So my friend and colleague, the film writer D.K. Holm, is in a serious spot of bother.
He recently found out he has esophageal cancer, explaining the months of earth-shaking coughing fits that led up to the diagnosis. Until recently, Doug was an insured employee at Powell's City of Books, but recently left to pursue a full-time writing career. He now ruefully describes himself as "the American nightmare" -- uninsured and facing thousands of dollars in medical bills.
The good news is that the cancer is very treatable. The doctors caught it early (stage 2, if memory serves), and chemotherapy combined with what I'm told is a very unpleasant surgery is probably going to lick the problem within a year. The bad news is that the debt is going to be staggering, and the treatment is currently kneecapping the energy and concentration he needs to write.
Living expenses are, to put it mildly, a serious problem for him at the moment.
Some friends of his are throwing a fundraiser at Cinema 21 on April 27. This Web page has all the details. You should go, participate, or at least drop the man a spot of cash if you've enjoyed his work.
Much praise of my slightly mad colleague after the jump. It will completely mortify him, I'm sure.
My boss Shawn Levy describes Doug as "the longtime Portland film and book reviewer, curmudgeon, gadfly, and boulevardier," which sounds about right. He is a tremendous, thoroughly eccentric and deeply personal writer and thinker about movies, comics, books and journalism. Like the best film writers, he takes a provocative point of view and goes on to defend it thoroughly, educating you about several cultural nooks and crannies in the process. And like the best film writers, he's probably spiritually and constitutionally incapable of doing anything else.
Take a look at a recent piece he wrote for GreenCine Daily, about Tim Lucas and Lucas' crazy-long book about Italian director Mario Bava. God simply doesn't make many film writers with the stamina or authority to tackle this subject this clearly, or in this level of detail. It's a beautiful piece of journalism -- granular, lucid, funny, footnoted -- and, to my thinking, it represents everything that's great about movie discourse on the Internet.
He's also a terrific, loyal friend.
One of the great pleasures of my career has been befriending Doug after admiring him from afar. Long before I got into the film-writing racket, I was a huge fan of his Willamette Week movie reviews and his pseudonymous critiques of Portland media as "Sid Falco"; his Falco-penned "Hack Attack!" columns in the long-defunct PDXS were the closest thing Portland ever had to a SPY magazine-style "Review of Reviewers" column.
Years later, we met and hit it off (in part because he and I are probably the only two people in Portland with near-compete SPY collections). Doug and I have whiled many an hour in the back room of the Aalto Lounge with a close circle of film-writer friends -- quaffing beers, annoying the hipsters, and ranting about movies, our careers, and assorted heroes and enemies. We've pre-edited each others' stories and pitches. He's been an unflagging supporter of my ridiculous career. I'm still a little in awe of his.
(Just yesterday, in the throes of chemo, Doug spent the better part of a phone conversation haranguing me, unprovoked, about self-publishing a collection of CulturePulp strips.)
I spent a few hours with him a few weeks ago in his apartment, which resembles nothing so much as a magnificently curated used bookstore containing a single chair, bed, and desk. The shelves were looking slightly more bare as he slowly liquidates his collection to keep eating and paying rent. He's lost about 40 pounds (and his hair) on a liquid diet. A small Darth Vader breastplate of a medical device dispensed timed doses of chemo with a quiet hiss. He was having a good day, and wanted to talk about everything but his illness, and did. He sounded upbeat, but also resigned to the total upheaval, financial and otherwise, that will follow his remission.
Anyway. Please consider attending the fundraiser. If everyone who's ever read Doug's writing -- in Willamette Week, PDXS, Movie Poop Shoot, Quick Stop Entertainment, Nerve's Screengrab blog, MSN, the Vancouver Voice, or any of his five books -- threw him a few bucks each, he'd have this basic-living-expenses problem licked.
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