John Slate is No Slacker

There's a piece in (or is that on?) Salon today about the 15th anniversary of the most overrated indie movie of the 1990s, Richard Linklater's Slacker. Now, it's been years since I've seen it, and maybe I'll soften toward it if you feel like giving me your copy of the Criterion Collection DVD when yer done with it; and it does star some friends of mine; and maybe I just hated it since they were shooting it around Austin as I was wrapping up my final semester at the University of Texas and trying to get the hell out of that city. Or maybe I've got something against self-indulgent, willfully quirkly, naval-gazingly chitchatty movies about nothing. Dunno. Whatever. Doesn't matter. All of this is just a rambling prelude to this nugget you might be interested in: John Slate, the Kennedy-assassination conspiracy-a-go-go guy in the movie loitering around Half-Price Books, lives in Dallas. And not only that, but Slate, who appeared in only the one movie, works for the city of Dallas as our very own archivist--which means, yes, he handles JFK documents all the time and gets paid for it. Says Slate in Salon (not Slate, oddly): "When people approach me about JFK, it gets tiresome. But rather than be annoyed, it's easier to be flattered. I now work with real JFK materials on a day-to-day basis. I'm the archivist for the city of Dallas, so I'm in charge of all the Dallas police department records on Kennedy. I've got to have a little professional distance. I'm interested in the materials, but as far as being a junior detective, I'll leave that to the professionals." --Robert Wilonsky