"Mongo just pawn in game of life."
(Mongo, from Blazing Saddles)
March 31st, 2007 (12:21 a.m)
Imagine that, instead of coming to a tragic end in Of Mice and Men, Lennie the man-child slipped away into the night and became a roadie for a rock band (this would require that Of Mice and Men take place decades later than it does, but bear with me). Give him some long hair and take his picture.
That's what my new driver's license picture looks like.
My last one wasn't good, but it had a certain "mug shot" quality that I'd come to accept. Long hair, goatee, disinterested look. You could come to terms with a picture like that. You could imagine losing that license, and someone finding it and saying, "Man, he looks like a bad ass." There's nothing on your driver's license that says liberal beer-snob English Major who still wishes he had time to play Dungeons and Dragons (not yet, anyway -- I'm sure the gov't will find it necessary to include that info in the magnetic strip any day now). They'd never know the truth!
I could have kept that picture, but I was slack. I took too long to schedule an eye appointment, so I wasn't able to send in the mail-in application. So it was off to the DMV I went.
I couldn't tell you why I tried to smile for the picture. I'm not a smiler. For nearly forty years, people have been taking pictures of me where I think I'm smiling, but what feels like a beaming smile in my facial muscles barely registers on the camera. But for some reason, I tried to have a pleasant expression for my driver's license -- a huge risk for a picture that I'd be carrying around for eight years.
The end result? I look like a simpleton, a vacant, bewildered look in my eyes. I look like I've seen something shiny and want to take it home to be part of my nest.
And then the next day, I cut my hair short, losing a good ten inches of hair length in the process. I can only imagine the ID hassles waiting for me now...
Requiem for Daddy Rabbit
March 28th, 2007 (1:36 a.m)
Buddy, my grandmother's brother (which makes him, what, my great uncle?) died this week at the age of 87. Buddy was a horsetrader from day one, and built himself quite the small-town storage building and tanning bed empire by the time he died.
The last time I saw Buddy was at my grandfather's funeral, where Buddy took one look at me and my growing belly, and laughed, "Boy, someone needs to push you away from the table!"
They still do.
My favorite Buddy story goes back to my childhood. My grandmother had a black and white cat that had a habit of wandering off tomcattin' for days at a time. One time, he was gone longer than normal, which set my grandmother to worrying. She felt pretty sure that her cat had been hit by a car or attacked by a dog, so she grew increasingly worried about her cat.
Buddy decided that she needed some closure.
One day, a few of us kids saw Buddy pull up in his pickup truck, and then go in to get my Grandmother. When she came out, they stood over the bed of the truck, with my grandmother shaking her head.
We scrambled over to see that Buddy had brought her a dead cat, so that she could identify the body, and, if this was her cat, to get on with life. He knew it was a tomcat because, well, when he saw the dead cat in the middle of the road, Buddy got out of his truck, walked over, and examined the dead cat's privates as traffic whizzed by.
Over the next couple of days, Buddy brought my grandmother several more dead cats, but none of them were hers. If I remember correctly, the One True Cat showed up a couple of days later (or maybe not -- at one point, the cat stayed gone for good). So at some point, Buddy had to just let dead cats lie.
Over the years, I'm sure our memories have conspired in the ways that memories do. To hear me get going and tell the story these days, Buddy practically had a truckload of dead cats every day, piled up into a mountain in the bed of his truck, to the point that he was leaving a trail of dead cats wherever he went.
It's a minor story, but it's my favorite Buddy story.
Uncorrected Dancing Traits
March 25th, 2007 (1:00 a.m)
I thought I was going to see a dance battle, one for the ages. Granted, you wouldn't think a Robyn Hitchcock show would get the ladies dancing at the stage, but with the Venus 3 backing him, Hitchcock was putting on a pretty darn good rock and roll show by the end of the night.
First, you had the heavy metal chick, dressed in knee-high boots and a leather mini-skirt, grinding and gyrating her way in slow motion around the floor (and it's important to know that this was a seated show, so for a while, she was the only one up there). She may be the only person who's ever greeted a Robyn Hitchcock song with the heavy metal devil sign salute. She was angling for some groupie action, I think, but as far as I could tell, none of the band were giving her a second thought. Armed with a pint of beer, she'd take a swig, set the glass on the stage, dance a little, take another swig, repeat, until she was a stumbling wreck.
Then there was the stick-thin hippy chick (please, Phish, get back together so that the hippy chicks quit showing up at other bands' shows and blocking my line of sight with their noodle dancing). She was bouncing around like a superball, flailing around like Jack Skellington on a crank bender (seriously, she weighed about thirty pounds from the looks of her).
They were starting to get into each others' space, and while I don't think the hippy chick would have cared, I'm pretty sure the metal chick would have done something to take out the competition. However, the show ended and everyone went their separate ways before we got a chance to see which dancing style would win. Apparently the metal chick was making a nuisance of herself after the show, and had to be thrown out while the band was signing autographs. At one point, she could be yelling, "Peter Buck wants to talk to me! Peter Buck was looking right at me!" Later, I think she was trying to talk one of the cooks into letting her back in through the back door.
Ah, rock and roll decadence ... it finds a way to pop up even at your local folk club.
Somehow, it makes Red Sonja's chainmail bikini seem strangely practical
March 11th, 2007 (6:13 a.m. -- sometimes the baby just won't sleep)
Hit the theatres today to see 300, a fairly faithful adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel, which in itself was a fairly loose retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae.
300 hits the theatres hot on the heels of some truly awesome trailers -- trailers with skies as bronze as the six-packs on the Spartans, full of mountains of bodies, full of exotic Persian hordes. There's absolutely no way the film could have lived up to those trailers, and it doesn't.
Unfortunately, there's little real heart at the center of the movie. To their credit, the filmmakers get good mileage out of Leonidas' devotion to his family and to his country, but the film doesn't draw you in. Even in the climactic moments, when the Spartans are staring at their own death, the film keeps you at arm's distance. It's in striking contrast to recent blockbusters like The Lord of the Rings. The makers of 300 could have watched the Charge of the Rohirrim segment a few times to learn how to really get the goosebumps rising.
In his book Jarhead, Anthony Swofford speaks of the way that men see battle and want to be in it. Sure, the conscious brain says the very idea is craziness, but the subconscious says, "Let me in on some of that chaos." 300 has a few moments like that, but not enough.
And while I know the film doesn't try to act as a history lesson, it's unfortunate that you don't get a sense of the larger picture -- the sea battles, the fact that Athens burned after the 300 fell. At the end, you're treated to the beginnings of the Greek revenge, but it comes a bit out of nowhere.
There is plenty to like about the film, though. Leonidas is pure testosterone, roaring like a lion and dripping with authority. The portrayal of the Spartans' phalanx formations are excellent (especially when they first meet the first wave of Persians -- the whole thing turns into a rugby scrum before the spears start doing their work). The cinematography -- CGI though it may be -- is wonderful. And like with Sin City, you just have to give yourself over to the hyper-dramatic narration. You really do.
As for the homoerotic subtexts and displays of ultimate masculinity vs effeminate and deformed men, I'll just leave that discussion to others. Overall, despite its flaws, 300 is a decent piece of eye-candy, even if the sight of all those six-pack abs just makes you want to wallow deeper into a box of ice cream sandwiches.
If anything, it's probably not far-fetched enough...
March 1st, 2007 (8:40 p.m)
This is kinda cool if you've seen the movie. A streaming clip of the background imagery and media from Children of Men. Digging the King Crimson music...
"Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels" -- Samuel Johnson
March 1st, 2007 (12:36 a.m)
I read this, my sister's meditation on life in wartime, with pride. Not because I agree or disagree with her, but because she still feels whatever she feels. It's so easy to get worn down by the sheer unrelenting ... pig ignorance of our age.
I have a kid now, and supposedly that makes you more conservative. Depends on what you mean by "conservative", I guess. I have no intentions, once my child finds out what the TV is for, to let her watch age-inappropriate things. I sure don't have any intention of letting her get anywhere near the slack-jawed, mouth-breathing excuses for boys that shuffle around my neighborhood: boys who don't have the good sense to get out of the way of cars, boys with small weasel eyes, boys without enough ambition to even pull their pants up over their butts.
But for all the irrational protectiveness that I'll lay onto my daughter's life like it's mortar from a trowel, there's one thing I definitely don't want to happen. I don't want her to grow up in an America that no longer resembles the America in which I grew up.
When I was in school, my social studies and civics classes had the gall to tell us things about free speech, about the dissent that founded this country, about civil liberties, about systems of checks and balances. We learned about this horrible place, the Soviet Union, where you had to show your papers to go anywhere, where citizens could be snatched from their homes and deposited in a gulag without so much as a by-your-leave, where the government listened in on its citizens' conversations.
These were the examples that our teachers gave us to show us why America was such a wonderful country, a noble place, the envy of the free world.
And now? Don't get me wrong, I still think America is a great country; I wouldn't want to be from anywhere else. But where should the laundry list begin?
A friend of mine is perfectly fine with the erosion of our civil liberties as a way of combatting this hazy enemy that will never go away (and even if it did, we'd have scaremongers whose positions in power depend on keeping us scared). He's fine with anything that protects his family. I can't accept that, this idea that the cornerstones of our country's identity are somehow expendable. I want to protect my family, too, but at some point you have to step back and ask yourself what kind of country this protection will allow your child to grow up into.
She'll be rolling her eyes at me plenty over the next twenty years. I hope that my stories of "the good old days" when you could check a library book out without it going into the government's files aren't one of the things that triggers it.