on the soundtrack).

Watch the Couchgarden trailer here!

Kanye West Bank

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:31:00 -0400

Early this May, the blog “What I Learned Today” posted an insightful article examining American music culture’s controversial adoption of the keffiyah, a distinct checkered Arab scarf. As the garment-of-choice for both militant anti-Zionists like the late Yasser Arafat and not so militant rap musicians like “Meet the Spartans” star Method Man, the popularity of the scarf has raised a degree of National debate.

I respectfully bowed out of this debate since, despite stumbling my way through Thomas Friedman’s “From Beirut to Jerusalem” this Spring (spoiler alert: Arafat and Rabin make up in the end), most aspects of the Middle East remain a complete fucking riddle to me: Who’s good? Who’s bad? Who do I sympathize with when someone brings up the Lebanon War? What the fuck was the Lebanon War? Sometimes the answers seem at once deathly important and totally meaningless. Kind of like a David Lynch movie, if Laura Dern toted an RPG and midgets were replaced with martyrs.

As a sort of built-in defense mechanism against such heavy debates, I tend to focus on trivial details of the greater story at hand. In the case of Kanye West’s controversial headscarf, I focused my energies on another foreign piece of the rapper’s attire: his sunglasses. The distinctive slotted “shutter shades,” worn by Mr. West during live performances and in the music video for his single “Stronger,” are a relic from a place far more terrifying than the Gaza Strip: the 1980s.

From the moment Kanye first donned them in 2007, the shutter shades were instantly identified as a distinctly ’80s accessory. However, visual evidence of the glasses from the period is harder to come by than I had anticipated. In the end, I was only able to find two exhibits of the glasses from their alleged decade of origin. The first is the1985 film “The Last Dragon,” in which they were worn by the character Sho’Nuff. The second is the music video for Animotion’s hit 1985 single, “Obsession.”

Depressingly, the one ’80s icon I most vividly remembered sporting a pair of shutter shades, Michael J. Fox’s randy “Teen Wolf” sidekick Rupert “Stiles” Stilinski, did not dawn a single pair in the film’s entire 91-minute running time.

He did, however, wear this shirt. Which, incidentally, is far more offensive in my opinion than even the most egregious pro-terrorism scarf…

Genius Blog Post Explores National Socialism

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 22:44:00 -0400

One relatively minor but incredibly enjoyable duty of my job at a humor website involves coming up — along with a number of talented co-workers — with amusing descriptions of the Internet’s funnier viral videos.

But a shockingly high number of those videos revolve around a single theme: poorly performed physical feats. And while nothing brings me more joy than watching arrogant attempts at sports and stunts fail most epically (the notorious “Afro Ninja” draws a guttural laugh from me to this day), there are only so many ways you can describe different gymnasts face-planting into different floors before you begin repeating yourself to at least some extent.

An occasional method of avoiding descriptive redundancy, one first practiced by my office’s senior staff members (and probably based on some comedic principal of misdirection that I’m sure can be traced back to an ancient Greek dramatist whose name I don’t know), is to endow embarrassing videos with deceptively impressive titles. Thus, a home movie of a painful, 75-foot belly flop is titled “Sick Backflip,” and a young man hurling himself face first into a wall is described as having run up it “flawlessly.”

Of course, belly flops and minor concussions hardly need our editorial assistance to make America laugh. But it’s nice to believe the misleading caption adds at least some extra punch to the audience’s initial viewing experience. (I’m reminded of an article by Amir Blumenfeld praising the equally misleading humor so effectively used on “The Simpsons.”)

With this philosophy in mind, my friend and colleague Kevin recently suggested collecting our site’s more dishonestly described videos in a single group. I now encourage you to visit CollegeHumor’s “Misleading Caption” videos: A brief-but-in-progress listing of “incredible” jumps, “graceful” dives, and a number of other “not hilarious” stunts by “talented” individuals. True, their element of surprise may now be diminished for you, but if you’re anything like me or the slapstick-loving individuals I work with, the humor only increases with the utter wrong-ness of our praise.

On Sunday a news item on Patrick Swayze gave me the opportunity...

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:35:00 -0400

On Sunday a news item on Patrick Swayze gave me the opportunity to discuss the the actor’s general persona and the vague concept of Swayzian “awesomeness.”

Since there’s no way of knowing how long it’ll be before I’ll have another reason to write about Mr. Swayze (though I suppose I’ve never needed an excuse before), I’ll use this chance to share one of the greatest Internet finds (relating to 1980s leading men, of course) I’ve had the good fortune of stumbling across: A 1991 unauthorized Patrick Swayze comic book biography. (Thanks to Christopher Bahn for sharing.)

I’ve already passed a printed hard copy along to a few co-workers. I hope others will do likewise. Here’s a brief passage about the actor’s “Road House” performance to get you pumped:

“Swayze can be seen executing a combination of no less than nine fighting forms ranging from brawling to kick boxing. He did many of his own stunts.”

The "Enduring Awesomeness" Of Patrick Swayze

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 20:19:14 -0400

This weekend, the New York Times took a break from reporting meaningless, trite news items like the Democratic nomination of Barack Obama and the fragile state of the economy to give a report I actually cared about: Patrick Swayze will still be starring in the under-production A&E crime drama “The Beast,” despite being recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The Times article was filled with the kind of positive sentiments and enthusiastic quotes from friends and colleagues that one would expect to find in a story about any good man battling a disease, but one quote from Swayze himself stood out to me. Not because it was especially poetic or insightful –- at least not in the traditional sense — but because it inadvertently encapsulated the essence of the “Dirty Dancing” star’s entire career. When asked about his upbeat attitude toward recovery, Mr. Swayze is quoted as saying, “I’m a cowboy. I’m a dancer. I’ll beat this.”

I am a cowboy. I am a dancer. With all due respect, the words read like Eagles lyrics. Life-threatening illness or not, these sentences would sound ridiculous coming from the lips of just about any other actor – or person, for that matter – on the planet. (Could you imagine the fallout – and religious implications – of Tom Cruise calling himself a cowboy?) Yet they somehow feel natural when uttered by Swayze, whose roles over the last 25 years have included bouncers, dancers, surfing bank robbers, and a shirtless banker who fucks Demi Moore on a pottery wheel.

Yes, technically Mr. Swayze does own a ranch and is a trained ballet dancer. But the acceptability of Swayze’s words is about more than that. For the bulk of his career, Swayze has chosen roles so absurdly bodacious that they border on parodies of themselves. In those roles, however, Swayze has never given in to the urge to take them as anything less than serious. Weather he’s killing invading Russians in 1984’s “Red Dawn” or killing post-apocalyptic bandits in 1987’s similarly titled “Steel Dawn,” Swayze has never taken the “Hey, how silly is this movie I’m in?!” approach, as so many contemporary leading men (Clive Owen in “Shoot ‘Em Up,” Bruce Willis in “Grindhouse,” the entire cast of Tony Scott’s “Domino,” etc.) have done.

The surprising sincerity of Swayze’s words reminded me of a 2007 essay by “A.V. Club” writer Nathan Rabin praising the non-ironic “awesomeness” of “Point Break,” a 1991 action film about an undercover FBI agent (Keanu Reeves) who infiltrates a gang of surfing, bank-robbing adrenaline junkies led by a wavy-haired skydiver named Bodhi (Swayze). If that description sounds like a joke, it isn’t. And that, Rabin argues, is precisely the point:

The key to Point Break’s enduring awesomeness is that it plays its premise one-hundred percent straight. If the film were made today I suspect it’d be filled with invisible air quotes and non-stop winks to let the audience know that the filmmakers are way too cool and hip and ironic to expect anyone to take Patrick Swayze seriously as the Buddha of the surfboard set… As “Snakes On A Plane” and “Spice World” both illustrate, nothing kills a potential camp classic quite like constantly letting audiences know you’re in on the joke.

The same way “Point Break” can have Swayze give Keanu Reeves a mid-air high five while sky-diving without a hint of irony, so Swayze can now proclaim with complete frankness that he’s a cowboy and a dancer while coming off as neither pompous, out-of-touch, or joking.

Silly choice of words or not, ironic or serious, I’m just happy to know that recent events haven’t taken the Swayze out of Patrick. Like all his fans, I wish him the best. And though I’m at a loss for the wisest words of consolation to offer Swayze at this juncture, I can borrow a few of the man’s own, spoken in “Road House” when his character, an ass-kicking bouncer with a PhD. in philosophy named Dalton, is asked what he studied in college:

“Just man’s search for faith,” answers Swayze, “and that kind of shit.”