One of my best friends, whom I met in college, introduced me to a ridiculous amount of things that I now dearly love, from Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension to the majority of John Carpenter's filmography. At one stage, Kirk Lawrence and his roommates called their rental house "Chez DeLorean". Kirk had some of the absolute best taste of any geek or nerd I've known. At one point, he worked in a record store, surrounded by the media he worshipped.
My now-wife (then-girlfriend) and I dropped in to his Halloween party one of the last years we lived in Tallahassee. I was dressed as Ed Wood, she as an Alfred Hitchcock Double feature (The Birds and Psycho). Wearing a 60's-style business outfit, she had a plastic knife (partially embedded) glued into her shirt on one side, and a black plastic bird (wings spread wide) on the other.
Kirk was dressed as RoboCop. He and his roommates made a labyrinth stretching from their garage into their backyard. It was great. He seemed a little worn out. Later in the night, he just kept vomiting and his head was killing him in a way not related to alcohol consumption. He had a brain tumor that had its tentacles in him like an angry monster from a Lovecraft story.
They shaved his hair off and cut his head open to take out what they could. They sealed him back up with a titanium plate on the inside. All of his friends cheered this as a silver lining: Kirk had become a Robocop-like icon of justice and good. A few of us collectively dubbed him reborn as Titanium Justice.
Back then, MySpace and LiveJournal was where people "hung out" online, with Facebook on the ascendance. We had a sort of support group of friends unofficially knit together. We'd buy him DVDs when he was in the hospital, One day, I put together a LiveJournal Group called Titanium Justice. The icon was the Robocop helmet photoshopped over his face.
Many cycles of hardcore treatment later, the brain cancer finally took him. Ever since, I've seen things like Watchmen and many others he would have wanted to see, and thought "I wish he could have seen…", and it goes the same way with rewatching favorites (Robocop especially), Blu-rays, and restorations.
One of my all-time favorite disc shops is Vinyl Fever, the iconic, now-closed shop Kirk worked at down in Tallahassee. Tallahasseans in the know called it "The Feve".
Knowing Kirk is the reason I'm as deeply into movies as I am. He's also most of the reason I spend more money than I probably should at used DVD/record stores. He taught me that discovery and presentation quality could be uniting, communal experiences in the way some people participate in their religions.
I miss "the good ol' days" not just because I miss him and because nostalgia is a human "thing", but because modern society has lost a lot of the joy in in-person, communal experiences that get to live within themselves in favor of constant broadcast and attention-seeking. I've changed the way I share and participate in (anti-) social media and my private life quite a bit over the last year. A lot of that has come from reflecting on friends I've lost to mortality, including Kirk, my brother, one of my mentors, and various others.
I've also doubled down on living up to a piece of North Florida resident George "P Funk" Clinton's wisdom that Kirk pulled out of his head one day:
"Give the people what they want, when they wants it…and they wants it all the time"
The new RoboCop transfer from a 4K remaster looks astonishingly good and is worth a reasonable price (like the $8 it cost its week of release). I'll post a screen grab comparison to the previous release soon.
If you really love RoboCop, note that the OOP Criterion DVD extras are all ported to the Blu-rays with the exception of the Criterion commentary. The Fox/MGM commentary features the same participants as the Criterion, but is a different recording entirely.
