COLUMN: John 'Shirley' Miller — Welcome to My World

John 'Shirley' Miller

Since I’m going to be writing this column once a week, and that’s a more frequent pace than I talk to my parents, you’re going to get to know me intimately. That being said, when deciding what to write for my first article ever, I have succumbed to my own vanity and decided that it’s going to be all about me.

Most importantly, my name’s John, but my friends call me Shirley. If you see me on the street someday, (check above picture for reference), I will only respond to the latter moniker.  There’s a couple stories circulating out there about where I got the nickname from, but no story that I can tell can ever be as creative as what your imagination can cook up on its own, so I leave it to you to fill in that gap. A very brief history: I’m a licensed high school English teacher who grew up in Connecticut, went to film school on Long Island, lived in Brooklyn for five years, and arrived in the City of Angels almost exactly a year ago.  I’m one fucked up guy.

Now, if you’re looking to read fancy words to make yourself feel like you’re an intellectual, you’ve come to the wrong place. There may be the occasional article where I’m feeling particularly pretentious and throw around some new vocab, but those moments are going to be few and far between. I’m not here to impress you, I’m here to talk about the love of my life: film, cinema, movies, moving pictures, or whatever else you want to call the specific medium of images running in rapid succession accompanied by sound.

For me, movies have always been kind of like my third parent. Communication was sparse between my parents and I when I was a kid. To paint a mental picture, there are probably more black people living in the Hamptons than there were conversations per week in my childhood home. I never had a sex talk, drug talk, or even an immense pressure to be the number one student at my school. My parents are great folk, and I love them for letting me find my own way, but I would be doing a disservice to the motion picture industry if I didn’t credit them for helping to raise me and some of my still-present ideals.

My parents let me watch R movies from a very young age, and although it seems like a counter-intuitive move that could fuck up your child for the rest of his or her life, it had the adverse effect on me. I matured faster, I felt I knew about what was really important in life at an early age, and when I encountered extreme situations in the real world, I was less shocked because of the movies I had been watching. Sure I may have broken my arm when I was 10, but then when I remembered an image of a man’s arm being broken and his bone tearing out of his skin from an old zombie movie, I felt alright about my own dilemma. I learned about sex from Jade, violence from The Quick and the Dead, and a bit about the complexities of morality from Seven. The year following, I turned 11 and hadn’t  had sex with anyone, killed anyone, or made any extremely bad decisions to alter my life forever, so my parents and I figured that movies were probably an OK thing to keep around.

Films have taking many interesting twists and turns throughout the decades, and I’m going to explore the ever-evolving medium in all its glory, failures, and in-betweens. Anything can happen in this column from week to week, and I encourage you to be on your toes. One week we could be examining the classic films of Preston Sturges, and the following week we may have a dialogue about why Edward is better than Jacob in the Twilight series.

You may get pissed at me one week, love me the next, and then feel a mix of emotions the week after that.  But as long as I make you feel something, and you come back the following week, I’ll have done my job. This is my world. Welcome to it.