Link TV Theater

Here's something I saw on Link TV's music program and I present it with no sense of post-modern irony...really...

Signs

I saw two signs on stores across the street from each other:

"Laundry and Tanning"
"Obedience and Grooming"

Le Temps Ont Change

My favorite new guitarist. Great summer driving music.

Beyond the Pale

For my new job, I took a one day seminar to be certified as some sort of food safety person. During his self-introduction, the instructor mentioned that he had minored in history and developed a love of European History in general and Russian History in particular. Now devoted readers of the blog, and you must be devoted to still be checking in after all these months, will remember that Isaac Deutscher's Trotsky trilogy was one of the memorable reading events of my youth. So, as I turned in my test (quick--within what temperature range is the "danger zone" for perishable meat?) I asked if he had read the Deutscher trilogy, he gave me a look which, while slightly ambiguous, could easily have been interpreted as uncomprehending. He mumbled something about his father having them and that he had read part of the first volume. He held up his Golf Digest and said, "This is about all I read nowadays." It could be that Bolshevism is frowned upon in corporate life, or maybe I had crossed his comfort line of personal contact or perhaps, to paraphrase Benjamin Braddock, "I guess, he just lost interest over the years."
Three days later I was at my local library's used book sale and I was delighted to find "Trotsky, The Eternal Revolutionary," by Dmitri Volkogonov. While reading the book I came across the fact that Trotsky was born in a region along Russia's border with Poland, called "The Pale". Immediately the phrase, 'beyond the pale' came to mind and I wondered if that's from whence the phrase comes. Maybe, I guessed, it's a Jewish phrase referring to a place outside the permitted, or the familiar.
Well it turns out the word pale comes from the latin palus which means 'stake'.
A pale is an old name for a pointed stake driven into the ground and — by an obvious-enough extension — to a barrier made of such stakes, a fence (our modern word pole is from the same source, as are impale and paling). This meaning has been around in English since the fourteenth century. By 1400 it had taken on various figurative senses — a defence, a safeguard, a barrier, an enclosure, or a limit beyond which it was not permissible to go. --Worldwidewords.org.
Further reading of the above link reveals that there was also an English Pale in Calais and one in Ireland.
Now that I know what it means, it pleases me to consider it in a much more positive light; nothing wrong with hopping the fence of our particular ghetto.

Thou Villain

So Suzy and I are watching King Lear the other night with Ian McKellan as Lear and when Gloucester says, "O villain, villain!", Suzy says, "That's a good word--people don't call each other villain anymore." And I agreed. It is a good word. I guess the English use it more regularly than we, but to an American, especially a moral relativists like myself, it may seem a little too Manichean. But, unlike it's uncouth cousin 'evil-doer', villain is at once a colorful, pointed, clear and fun way to address someone at cross-purposes to you. It is erudite without being obscure and condescending. After all, it's used all the time to describe a character in our comic book dominated storytelling world, but it takes on a different connotation when you are talking to, or about, a real person in your life. So the next time you want to call someone an asshole, I ask you to consider 'villain'.

Some villainous facts and fun:

*(from Wikipedia) Villain comes from the Anglo-French and Old French vilein, which itself descends from the Late Latin word villanus meaning "farmhand." Someone who is bound to the soil of a villa, which is to say, worked on the equivalent of a plantation in Late Antiquity, in Italy or Gaul. It referred to a person of less than knightly status and so came to mean a person who was not chivalrous. As a result of many unchivalrous acts, such as treachery or rape, being considered villainous, in the modern sense the word, it became used as a term of abuse and eventually took on its modern meaning.

*What SuperVillain are you? (I'm Apocalypse)

*'Villain', a 1971 movie starring Richard Burton is loosely based on the story of 'The Krays', the violent English twins of 50's and 60's London. A recentauction of Kray memorabilia raised over 100,000 pounds.

Fifteen books that given the way my life has turned out I probably shouldn't have read

YouTube, then poetry and now a meme--this is what you've waited two months for?
Per Lance Mannion, here are fifteen books that ruined me for the good life:

1984-George Orwell
The Woman in the Dunes-Kobo Abe
The 42nd Parallel/1919/The Big Money-John Dos Passos
Ida-Gertrude Stein
The Mandarins-Simone De Beauvoir
A Walk on the Wild Side-Nelson Algren
White Buildings-Hart Crane
The Sound and the Fury-William Faulkner
Riven Doggeries-James Tate
I Am A Memory Come Alive-Franz Kafka
Letters to a Young Poet-Rainer Maria Rilke
The Collected Poems-Wallace Stevens
The Big Sleep-Raymond Chandler
Wise Blood-Flannery O'Connor
The Prophet Armed/The Prophet Unarmed/The Prophet Outcast:Trotsky 1879-1940-Isaac Deutscher


There we go. Fifteen pretty much off the top of my head. I maybe cheated with two trilogies, but in my defense, I never read the first without reading all three. These are not the greatest books of my youth--and I do think it's odd that I picked non-fiction from Kafka and Rilke when I loved their primary work so much--but what remains of the internal drama of a romantic and solitary youth.

Valentine's Day 2008 (Two Poems)

Untitled

As the scorpion strikes at the descending heel
As the gypsy thrives on confusion
So you drift to Paris
On grey clouds through a magenta sky

At the Strip Club

Call me Romulus
he said,
his jovial smile
his golden teeth
Call me Geisha
she replied
her heart a gazelle
a feather on the ocean

Kou Chou Ching (Black Heart)

Yes.

Like What I Like, Like Me Wednesdays

As I rejoin the blogging world, I'm trying out some new regular features to keep me...well... regular. Yes, blogging requires fiber and YouTube and its cousins provide many grams. So for Wednesdays, I'm going to post some things which entertain me, usually for no apparent reason and occasionally on the quirky or esoteric side. So for today we take a look at the only man I truly fear, Crispin Hellion Glover:

"I don't want people to know where I go to get my shampoo...and conditioner."

Death Mask Tuesday (Alternating Current Ed)

Today's death mask is the father of alternating current, Nikola Tesla.

After being bested financially and in celebrity by Edison, Westinghouse and Marconi for inventions he created, he uttered this great statement which cements him as an oocHero:

"My enemies have been so successful in portraying me as a poet and a visionary," said Tesla, "that I must put out something commercial without delay."

It is precisely because he was a visionary and a poet, that he captures the imagination of artists and conspiracy theorists to this day. As I noted in my look at The Prestige, he appears as the inventor of a matter replicating device used by one of the magicians, who engages him at his Pike's Peak laboratory. It was at Pike's Peak that he took his first tangible steps towards his dream of the wireless transmission of energy. Later this dream was dashed against the rocks at his Long Island Wardenclyffe laboratory.

I soon will be watching the PBS documentary on Tesla, but the online companion to the video is a good place to get an overview of this romantic and tragic figure.

Bollywood Monday (from Kala Pani)

Bollywood Monday returns to oocRadio with some 50's Bollywood starring Dev Anand and Madhubala:

oocAdaptation Examination--The Prestige (the movie)

(caution-plot revealed below)

I've watched the Prestige, directed by Chris Nolan, written by Jonathan Nolan and I'm beginning to doubt the wisdom of this adaptation examination project. Only because I think I know I would have liked the movie much better had I not read the book—and not because the plot twists were ruined for me, but because of the hollow feeling I got while watching it. Of course, that could because I was unusually entertained by the novel. But onward I’ll press, and give you what I have obliged myself to do: a comparison of the book and movie.

The movie opens with an explanation of the title, done in the form of a demonstration, by Cutter, Angier’s, ingeneur, or technical assistant. Cutter performs a trick while explaining the three
stages of a magic trick: 'The Pledge' is the object with which the magician begins, a person or thing, 'the turn' is the magician acting upon that person or thing--sawing in half, destroying, disappearing it--'the prestige' is the thing again made whole, restored, the 'proof' of the trick.

In the book, the prestige of Angier's trick is an exact new copy of himself--and a lifeless original. His rival, Benton, disrupts his transportation and leaves two living Angiers, 2/3 of his original
weight and dying, the other 1/3, slightly insubstantial, vigorous, and murderous. This second prestige describes how I feel about the story the Nolans bring to the screen.

The Nolans dispense with the modern day framing of the book, framing it cleverly with trial, conviction and execution of Borden for the death of Angier. Borden is framed by Angier because of a fiendish (and chillingly welcome) change the Nolan’s make: unlike the book where the original Angier dies each time, both copies of Angier live as a result of his performance and Angier must drown one of his selves each time. Borden sneaks below the stage to find the secret of the trick, and, discovered by Cutter watching one of the Angiers drowning, is charged with the murder. This framing device is well thought out, but points to the fact that the movie is much more a story of spiralling revenge--told through flashback—than the book's challenge to our
concept of identity. What provoked me about the book was it's undertone of separation, dis-integration and the characters attempt to regain a lost integrity, physical and metaphysical, social and personal. Much of that is abandoned, or buried so deep that it becomes very minor to this picture. And there is nothing wrong with that. It is a well told whodunit, or should I say, howdunit, which is focused on the cost of vengeance and the story of the destruction these two men leave in their wake. Deception and trickery, illusion, is a vehicle for the story,
and movies are story after all, at least commercial ones. And, of course, there are the monologues which spell out the themes--illusion of existence, mystery as escape--but, for some reason I found them less offensive than in the Dark Knight, maybe because these characters
seemed more genuine paradoxically, than the so called characters in the Dark Knight, which seemed more like examples of people or animated concepts, rather than motivated individuals with distinctive personal traits. Careful, don't want to think about TDK any more than I must.

A couple of minor things: The character of Tesla, while played charmingly by David Bowie, is much less entertainingly delineated in the movie than the book, where he serves as much more of a plot function than as a satisfying character in his own right. A concession to time, necessary, but unfortunate. The diaries, which are basic to the structure of the book but presented directly to the reader, are used effectively by the Nolans, in my opinion, as tools of deception worked by one magician upon the other. Once again, they have folded this element completely into another explicit example of the direct conflict between the two protagonists.

The Prestige is a successful adaptation, because it is a successful movie, not because it's faithful to the book. The Nolans took a book which interested and inspired them, digested it, and used it to tell a similar, yet distinctively cinematic story which joined Christopher Priest's vision with their own. The chose a manageable slice of the story, made a fundamental and clever change to the framing story, and, though they kept a little less of the open-ended mystery than I would have preferred, told the story in a way which honored the tone of the book.

oocAdaptation Examination: The Prestige (the book)

(caution-plot revealed below)
First, a confession--I did not read this book. I listened to it. I had a lot of work around the house and the audiobook of The Prestige was available to download from my library, so I put it on the mp3 player and for 12 hours, I couldn't put down the headphones. But I do have a physical copy, and believe me, I will reread it at some point. It is very good. Incidently, so is the guy who read it to me. Secondly, this is not a book review at all, but a list of the challenges I see of adapting this to a movie.

First a synopsis from author Christopher Priest's website:

A story of secrecy, curiosity and concealment,
The Prestige is largely set in the smoke-and-mirrors world of Victorian music
halls. Two stage illusionists engage in a bitter and deadly
feud -- the effects are still being felt by their families a hundred years later.
Both men are driven to the extremes by
the mystery of an amazing
stage illusion they both perform. The novel itself is constructed like a
stage illusion: because of misdirection, nothing can be taken for
granted -- revelations and unexpected twists occur at regular intervals.
The secret of the magic is not kept from the reader, because for the antagonists the real mystery lies deeper. Both
men have more to hide than the mere workings of a trick.

The story's big, not in terms of plot so much, as the layered form in which it is delivered. We have four first person narratives of varying reliability,overlapping and deepening the story as often as moving the narrative forward. There are three stories being told somewhat concurrently--the rival of the turn of the 20th century magicians, the confrontation between their descendants some 70 years later and the contemporary framing story involving a son and a daughter of those descendants. At the climax, the stories all intertwine and resolve, to some degree.
Now if the film-makers decide to tackle all three time periods, they will be hard pressed to tell the stories and give enough attention to developing the characters sufficiently for the viewer to engage. They must simplify, but without compromising the deception and mystery with which Priest reveals both story and character. The three stories echo and amplify and, in a real sense are part of one long, spiralling story--perhaps they will consider the entire story in a linear fashion and, rather than eliminating a time period or two, keep what is essential to the whole plot and let it range over all the years.
There is a very real question of the nature of identity central to the book which will be a challenge to portray in the movie. The ultimate illusions of each of the magicians rely on dual beings, in one case, twins which share a single life, in the other, the actual replication of his person with each performance.
The rivalry itself should be the easiest to portray--there are very real and dramatic scenes in the book which would be very demonstrative and filmable--each magician ruins the other's act throughout.
The epistolary nature of the storytelling in the novel will have to be mimicked with narration or abandoned to drama. Hopefully, it will not be exposited through character dialogue.
The wonder of magic--especially at the time of the two principles--will be hard to portray on film.
Okay, off to see the movie and how they pull it off.

OOC looks at Adaptation: Intro

I have been much interested of late in the craft of screenwriting. Having failed to get past 20 pages in previous attempts at novel writing, I have found visual drama a very useful tool in learning what a story is and I've written a couple hundred pages of TV (I've even made little money there--more on that in upcoming installments of oocTelevision), am nearly done with my first screenplay, and have a second and third in various stages of writing (ADD anyone?). There's a pared down, elemental feel to drama that seems to suit my fictional voice.

I've devoured everything screenwriting and, during the course of my studies, I've become particularly fascinated with the process of adaptation, especially novel to screen. In the upcoming months I'm going to be thinking out loud about some novels and the movies they inspire. First I'll read the book, throw out some thoughts on it, then watch the movie and give my thoughts on that. You'll find that I'm clearly a novice, but maybe you can learn by watching me learn, or, more likely, maybe you can teach me something I don't know, for which I will be most grateful.

Anyway, let's get off to a simple, vague start. The main thing a screenwriter must do is decide which part of a novel he finds the most interesting, which themes or ideas are central and resonant, and bite just enough off story to create a relatively short and visual cinematic experience. It's astounding how quickly, and efficiently one must tell a story in a screenplay. Obviously, thoughts must be dramatized, or voiced in narration if that is desired, characters and incidents must be compressed or discarded, and the story must be restructured or reframed in a cinematically possible way.
Our first subject, the 404 page 'slipstream' novel, The Prestige, by Christopher Priest, poses a great challenge on all these fronts. In the next post, we'll look at the novel, which I've just read and loved, and I'll point out some of the challenges that making the movie, which I've not yet seen, will present. Then I'm going to be watching the movie, looking at the screenplay and noting the decisions the Nolans made in the making. Hopefully, I will have a more positive and erudite response than I had to their Dark Night.

Sleep Tight...

A year or so ago, I noticed a small storefront off the beaten path in beautiful Downtown Hamilton advertising for bed-bug extermination. Now this wasn't a pest company emphasizing one aspect of it's offerings, this was all these people did.
I wondered at a friend how much of this could be going on and how a service like this could stay in business. To my mind, people with enough money to pay for the service wouldn't have bedbugs and people who had bedbugs probably couldn't afford to have someone come in to get rid of them.
To my surprise, he admitted to having them and having paid to remove them. When I asked him how much he paid, he just rolled his eyes.
All this came back to me when I read the following on Cincinnati's WLWT.com via MSNBC:

City's Bedbug Problem Gains Worldwide Attention.

Health officials said the best way to combat the city’s bed bug problem
was to raise awareness, and now the whole world knows about the area’s
resurgent pests.

And here's a report from Cincinnati's channel 12:

Apartment Infested with Bed Bugs

Bed bugs have a long history of interaction with humans--paleontologists have found a fossilized Egyptian bedbug over 3500 years old and, according to this LA times article:

Bedbugs first turned up in print in ancient Greece and Rome. The
Roman philosopher Pliny described the bugs in a book on natural
history; Greek playwright Aristophanes wrote the pests into
several plays.

Greek doctor Dioscorides found more practical uses for the critters.
To heal a wound, he suggested mixing crushed bedbugs with tortoise
blood. Whether or not such cures worked, they stuck around. More than
1,000 years later, some Chinese medical practitioners advised mixing
crushed bedbugs with rice or lime and sesame oil to treat injuries.

The bedbug’s love of warm, dry places may be why it took so long to
move beyond Africa and the Mediterranean. The earliest English mention
of bedbugs dates to the late Middle Ages, and even then the insects had
limited reach. They only bothered the well-to-do, the ones lucky (or
unlucky) enough to have warm, dry homes.

According to Techletter.com, a pest control resource, bed bugs were another gift of the early settlers:

Bed bugs were first introduced into the Americas by the early
colonists. Colonial writings of the early 18th century documented
severe bed bug problems in the English colonies and in Canada, but not
in Indian villages.

Old sailing ships were
notoriously infested with bed bugs, some so much so that some ships
forbade passengers and colonists from bringing bedding on board.

DDT and Malathion pretty much wiped out bed bugs in the mid-20th century, but in the last ten years they've made a comeback.

Death Mask Tuesday (Most Classical NeoClassicist ed.)

Death Mask Tuesday returns with this suffocating representation of the Danish sculptor, Bertel Thorvaldsen.



Often compared favorably to a fellow neo-classicist, Antonio Canova, Thorvaldsen was considered to be more strictly classical the our former death mask subject.

Here's an excerpt from his 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica entry:

On the whole Thorwaldsen was the most successful of all the imitators of classical sculpture, and many of his statues of pagan deities are modelled with much of the antique feeling for breadth and purity of design. His attempts at Christian sculpture, such as the tomb of Pius
VII. in St Peter's and the "Christ and Apostles" at Copenhagen, are
less successful, and were not in accordance with the sculptor's real
sympathies, which were purely classic. Thorwaldsen worked sometimes
with feverish eagerness; at other times he was idle for many months
together. A great number of his best works exist in private collections in England. His not very successful statue of Lord Byron, after being refused a place in Westminster Abbey, was finally deposited in the library of Trinity College,
Cambridge. The most widely popular among Thorwaldsen's works have been
some of his bas-reliefs, such as the "Night" and the "Morning," which
he is said to have modelled in one day.

And here are some of his works:

Jason, which was his first great success:




Ganymede:



Lion Memorial Relief:



Venus:



The Graces:



And his 'flop', Byron:

Mike Leigh

Here's an interesting, if inelegantly conducted, interview with director Mike Leigh, below which I've posted a scene from my favorite Leigh movie, the unfairly obscure Topsy Turvy.

Radio Days

Here's a clip from a great New Year's Day movie, Woody Allen's Radio Days which ends with a New Year's celebration.  When the going gets tough, get real with family and escape with imagination.  At least that's my plan.

Objectivity

I was driving to visit my Dad and thinking about the crossroads at which I find myself in mid-life. As I shifted lanes to pass a slow car, I considered the mistakes of my life, the waste of time, mourning a little, the fact that it has taken me so long to find direction in my life, to find a passion for something. For a moment I felt sad that even if I succeed quickly and beyond reasonable expectations, I will have so little time, relatively speaking, to enjoy that success.
But abruptly, my mood turned and lightened. I marveled at the fact that I really feel no different than I did fifteen years ago. Every day, after all is a distinct and individual experience. Enjoying what you are doing, deriving a little pleasure from pursuits which feel right, natural and fulfilling defies time. And besides, I'm really not old, just not young. Some cliches are true; truly, you are only as old as you feel. It was then that I realized that my left turn signal had been on for ten minutes.

A Car Chasing Dogs

I realize that I'm one of the last Americans to see "The Dark Knight", but I joined the masses on Christmas Eve when my wife brought home a copy. Susie and the boys had already seen it, of course, and they loved it--Susie especially for Heath Ledger's Joker. I had some preconceived notions, mostly about the edgy anarchic brilliance of Ledger, but also how different and special this Batman movie was going to be.

Where to begin? Let's start with The Batman--hilarious, at first, and then so off-putting that I began to cringe in anticipation of his lines. I get the idea of disguising his voice, but Mickey Mouse would have been less annoying that the Clint Eastwood/Harvey Feirstein choice Bale made.

You know what? I had intended on doing a detailed run through of this picture, but I'll cut to the heart of the matter. This was one boring movie. Boring. I cared about nothing and nobody. The political corruption plot in which no one can be trusted was not intriguing at all--maybe just having watched Season 1 of "The Wire" ruined me for that. I never bought Dent's character. Establishing him as incorruptible in order to make his conversion more shocking. Never bought it. And I guess this brings me to the real problem I had with "The Dark Knight"--the filmmakers spent more time telling us their theme than making it part of the story. How dull to hear Gordon tell Batman, Batman tell Gordon, Dent tell Gordon, Batman tell Dent....blah, blah, blah... And how are we supposed to be sensitive to the killing of one person a day when dozens are dying in Batman's battles and the joker's little forays. How many cops die in the car chase between Batman and the Joker? By the end of the movie, I really don't care the kind of hero Gotham needs, gets or deserves. I'm not invested.

As for Ledger--well done. My life isn't changed, but he was very entertaining and he was in the only scene that made the movie worthwhile for me--the scene between the Joker and Dent in the hospital:

The Joker:

I'm a dog chasing cars... I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it. I just do things. I'm just the wrench in the gears. I hate plans.
Yours, theirs, everyone's. Maroni has plans. Gordon has plans.Schemers trying to control their worlds. I'm not a schemer, I show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are. So when I say that you and your girlfriend was nothing personal, you know I'm telling the truth...

To me, "The Dark Knight" is a car chasing dogs...

Dildos and Cookies

Here is my third annual posting of an OOC Christmas Story (and shame on you if Google brought you here for another reason):

Dildos and Cookies

“Everyone gets dildos and cookies for Christmas,” said Susie as she threw herself down on the couch and gave a humbug recitation on the season. I gathered she was a little exasperated by the holiday and quite fed up with the commercial orgy of consumerism. With my beloved Susie, there are many layers of meaning in her behavior and expression. At the end of her tirade on the false values and obscene greed that Christmas engenders and the contempt in which she now holds the holiday, I commented, “You sound like a jilted lover. There’s a bitterness in your voice that says more than coming to a realization of the hollowness of Christmas.” She stopped, thought, and said, “I guess you’re right.”

Susie’s been getting fed up with the Santa Claus mythology as well. We’ve always been wary of fairytale stories like Santa and the Tooth Fairy, debating the wisdom of constructing a fragile fantasy that would one day crumble and whether it was better just to find joy in what was more earthly and real. After all, a child’s world develops it's own mythology, in a comfortable and loving environment at least, so why guild the lily? Our whip-smart youngest child turned 10 this year and she had already started asking tough, smart, probing questions during the last holiday season. In fact, we assumed she knew, but she was just holding out for fear of losing the presents. Finally, after a barrage of cross-examination, we decided the time had come. Susie pulled one of the boys in and looked at me. I was to have the honors. “There’s no Santa Claus.” Her face sank. It is one thing to know intellectually and another to feel it in your body. She felt it. Dad said it was so. Jordan recounted how he learned from Susie one holiday season in the van. “What about the tooth fairy?” he had asked, feeling the economic threat. Well now it was done for Lia and it seemed to have gone reasonably well. I went back to my browsing on the laptop, but it was not over, Daddy. It meant more than I realized. Emotion was welling up in the girls. For Susan, it was the end of an era in motherhood. The last child to give up the fairy life of childhood. For Lia, it was the end of the fairy life part of childhood.

This was to be the end of another era.
The era of the live, or once live but dying in the house, Christmas tree was about to end. I have always clung to the absurd ritual of buying a real tree every year. I am sentimental, believe it or not, and I like the smell of the tree, and the fact that each year has an individual quality in some ways signified by the various trees. We have the hunt with the children to find the right tree—complete with the nursery employees huddled around the fire burning in a 55 gallon drum--and the futile search for last year’s stand. Then there is the annual ‘price to size and harmonious-shape comparisons’ with my father. On the other hand there is the shedding, cost and disposal of the tree. I must say that some years the tree sat on the front porch until the ides of March or later. Susan has always wanted to go artificial, but they have never looked close to right to me and I held fast to this one last tradition. But this year, the trees were truly uninspiring. Our usual nursery, the supplier of 9 of the last ten trees had had spindly Charley Brown trees at premium prices and there was no fire in the drum, to add insult to disappointment. A survey of the other vendors in the area came up equally disappointing. On the other hand, the artificial trees have come a long way, they have gotten very clever with the trompe l’oiel effects and, instead of having individual pipe cleaner branches, the new trees have branches which lock into an upright position for easy storage. We got one, and in the days leading up to Christmas, I found myself absently pulling at the needles of the tree and a little surprised when my hand came away empty.

On one of the mornings leading up to Christmas, Susie and I were laying in bed and the topic of her disgust with the Gift-Go-Round came up in conjunction with the fact, which I was not happy about, that we were to go out to a houseful of relatives for the blessed day. I like to cook and I like to be in my home with my family on holidays. But now that my parents have come to the area, I am obliged to travel, either to their house or another relative’s for celebratory purposes. I brought up how I hate the question “What did you get for Christmas?”; kind of my version of “Cookies and Dildos” disgust at the focus of things. I said, “If somebody asks me that at the Christmas Party, I’m going to say: (an intent, semi-rapturous tone in my voice and a far-off look on my face) We were lying in be on Christmas Morning and the skylight over our bed began to fill with a warm light, and a rich full tone filled the room, coming from nowhere and everywhere at the same time, and it told me not to want, and that everything I needed I had, everything I wanted I had, and that the world was a temporary and empty place, filled with sound and fury and that when I stepped out the door I would feel a peace and fulfillment that needed no words or objects and the fullness of time would be in my every living moment unto eternity and that this was my gift.” Susan was delighted. “You have to say that to someone in front of me. That’s what I want this Christmas.” “Really?” I answered. “OK.”

I got a tip on a recent CD from a blogger about my age who said his 14 year old and he had both enjoyed it, so I downloaded it from Napster-To-Go, put it on the flash player and listed to it. I liked one of the songs, and I really felt my oldest, George, would love the whole thing. I’m not the Christmas shopper in the family, but I usually like to pick up something for each of the kids that I choose personally. I thought the Dirty Pretty Things CD might be right for the boy. But, I wasn’t sure so I decided to do a little test. I picked him up from school one day and had the album queued up on the mp3 player. We drove home and I dropped him off and went back to work. The next morning as I was driving the boys to work, George asked for the name of that group we had listened to the day before, thus, in effect, getting the CD for Christmas. Several days later, I was browsing the hole in the wall CD store for used Cd's and decided to check and see if they had the CD in stock, which they did, at a very reasonable brick and mortar price. So I bought it, and placed it under the front seat of my car, atop Susie’s stocking surprise, Policewoman, the Complete First Season. Several days later as I was driving the boy home from school, he asked how I came to find out about the Dirty Pretty Things and I told him, and reaching under the seat I explained how I conspired to buy it for him, handing him his Christmas present a week early. Later that day Susie told me that George had told him the whole story of his Christmas present and that she could tell how much it meant to him.

On Christmas Day, after the subdued (compared to the years when the kids’ ages were in the single digits) opening of the presents and breakfast, we got in the car and went to the big Christmas Party, which was pleasant enough. After we had eaten and I was having coffee, sitting with a couple of my cousins and Susie sat down with us. The conversation came around to presents and Susie said to me, expectantly, “John, tell them what you got for Christmas.” “Really?” I asked, knowing full well what she wanted. “Tell them,” she insisted. “All right,” I said a bit reluctantly and began, in kind of an off-hand way, “We were lying in bed the other morning and a warm light….” As I spoke, I watched their attention grow and they became, well, enthralled and I actually began to enjoy the performance. I finished and, after a pause, one cousin asked, respectfully, “Did that really happen?” The others were waiting and Susie was loving it. “Of course not,” I said, “I got a crock pot and an electric griddle.”

In the end there were some cookies but no dildos. A little childhood slipped out of the holiday, as it does every year, no matter how we feel about it. And the line between the plastic and the organic, the social and instinctive, traditional and adaptive gets a little blurrier and less important in my little center of the universal.

Scripts Online

Follow this link to the Oscar promos for Burn After Reading and Milk. Root around and you can find the scripts in pdf. Coen Brothers fans should take this rare opportunity to read their work on the page. I know I can't wait.

Riddles

I've been doing a lot of reading, a lot of writing and a lot of tv watching (research, honestly), so I've been quite neglectful of this public forum and I've found myself quite missing it. Not enough to make any commitments, but enough to force myself onto the blog to see what happens.

In any case, I've been reading a fascinating book by George Reedy, who was an adviser to LBJ, called "The Twilight of the Presidency". I'd been listening to LBJ's phone conversations, many of which are available on the Internet Archive, and was struck by a curious conversation Reedy had with a secretary before being put through to the President. In the course of looking into Reedy, I came across a review of the book by John Dean and immediately picked it up at the library. It's a slim volume which argues that the President has been so removed from the public that he is almost impervious to its will and certainly unable to ascertain its real needs. The book was written during the Reagan Administration and it certainly hasn't gotten any less relevant.

As I read this post from the Canadian TV man Dennis McGrath's Dead Things ON Sticks blog which chastises Canadian TV for being too concerned with spoon feeding its viewers the 'why's of stories, rather than trusting them to meet a story half way, I immediately thought of a quote from Reedy's book:

Personally, I believe that the Delphic Oracle was a much more useful device for solving a society's problems. It gave mystical answers to questions, which made people think hard to solve the mysteries. Often they lit upon the right answers to the problems as well as to the mysteries. The computer gives one final answer and, if it is wrong, God help all of us.

Of course, this was twenty years ago, before computers became the wonderful mystery solvers they are today. And one could argue, if the Delphic Oracle were so damn great, why didn't it survive? In this rational world, the best way wins out, doesn't it?

An argument could be made that George W. Bush was the most oracular President ever, thus paradoxically proving Reedy's thesis of the out of touch Presidency, while answering his call to the return of myster. Yes, Bush's words where superficially nonsensical, but we may all be wiser if we spent some time contemplating his most oblique statements.

Here's Joan Jett's "Riddles" which addresses this, though not in as open-minded a way as I.

Joan Jett Riddles Live 9/17/06

Death Mask Tuesday (Immigrant Criminal Ed.)

This week's death mask is of a wicked Frenchman who in 1833 blew into a small New Jersey town and committed a sensational triple murder.

(photo by Kevin Coughlin)

Antione Leblanc, a laborer killed his employers and their servant and made off with their valuables. His nine day trial drew huge interest and thousands watched his execution. After his death he was jolted with electricity in a futile re-animation experiment.



The scene of the crime was turned into a restaurant which now attracts visitors by claiming to be haunted.