PUT DOWN THE HAMMER

Men In Black 3 may have finally knocked The Avengers from the top spot at the box office, and what with Ridley Scott's deeply unnecessary Alien prequel Prometheus opening next weekend, the summer movie season is finally here.  But however all the upcoming releases may fare financially, I doubt any of them will do what Joss Whedon does so astonishingly well with The Avengers: Make it look easy.

Make no mistake, this is just a popcorn movie, and on some level, a fairly cynical one, the latest attempt by Marvel (and its new Disney overlords) to implant its brand on the consciousness of every moviegoer everywhere.  As such, it's the culmination of a series of movies now clearly revealed to be mere prequels.  These ran the gamut from good (Captain America) to bad (Iron Man 2), with most falling somewhere in between, but they all carried the unmistakeable air of Product, branded entertainment meant to provide a momentary diversion, then be forgotten.

And yeah, The Avengers is itself just a disposeable piece of entertainment.  But what entertainment!

For TV auteur Whedon, the architect of such beloved series as Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Firefly, this is strictly a job for hire.  He's a well-known fanboy himself--hell, he's written for Marvel Comics--but this isn't one of his own creations, and he can't do anything with the characters beyond what Marvel will allow.

But he can scribble in the margins to his heart's content, and it's in these small character moments that the movie finds its heart, rising above its purely mercenary origins.  Whedon realizes that this is primarily a story of broken souls who come together to find a common purpose--the type of thing he specializes in.  And, by showing how they fall apart and reassemble, he somehow finds a way to make the whole thing--dammit--moving.

Which is great and all, but where the success of The Avengers may actually bode well for future Big Summer Movies is in its expertly unfussy storytelling.  Even its massively cliched opening sequence--Good Guys battle Bad Guys over a Macguffin, complete with a hokey "outrunning collapsing ground" bit--is thrillingly put together, its action cleanly staged and instantly readable, with none of the whip pans or frantic overediting so common to modern action cinema.

In fact, the greatest delight of The Avengers is how essentially old-fashioned it is.  Despite a huge budget and all the technology in the world, Whedon never feels the need to show off.  He's like Howard Hawks or Raoul Walsh, here to tell a story, not make a spectacle of himself.  Or, to phrase it another way, he's the Captain America of filmmakers: A solid tactician, always to the point and eminently professional.

BUT THEY ARE ALL THAT'S UNCHANGED

Janie and I drove down to the cemetery where her parents are buried, about forty-five minutes south of Des Moines, but, at first glance, a different world.

Rows of crops on either side of the lonely paved highway.  Gravel roads branching off to who knows where.  And, as we entered the town where her grandparents once lived, a modest little sign: WELCOME TO MILO, then below that:  Please Help Our Boy Scout Can Drive.  For a moment I thought I'd been transported back in time, maybe to the very small towns I'd grown up in myself.

But of course, no.  We passed by a park, where a small child played on the merry-go-round as her mother talked on a cell phone, oblivious to her.  We drove past the farm once owned by Janie's uncle.  Many of the buildings she remembered from her childhood had been torn down, and what remained had obviously been converted to other uses.  A Lexus sat in the driveway, and two pickups, but no farm equipment was in sight, and a few horses represented the only visible livestock.  The surrounding fields were obviously owned and maintained by somebody else, somebody who didn't live around here.

Sure, we all know change is the only constant in this world.  It's a given, as certain as the ultimate destination of our trip: a cemetery.  We laid flowers on the graves, the graves of people I'll never meet, then we moved on, past the same lush fields and through the same town, but somehow they didn't look as inviting as they did only a few minutes earlier.    

"I don't get down here as often as I'd like," Janie said as we headed back home.  "And every time I leave, I feel like I'm leaving something behind."

"You're not, though," I said.  "It left you.  All you can do now is live the rest of your life."

She took my hand, and we drove back in silence.

SERIOUSLY, GOOGLE, DO YOU WANT THIS TO BE A PAIN TO USE?

I've had a couple things I intended to write about, but since I never got around to actually, you know, writing, I'm beginning to think the will wasn't that strong in the first place.  So there's that.

But also, Blogger has redesigned its dashboard, and in the process made this site an absolute pain to use.  Seriously, it was fine and easily understood the way it was.  Why do a redesign that makes even the simplest function difficult?

Anyway, the combination of these two things has me pondering the future of this space.  Not going away permanently, necessarily, but...well, I don't know.  But since my words here provide no entertainment whatsoever, here's a very Early Eighties Marshall Crenshaw--check out the pink shirt!--casually knocking out an absolute classic.  Enjoy, and whenever the hell I come back, hopefully I'll actually have something to say.

SAY, MAYBE HAPPINESS REALLY IS A WARM PUPPY

As I sit at my desk, the Beagle feels the need to remind me of her presence.  She scampers up to my side while chomping a squeaky toy, which she promptly drops on the floor.  I pick up the rubber turkey leg and toss it into the living room.  Immediately, she brings it back and drops it on the floor.  I toss it back into the living room.  Immediately, she brings it back and drops it on the floor.  Changing it up, I toss it into the kitchen. 

Immediately, she brings her food dish and drops it on the floor.

A simple, perfect gag, impeccably executed.  Of all the many reasons to treasure Isabella, this may rank above all others: She makes me laugh.  Not smile warmly or chuckle fondly, but full belly laughs.  She's been in my life for two years this month, and the joy I feel for knowing her is present in that laughter.  My life is richer, more whole, in ways I could never have imagined.  No matter what nightmarish turns life may take, I know she'll be there, head tilted, tail wagging, eager to please, effortlessly sweet, eternally loved.

FEEL YOUR OWN PAIN

Sitting in a Sears Auto Center, noticing a poster for a particular brand of brakes, I turned to my wife and, adopting the hyperbolic tone of a movie trailer announcer, loudly proclaimed, "Antonio Banderas IS Raybestos!"

Without missing a beat, Sue Ellen, rolling every r, responded, "Now, Antonio Banderas returns in Raybestos 2: The Reckoning."

I mention this exchange not because it was particularly witty (though it seemed hilarious at the time) but to give an idea what my marriage was like.  Every quip had to be met with another, each one funnier or more elaborate than the last.  We'd improv entire conversations in character, or suddenly start singing and dancing in the living room.  It was like being trapped inside a mid-nineties Friends knockoff; everything we did--everything we did--became self-conscious and ironic.  We were always on.

Which, as you might imagine, was exhausting.  And doomed to failure--this month marks the ten-year anniversary of the spectacular, and spectacularly ugly, end of my marriage.

I'll skip all the details because, frankly, I don't want to remember them.  The point is, there was a lot of anger, a lot of resentment, but also a gradual realization that Sue Ellen and I were the only two people in the world who knew exactly what went down.

So we started talking again, partly to work out some lingering issues, but mostly because we realized we still had a lot in common.  We became friends, which is maybe all that we should have been all along.  Friends can trade funny lines back and forth, but then leave it alone because they don't have to live together. 

Time moved on.  We met other people, and discovered the happiness we somehow could never quite provide for each other.

And I'm very happy now with Janie, who has absolutely nothing in common with Sue Ellen beyond their shared amusement at my insistence that I'm not obsessed with Star Wars.  (I'm not, really.  Try getting me started on Batman: The Animated Series and we'll be here all day.)

Whatever my obsessions are (for that matter, you can easily get me going all day on the greatness of John Carpenter movies or Mystery Science Theater 3000), Janie doesn't share them.  That's okay, though; she has her own enthusiasms and interests.  We can be together and still live our own lives, as long as there is love and mutual respect.

As for Sue Ellen and me, we still talk occasionally, but not so often or at such length.  We had what we had, and it still matters, but not like it did.  It blends into an increasingly hazy past, a fading that is perhaps the only constant in life.

NEVER LET FACTS GET IN THE WAY

I don't read Salon.  It's the type of thing aimed at well-off kinda-sorta liberals, a slightly more interesting online version of The New Republic and not my sort of thing.  So I can't tell you if their political articles are any more well-researched or knowledgeable than this piece, a hugely uninteresting article with a questionable premise that is just wrong in every conceivable way.

Author Michael Barthel details the way movie trailers have changed in the digital era.  For the first century of film, even into the late nineties, movie previews were staid, hidebound things, designed to put seats into asses but certainly nothing innovative.  Trailers today, Barthel argues have changed in so many ways--where they used to rely on stentorian narrators, now they use onscreen text.  Whereas they used to feature dull soundscapes, now they are far more sophisticated in their aural design.  And most of all, trailers have become marvels of fast, innovative editing.  All in the last twenty years!

Uh-huh.  Here's a trailer from 1963.



Almost subliminal cutting, an inventive use of sound, no narrator (except to give the title, and even that's done as a joke)--pretty much gives the lie to everything Barthel claims, doesn't it?  Of course, maybe I'm being unfair.  Dr. Strangelove is one of the greatest films ever made, and director Stanley Kubrick personally obsessed over the ad campaigns for his films.  Barthel, presumably, is talking about more obviously commercial movies, big blockbusters, popcorn entertainment.

Specifically, he seems obsessed with the ad for Ridley Scott's upcoming Prometheus.



"It is amazing," Barthel gushes.  "There's no narration...few shots last for more than a second, and it builds from a quiet beginning to ear-shredding shrieks accompanying micro-second glimpses of huge effects shots."  That's an accurate enough description of the Prometheus trailer (though I don't find it particularly "amazing")...but it would also--right down to the shrieking soundtrack, something Barthel claims "simply didn't exist twenty years ago"--describe the 1979 trailer for Scott's Alien, the movie that inspired Prometheus.



In other words, Barthel doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.  There's been a "revolution" (his word, not mine) in the crafting of trailers in recent years, but not in the way he suggests.  Where ad campaigns used to be carefully tailored to each individual movie, the same generic style is used for pretty much every movie made these days.  Barthel's breathless description of the Prometheus trailer could as easily apply to The Dark Knight Rises, The Avengers or any Michael Bay movie ever. 

In fact, sitting through the trailers has become one of the most painful aspects of moviegoing, a joyless slog through the same overly familiar editing patterns, the same library music, the same thing over and over and over again.  This type of thing doesn't make me want to see the movie.  It makes me want to run in the other direction.

COMPARED TO THIS, THAT WHOLE "GREEDO SHOOTS FIRST" THING IS NOTHING

Apparently it's been out for awhile and I just hadn't paid attention, but the "Director's Cut" of Kate & Leopold is available on DVD and Blu-Ray.

You response to this news is likely, "Wait.  What?  Huh?"  It's an understandable response, since you likely don't remember this Meg Ryan/Hugh Jackman time-travelling romcom in the first place, and even if you do, you would find it hard to believe that the world needed an alternate version.  It was directed by unambitious studio-approved auteur wannabe James Mangold, whose movies can invariably be described as adequate.

But apparently he has enough pull to issue his own version of...a Meg Ryan romcom.  I mean, look, I'm sorry, as these things go, Kate & Leopold is on the high end of the scale--based on the five minutes of it I saw on cable once--but let's not get carried away.  This isn't Diego Rivera vs. Rockefeller.  This isn't a masterpiece destroyed by philistines.  This is a piece of studio product that its director inexplicably confused with art.  We didn't need Mangold's, um, vision brought to us in full strength.

As compromised as they may be, I generally believe the released version of a movie should be the definitive version.  Yeah, Walter Murch thought he was doing the world a favor by recutting Touch Of Evil to a version closer to Orson Welles' wishes...but however heavy-handed some of the studio-imposed aspects may be, it was that original version that critics have known and loved for years.  And Francis Coppola can claim all he wants that the Apocalypse Now Redux cut is what he originally intended--though I'm pretty sure he's lying through his teeth--but it's not the movie he originally released, not the movie I saw and loved back in '79. 

Sometimes a recut version isn't a bad idea--the studio really did butcher David Lean's original cut of Lawrence Of Arabia after the film had gone into release, so his altered version of it thirty years after the fact was an attempt to put back what was originally there--but generally speaking, I'm not a big fan of changing film history after the fact.  Maybe the version we have isn't all that it could have been.  But it's what we've got.

LIKE GUARDIANS OF THE GATES OF HELL

Finally got around to seeingJohn Carter, and hey, it's really terrific.  In particular, the visuals are way more ambitious and unusual than anything that had been shown in the previews, which gave absolutely no sense of its epic scale or its sly wit.

Recent stories in both The New York Times and New York magazine have the Disney marketeers blaming director Andrew Stanton himself for the lackluster ad campaign, but that feels like finger pointing from studio lackeys who failed to do their job.  How hard could it have been to sell an adventure picture based on an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel?  American International Pictures knew how to do that sort of thing back in the seventies.  True, John Carter doesn't actually feature an exploding lizard--and is poorer for it, I must admit--but it should have been easy to put together a trailer featuring some exciting highlights.  Because, let's face it, this makes At The Earth's Core look like a ton of fun.

TURNED ON TO EVERYTHING BY THE TORRID TEMPO OF THE STRANGE AGE WE'RE LIVING IN!

The weekend isn't even over, but people who do such things for a living are already proclaiming the massively expensive new science fiction epic John Carter a flop.  This failure has nothing to do with the quality of the movie itself and almost everything to do with its incredibly incompetent marketing campaign.

Really, though, when was the last time the trailer for a movie made you want to see it?  If you're predisposed to see, I dunno, a Sandra Bullock romcom or a hyperactive action movie starring a bunch of real-life Navy Seals, well, the ad campaigns for such movies pretty much let you know they exist.  But they won't make you feel like you must see it, like this movie might be the most important thing in the whole world.

People don't go to the movies as often as they once did. The batch of Oscar nominees this year were all box office underperformers.  Not surprising, since even the good ones were sold in a safe, respectable manner.  Maybe if the ads for War Horse had managed to work in the phrase "A Rebellion of HUMAN GARBAGE" more people would've shown up in theaters. 

I RODE WITH HIM, AND I GOT NO COMPLAINTS

The great if unheralded cinematographer Bruce Surtees has died at the age of 74.

His dad was the Golden Age cameraman Robert Surtees, who toiled at MGM at the close of its Dream Factory days, but the son's work would be the polar opposite of the father's easily read Classical Hollywood style.  His most frequent collaborator, Clint Eastwood, dubbed him the Prince Of Darkness for a reason.

After serving as an apprentice to his father and others, Surtees' first film as director of photography was Don Siegel's The Beguiled, the first of several outstanding collaborations, including Dirty Harry, The Shootist and Escape From Alcatraz.  He provided tabloid squalor for Bob Fosse's Lenny, low-key naturalism for Arthur Penn's great Night Moves and a touch of glamour for Stanley Donen's wonderful Movie, Movie.  Why he didn't become one of the superstar cinematographers of the seventies, joining the ranks of Laszlo Kovacs or Vilmos Zsigmond or Gordon Willis, is frankly beyond me.  He could shoot in any style, and it always looked good.

But his preferred style was the underlit naturalism of his work with Eastwood, one of the great director/cameramen collaborations in movie history.  In particular, their work on three great Westerns--High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales and Pale Rider--feature some absolutely stunning imagery.

High Plains Drifter has a strange, stylized appearance, its colors just slightly oversaturated.  Pale Rider, by contrast, is almost monochromatic, its overcast skies and drab clothing giving it a feeling of black-and-white in color.  And The Outlaw Josey Wales--well, look, I pretty much consider it as close to perfection as any movie ever made, and Surtees' visuals are surely one of the major reasons for that.  I can't think of any film that so subtly conveys the passing of seasons, the feeling of moving from place to place.  Every frame is gorgeous and gritty in roughly equal measure.

Sadly, Pale Rider would be his last film for Eastwood.  He'd work with other good directors in the eighties, like Sam Fuller and Paul Brickman, but his A-list days were behind him.  He wound down his career toiling away on TV movies obviously unworthy of his talent.  But at least he kept working, a pro to the end.

UM...OKAY?

According to E! Entertainment News--the only information source that matters, if you're really, really stupid--Josh Duhamel is "not sure" he'll be back for the latest Transformers movie.

I think I speak for all Americans when I say, "Who's Josh Duhamel?"

Since I have cable TV, I've seen huge chunks of the Transformers movies, and all I remember are giant but weightless CGI robots, plenty of offensive caricatures and Shia The Beef running around screaming, "OPTIMUS!"  Whoever Josh Duhamel is, he clearly made no impression on the films whatsoever.

Then again, I'm pretty sure he's made no impact on anybody whatsoever.  I'd be willing to bet that if you asked ten random strangers who Josh Duhamel is, none of them would know.  Some of them might say, "Yeah, wasn't he the guy in Pearl Harbor who was even less interesting than Ben Affleck?" and while that was my first thought, too, it turns out that particular nonentity was Josh Hartnett, who has himself gone from being hyped as The Next Big Thing to toplining direct-to-video horror movies, a career arc that should surely give pause to Duhamel. 

What I'm saying is, Josh Duhamel should be fighting like hell to continue doing whatever minimal, uninteresting work he can get in a new Transformers movie because hey, a paycheck is a paycheck, and I'm guessing a check from a shitty Michael Bay movie has more zeroes in it than a check from some celebrity autograph fest.  Sure it may be humiliating to find yourself billed below the guy who does the voice of Optimus Prime, but it beats sitting between Billy Mumy and Jonathan Frid at a table in some suburban convention center, with a placard in front of you identifying you as a "former Transformers star" and gritting your teeth the whole time because Mumy's got a huge line in front of him and you're just sitting there.

And he deserves it, dammit, because Billy Mumy recorded Fish Heads and you...well, you're just Josh Duhamel.

NOW WE ARE SIX

Mom didn't care much for Peter Jackson's King Kong.: "Why did it take so long to get to the island?  Why was it three hours long?  And that dinosaur stampede!  What were they thinking?  And that scene on the ice--cute, cute, cute.  No, I didn't like it."

This was late December of '05.  Earlier that month, she'd been given six months to live.  As it turns out, she had considerably less.  To many of us, the reality of impending death might cause us to give in to fear, or despair, or introspection, or something.  Mom...just became more like she always was.

On the movie version of Rent: "Oh, it's terrible.  He dies of AIDS, and we're going to try to make you cry by reminding you about it over and over, 'Oh, it's so sad,' like we've forgotten what happened ten minutes ago.  Was it this bad on stage?"

On Lost, then in its first season: "Maybe there's a monster, maybe there's not a monster.  But if there's not, they need to stop pretending that there is and get on with the plot.  And if there is a monster...that would be kind of stupid, wouldn't it?"

On Brigadoon, which she's stumbled across on cable and called me immediately after just to gripe about: "It doesn't work that way.  You can't say, 'These are the rules, this is what happens,' and then do something else and say, 'It's a miracle.'  Why did you make the rules in the first place?  And I don't think Cyd Charisse was Scottish..."

Six years since her death, I admit I don't think about Mom as much as I used to.  I don't miss her anymore, not really, not like I thought I would.  But sometimes, when I'm in the middle of a rant, when I'm asking a sales clerk to stop talking to his friends and actually give me some service, when I see through the lies of a politician...These are the times when I am thankful Mom was there to teach me how to question, to stand up for myself, to see what is really there.

Mom liked everyone, and everyone liked her.  She had a sentimental streak a mile wide, any rendition of Bein' Green would automatically reduce her to tears, she had a goofy sense of humor and laughed easily.  But beneath her easygoing manner was a fierce determination to say what needed to be said.  In the wake of my divorce, I was unloading my feelings about my ex, but she seemed to be taking Sue Ellen's side.  Why, I asked, are you sticking up for her?

"Because she messed up, but she wasn't stupid.  You were stupid."

I remember that, and I've used that to guide me since, in relationships and everything else.  Because she was right, of course.  She was always right. 

Well, except for her weird obsession with Murder, She Wrote...

MEMORIES CAN HANG YOU UP AND HAUNT YOU

There are two tragedies in what will now be known as the short life of Whitney Houston.  There is the obvious one, the numbingly familiar tale of a huge star with the world at her command, who somehow finds fame isn't enough, who falls into a downward spiral of drugs and erratic behavior, who tries for the Big Comeback that never quite happens, who is found dead in a hotel room, in this case at the depressingly young age of 48. 

As sad as that story might be, there's another one that to me is even sadder: The story of a possibly major artist with an absolutely incredible talent, who let herself be led by industry professionals down a path that would strip her of any individuality, to a career of absolute inconsequence. 

I first became aware of Houston as so many people did, with her debut album, cannily assembled by blanderizing industry pro Clive Davis.  The first single, Saving All My Love For You, showed promise, especially in this performance on David Letterman's old show, assisted in no small part by the arrangement by band leader Paul Shaffer, much superior to the schlocky, overproduced version on the album.



She's incredible here, in full command of her multi-octave voice, and the vocal pyrotechnics are deployed well.  Later, of course, she'd start melisma-ing all over the place, a profound and bad influence on so many singers who would follow her.  The most obvious Whitney Wannabe, of course, was Mariah Carey, but ironically, Carey's recorded legacy is stronger than Houston's.  Saving All My Love isn't a great song, but it's at least servicable as a showcase for Houston's vocals, and it stands out on an album full of pop piffle like How Will I Know? and overwrought ballads like The Greatest Love Of All.

Unfortunately, all of her albums followed the same carefully-engineered template, machine-tooled by Davis and his minions to maximize profits.  Album, tour, album, tour, with numerous awards show appearances thrown in along the way--that became Houston's life as a musician.  Artistic concerns never entered into the picture.

But what about the path not taken?  Prior to superstardom, Houston was a working musician, which is what led her to work with the NYC collective Material, which produced this stunningly beautiful track, which showcases Houston, not even twenty, as the jazzy chanteuse she might have been, the artist she was.

THREE TIMES THAT NIGHT

First Staley--of course.  Every night when I go to bed, Staley leaps up beside me, purring loudly, head-butting me into I skritch her her, moving around constantly, making sure I pet her just as much as she wants.  Then--wump! wump! wump!--she scrambles to the foot of the bed, leaps down and runs off.

Later, Cookie appears, climbing over Janie and draping herself on my side.  I pat the bed beside me and she crawls down, snuggling beside me, tucked under the blanket.  Her entire body vibates from the force of her purring, and she's close enough to me that my body feels it, too, it's comforting, it's reassuring.  But ultimately, like Staley, Cookie is only there for herself.  Once I stop actually petting her, she's gone.

But when I wake, there he is--Delmar.  He doesn't care if I'm petting him, if I'm paying attention to him at all.  In fact, he seems happier when I'm not noticing him.  Those are the times when he can sneak in and remind me of his existence, can prove his intense, unending devotion to me. 

Sometimes that devotion is just strange, not like a pet's love for his owner but more stalkerish, like I'm Jodie Foster to his John Hinckley.  But the little feller's so sweet, and he means so well, and when I wake with his front legs wrapped around my arm, I know he's been holding me, claiming me as his own, offering his heart.  And as cats go, well, Del's pretty much the greatest thing ever.

Staley and Cookie are prettier, though.

IN THIS MOMENT FOREVER

Janie's in bed by the time I get home.  Of course she is.  I work later now.  Since I'm gone all evening and sleep later in the morning, it sometimes seems like we hardly see each other anymore.

So I walk the dog, choke down a late dinner, spend some time on the interweb.  There used to be an entire evening to decompress after work, but I've only been home a little more than an hour, and it's already 1 AM.  The bed is calling.

The radio's on, the "lite FM" station Janie favors when I'm not around.  Fine.  I leave it on.

She stirs slightly as I get into bed, a relexive action to the new presence beside her, but she doesn't actually wake up.  I claim my side, put my arm around her...and become aware of the song that's playing.

Look, I don't like Aerosmith, okay?  And especially this--I Don't Want To Miss A Thing.  A generic Diane Warren song, recorded for Michael Bay's typically awful Armageddon?  Can it get any worse, less inspired, more corporate?

No.  I hate this song.  I've always hated this song.  But at this moment...damn.



Right now, it can't be denied: These words sum up my feelings perfectly. Staley leaps over Janie and looks at me, letting out a tentative meow, and the three of us snuggle together. Maybe, I think, even the crappiest music has its place, and I drift off happily to sleep.

JUST SITTING HERE DOING TIME

Walking down the corridors of a hospital at night, the thing that immediately stands out is the blue TV light shining from patient rooms, and the sounds of different channels wafting into the halls.

The mix is always pretty mainstream.  Sports.  Religious broadcasts.  Sitcoms, both old and new.  Shitty Ben Stiller movies that would have been comfortably forgotten had they not been repurposed into basic cable staples.  Nothing really demanding of anyone's time or attention.

That's the point, of course.  People in a hospital, whether patients or visitors, are a captive audience, but they tune into these shows for the same reason people at home do: Because they're there, and there's nothing else to do.

This sort of TV is often described as the audio-visual equivalent of comfort food, but that's not quite true.  A meatloaf and mashed potato dinner may be full of calories and starches, but it will still provide some form of nourishment.  This sort of TV doesn't do that--quite the opposite.  It deadens the mind and senses.

Sometimes that's needed.  There are times in our lives when there is literally nothing else to do, and all that's left is to kill some time.  That's the job of most TV, and it does it well.

THE NAMES HAVE ALL CHANGED SINCE YOU HUNG AROUND

Since this will only be my fourth post for the month, it doesn't seem possible that I could become less prolific around here, but enormous changes in my work schedule are likely to have some sort of trickle-down effect on my writing time. 

What this means, I can't really say.  It's going to take some time to readjust all the other patterns of my life, and quite honestly, writing isn't as much of a priority as it used to be.  I'll presumably pop back here from time to time, but it may take some time before that happens. 

For now, let me just note the passing of Robert Hegyes, Juan Epstein from Welcome Back, Kotter, my favorite sitcom when I was eleven.  It's funny how the clips of Brooklyn street life in the opening credits look vaguely hellish today, but when I was a kid, I longed desperately to go there, to be anywhere away from the isolation of the country.  Now, of course, I'd give anything to go back to the life I once had, the life I once hated, the life that is gone forever. 

Sorry, did I say "funny"?  That may not have been the word I meant...

IS THIS SAD? YES. YES, IT IS...

The thing is, I get up absurdly early every day in order to give myself time to write.  And great googly moogly, it's not as though there's nothing to write about. 

The baffling persistence of Newt Gingrich, for instance, and the stunning hypocrisy of the Republican party.  The post-death treatment of Joe Paterno by the press, which may make a few concessions to his "tarnished legacy" but still insists that the greatness of being a winning football coach somehow trumps looking the other way as his assistant fucked little boys.  Or even the Oscar nominations, which...seriously?  Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close?  Did anybody like that?

But, as always, I find something--anything--to do with my time to avoid writing.  Playmate Of The Apes was on cable, and who can resist the lure of fake tits and bad puns?  That was followed by The Pope Of Greenwich Village, the movie that by itself derailed the career momentum of Eric Roberts and Mickey Rourke.  Neither of these movies are remotely worth watching, despite either abundant nudity or a fine cast that includes Geraldine Page, Kenneth McMillan and M. Emmet Walsh, and yet I sat through them anyway.

Then sat down and knocked this thing out in a couple of minutes, just to reassure myself that, yes, I'm still writing.  Sort of.

OH LOOK, CHILDREN, IT SEEMS TO BE ONE OF THOSE RANDOM THOUGHTS POSTS WE'VE HEARD TELL OF

1) I really don't want to turn this space into a series of musings over songs heard on my cable company's "Seventies Gold" music service, but once again I had it on in the background this morning while I was doing other things (by "other things" I mean reading the Wikipedia entry on Mamie Van Doren), and this came on in the background.



And the thing is, it took me awhile to realize what it was.  It sounded like just another sensitive singer/songwriter from an era loaded with 'em, and as such, it didn't really seem, you know, bad.  Then at some point I realized, "Oh my God, it's David Soul," and I remembered I was supposed to treat this song with the sneering condescension I regularly bring to clips of Lynda Carter variety specials and whatnot, but honestly, it really isn't bad.

Also, honestly?  David Soul's a pretty good actor.

2) So I'm wandering around a department store today and I keep running into the same little kid, who is being chased everywhere by his mom, who keeps calling him by name: "Xander!  Come back here!"  "Xander!  Put that down!"  "Xander!  This isn't a playground!"

Though I realize there are any number of reasons why she might have named her kid Xander, I prefer to conclude that she's a big fan of Buffy The Vampire Slayer.  Because it makes me happy.

3) Janie's dozing in the other room, the TV tuned to back-to-back showings of Young Guns and Young Guns 2.  Periodically I feel the need to try watching these things, to see if time has been kind to them, as programmer Westerns from the fifties starring the pretty boy likes of Rock Hudson and Robert Wagner have aged better than might have seemed possible at the time.

Of course, those fifties movies had the advantage of the occasional Douglas Sirk or Nick Ray directing, whereas the Young Guns movies were helmed by the auteurs of Gone Fishin' and Freejack.  And even though Emilio Estevez's stock has risen in recent years by simply not being as awful as Martin Sheen's other kid, he's still absolutely terrible in this movie, as are his fellow "guns"--Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips, Christian Slater.  Also, dropping in better actors (Alan Ruck, Jenny Wright) or authentic cinematic icons (Terence Stamp, Jack Palance) does its stars no favors.

And seriously, Young Guns 2--you really want to throw a cameo from James Coburn into your crappy Billy The Kid movie?  Because anything that makes a viewer think how they could be watching Sam Peckinpah's magnificent Pat Garret & Billy The Kid instead of this piece of shit would seem to be a thing to avoid.  But what do I know?  It's not like I directed Freejack.

4) To be fair, it's not that basic cable perennial Freejack is a bad movie (though it is) so much as the single laziest, most unnecessary thing ever projected on a screen.  Literally every single aspect of this thing had been done before, and better.  As bad as movies are now, I sometimes forget just how bad things were in the late eighties and early nineties.  (Newsies--enough said.)  Next time I'm sitting through the trailer for the latest Resident Evil sequel, I'll try to remember there was once a time when Hollywood thought we all wanted more Emilio Estevez or singin' and dancin' Christian Bale, and be, for lack of a better word, grateful.

5) Cats and dog.  Are they adorable?  Of course!

EVERYTHING WE ARE WILL NEVER DIE

Janie's sleeping in the other room, cats gathered all around her.  The dog is at my feet, and music plays softly in the background.

Specifically, Music Choice, courtesy of my local cable channel.  The choices are broken down according to genres and moods or, in this case, eras--I've got Seventies Gold playing, for no better reason than the hope some song will unexpectedly pop up that sparks a frisson of recognition, conjures a memory so vivid that it can't be shaken.

Because I haven't been having any of those lately.  Last Saturday, for instance, was the seventeenth anniversary of my wedding day.  The fact that the marriage has been dead for years is beside the point--it was still a milestone in my life, and you'd think, given my nature, I'd spend time ruminating over loss, impermanence, regret, what have you--that's what I do here, after all, to the extent I do anything at all.

Instead, it flashed through my mind once as I sat down to watch New Year's Rockin' Eve and that was that.  A good thing, I suppose, moving on and all that, but again, it just doesn't seem like me.  I obsess over things that were that will never be again.  A passing shrug?  Is that all I've got?  Really?

I'm eating Fudge Rounds and drinking Sprite for breakfast (because what's the point of living to adulthood if you can't do everything you wanted when you were six?) and when I finish, I take my empty glass to the kitchen.  Suddenly the mellow horn intro to the Bee Gees' Too Much Heaven wafts from the TV, and it happens.  I have a vivid memory of this song drifting from the radio as my brother John and I drove down 141 heading from the farm to Des Moines on yet another record-buying spree.  I'd just seen Brian DePalma's Obsession on TV, with its great, brooding Bernard Herrmann score, and I knew Music Den in Merle Hay Mall had the soundtrack, because I knew everything they had in regular stock, and where everything was, the details assembling in my head with remarkable clarity...

...Until CLANG!  Isabella has used her front paw to flip her water dish upside down, and it hits the linoleum with a reverie-shattering sound.  She looks at me, head tilted, tail wagging, big brown eyes in full-out soulful mode.  "You're in the kitchen," she seems to say.  "That means snacks, right?  I love snacks.  Also, I seem to have spilled my water.  Can you do something about that?"

As I get out a biscuit, refill the water and give the dog a big hug, the Bee Gees fade to background noise, and I realize any vivid memories of thirteen-year-old me are...well, only memories.  They matter, sure, but they don't--can't--define me.  Isabella scampers off, perfectly satisfied, briefly chasing Delmar and Staley, who'd come to the kitchen to see what all the noise was about.  I move quietly back to the bedroom and rest my head next to Janie, glad that I've learned to live in the here and now.