tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62374281210314510172024-02-08T12:01:46.575-08:0040 'Til 40!Blasmohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01267720628197164493noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6237428121031451017.post-59511568077916588732010-12-23T08:49:00.000-08:002010-12-23T12:17:19.385-08:00END OF YEAR LIST 2010Okay. 10 things. With subsections. <br /><br />1. Best Music Purchase: LCD Soundsystem – <span style="font-style:italic;">This Is Happening</span>. My strange return to electronic music this year hit a high with this one: at times beautifully danceable (“All I Want”) and other times beautifully noisy. “Drunk Girls” may be the catchiest single of the year, and is more about slyly admiring the bonding of drunk girls versus the solipsistic behavior of drunk boys. Best lines: “Just 'cause I'm shallow doesn't mean that I'm heartless/ Just 'cause I'm heartless doesn't mean that I'm mean” and “Drunk girls wait an hour to pee”.<br /><br />1A. Fave Music Purchase: DEVO – <span style="font-style:italic;">Something For Everybody</span>. A high concept album that featured fake marketing research videos and a release party only for cats, this album was more than a comeback for fans; it was a reminder that when Devo’s syncopation is on, and Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale’s voices blend together, you get some damned fine, really fun music. It starts off with four great, ironic and utterly danceable singles – the song “Fresh” features recycled lyrics from other Devo songs and “Don’t Shoot” is as propulsive as anything they’ve ever done – and then gets better, peaking with the final three songs, which are totally unironic, emotionally committed songs that should not work for Devo, but absolutely do. Problem: The CD stalls momentarily with “Cameo”, a song that is either: 1. About Ian Astbury of The Cult and his appropriations of Native American culture; 2. Simply about pop appropriations of Native American culture, or; 3. Completely fucking offensive for fucking offensiveness’ sake. Regardless, the single “Work It” should have been on here instead of this. <br /><br />1B. Fave Single: “Alive” by Goldfrapp, a spot-on <span style="font-style:italic;">Xanadu </span>soundtrack soundalike that should be played in skating rinks everywhere. It features everything that’s great about early 80’s Eurodisco – a hook that could catch a sperm whale, self-empowerment lyrics, big, fat, bloated keyboards, and a line about one’s jeans being “a little tight”. The video is a hilarious romp through a Satanic ritual designed to bring a now-aerobicized Sandy from <span style="font-style:italic;">Grease </span>back to demonic life via a Goth dance ceremony, interrupted by also-aerobicizing vampires. <br /><br />2. Worst Music – I haven’t immediately hated any song as much as Owl City’s “Fireflies”, a song with lyrics I have seen quoted in complete sincerity on Facebook. Besides the fact that the music is a complete ripoff of the Postal Service, it attempts to, and I quote myself here, “…commercially recreate the feeling of precious wonder felt by any girl seeing Lloyd Dobler delicately kick the piece of glass out of Diane Court’s way in <span style="font-style:italic;">Say Anything</span>”. It doesn’t mean anything. It wants you to think it does. It wants you to believe that preciousness equals emotional and spiritual yearning and discovery. It features the worst fucking song lyrics of all time: “It’s hard to say that I’d rather stay/ Awake when I’m asleep/ ‘Cause everything is never as it seems”. The video only adds to the horror, as a bunch of old toys come to life as Mr. City plays his Sears-brand 70’s catalog-bought organ, complete with light patterns, while leaning over it in his darned socks. It is a completely commercial attempt to co-opt the dreams of sensitive teenagers everywhere and completely succeeded on a commercial level. And I hate its ass-face. Yes, most pop music attempts to use co-opted emotion to sell product, but rarely is it dressed up as sincerely as this crap. Yeah, it may have come out last year, but it’s still as fucking ubiquitous as ever, which is why it’s still the worst song of the year. <br /><br />3. Best Saddest Moment: Gotta say, David Tennant’s departure from <span style="font-style:italic;">Doctor Who</span>, while certainly not the best story of all time (with commercials, the pacing drags, without commercials, it’s a dozen times better, but still not that great), does get the epic transition and the idea that the Doctor actually dies when he regenerates completely right. But what seals it for me is not Tennant’s fantastic final line, completely in character for his Doctor (“I don’t wanna go.”), but the teary salute Wilf gives him as he goes off to die. Wilf – an old man with maybe 2-3 years left in him, has done something completely selfless and stupid that, after saving the universe for the umpteenth time, forces the Doctor to sacrifice himself just to save one old man, who did something selfless and stupid. At Donna’s wedding, Wilf salutes him as he’s leaving, and The Doctor gives him a look that, to me, is full of blame and anger. Wilf knows what’s happened, and knows this “wonderful man” may never forgive him. <br /><br />3A: Best Next Moment: Matt Smith appears in The Doctor’s pants post-regeneration and makes the part completely his in about 2 minutes. <br /><br />3B: that’s what she said<br /><br />4. Best Movie I Actually Saw From This Year Released This Year: I don’t go to the movies anymore: maybe once a year. This year, it was <span style="font-style:italic;">Tron: Legacy</span>, and I was deeply disappointed, although my eight-year-old loved it. The best movie I saw was …well, shit. I’ve hit a point where I don’t care as much about seeing newer films as I do about discovering older ones and revisiting old friends. Hell, I cry during the first five minutes of <span style="font-style:italic;">A Matter of Life and Death</span>, and did so again Monday night. I guess the newest film I saw that had any impact on a legitimate critical level – and not the one I will discuss below – was <span style="font-style:italic;">Monsters</span>, which wears its allegory on its sleeve so much that it almost doesn’t work. And I’m sure it doesn’t work for most people, who want a movie about giant monsters and not a very slightly hidden story about illegal immigration, the genuine horrors those people go through just to get across the border, and how aggravation and unthinking violence destroys lives. In case you didn’t get that when watching it, I advise you to think about the sublime ending of the film, where two people trapped in a deserted gas station bear witness to an amazingly beautiful courtship/conversation/mating ritual performed by two computer generated squid/elephant hybrid lookin’ things, and then remember what happened in the first sequence of the film. No spoiler here. It’s overwrought at times, and I wished I cared about the two main characters more, but the thing works fantastically at times, and there’s a supporting performance by a ferry worker that ranks among the best performances ever, as he smiles and continues to insist that the two travelers will pay what he wants eventually, so why haggle? And why get upset? The most suspenseful part of the film is when he eyes a ring given in exchange for travel and sits and eyes, and eyes, and eyes, until he says something so short and natural that it’s funny in spite of itself. Oh, and the director made the film for about 50 grand, most of which was spent on the title critters, which he created on his computer in his bedroom. I just play Starcraft 2 on mine. Movie improved a lot upon re-viewing. <br /><br />5.Thing I Still Just Don’t “Get” But Which Must Be Great Because My Wife Likes It So Much And I Deeply Respect Her Opinions On Things: <span style="font-style:italic;">Dexter</span>. He’s a fucking serial killer. So he kills other murderers. If that’s what we’re down to, morally, that this sort of thing is okay – and I’ve never seen an episode where this wasn’t portrayed as something okay – then throw Hammurabi’s Code out the fucking window. Hell, let’s just throw every idea we have that’s morally above such behavior in order for society to progress right out the window and just let the planet revert back to the Cro-Magnon era. Seriously. My wife says the show is about the mental damage caused by bad parenting, and I believe she might be right, because I respect her opinion. I still call bullshit on it. But this is highly ironic because….<br /><br />6. Best Guilty Pleasure and Fave New Movie of the Year I Actually Caught On Demand As It Was In Theaters: <span style="font-style:italic;">Centurion</span>. Damn, I love a good B-movie. You don’t have to think, it doesn’t ask anything else of you than to watch it, and sometimes a great filmmaker can take those limitations and make something great. This is not great. It’s a hell of a lot of fun, but as bloody and violent a movie as I’ve ever seen – and damned if I don’t love it for going as far as it does. This isn’t violence – it’s cartoon violence, so over the top and in your face that it’s like watching any one of <span style="font-style:italic;">Braveheart</span>’s battle scenes if they were done by the old Warner Brothers cartoon crowd and extended to 90 minutes. You’ll see more brain bashing and severed heads than in any performance of <span style="font-style:italic;">Titus Andronicus</span>. There are some great things about it: Michael Fassbender gives an Oscar-caliber performance that holds the whole thing together, and David Morrisey and Olga Kurylenko are great, too. Ms. Kurylenko’s revenge seeking Pict is awesome, especially the way she just jumps right in to the horrific primitivism that is the slow, savage chopping of someone’s head off via a handaxe. If you’ve ever seen a movie before, you know exactly what will happen, and that’s exactly what great B-movies do – fulfill the promise. It turns into a chase film that uses every cliché in the book, from the waterfall jump to the centurions’ amazing ability to hide exactly where and when necessary to escape their foes. So, yeah, it’s more violent than <span style="font-style:italic;">Dexter</span>, and, yeah, I’m being asked to identify with a bunch of Roman soldiers who are evil occupiers and who have – for the most part – earned their fate. The difference is that the film doesn’t try to hide any of it, and isn’t trying to make some point. It’s pure, visceral power that could be even better than it is if it didn’t try to give us so many characters to try and deal with, and if the ending didn’t just…sort of happen. I know my history, so I knew what was going to happen, but there’s a suddenness to it that throws it off, just slightly. Neil Marshall is on his way to becoming the next John Carpenter, and Godspeed. <br /><br />7. Best Night Of The Week: Thursdays on NBC. Certainly, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Office</span> has declined over time, but how the hell was it expected to keep up the amazing heights reached in Seasons 2 and 3? I still laugh at it, even though the humor’s not quite as smart. However, as of the last episode, Holly, you’re dead to me. New secretary Erin’s blockage of Holly Flax as she tries to explain things to a devastated Michael is the high point of the season, for me. Now, <span style="font-style:italic;">Outsourced</span>? Hate it. <span style="font-style:italic;">30 Rock</span>? It’s okay, and I laugh, but it’s just not…deep, emotionally, and isn’t intended to be. That leaves the two best sitcoms on the air right now, <span style="font-style:italic;">Parks and Recreation</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Community</span>, the latter of which hit it out of the park with the stop-motion animation Christmas episode, which may be among the greatest things in the history of humans, esp. the final, sublime image of the real life actors reflected in Abed’s TV screen, as in a Christmas card. If there was ever a TV show that could actually heal the planet, it might be that one. <span style="font-style:italic;">Parks and Rec</span>. has overtaken <span style="font-style:italic;">The Office </span>in quality, maybe more so than that series' best seasons, and I care so much more about April and Andy than I ever did Jim and Pam, since A & A were never predictably destined to get together (and haven't), unlike Jim and Pam. This season’s high points include the great Ron Swanson, aka Duke Silver (smooth jazz saxster supreme), going to April’s house to apologize for being mean to her, where he runs into her sister and incredibly friendly parents, who have all his CD’s. The sister’s response to his “You must be April’s sister” is to scuttle off hilariously out of the room after rolling her eyes and dipping her head, just like April. And then he apologizes to April with all the sincerity he can muster, which is exactly enough. That’s the greatness of the show – its ability to be alternately hilarious and emotional moving. Also, there's a scene in one episode where Andy dives on and captures a raccoon that is awesome physical comedy, as is the aforementioned Ron Swanson's no-real-reason-to-show-it-except-it's-damned-funny slip and fall on the grass in the background of the season finale. No way will either of these shows last past their third year. Maybe they’ll get canceled this year, if only to make room for more of…<br /><br />8. The Worst Things On Television That People Seem To Give A Shit About: Reality shows with people who are horrible role models getting shows that seem to turn them into role models and then idiots at home who don’t think begin to act just like them, so now they <span style="font-weight:bold;">are </span>fucking role models. <span style="font-style:italic;">Jersey Shore</span> doesn’t bother me so much, because they’re just a bunch of rowdy kids who are taking advantage of an opportunity, and who can blame them? No, it’s the <span style="font-style:italic;">Teen Mom</span> Shows and <span style="font-style:italic;">Blah-Fucking-Blah Housewives of Who-Fucking Cares</span> that get me. Being a teen mom should be about the hardships and problems of being a teenage parent, not getting on the fucking covers of magazines and getting millions of dollars in salaries and product endorsements: the copycat pregnancies have already commenced. Rich housewives who have a shitload of money, yet also the temerity to act as though their lives are anything <span style="font-weight:bold;">but </span>troubleless, pointless, vapid-as-fly-farts creations have no business but to be on TV to <span style="font-weight:bold;">MAKE FUN OF THEM</span>. Unfortunately, they’re role models now. Certainly, there are rich housewives whose lives are worth following, but none of these are them. Weird moment of the year from this crap? Realizing that one of the <span style="font-style:italic;">“Real” Housewives of Beverly Hills</span> is former Disney child star Kim Richards, who looks almost exactly the same, but who cannot really communicate telepathically with goats; she talks to them out loud on this show, and they are the title characters. <br /><br />9. Best Reason For Dubbing Ever: the vast amount of <span style="font-style:italic;">Godzilla </span>and Toho-Monster related films I purchased this year, primarily because they’re cheap, but also because watching the dubbed versions with the subtitles on gives you completely different viewing experiences. Also, it’s the best way to understand some of the ways the Japanese deal with the Second World War using pop culture. We bought one titled <span style="font-style:italic;">Atragon</span>, the name of a giant, awesomely beautiful flying submarine, which is as weird to watch as can be, since the captain of said flying sub has been in hiding since the end of WWII under orders from a former naval colleague, and who refuses to fight for the world, but wants to use the sub to start re-fighting the war. As his own daughter and his former colleague desperately try to convince him to use his amazing Japanese product to save the world, and not just Japan’s reputation, the people from the sunken island of Mu attack using Manda, which looks like an old Japanese dragon, but which moves like an old Japanese puppet. At the end, SPOILER ALERT! the captain and his flying sub save the world, and the captured queen of Mu chooses to jump into the flaming water around the destroyed continent. So the captain gets his cake and blows it up, too. Manda eventually shows up again in <span style="font-style:italic;">Destroy All Monsters</span>, which, as film historian David Cook calls it, is the Gotterdammerung of Japanese monster films. His choice of words seems slightly ironic, in regards to one of the other Axis powers. <br /><br />9A. If you have never seen <span style="font-style:italic;">Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People</span>, find a subtitled and dubbed copy so you can see how a legitimately creepy and serious children’s film about human greed and selfishness can be turned into something nice and fluffy for American audiences. The dubbed, unintentionally hilarious final line uttered by the lone survivor is not even a part of the original Japanese script. That line? “I ate them!” Also, there is a three minute song that consists of nothing but the word “La”.<br /><br />9B. Damn, I love <span style="font-style:italic;">Inframan</span>. Not Japanese, but a Hong Kong version of the <span style="font-style:italic;">Ultraman </span>series, it contains amazingly cheap and beautiful effects with the usual “hero fights monsters with kung fu until the final moment, when he whips out the new secret weapon the inventor has made for him (Thunderball Fists!) and just blasts whatever monster he’s fighting into fairy dust” motif. The original English dubbed version has some of the greatest lines in history, none of which actually appear in the original version: the main baddie is now named Queen Dragon Mom, and at one point, a scientist actually says, “The situation is so bad now that it is the worst the world has ever seen.” In the first two minutes, post-credits, a giant dragon lands on a road, causing a school van full of children to crash off a cliff – just the driver, the kids get out – and then the film immediately jumps to – with no rhyme or reason -- Hong Kong completely in flames and people leaping out of windows while on fire. That’s cutting to the chase. If I ever teach a film class again, I will figure out some reason to show this amazingly entertaining movie. You are warned.<br /><br />9B1. <span style="font-style:italic;">Inframan </span>is, as of now, the only film Roger Ebert has ever changed his star rating for, up from 2 and a half to three stars, so it remains better than <span style="font-style:italic;">Mighty Peking Man</span>, made by the same film company (Shaw Brothers), and which contains a scene where five men shoot an attacking lion with pistols about 675 times. <br /><br />10. I didn’t die this year, which is surprising. <br /><br />10A. There’s still about a week left in the year.<br /><br />10B. I am now too old to care about word repetition and the correct use of the word "ironic" when writing ironically.Blasmohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01267720628197164493noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6237428121031451017.post-64222316583770484812009-09-22T12:22:00.000-07:002009-09-24T10:44:59.882-07:00THE MOMENT(This is dedicated to Stephen Gill for some reason. He will know the reason. The numbers in parenthesis are there to indicate that there's more information about whatever the number is after in the Appendixitis! located after the entry. My advice is to read the stuff after reading the blog entry, and then go north and south with it.)<br /><br />“Swami: We were speaking of belief; beliefs and conditioning. All belief possibly could be said to be the result of some conditioning. Thus, the study of history is simply the study of one system of beliefs deposing another, and so on and so on and so on... A psychologically tested belief of our time is that the central nervous system, which feeds its impulses directly to the brain, the conscious and subconscious, is unable to discern between the real, and the vividly imagined experience. If there <span style="font-weight:bold;">is </span>a difference, and most of us believe there is. <br /><br />Am I being clear? For to examine these concepts requires tremendous energy and discipline. To allow the unknown to occur and to occur, requires clarity. And where there is clarity there is no choice. And where there is choice, there is misery. But then, why should anyone listen to me? Why should I speak, since I know nothing? <br /><br />Sonny Liston: How’s about some more steam?”<br /> -- quoted from the movie <span style="font-style:italic;">Head</span>, featuring The Monkees (1). <br /><br />Try as I might, I cannot let things go. I am cursed by memory – an inability to forget most anything, except that stuff that is relevant to day-to-day activities. For example, I can remember with great clarity the food I ate at a restaurant in Pueblo, Colorado when I was about 11 years old, but have trouble remembering if I told my wife who called last night (2). <br /><br />There’s a lot of bad stuff to go with a memory like mine, but there’s also some pretty good ones. Take “The Moment”, which took place on the Wednesday afternoon of a trip I took to Calgary, which involved driving some-odd 300 miles north from Glacier National Park, which had, the day before, seen another 300 mile drive, from Yellowstone National Park to Glacier. All of this was part of a trip I took during the middle of July between my undergraduate and graduate years at OU. <br /><br />I came up with the idea of flying up to Yellowstone as I headed towards my graduation from OU with mighty Bachelor’s Degrees in mighty useless degree programs. Which ones? Well, I can tell you the history of film, and the history of America in the same breath, and will starve to death trying to do so. I was going to begin OU’s English graduate degree program the next Fall, and would be teaching as part of my studies -- you know, First-Year Comp 1 and 2 -- and some film classes, since I was also going to work as the sole grad. student in the FVS department. At one point, I figured I was teaching over 300 students, and all with a collection of sweater vests to rival even the most stereotypical Harold’s-shopping professor. I’m sure I was an imposing sight – long hair done up in a professorial pony tail, sweater vest flapping in the breeze – but the kids seemed to dig me, so myeah. <br /><br />Intimidated by the prospect of starting a degree program someone had basically blackmailed the department into letting me join (don’t ask), and not sure whether or not I could actually, well, teach, I wanted some time to get away from everything and everyone. Why not head to one of the most-visited national parks at the height of the season? I knew that I’d probably never have a chance to do this sort of trip again in my life, so I got my plane ticket, paid for two nights in a hotel room in Gardiner, Montana (one of the most serene and beautiful places on this planet), and reserved my rental car. It was when I got to the hotel room that I hatched my scheme to drive north to Calgary. <br /><br />Rental cars from the Billings airport (think Wiley Post Airport (3), only older) have a limit of 1500 miles on them, and then it’s 25 cents a mile over it. I was flush with cash and credit, so I figured a 600 mile round trip to and beyond the Canadian border would ultimately only add about 100 bucks to the price of the car. I got out the road maps and started planning. Why Calgary? Good question. Probably because it seemed distant enough to be a “journey”, as opposed to just a trip, and I figured the scenery alone would be worth it. I figured that this part of Canada=Mountains, just like Montana. I knew nothing about the city itself, and assumed it was about the size of Tulsa. Oh, so wrong. So very wrong. <br /><br />Tuesday afternoon of the trip, after a drive that seemed to include nothing but wheat fields, wheat fields, and more wheat fields, I hit city. There was some sort of major event going on, so I wound up having to look for a motel with vacancies and had to decide between a Holiday Inn for about 100 Canadian dollars a night, or an Econolodge for about 40. I chose the Econolodge to save some Canadian cash, and immediately regretted it when I found that to get to the bathroom, you had to climb over the bed. Awesome.<br /><br />Calgary also turned out to have a population of about a million – nowhere near the large frontier city I’d thought it would be. I was alone in a city the size of Dallas, and had no idea what to do. I decided to do what I usually do in big cities, find the local university and sample the college life of Calgary. As some form of protest, except for breakfast Wednesday morning at the Canadian equivalent of a Grandy’s, I ate nothing but sushi the entire time I was there. <br /><br />So the big-city trip turned out to be a bust. I drove around a lot, hit some local record stores, and went to the James Joyce Irish Pub, where I had an authentically poured Guinness. For those not in the know, this means it takes somewhere between two and three hours to fill the glass, and the thing has to be room temperature. You’re basically drinking bread. The only other plan I had for the two days I was going to be there was to hit a couple of hobby shops. I like hobby shops. They remind me of when I was a kid, and I used to assemble model kits. They also remind me of when I was a <span style="font-style:italic;">Doctor Who<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span> fan. Which is always. <br /><br />By noon of the first day, I had decided to swallow the second night at the “motel” and head back down to Montana, probably to Great Falls to spend the night. Calgary meant nothing to me but a long drive wasted. The last hobby shop on my list was, nicely enough, supposed to be right off of the road that would take me out of town. I checked the address again, and headed towards the north side of Calgary, where it was located. As I kept heading norther and norther, I started getting worried. Had I gone the wrong way? The street numbers seemed correct, but I was beginning to worry that the shop was located even further north, possibly in Edmonton (that’s a Canada joke! Ha ha, eh!). Up ahead, a mall was becoming visible. Discouragement mounted. Imagine thinking you’re headed towards a nice, Nichols Hills-esque neighborhood, and you suddenly find yourself at Heritage Park Mall (4)(that’s a Midwest City/Del City joke! Ha, ha, fuckers!). I pulled in the parking lot, and it matched the address. Shit.<br /><br />Fortunately, the shop was located directly inside the doors, so I didn’t have to worry about crossing the food court, with what I imagined were the rich combined smells of Poutine and back bacon (another Canada joke! Sorry, eh.). The shop itself kicked ass. They’d spent some money on decorations, and had an awesome tunnel instead of a doorway, which turned around and around slowly, like a Time Tunnel. It was more collector’s toy shop than actual hobby shop, and I was able to fulfill both childhood and adult fantasies by looking at sci-fi model kits and eventually purchasing an import K-9 action figure, which means nothing if you’ve never seen an episode of <span style="font-style:italic;">Doctor Who</span>, and even less if I tell you it was one of those crappy Dapol toys (5). Never take’em out of the box, and don’t look too close, or you might see some resemblance to what the action figure is supposed to represent. The K-9 toy was cool, though – hard to mess that one up – and I felt like it was worth the long drive north. Not the whole damned drive into the wheat fields of Canada, mind you, just the long journey into the northern part of Calgary, where the wild things aren’t. <br /><br />So, shop trip accomplished, I got back in the rental car (bumped up two levels for free, by the way, because the rental place didn’t have the type of car I’d reserved or the next level up, the first of many awesome surprises on the trip), and got ready to head for The America. In full, sort-of-but-not-kind-of ironic fashion, I had to head north out of the parking lot, and north again to make a U-turn. The left-turn light was red when I got to it. Turn signal clicking, 100-minute Maxell cassette tape of Americana music blaring (let’s make it Lucinda Williams’ “Side of the Road” for extra effect (7)), I sat there. And then I had The Moment. <br /><br />Your brain thinks fast – the speed of electricity. This allows you to make a hundred decisions and revisions in less than a second -- a fantastic development that lets you think of something, decide to fully invest yourself in it, and then out of it, so The Moment really only lasted about three or four seconds, but seemed, as the cliché goes, much longer: possibly even longer in Canadian seconds. <br /><br />I was about to turn south. In a literal sense, that meant that my vacation was half over. I had hit the crappy point in every vacation, when the journey itself is over and the trip home has to begin. I had to be at the Billings airport by 3:30 Friday afternoon for a 5:00 flight out. Yes, an hour and a half before the flight. I was not worried about traffic or overcrowding -- I always get to the airport early so I can get a great seat in the line for the plane. And to eat at the airport diner. I love airport diners. The trip had, aside from the trip to Calgary – and let me point out that Calgary is one of the cleanest, prettiest, friendliest cities I’ve ever been to, and all this bad talk is simply because it wasn’t what I expected – been extraordinary. The weather was perfect, people were not everywhere, and Montana had NO SPEED LIMIT at the time. If you ever have the chance to drive a car at 100 miles per hour legally, take it. The trip was everything I needed, and more so. But now it was time to head towards the endgame portion. I was a few hundred miles from the Billings airport. After a 70 kilometer-an-hour drive south through Alberta, I could again hit 80-90 miles an hour, getting passed only by people much sturdier than I and state troopers, who are by definition much sturdier than I. I could be in Great Falls by around 9PM, MST., then Billings the next morning. The people running the Econolodge would never know I’d skipped out the second night. Nor would they care, since I’d already paid for it. <br /><br />Metaphorically, the u-turn meant something bigger, as metaphors always do. I was about to turn a corner in my life, and start a graduate degree program, a new job, and…well, there was something else going on at the time, which I’ll get to when the postcards are mailed, somewhere down south of here. In those 2-3 seconds, I felt the full impact of the huge change in my life that was about to happen. And I also knew one other thing: I was the furthest north I would probably ever be in my lifetime, and I was about to turn south. So I took The Moment.<br /><br />I looked in the rearview mirror, saw that no one was behind me, and let the light turn green and then red again, still sitting there. I looked down at my little K-9 “action” figure, and remembered when I was a kid and staying up late on Saturday nights was the greatest thing for me. Doctor Who has been a part of my life for so long, I sometimes refer to my life as pre-“The Ark in Space”, and post-“The Ark in Space” (8). About 30 seconds later, the light turned green, there were now a couple of cars behind me, and I turned south, “homeward bound.” Next stop, adulthood -- fucking adulthood. And I was only in my early 30’s. <br /><br />I’d purchased two postcards from a random gift shop Wednesday morning, and now I needed to mail them. First, though, I wanted to get the hell out of the city, and back to the frontier. It took about 30 minutes to drive all the way south through the city, and I eventually left the non-wilds of Calgary for the strangely familiar wheat fields of Canada. I grew up in Yukon, Oklahoma, where the old flour mills still stand. At one point, they even paid a crapload of money to relight the old “Yukon’s Best” flour mill sign, which glows like a multi-colored beacon in the night (9), attracting Martian spaceships who arrived at the actually pretty decrepit flour mills and left disappointed that they would not be able to make their delicious Martian pies. In a rage, they strafed El Reno. Or maybe it just looks that way. Maybe that was another reason to be disappointed with this part of the trip – it was too much like my old hometown, if it suddenly gained about a million people. <br /><br />I hit some town about 20 minutes south of Calgary and mailed the two postcards – one to the now-named Sarah Mauldin, then Sarah Cooper, one of the 36 Tzaddikim (10). The other was mailed to my now wife, who was going to be married in a few months. Not to me. Yes, my wife is a divorcee. She was a fiancé at the time, and not mine. That’s what I was talking about somewhere up north in the story. Once I mailed them, with enough stamps to get them to the dwarf planet Pluto, I kept going. <br /><br />I stopped to take a break in some small town right across the border from the U.S., mainly to stretch my legs, but also to take in the scenery again – wheat fields and flour mills, just like my hometown, except for the life-sized T. Rex statue they’d somehow/some reason put in the town park. Roar. With tiny useless arms. <br /><br />The border crossing was uneventful. Unlike the trip over the border, this was very much like a drive-thru bank lane (pre 9-11, of course). I was asked one question:<br /><br />“Do you have any Beanie Babies?”<br /><br />“Sorry?” <br /><br />The guard sighed. He’d gotten this response before, and was obviously embarrassed at the fact that instead of asking me if I had any guns or weapons-grade Plutonium, he’d been forced to ask me if I had any Canadian-only Beanie Babies (11) that were being smuggled across the border to be sold for dozens of dollars on the American Beanie Baby black market. <br /><br />“No, sir,” I answered, as seriously as I could, to try and give him the respect he deserved – a man with a loaded gun and a badge asking me about some goddamned Beanie Babies.<br /><br />“Have a good day, and a safe trip.”<br /><br />I drove on.<br /><br />The sun started to set. I was feeling lonely for the first time in the trip. The flat lands of Canada had given way to the more hilly parts of northern Montana, the sun was setting, and I kept pulling the car over to take pictures of the incredibly beautiful waves of golden light as the sun slowly sank between two hills, framed perfectly by them. The picture are amazing, except for the fact that I forgot to turn the damned date stamp off, and so the date is permanently etched on the photographs: July 22nd, 1998. Two days before the release of <span style="font-style:italic;">Saving Private Ryan<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span> (I had to kill some time in Billings that Friday morning). <br /><br />Through a series of events, I wound up staying the night at a Best Western in downtown Great Falls, a hotel that had probably been the hippest place imaginable in 1964, but hadn’t changed a bit since then, and was now into full blown kitsch phase. It was surprisingly cheap for a downtown hotel, and may not have changed the rates since ’64. I checked in around 8:30, ate at a local diner where Leonard Nimoy had shot a movie (12), and then decided to hit the hotel bar before settling down in my room for the night.<br /><br />The bar hadn’t aged, either. It was still 60’s-Camelot-era Tahitian Tiki style, grass skirting and mood indigo lighting, painted tropical island motifs on the walls, and was having a special on Blue Hawaii’s (13). I walked in and immediately smiled. The place was awesome. It had obviously gone from stylish to dated to kitsch to special local attraction for hip twenty-somethings over the course of 30-plus years. In a darkened corner, a group of probable college students had camped out, drinking fruity drinks from huge glasses with little umbrellas while wearing Hawaiian shirts (in Montana, mind you) and wearing leis. I took a seat at the bar and ordered a special. The bartender, an older gentleman, the kind you’d expect to see in a BAR somewhere in New York City, where they kick your ass if you order anything that isn’t clear and painful to drink, served me my fluorescent blue drink, two umbrellas for décor, and took my ridiculously large tip, probably embarrassed by the Hawaiian shirt he was forced to wear. Again, I was flush – for the last time in my life.<br /><br />My mood continued to lighten as the entertainment started back up. I turned towards the sound of a piano and stopped at the huge window that was obviously set into the side of the hotel’s swimming pool: pure 1960’s. No one was swimming, but you knew that during the day you would see people swimming by the window and peering in towards the glowing blue drinks. I assume that any potential night swimmer would use the drinks in the bar as lights to swim by. <br /><br />I continued my turn and stopped at the entertainment. Sitting in front of a piano – not a grand piano, but the kind you find in grade school vocal classrooms all across America – was a woman, probably in her early 80’s, peering down through her reading glasses at the songbook propped up on the piano in front of her. To her right was the coolest looking Casio keyboard ever. I knew that at some point in the evening, she would eventually resemble Keith Emerson (14) or Tori Amos, straddling the gap between the two keyboards, and playing both at the same time. It took a while for me to recognize the song she was playing: “I’ve Heard That Song Before”, by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn. She did not sing, but simply played the melody. <br /><br />As she played, one of the college students walked up to the piano, put a couple of dollars in her tip glass – the same as the neon drinks were served in – and made a request. He walked off, happy as could be, and she finished the song. She pulled out a stack of songbooks, found his song, and started singing and playing: “Margaritaville”.<br /><br />It was obvious she didn’t know the song, and was sight reading it, barely hitting the melody and just sort of speak-singing it, playing the chords and bobbing her head. The college kids thought it was awesome, and clapped and hollered. You know what? It was awesome. I spent an hour in the bar, listening to her fake her way through a couple of songs by The Beatles, which eventually required the Tori Amos straddle I predicted, and a bunch of old standards. I put a five in her glass and requested a song that reminded me of the love of my life, who loved me as much, but was going to marry someone else: Cole Porter’s “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To”. She knew this one (15). <br /><br />Glowing drink in hand, big grin on my face, I listened to her as she sang a song she seemed to actually like and I finished up. When she finished, I thanked her again and told her she was easily the greatest lounge act I’d even seen in my life, and I wished I lived in the town so I could come see her as often as possible. She thanked me and took a cigarette break. <br /><br />I went back to my room and walked in. The room itself was also straight out of the Camelot-era, with big colored buttons to control everything set in a shiny steel panel next to the bed. Most of them even worked. I pushed on one and it smushed in with a loud “CLICK”, turning out the light by the door. They were not labeled. I eventually found the “TV ON” button and smushed it down with another “CLICK”. I got ready for bed as the sound of Headline News filled the room. The Moment was several hours old, and I still dwelled on it, but the hotel, bar, and entertainer had lightened the mood considerably. <br /><br />I’d get to the airport Friday afternoon and my flight out would be delayed for three hours while they scooted air traffic around to avoid the runways, which were being re-tarmacked. I missed my connecting flight out of Salt Lake, and the airport had to bump me up to first-class on the first flight out Saturday morning, put me up in a bitching hotel for the night and paid for dinner. Saturday night, I would play my last-ever gig as a musician, singing at the final Prairiemen show, which would end with me still not speaking to my brother, the drummer, and not doing so for another couple of years. Never join a band with family (16). <br /><br />My wife got married at the end of the year, called me at work a few months later, and then married me a few years later. How ‘bout that.<br /><br />The Billings airport was still a couple of days away. Fading quickly, I smushed the button down to turn the TV off with a “CLICK”, and then smushed the button for the room’s main light. <br /><br />CLICK. <br /><br />I settled down and eventually fell asleep, Moment securely set in my memory, and neon-blue drink restless in my stomach.<br /><br />I’m sure I dreamed about something. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br />APPENDIXITIS!!!<br /><br />1. <span style="font-style:italic;">Head</span> is the infamous Monkee movie, co-written by Bob Rafelson and THE Jack Nicholson (17). Far from the kiddie film it was partially advertised as, it is actually a quite brilliant dissection of the power of celebrity in our society, the mythology of The Monkees themselves, the circularity of fate, and society's willingness to repeat history without thinking. It also contains "The Porpoise Song". The scene quoted to the north features Peter, the "dummy of the group", listening to his swami in a steam bath. Sonny Liston, who has previously knocked out Davy Jones in a dream sequence inside another dream sequence, is not impressed, and fills the room with steam, obscuring everything. Eventually, once the group is captured yet again inside the Black Box, Peter tries to teach the other three Monkees about the zen feeling of serenity that can come when one is faced with the prospect of not having any say in the matter, so why create tension in your life by fighting it, if you cannot win? This pisses Davy Jones off, he yells "That's it?!" and kicks down the fourth wall, allowing them to escape. They then try to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge, only to be caught in the box again. Yup. They wrote it while extremely high. The scene is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFM4hvpyWNE<br /><br />2. I have seen every extant episode of <span style="font-style:italic;">Doctor Who<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span>, and can recite some of them from memory. Behold, from "Revenge of the Cybermen":<br /><br />VORUS, LEADER OF THE GUARDIANS: You have no proof of these absurd allegations.<br /><br />TYRUM, LEAD COUNCILLOR OF VOGA, THE PLANET OF GOLD: Nevertheless, I believe it. Strange stories have reached my ears – your guards have never resorted to murder.<br /><br />VORUS: It was a matter of internal discipline.<br /><br />Later on, there’s one of the greatest lines ever written:<br /><br />TYRUM: You’re insane, Vorus! You’ve brought about the destruction of our race!! (Cue Stephen Gill)<br /><br />Yeah, I can go on.If you've never seen an episode of the original series of Doctor Who, this is not the one to start with. Start here: (8)<br /><br />3. Yes, we all know that central Oklahoma's two major airports are named after people who died in plane crashes. Ha-frickin-ha. The airport is here: http://www.wileypostairport.com/<br /><br />4. http://www.deadmalls.com/malls/heritage_park_mall.html<br /><br />5. http://www.sevenzero.net/toyroom/eighties.htm The second paragraph is spot on.<br /><br />6. Id. iii, verse 24. <br /><br />7. http://www.lyricsdepot.com/lucinda-williams/side-of-the-road.html<br /><br />8. http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/arkinspace/ So let's explain the rather grand statement of life pre-Ark in Space and post-Ark in Space briefly. The first <span style="font-style:italic;">Doctor Who<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span> story I ever watched was "Robot", Tom Baker's (previously the most famous of the Doctors in America, before the new series) first story, and the first story broadcast in Oklahoma. The next story is "The Ark in Space," widely considered to be one of the best in the history of the series, and which scared me shitless as a 10-11 year-old. It also meant that, because the story scared, entertained, and enthralled me, that I would watch the series almost continuously for (my gods) 30 years. Thus, pre-Ark in Space, and post. The fact that the monster maggots in it are actually stuntmen in painted green bubble packing plastic wrap does nothing to its power. It is one of the best stories they've ever done. This was made in 1975. <br /><br />9.http://www.route66photographs.com/photographs/neon_3.php A picture of the mill is about a third of the way down the page. You can even buy one there.<br /><br />10. From Neil Gaiman's <span style="font-style:italic;">Sandman </span>series:<br /><br />DEATH: Did you ever hear the story of the 36 Tzaddikim? They say that the world rests on the backs of 36 living saints -- 36 unselfish men and women. Because of them the world continues to exist. They are the secret kings and queens of this world. <br /><br />11. http://www.amazon.com/TY-Beanie-Baby-Canada-Exclusive/dp/B00001P4XW<br /><br />12. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110044/<br /><br />13. http://gohawaii.about.com/od/drinks/r/blue_hawaii_01a.htm <br /><br />14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Emerson <br /><br /> also, <br /><br /> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_nvjaHBsAo&feature=PlayList&p=B71BD90DE7D732C6&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=115 <br /><br /> which is of low quality, but Rick Moranis at 1:43 is pretty accurate.<br /><br />15. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmZl4eo3Vsg<br /><br />16. If it seems like this obviously major event just got tossed in at the last minute, it’s because the reasons why, the during, and the complete pointlessness and stupidity of it all doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as the fact that it ended, and Jerry and I are so much better now. Better than ever, frankly. The fact that it happened is so unimportant as compared to the outcome that it’s just not worth discussing any more than I do here. <br /><br />17. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000197/<br /><br /><br />By the way, #6 is a joke based on Eliot's <span style="font-style:italic;">The Wasteland <span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span>.Blasmohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01267720628197164493noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6237428121031451017.post-54135104075749765632009-06-26T10:03:00.000-07:002009-06-26T11:18:52.494-07:00THOUGHTS ON THE DEATH OF MICHAEL JACKSONMichael Jackson died yesterday, although he’d been a walking corpse of a man for many years. To say that he’d turned himself into something beyond human, beyond any sense of normalcy was sometimes an understatement. He pushed the publicity bandwagons to their breaking point with tales of giant castles, Elephant Man bones, and dating Madonna and Brooke Shields in a completely celibate manner. <br /><br />Madonna. Celibacy. That’s a weird guy. <br /><br />I read my first Michael Jackson death joke about 10 minutes after finding out he was dead via cable reports. The joke was part of a comments thread on The Onion’s AV Club page, an amazing collection of brilliance and snark that often has insights about popular culture that are brilliant and offensive in the same sentence. So, here’s the sentence that actually caused me to laugh:<br /><br />“Well, he’s having sleepovers with Baby Jesus now.”<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Sorry for the pause, I was listening to “Rock With You” again. It’s pretty much impossible not to sing along with that one. It has a much softer melody than most of the other dance songs on <em>Off The Wall</em>, and a series of call and responses on the chorus that define “smooth”. It builds well towards it, too, the way the massed vocals sing “Feel that heat”, and the song pulls back, dropping everything but the percussion and Michael singing “And we can ride the boogie” with the hihat cymbal emphasizing the off-beats. The chorus uses the beats between the phrases in a way that makes the responses even more powerful. When Michael sings “I wanna rock with you”, there’s a mild snap of massed fingers and percussion that creates a single beat pause before the choir sings “Allllll niiiiight”. “Rock With You” is great in that it never boils over – never is anything but remarkably smooth. The tension created by the propulsion of the beat and the lack of caterwauling works fantastically to create a mood of anticipation. The song sets up the idea of rocking with you, but does not yet rock with you. That’s the next few songs. He’s the seducer here, and, back then, we all knew what that meant: get McKinley laid! It did not mean sleepovers with children in the same bed as a 40-year-old man. <br /><br />(physical shudder)<br /><br />I have a child who’s 7 years old. I never thought I’d be a parent, partially for biological reasons (way to go prostrate treatment!), partially for personal (ain’t nobody gonna break MY stride), but I have one, and she’s awesome. All parents say their kids are awesome – well, decent parents do – but E-beth is truly cool and awesome. She’s polite, nice, genuinely appreciative of everything and everyone, and doesn’t judge. While I’d love to take credit for all this, most of that has to go to my wife Lori, who, after I quit OU, has had to spend a lot more time around Elizabeth than me, which means she’s getting to be the child’s teacher of taste and manners. Smart move, fate. <br /><br /> We try to support her as much as we can, but also want her to be a kid – a paste-eating, crap-leaving, mess-making kid. She deserves the right to be a child. <br /><br />And so did Michael Jackson.<br /><br />I can’t begin to imagine the abuse in the Jackson household. We’ve all heard tales of Joe Jackson driving his kids into tearful fits, picking Michael up by his feet and slamming his head against the ground, and generally treating him in a manner we now call Child Abuse without even thinking about the definition. And that, unfortunately, is what will be lost in the whole shuffle to “understand” Michael Jackson: that his story mirrors the way child abuse has been dealt with by our society. <br /><br />When I was a kid, children’s entertainment took on a particularly educational, left-wing stance. Sesame Street and other children’s educational television suddenly popped up with messages of equality and empathy, echoing the left-wing themes of the late 60’s. These messages were ingrained into a lot of Saturday morning cartoons, and much of it is mocked for its over-the-top stance and insistence on a moral, no matter how goofy the show’s premise might be. The last episode of <em>Land of the Lost</em>? A cavalry soldier and a Native American learn to help each other. <em>Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids</em> – a criminally underwatched show nowadays – dealt with the harshness of inner city life as realistically as possible for a kid’s show. Drug use, stealing, poverty, ice cream after a tonsillectomy – all these subjects were discussed on the show, and things didn’t always turn out well for those involved. The <em>Super Friends</em> routinely took on various racial and political ideologies and showed how they were flat-out wrong, and then Superman saved us from the Liquid Light – a liquid so corrosive that it can eat through everything but the ground it slides down on towards a city. <br /><br />Michael Jackson had a cartoon, too, as part of the Jackson 5ive. Ever seen it? It’s a piece of shit – one of those Rankin-Bass/Filmation cartoons that featured so much repetitive animation that, even as a small child, I recognized its lameness. The Jacksons were so busy, they didn’t even do the voices of themselves. Think about that: Michael Jackson, a person obsessed with childhood and everything tethered to it, wasn’t even allowed to do the voice of his own cartoon character. For the record, Diana Ross – the “discoverer of the Jackson Five” – did her own voice when she appeared. It may have been the episode where Michael and the boys did some farming. How craptastically disappointed would you be if you found out there was going to be a cartoon of your (fictionalized) life, but your dad wouldn’t let you be in it? <br /><br />While a lot of the shows from that period haven’t aged well for that very seriousness of approach, I still admire what they were trying to do. Women’s rights, open-mindedness, charity: these were the traits pushed in a lot of these cartoons and children’s shows, before the 80’s when the rules regarding children’s television – and all of television itself – were trashed so stations could sell more airtime for commercials. Who to blame? Those people who saw capitalism as the way to improve everything and broke down as many barriers as possible that stood in the way of people making money. Nope, not everything was improved. Love those 24-hour infomercial stations and the constant selling of subsidiary products on TV shows? Great. Please leave. For those of us who see constant advertising as a soul-crushing experience, I’ll buy yez a beer at the Reunion tonight. <br /><br />So, along with other social wrongs, child abuse was one of the subjects these shows dealt with, and sometimes with a clarity that put news reports to shame. So I grew up, and society began to understand what a horrible thing it is to beat the shit out of your own kids. Way to go, humanity. What the hell took you so long? Moral Relativity? <br /><br />(In a horrible piece of irony, Janet Jackson, sister of Michael played an abused child on <em>Good Times</em>, and I’m assuming she brought a lot of real-life experience to the role.A bit more on her later. Just a bit.)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Ooh, here comes “Billie Jean”. In the same way that “Like a Rolling Stone” or “Strawberry Fields Forever” show how you can take pop music and make art out of it, “Billie Jean” is a momentous event. It’s an amazing thing – a song about stalking, lying, the dark side of celebrity, and parental responsibility that you can dance to. Set up as one of Jackson’s paranoid fever dreams about how celebrity can bring out the freaks, the song is about an accusation of parenthood. Jackson is terrified that the child might be his, because it will destroy everything, and he fights and fights to find ways to ensure, factually, that the kid is not his son. He denies, denies, denies, and then “the lie becomes the truth” and he cracks. <br /><br />Whether or not he is actually the father is not important. What’s important here is the denial. He refuses to accept the idea that he is the father of a child. He rails against it and blames everyone but himself: the media, the machine, the woman. It’s the second song on <em>Thriller </em>to discuss the probability of having an unwanted child. The first is “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin'”, which reminds us that if you can’t feed the baby, don’t have the baby. In “Billie Jean”, if you don’t want the baby, you rail against everyone and everything but never accept the possibility that you are responsible for the child. <br /><br />The music of “Billie Jean” is what most people want to talk about: that bass-line, the spare use of guitar, the scary-movie string cues. The bass line gets us into the song, although a drum beat that sounds more like someone walking down a dark street introduces us to it. The bass line is almost an inversion of the Peter Gunn theme, and shouldn’t work as a funk bass line because it’s too busy. But it hits the One hard enough to work. Then, the “ooh…ooh……ooh…ooh” vocals come in. The effect is staggering, creating a dark psychic landscape right out of a film noir, and that’s before the strings come in to counterpoint the melody and make the song even darker sounding. There’s no escape from the depth of the song. It sucks you in to a world of stealing and shadows, where you can be a pop star and have no happiness because of your constant paranoia, and where a child can be used as a bargaining chip to gain money from innocent people. Well, that’s if you believe the kid is not his son. I certainly think he is. <br /><br />The song slowly builds and builds, adding layer and layer of instrumentation until you get the controlled chaos of the end, where everything’s playing at once, and the singer’s wailing over the backing vocals, and the guitar line keeps coming in, and the chaos keeps generating, and…is never released. We just fade out. Quincy Jones obviously deserves a lot of credit as producer of the song, but Michael was in charge by this time. If it sounds like this, it’s because he wanted it to. “Billie Jean” is as complex and heartbreaking as pop music gets. More than Dylan, who peered into the abyss and decided he wanted out of that shit, Jackson comes from a world of shit, and still lives in it during this song. He returns to this theme in other songs – “Dirty Diana” is the most obvious – but never wallows around in it the way “Billie Jean” does. God, I love that song. It disappeared right after “Beat It” hit and <em>Thriller </em>slammed its way into the subconscious of every American, but, by then, Michael had moved onto the more fun, flippant sounds of “PYT” and “Thriller”. “Billie Jean” sort of disappeared as the funner songs on the album took over the narrative. <br /><br />By now, you’ve probably realized that I’m pretty affected by Michael Jackson’s death. Like a lot of people my age, I grew up with him as a constant presence – radio, Saturday morning cartoon, <em>The Wiz</em>. When <em>Off The Wall </em>hit large on the charts, it was cool to see him make the transition to being an adult singer, and I liked that someone who was still very much a kid could do so well. <em>Thriller </em>underwhelmed me when it appeared. While “Billie Jean” was obviously brilliant, I didn’t like “Beat It” or “Thriller”. They were too conventional for me, the guy who kept trying to get people to listen to Zappa, Oingo Boingo, and Elvis Costello in middle school and beyond. So while I became less interested in Michael Jackson, everyone else got too interested. <br /><br />Has there ever been a person as popular as Michael Jackson was during the 1980’s? I mean, besides a dead religious figure, has there ever been anyone that popular worldwide? The man ate with presidents, helped Eastern Europeans learn to dance, and tried to feed the goddamned world. That’s how big Michael Jackson used to be. For a while, you could not escape coverage of him on TV. MTV – after Jackson finally broke the color barrier there – played his videos non-stop, including that over-hyped mini-movie of “Thriller” that brought a crashing end to the world of cheap, do-what-you-want music videos that used to play all over the channel because they needed stuff to fill up space. Myself, I could watch Costello drunkenly flailing around motel corridors all day – a lot more than I want to watch the video for “Thriller”. But the world had changed. It wasn’t enough to have a decent video; it had to be an event: cue the flowing curtains, white horses, and glowing children’s eyes. Jackson also brought entertainment news to the forefront like no on else before him – especially as he started his move from eccentric to crazy during the years following the release of <em>Bad</em>. <br /><br />Jackson never did anything close to even the filler on <em>Thriller </em>after that. <br /><br />Stories of Jackson’s weird shopping sprees, glitzy outfits, and the constant presence of children painted the man as batshit crazy years before Lisa Marie, skin-bleaching, and nose problems. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br />“She’s Out of My Life”. Awesome song. Beautifully undersung until the passion is needed, with as minimal of accompaniment as the song can take without bursting like a soap bubble. If someone sang this these days, there’d be glissandos and other fancy vocal shit all over it, not to mention the auto-tuning, which would eliminate Jackson’s very real breakdown during the last few lines of the song. This isn’t a song he wrote, so it’s a bit more personal about these feelings than Jackson’s own attempts to talk about heartbreak. This song gets it right on almost every level, from the adult understanding communicated in the lyrics, to the way the melody goes up and down the scales like a child’s sing-along. At one point, Michael pushes the volume up and sings “Damned indecision and cur-sed pride”, but doesn’t quite release the pent-up emotion until the end of the phrase, which is “’Kept my love for her/locked deep inside”, and he lets it all loose in a controlled burst, taking the word “deep” and extending it as long as he can without breaking it and holding the “eee” sound until he sings it through clenched teeth. His own pride killed his one true chance at love, and he knows it. Nothing he can do but stand in place, rigid, without revealing any emotion until he has to. The power of the song is that his tentative delivery is the same tentativeness that kept him from admitting his love, and, obviously, the guy has learned nothing but how to feel bad. He can’t even break out of his depression to express genuine rage and sadness. It’s a crushing song and was the first song I listened to after hearing he’d died, and I felt sympathy for him. Lori tried to make an <em>Arrested Development</em> joke, and I quietly shut her down. Jackson had earned some seriousness from me, and, aside from the jokes at his expense that were all over the place within 10 minutes, I tried to keep it serious, which is hard to do when you’re talking about a man whose best friend was Elizabeth Taylor, another person whose abused childhood and early traumas turned her into a basket case. <br /><br />“They fuck you up, your mom and dad”, goes the poem. As hard as they (now we) try, a parent can’t help but bring some of their own baggage into their own relationships with their children. Who knows how Joe Jackson was treated as a child? Parallels between Jackson’s childhood and Brian Wilson’s childhood are so close, is it even necessary to say that great pain can create great art, but great art isn’t enough of an achievement to justify it? Wilson spent years in therapy to deal with his problems, and seems to have come out the other side intact and better. But he had one thing Jackson never had – a pause. Wilson’s life slowed down considerably once The Beach Boys became nothing more than a nostalgia act, so he had time to step away from the limelight and get some of his shit together; Jackson never did. As he got older, he got more exposure, and as his popularity grew, so did his eccentricities. From around 1983 to 1990-something the man was everywhere – somehow. He never got a break, and never gave himself one, possibly because he never got one as a child – not even to do his own voice over for a cartoon based at least partially on his own life. Now, why would someone like that become a control freak?<br /><br />I don’t think Jackson had sex with the many kids he was around. I think that at some point, he lost his ability to tell whether or not right and wrong mattered in his world. He was an abused child, so he wound up trying to be the best friend he could to every child in the world, going so far as to try to end hunger in Africa with a song I find nauseating, at best: “We Are the World”. But in his obsession to help kids, he simply regressed and became one, with the same sort of solipsistic sense of self and lack of social niceties. I this, he began to practice a form of self-abuse that defines self-hate caused by abuse. Did Jackson ever understand that what he was doing was wrong? You can’t be a man in your 30’s and 40’s and have sleepovers with children; it’s simply not appropriate in the same way that a teacher/student or boss/intern relationship is wrong. It’s a use of power that is wrong – turning a relationship that should be about nurturing and educating into sleep-over buddies and damn the consequences. At most, I think Jackson played “Doctor” with the kids in the same way young kids would do so, with a level of innocence and curiosity that a child would have. Jackson wasn’t a child; he was a full grown man, and that sort of behavior is inappropriate on every level. <br /><br />So who told him not to do it? By the time Jackson was doing all of this stuff, his family of hangers-on had used his celebrity to become celebrities themselves, including dear-old abusive dad, Joe. They sure didn’t stop him. What about his – face it, no one told Jackson to stop doing it, or at least no one told him with any authority. His parents could have tried, but they lost that opportunity – the opportunity to teach right and wrong – the moment Joe Jackson realized he could get rich by exploiting his kids, especially poor Michael.<br /><br />It’s hard to jump back and forth discussing Jackson’s abuse and the abuse he himself performed without sounding like a schizophrenic. But that’s what the cycle of abuse does – replays itself into rote routine until someone stops it. Want a literal metaphor? Take the ending of Kubrick’s <em>The Shining</em>, a movie that is about the cycle of abuse in society, even more than it is a supernatural horror film. The ending – different from the book for both technical necessity and support of theme – has Danny fleeing from his axe-wielding father, who now has a chance to kill off the main person who ruined his life – his kid, who obviously forced him into an unhappy marriage with a flake of a wife, and ruined his chances to be a best-selling, world-famous author. Jack Torrance is living out his dream – a dream of revenge against all those who screwed his life up but his damned alcoholic, barely talented, selfish self. But Danny’s smarter than that. He starts walking backwards in his own footprints left in the snow, and eventually jumps into a hiding place and covers up the footprints that show him heading to it. His father follows the footprints and is caught up, forever, in the redundancy of the hedge maze. Danny has literally walked backwards through his own steps to break the cycle of abuse. He and his mom will go on to better lives, with the aid of huge amounts of therapy and a frozen-dead psychopathic father. <br /><br />Too bad it wasn’t Michael Jackson who had the opportunity to break the cycle. Instead, he’s raised his kids outside of the real world that hurt him so much, and so they will internalize his own faults and fuck-ups unless they get help. But considering the people surrounding them, I can’t see that happening. Kids, don’t watch TV for about a month. You’re not going to like what they have to say about your father.<br /><br />While Jackson got nuttier and nuttier, the idea that his actions stem from abuse began to drift away until he stopped being a person to most people, and became a thing to point at, like that crazy woman who talks to her hand and walks the streets of Norman. She must have been somebody, at some time. For almost 20 years, Jackson’s existed as Michael Jackson the fucked-up nut, and not Michael Jackson, the Artist. It’s weird to have taught students who thought Jackson “turned” himself white, and was no longer “black”, as though identity is nothing but your skin color. Instead of a cautionary tale of what abuse can do to children, he’s a freak child molester – no evidence of it whatsoever and vindication in a courtroom haven’t dispelled that notion at all – whose body is so plastic and fake he no longer counts as a person, but as an object of ridicule and Boo Radley-esque horror stories (“Why, once, I seen him walking on the moon!”).<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” is on now. As the lead-off track for <em>Thriller</em>, it’s a bit of a wild card, a shuffling skitter of an electronic percussion beat with lyrics that seem to be about all of these things: Jackson railing against someone trying to cement a bad relationship by having a child; the way someone else is treating this person, much like a “buffet”, where you take all you want , but don’t necessarily eat (need) all you take; and a “dammmit, you’re amazing, regardless” song. Towards the end, everything but the background singers and handclaps drop out, and a chant starts up: “Mama-se, mama-sa, mama-coo-sa”. It’s stolen from an old Manu Dibango song and pretty much is there for dressing, as it’s actually translates as a call to dance and have sex, in the original (Makossa is a slang word for “dance” in Cameroon). It’s supposed to be a chant to get women to have sex, but Jackson just has it there because it sounds cool -- hopefully. Otherwise, it’s hypocrisy in action.<br /><br />Now that Jackson’s finally dead – and I say “finally” because he’s been dying in front of us for years, and few people tried to help him stop and instead pushed him onwards as long as they got money and the opportunity to be a “hanger-on” (Jackson family, I mean you) – maybe we can concentrate on his accomplishments more than his history. The man took popular music and – like Elvis and The Beatles before him – stretched its possibilities and creativity to the end. Unlike The Beatles, whose back catalog gave him the cash cow he needed to buy most of central Walachia for a picnic ground, Jackson kept trying long after he should have stopped. Unlike Jackson, Elvis was still beloved by everyone after he died, since the really freaky stuff he did hadn’t leaked out. Elvis’ weirdness was tempered by the fact that he kept it at home and didn’t display everything for the whole world to see, like dangling Lisa-Marie out a hotel balcony because he was so happy he wanted to show off his kid to some fans below for their approval. <br /><br />And that’s ultimately the tragedy of all of this. Michael wanted everyone’s approval, since he didn’t get it from his father and family. He wanted to be the biggest star in the world because he thought that would mean everyone would love him. Instead, he got approval when he was making us happy, general disapproval when his music got less and less interesting to listen to, and then complete disavowal once the really fucked up shit came out. <br /><br />He died on the verge of a comeback, so they say. What that word means in this context is a bit weird, since in this case, “comeback” meant “doing some big concerts to dig himself out of debt”. He wasn’t trying to revive himself musically, he just needed tons of money to pay things off. So his search for approval became a life and death matter for him, and he ultimately lost it, although, if he could see the way the world is reacting to his death (and Mark Sanford should be on his knees thanking God that the media isn’t at all interested in him anymore), he’d be happier than Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn at their own funerals. Lester Bangs, the late, great rock critic, wrote a piece about Elvis’ death that works as one of the greatest elegies ever, but also as an understanding of how Elvis’ death meant society was changing, becoming more and more individualistic, and, therefore, less empathetic to other people’s views and beliefs. Here’s a long quote from it, included because it’s one of my favorite bits of writing, and because it takes up space:<br /><br />"If love is truly going out of fashion, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each other's objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation's many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis's. But I can guarantee you one thing; we will never agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won't bother saying goodbye to his corpse. I will say goodbye to you."<br /> <br />Bangs was wrong. There was something else we could all agree on: that Michael Jackson was a very talented man who was completely fucked up. That mutual recognition of his insanity also tied us together, since, no matter what, we could all agree that Jackson was fucked up beyond belief. There will never be another person like him, in that regard, and no one who deserves our sympathy more right now. The man’s story is a walking tale of the horrors of child abuse and the effects it has on those involved. However, at some point, he lost our sympathies and became a thing to be mocked and ridiculed. He never stopped being an abuse victim, though. Most people just stopped caring about what caused his weirdness and just concentrated on the weirdness. <br /><br />Which is why we probably won’t learn anything as a society because of Jackson’s death, except that there’ll be a chance to re-evaluate him as an artist rather than a freak in many people’s eye, since he‘s no longer there to distract us from him. Michael Jackson’s story is a cautionary tale of how families can hurt each other for personal gain, and abuse can turn a happy child into a freak. We don’t want to face him that way because, as a freak, it’s so much easier. His surprise death probably won’t do anything but remind people that, for 20 years, Jackson’s been considered less an artist and more of a reclusive, pedophiliac, self-hating "thing". Everything before that is unnecessary, because it disrupts our ability to make Jackson a scapegoat for our own fallacies. Who’s to say we wouldn’t act the same once we were famous – so famous everyone on the fucking planet had an opinion about us? And once he had enough clout to get away from his family, why wouldn’t he retreat into a world of a fantastic childhood, to counter the one he actually had? He turned them all into hangers-on, their own talents and ambitions crushed by the weight of being one of Michael Jackson’s siblings. Only Janet, who ran away earlier and to other talented people, seems to have escaped. <br /><br />So, for the death of Michael Jackson, I’d like to reprint, without permission, the full text of “This Be the Verse”, the Phillip Larkin poem I started to quote earlier:<br /><br />“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.<br /> They may not mean to, but they do.<br />They fill you with the faults they had<br /> And add some extra, just for you.<br /><br />But they were fucked up in their turn<br /> By fools in old-style hats and coats,<br />Who half the time were soppy-stern<br /> And half at one another's throats.<br /><br />Man hands on misery to man.<br /> It deepens like a coastal shelf.<br />Get out as early as you can,<br /> And don't have any kids yourself.”<br /><br />It’s a dark one, and ends with the idea of the cycle of abuse as a permanent thing, unless you take the easy way out or simply don’t have any kids to pass on your own neuroses to. Some of Jackson’s work is this dark, and reflects a part of the man he would try to stifle or make overly maudlin instead of dealing with it head first in songs like “Billie Jean”. <br /><br />As that one starts over again, I wonder how the song would be received now, with all the knowledge of Jackson’s past and his weirdness on display for everyone to see. Nowadays, it would be understood that Jackson was talking about one of his deepest fears and confronting it, not necessarily in a successful manner. Back then, he was this cute guy who had finally grown up and was finally talking about sex. How far we’ve come. We understand now that abuse exists on many levels in our society, and many people are still abusing the guy, by telling jokes about wine, sleepovers, and plastic surgery without a damned care for the way he was brought up, and his inability to escape his demons. Make no mistake, there are a lot of very sad people out there who cared for Jackson, and many of his fans are going to be in hysterics, and they should be cared for, not mocked. They have their lives and loves, and we have ours. And even if there’s a disagreement on how the guy should be perceived, those in mourning should be respected. We’ve had enough fun at the guy’s expense, now let’s listen to his music and let the freakish recluse disappear into time. We’ve had our fun, and he didn’t, no matter how hard he tried. Goodbye Michael Jackson. Sorry I wasn’t there for you.Blasmohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01267720628197164493noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6237428121031451017.post-9699464901830668842008-12-22T10:32:00.000-08:002008-12-24T07:41:39.483-08:00Pop Culture and Christmas -- 6 1/2 Short Blogs about Music and TV for the Season No One Can Agree To Disagree On Anymore.1. My favorite Christmas song is "Joseph, Who Understood", by the New Pornographers. It's sung from the point-of-view of Joseph, the least sung about guy in the Bible, who hears the townsfolk of Galilee belittling his status as a father and husband because, to them, he's a cuckold. Joseph's response is to talk to Mary about this. He understands that "Some things are bigger/ Than we know", but still needs to know "Mary, is he mine?" It's a beautiful pop song, full of glorious choruses and harmonies, and background cadences that work both as a Greek chorus and an answer to Joseph's questions. By the end, he's singing "Mary, He is mine", which is why the title of the song is what it is. "You're Asking Me/ To Believe/ In Too Many Things" is as heartbreaking a line as ever written. "Mary, He is mine" is the determination of a father to do the right thing. Glorious. Go to iTunes and buy it now. It's a buck, for cryin' out loud. <br /><br />2. After that, it's the BC Clark jingle. For those of you who have never been inside the state of Oklahoma over Christmas, BC Clark Jewelers has been around for a very long time, and is older than the state itself. At some point, the gods smiled upon the commercial songwriters of central Oklahoma, and they came up with this gem of a jingle that is almost impossible to get out of your head, once heard -- and you cannot live within the state lines without hearing the song over and over for the month of December. Then it disappears, back into the vault to be reissued next December. Never re-recorded since its original version, it sounds beautifully retro and timeless AND works fabulously as a commercial, placing the store in historical context and providing you with the information you need to go spend money there. It never gets annoying, and no matter how many people are around, they will all start singing along when it's played on the radio. You can be arrested for not doing so in some of the smaller towns in Oklahoma, as a variation of their old "sundown" laws. BC Clark Jewelers should not be confused with the Trust House Jewelers, who aren't around anymore, and who used to sponsor a lot of local late night television. This led to Godzilla movies being interrupted every 15 minutes by a picture of their French Market Mall store, and a Muzak version of "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" playing as the owners displayed horrifyingly expensive, tacky as hell jewelry for you to buy. Late at night. <br /><br />3. There are so many worst songs involving Christmas that I could write entry after entry without my usual sardonic glee and just display pain -- the pain of Magic 104's already horrible station going Christmas since some time in late November. There's nothing like 24-hour, constant, enforced merriment to make you Grinch out all over the place. Worst thing I've ever heard: any of the myriad versions of "Mary, Did You Know?", which is answered "Yup, she did." Didn't you read that book? Almost any Christmas song written especially for a movie made in the last ten years also falls under this umbrella, especially that piece of shit "Where Are You, Christmas?" song that Faith Hill sang in that even shittier version of <span style="font-style:italic;">How The Grinch</span>... Ron Howard plopped on us from above. Magic 104 is a constant pain in my side. It's the station more people agreed to listen to at work, so it is played constantly. I have NPR on at my desk, but am not always there, so I get to listen to Magic 104's playlist, as selected by (in my mind, at least) their typical listener: a conservative 30-ish, low 40's-ish female secretary with three kids who thought Bon Jovi was the height of rock and roll in the 80's, but is too scared to listen to Top 40 radio now because it's all hip-hop and rap. She loved Garth Brooks at the time, and CARES about the contestants on American Idol. Think "Debbie", Frank Zappa's hypothetical teenager who is the focus of record companies' promotional departments, but grown up and almost 40, and you've got it. Magic 104: ass-kissing radio for your home or business. I also get to listen to Bill O'Reilly every day, in part because I believe in free speech and listening to those people you vehemently disagree with so you can understand where they're coming from. Also in part because the guys at work like to hear me yell back at the radio. "That's bullshit!!!" is another big Holiday tradition. <br /><br />4. At one point I could recite all the lines, sing all the songs, and perform all the voices of the great Rankin/Bass classic <span style="font-style:italic;">Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer</span>. Let me say this again; I could do them on command, and do so now without being asked. Many's the person who has heard me do this and looked wide-eyed at the weird person speaking like Yukon Cornelius. <span style="font-style:italic;">Rudolph</span> is to me, and for many people my age, THE Christmas TV special. And how did this happen? Seriously? How does a stop-motion puppet show from the late 60's come to dominate every other Christmas Special around it? Is it the message, that you should accept people for who they are and understand that every person is special in some way? Is it the songs? I mean, who doesn't love the timeless beauty of "There's Always Tomorrow For Dreams To Come True"? Or the remakes of almost-blacklisted folkster Burl Ives' classics "Holly, Jolly Christmas" and "Silver and Gold"? No, what makes <span style="font-style:italic;">Rudolph </span>so timeless is that the special helped create a whole chunk of Christmas mythology, and inhabits its world so completely, that it's hard to imagine Christmas without an Island of Misfit Toys, or the hope that the ones we love will simply accept us as who we are. That makes Rudolph, the character, a cipher. He can represent any minority group you want, and any hero you need. He's a tough deer-of-action who is polite, caring, and flies when people like him. And Hermie may be the best gay Jewish puppet role model ever. The fact that you can buy the entire cast of the show at auction is one of the weirder realizations of my adult life.<br /><br />5. The Charlie Brown Christmas Special has finally fallen victim to enforced nostalgia, for me. Now, they spread the 24 minute cartoon out to an hour, with more commercial breaks than you'd think possible in 60 minutes, and ram a few shorts in afterward to keep you watching -- and in order to fit in more commercials. The CBCS, as we hipsters call it (only me), is also the only special that really tries to downplay the festivities in favor of a discussion of the theme of Christmas. For many people, that means the Story of Jesus's birth -- and ONLY the story of Jesus's birth. For the special (and this has to be read a bit into it, as I never got high enough with Charles Schulz to ask him), the theme is the way Capitalism has destroyed the original meaning of Christmas, and has "created" a new, commercial and status-appointed meaning. Fogged up in the mist of ideology, time, and people bitching about "Lack of Tradition!" and "Tannenbaum?!" is the thing I remember most from the Story -- that Jesus's parents were willing to defy death in order to bring the child into the world. That selflessness (and let's not forget that Mary didn't really have much choice in the matter) and generosity (the two of them allowed that Jesus was their child, even though God was the father) is faintly echoed in Charlie Brown's pick of a runt-of-the-litter Christmas Tree, that he likes in spite of what everyone else says, and in spite of what everyone else thinks he should purchase. Linus eventually steps in, as he usually does, to provide some sense in those chaotic times, and simply recites a few lines from The Bible that resets everyone's bearings. Jesus, he points out, was a Gift. Be happy with the Gift. Selflessness is the reason for the season. <br /><br />But the ideology gets a bit crossed here. Linus seems to be saying that the gift of Jesus is what's important to remember, that it is the meaning of Christmas. In one sense, he's right. Christians are supposed to celebrate Christmas as the birth of their Savior -- the Savior of the World, for them. But the holiday is so much more than that. For those of us who aren't Christians, it's a pause for breath, a chance to take the year as a whole and celebrate those things that make life worth living. For you, it may involve religion. For me, it's my family and friends, and the hope that people can continue to be as selfless as Jesus's parents, and do unto others, etc. The CBCS isn't quite sure how to work this all out. After his tree is rejected by his selfish compatriots, Charlie takes it to his house. He'll love it as it is, so there. He's much better than you, and is self-important enough to know it. His attempt to make the tree more palatable -- the ornament from Snoopy's prize-winning Christmas doghouse display that Mr. Brown (sounds like Mr. Shit!) puts on it -- only succeeds in hurting the tree, and he runs off, screaming. His "friends", who have followed after him, possibly to see if he'll commit suicide, give the tree their "love", which for Linus is the gift of his security blanket, and for the rest, the moving of ALL of Snoopy's decorations onto the tree, thus making it as pretty as all the others BECAUSE THEY'VE MADE IT THAT WAY. Far from being an acceptance of the tree as it is, the Peanuts cast remakes the tree in their own image, and it is accepted. Hell, they even serenade Charlie Brown as some sort of "keeper of the flame", when Linus is the one who got everyone to shut up for a minute and think about the "meaning" of Christmas. The blanket around the tree should be enough, but it isn't for Shermy and the rest. Charlie bought the tree, and they made it less individualistic, just so he and it would fit in better. At the end, it just looks like every other over-decorated tree in the world, and not "itself" anymore. Rah frickin' rah. As dark as Peanuts got, I think this point might actually be what Charles Schulz is trying to get at, but, again, I never got high enough with him to ask. Dolly Madison cakes for all!<br /><br />Next up, a Marxist revaluation of the Cold and Heat Misers. <br /><br />6. Without doubt the saddest AND sappiest Christmas song is "Same Old Lang Syne", by schlockmeister Dan Fogelberg, he who told us about his penis size years before doing so was hip: "Longer". (See! I told you there would be dick jokes!) This 5 minute opus about a rock star who meets an old high school girlfriend in the grocery store is not the set up for <span style="font-style:italic;">Time Chasers</span>, but the saddest of all Xmas songs: the reunion that turns into the Big Suck. Filled with little details about frozen food and drinking in the car, the song represents nostalgia past, present, and future in a nice <span style="font-style:italic;">Christmas Carol</span>-ly sort of way: the Future, in that the song is about the inability to recreate the past, either in action or feeling, so it's best to look forward; the Present, in that the damned thing is played on Magic 104 every hour, and because I am about the age of the main character now, so, watch out, nostalgia fans!!; and the Past, which takes some back story. <br /><br />We used to have dances in high school, back in the day when I danced not to attract the opposite sex, but to have fucking fun! Really! I follow the idea that if music makes you want jump and down, then jump up and down! Forget the embarrassment that comes with trying to impress someone with your dancing, just do whatever the hell you feel like. Dancing is the greatest thing ever for those who want to express feeling through dance. All that said, I am one of the greatest disco dancers of all time. Hands down. <br /><br />Anyway, as one of the final slow songs of the evening, you know, the one where you're supposed to finally wind up with the person you have true affection for and stare MEANINGFULLY into each other's eyes and postulate on "For us, what happens next?", "Syne" is the greatest song, since it is about the time AFTER the relationship, after you've had your final dance with someone and they -- and you -- have gone on to other things. For those of us who had an eye on the future, it became the song to dance to and ponder deep, philosophical thoughts about the end of high school, the beginning of adulthood. It can be the first understanding of the power of nostalgia -- even before you've earned it. "Syne" allows that feelings never quite disappear, but are replaced, and either submerged completely, or re-interpreted ("I shouldn't have been a jazz musician after all!"). So you get a feeling of nostalgia just from hearing the song, because you once danced to it with someone you said you liked a lot, maybe loved, and now aren't with. Nowadays, the song simply takes me back to the time when I thought deep thoughts about relationships instead of actually having them; when I "acted" instead of doing. It's nice to think that teenagers are self-aware in high school, but in most cases, we were doing what we thought we were supposed to do at the time, instead of actually doing something because we wanted to do it. High school is a time of role playing, not introspection, unless you're role playing the part of an introspective teenager, which is, again, a role (and then you become a Goth: "Burn! Burn! Burn Hot Topic! Don't let it steal your soul!"). <br /><br />And that's why "Syne" is so sad. These two people are trying to connect with old parts they used to play, but that time is over. It'd be nice to recreate some magic every once in a while, but a lot of times, there isn't magic, just nostalgia. My nostalgia for the song "Same Old Lang Syne" is on many levels, from remembering people I used to dance to during it, to the genius of Darren Penrod, who put it on last on the slow-dance/make-out mix tape most of us copied to have as our own. You know, the one that had a lot of Journey, Styx (Styx?), and The Eagles, whose "Wasted Time" is another one of those instant nostalgia songs, but isn't Xmas-related, so it's not in here. It reminds me of a time when I thought I actually knew a lot of stuff, but it turned out I knew shadows of things, like owning the guidebook to Plato's Cave and expecting it to provide the true experience, rather than just being promotional material. I strongly believe that graduating from high school causes a sort of mental illness. You're grouped in with a bunch of people for up to 13 years, and then -- POOF! -- you're not. Set up. Fail. Suddenly, you don't see that guy with the cowboy hat in the hallway anymore, or hear Darron Dunbar's magnificent, wonderful laugh, or see Cindy, or ineffectually criticize everything decent with Mark, go "Myeh!" with another Mark, or slow dance with whoever happened to be closest and cutest when the right song came on. Good days, high school. Too bad, as the saying sort of goes, that we aren't adults when we experience it, so we can understand the beautiful tragedy of it all: fraudulent, meaningful, pointless, incisive high school. <br /><br />So "Same Old" re-creates, for me, that realization, late in my high school tenure, that I had spent too much time trying to do what you're supposed to do in high school, and not enough time actually enjoying it, which is, of course, part of the teenage experience, too. Oh, to be the un-enlightened person who looked at high school with less pretentiousness and less shit-headedness. Oh, to patronize some more. Oh, for the days when I didn't have to worry about so much shit that it becomes hard to be a part of one's life, and not an observer. Well, that's what adulthood is for -- to figure out the world. And you have a long time to do it. Adulthood lasts the rest of your life, which means you have a lot of opportunities to figure out stuff, but as you get older, less time to enjoy the knowledge as you try to pass it on to someone younger than you who is in the same trap you were "at that age". At the end of "Same Old Lang Syne," the protagonists part, and the snow turns to rain, which will wash away the beauty of the Winter Wonderland and return us to the rest of the year. Christmas is a time for reflection and exhaling -- lots of exhaling. Far from there being a War on Christmas, we rush towards the end of the year faster and faster each year, hoping the exhalation process starts earlier and earlier and lasts longer. Crappy Christmas music starts blaring out of radios a little earlier in November each year, and each year, Wal-Mart tries to push Xmas on us a bit sooner. I realize that some people are concerned about the death of Christmas, which is the dumbest fucking thing ever. No, it's more dumb than those Christmas commercials that try to convince you to buy the stuff you want instead of being happy with just getting a gift. And I know that Bill O'Reilly's greatest Holiday wish is to run around with a claw hammer bashing in the skulls of any and all who don't celebrate Christmas the same way he does every year: fucking mountains of hookers on top of a running chainsaw. But that's his deal, and he's wrong about Christmas. What he's really worried about is being passed by, about not being a part of something. He doesn't want his way of life to disappear, so he forces the world into his own mold, and tries to compress it into a shape, much like using a Play-Doh extractor. He's doomed to fail, thank God. As history bypasses us and makes it more difficult to actually be involved in a moment of history than ever before -- witness the "instant historocity" of the Obama election, and he hasn't even taken office yet -- we are forced to concentrate on the mundanity of our own lives, and try to force events into narrative conventions so we "get" our lives. Well, there's nothing to "get", no "meaning" to extract. There are lessons to be learned, for sure, but not everyone gets them. Christmas is a time of beautiful impermanence. It comes, leaves a trail of destruction in its wake, makes us happy for a few weeks, and then is gone until next year. Snow falls, sits on the ground, then melts or gets washed away by the rain. Presents are wrapped, and the wrapping paper is ripped and tossed in the corner to get at the thing inside, then winds up in the garbage can, unless you reuse it, which is a stupid idea. Whatever event you thought was incredibly meaningful in your teenage years turns out to be useful for creating nostalgia, that beautiful feeling that nothing will ever be the same again. Damn, I hope so. <br /><br />6.5 Hey, Merry Christmas everyone. Happy Holidays, just to make sure everyone gets a shout out. While my sarcasm meter may be off the charts right now, the one thing I really want to do right now is thank all those people who have been and those who are still a part of my life. I hope you're happy. I hope you succeed at something. I hope you are loved by someone and love someone back, even if it's a love without all that fluid passing. I hope you can be the person you want to be instead of the person someone else wants you to be, or that society wants you to be. I hope you're not judged, and I hope you don't judge. If you're religious, remember that you could be wrong. If you're not religious -- ahem --, remember that you could be wrong. Share a gift with someone for reasons other than selfish ones, and love the gifts you receive because they were given for this reason: Appreciation. "The worst thing in the world," the amazing songwriter Peter Case once wrote, "is to be unwanted/ To be used up and thrown away." Like wrapping paper. So take your time unwrapping things. Someone spent some time making the gift look pretty, and you should take your time in order to appreciate the thought. If you are alone this Christmas, and I've been there myself, appreciate the incredible feeling of independence and the fact that you're leading an alternative Christmas lifestyle. Break a tradition, and try to create a new one. Whatever the heck else you do this holiday, try to be nice to someone. Happy Saturnalia, everyone. I mean, Happy Kwanzaa. Sorry, I meant, Happy Hanukkah, all of you. I mean, have a nice life. Breathe deep and exhale slowly, since you have another full year heading at you faster than you'd probably like to realize.Blasmohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01267720628197164493noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6237428121031451017.post-57109271958619106932008-11-05T12:22:00.000-08:002008-11-05T17:52:01.414-08:00OKLAHOMAN HISTORY XWell, Barack Obama was elected president last night, a moment that scares, humbles, and thrills me to the core. This country has been divided by politics for too long, and maybe this is a sign that – because voters crossed both party lines and other, media-created ones – we can heal some of the fractures. <br /><br />I will not hide the fact that I voted for Obama, and that a part of me felt proud to be able to do so. However, he’s not the candidate I initially supported – that’s his new VP – and, far from the evil “liberal” tag people have tried to paint him with, he’s a moderate, and moderates don’t necessarily get as much done, because they don’t push as hard. I apologize to all the moderates – 2, maybe 3 people read this thing? – out there, but I am reminded of a joke my Constitutional History professor told in class, when he explained why he flat-out hated moderates, which, strangely enough, is very similar to a “how many blanks does it take to change a light bulb” joke I invented years earlier. Here’s his joke, paraphrased, or rather, misremembered and recited to myself in an attempt to not screw the damned thing up:<br /><br />A dam breaks and a wall of water is heading towards a bridge with hundreds of people on it. What does a Conservative do about it? “The wall of water is a necessary correction in the amount of humans on the planet.” What does a Liberal do about it? “We must throw an enormous amount of money in front of the water to stop it from hitting the bridge, and then build a newer, not-yet-designed-but-better bridge next to it.” What does a Moderate do about it? Nothing. All the people die and water crushes through everything while they’re trying to please everyone. <br /><br />This was, of course, his reason for being a Progressive, and not a Moderate, a political position someone had inquired about.<br /><br />His name was Dr. Crockett, a 70-ish year old man who taught the two-part Constitutional History class one night a week, for three hours a night. We rarely stayed past the first hour, and if we did, it was because we were giving our Supreme Court presentations in class, and, since there were about 80 of us in there, they could go all night. He also took smoke breaks every 15 minutes, and coughed up chunks of what must have been his remaining lung every five. <br /><br />It was a great series of classes. One thing most people don’t know about me is that, along with my Film and TV degrees, I also have a History degree. With honors; 4.0 and shit. One of my personal favorite moments in time to study is the year 1848 and the European Revolutions that threatened to change the social order completely, spreading equal rights across a group of countries, and which were put down violently. Historians refer to it as "The Year The World Could Have Turned, But Didn't." I got my multiple degrees by stacking classes, taking history classes as Humanities classes for my Film and TV degrees and vice versa. <br /><br />The “work” you did in the Const. Hist. class was research Supreme Court cases. This meant you were assigned 2 cases per semester, and you had to get up in front of the entire class and explain the case, along with historic precedence. Sometimes, this was really boring, and you might only need 5-6 minutes to explain the Interstate Commerce Clause and how it dealt with state-to-state rail transportation. Other times, and this means when I got my “randomly” assigned cases, I got <span style="font-style:italic;">Roe v. Wade</span>, or <span style="font-style:italic;">Gideon V. Wainwright</span>, and that meant basically teaching the class for half-an-hour while Dr. Crockett coughed and wrote notes, and giggled at whatever jokes I could make. Yup. Jokes around <span style="font-style:italic;">Roe v. Wade</span>. I did ‘em. They mostly involved swimming vs. paddling, but one was about the Texas judicial system, which I compared to the Nuremberg Trials, only backwards. He thought that was funny as hell, and coughed and spluttered approvingly. I also stated my political position on the issue of abortion (I’m pro-choice, but that’s another couple of entries, and I’ll summarize by saying that having a choice means you don’t have to do something, either), which I thought was mighty “vaginal-sy” of me (why is it that you have to have “balls” in order to show nerve? Does that mean all women are spineless cretins?). The rest of the class looked at me like Keith Olberman into the camera during a “Special Comment”. Or an OU fan watching us lose to Texas for the third time in four years. And what the fuck is up with that?<br /><br />The two of us had one extended conversation, at the end of the second class, when I had gotten my paper over Eugene V. Debs back with a nice “A” on it – earned, damn it – and a comment about my <span style="font-style:italic;">R.V.W.</span> joke that said something along the lines of “Nice to know someone who’s willing to voice an opinion that’s not popular in a place you can’t drink in.” I decided to thank him for that, and apologize to him for using the class as a bit of a soapbox. He coughed and chuckled, possibly both at the same time (coughled?) and said not to worry about it. He asked me why I wrote the paper over Debs, since he’s a historical figure who, while once a viable presidential candidate from inside jail (for speaking out against WWI), was disappearing from America’s collective memory. I admitted that I admired the fact that he stood for what he believed in, and never traded his position of authority for anything other than results. The man walked the walk and talked the talk. I admitted I wasn’t a Socialist, and that I thought humanity would never be ready for the amount of altruism and empathy true Socialism requires; you have to know why you’re giving up certain things and agree to do so in order for it to work, which means you have to care for your neighbor, sometimes, more than yourself. We’ll never get there, I said. <br /><br />Cough. Cough. <br /><br />"Well, you’re probably right. But it’s nice to know that some people have enough faith in people to think they might be able to do it. Sometimes just knowing those people can make the difference.” <br /><br />I also told him about my research into Oklahoma’s history, and how Socialism was once a relatively big part of Oklahoma’s initial government. We elected some real Socialists, and everything. There’s a very radical, leftist part to the early history of Oklahoma, which I thought was interesting, considering how right-wing the state had swung during my lifetime. Mmm-hmmm, he muttered. “But let me tell you about Oklahoma’s ‘radical’ nature.” He then proceeded to tell me about the one big anti-war protest held on the OU campus during the Vietnam War. <br /><br />“Oh, it was big – a couple of thousand students and teachers all gathered around, with signs, bullhorns, songs and everything. Then, the police showed up and told everyone to leave.” <br /><br />Cough.<br /><br />“And they did.”<br /><br />He laughed at this, and I did, too. He’d told the story like a great comedian, building up the size and ferocity of the crowd, which immediately gave in the moment someone in authority told them to. The punch line was both hilarious and telling, and his point was clear; no one was willing to go to jail, and no one was willing to fight back. The “protest” was all about following the crowd – everybody else is doing it, so why can’t we? (“Linger” begins to play). The leftist movement at the start of the 20th century wasn’t just a few fanatics and bath-avoiding people at the time; it was a full blown movement, and Debs was a national hero, not just “that ass-hat” who wants to get laid at a peace rally. Oklahoma, he was saying, followed trends, it never started them. When it came down to the business of implementing anything, ahhh... there’s the rub. As soon as Socialism was destroyed as a political force nationally, it died here, and never raised its head with any import again. As the country moved further to the right during the 80’s and 90’s, so did Oklahoma, up to where it is today, about as far to the right as you can get without meeting yourself on the other side – a bit less Conservative than North Korea, but not quite as far left as Jasper, TX. Eventually, the state will shift back to the left a bit, as the country always does after the turn of the century, but it will never get as far to the left as its early, radical days, because those progressive, radical days will never return to the United States. Never. Never ever ever.<br /><br />(Not that those early days were some sort of leftist paradise here, oh no. But imagine trying to be elected as a Socialist candidate in Oklahoma right now. “Hi. I’m David Murphy, and I’m running for office as a member of the Socialist Party.” “Are you fucking kidding me? Officer!”)<br /><br />One thing I’ve noticed about Oklahoma in the past few years is how openly hateful it’s become towards anyone who slinks past Moderate into “Liberal.” There are many reasons for that: the abundance of ultra-conservative talk radio, which more rural Oklahomans are going to listen to, since it’s the only thing out there, except for NPR, and they don’t listen to it because it’s “biased”; the continual bullshit of this being the “heartland” of America, because it’s in the middle of the country, and has all that small town blah-blah-blah-whatever, which is supposed to be what America should stand for, not those evil cities, where nothing good can ever come; and what I call the “squeezing the air out of the bag effect”. <br /><br />The “squeezing the air out of the bag effect” is illustrated as follows: you want to put something in a plastic bag that seals and ship it in a box. So that the bag takes up less space, you want to get the air out of it, so you close the end and press the air inside towards the seal, so that it will eventually get pushed out, leaving you with less air in the bag, so it takes up less space in the box. Before you get the air out, though, it bulges towards the end of the bag you’re pushing towards, which gets harder and harder to squeeze out. Think of that as a group of people who refuse to turn with the tide: Racists, for example. As these people get squeezed out as society progresses and understands how bad prejudice and racism are – not to mention how fucking stupid prejudice and racism are – not to mention how incredibly stupid the justifications for prejudice and racism have become -- not to mention how embarrassing it is to remember how naïve and stupid you can be when you’re uninformed and don’t know what words like “jigaboo” mean, goddamn I used that word so often before I actually knew what it meant that I’m about to throw up on the keyboard as I type this – I’ll start the sentence over now. As these people get squeezed out as society progresses and understands how bad prejudice and racism are, they’ll bunch up where they can and get harder and tougher in their stance as they’re pushed out of society. That’s a decent sized portion of Oklahoma for you; pushed to the extremes as the rest of the country moves on, and, because they can’t understand why they’re wrong and are too fucking caught up in “lost lifestyles” and “lost ways of life” to understand that there’s a reason why those things are LOSING, that they become more ingrained in their ways, instead of questioning them, which all human beings should do every once in a while. <br /><br />It’s easy to either dismiss these people or ridicule them, and there are perfectly good reasons to do both, but in doing so, all we do is create a “siege mentality”, where all they do is associate with people who agree with them, and have their beliefs entrenched further. This solves nothing. It proves nothing. It makes people feel even more like outsiders than they already do – earned in many ways, of course because they're fucking bigots -- but that doesn't mean you stop trying to reach them. Lead by example, and you never know what you can accomplish. I heard a quote last night that, of people who considered themselves prejudiced at one time, being regularly around the person they were prejudiced against, such as at work or school, 90 percent of the time, it eliminated the prejudice. There are dozens of real-world examples we can use to prove this, from the person Derek Vineyard (<span style="font-style:italic;">American History X</span>) is based on, to Malcolm X, on whom the film <span style="font-style:italic;">Malcolm X</span> is based.<br /><br />Now, I've tried this before. If you read the previous blog, you remember that I dated a red-haired beauty who turned out to be a bigot. True that. She did, in fact, hide her prejudices from me because I stated up front in our relationship that I didn't like prejudiced people. I guess it's a sign that she actually cared about me that she hid it as long as she could. It finally came out after we went to see that damned <span style="font-style:italic;">Wong Foo blah-blah-blah</span> movie, where the magic gay people who are played by stridently (vocally so) non-gay actors save a small town from itself. Afterward, I said the movie was okay. She said, "Yeah, it was okay, except for all the gay stuff." Picture me, eyes wide open, yet another revelation dropped in my lap. I decided to stick around and try to change her by example, and this turned into what the interweb peoples call an "Epic Fail". She eventually got to where she was talking about shooting Bill Clinton, and I knew I had to get out, which led to the, again, embarrassing-yet-necessary answering machine message. <br /><br />I made a choice I hated but needed at the time, and something I wish I'd done earlier in my life, when I was much more tolerant about what people said about the "Others", which actually means I didn't have the vaginals to get away; I wanted them to be my friends because I hate loneliness. <br /><br />Let me tell you, loneliness is much better than pettiness. <br /><br />When I began grad school at OU and started teaching, I decided that it was time to make sure I walked and talked the walktalk. Conservative students? I let them talk. Liberal students? I let them talk. Bewilderingly silly sorority girls who wanted to keep midgets as pets? Yuppers. (Oh, no shit. This happened. Greatest quote ever? "It's always sad when somebody dies. Especially midgets.") The idea here was to give everyone a legitimate voice; the idiots would hang themselves, and the serious ones would get a soapbox. The rest might learn a little bit of tolerance to other points of view besides their own. I talked about <span style="font-style:italic;">Doctor Who</span>. Every once in a while, I taught some writing. Greatest compliment I ever got was from a student who told his counselor that he felt students could talk about anything in my class, no matter how much I disagreed with them, and they would be treated fairly. I loved teaching. I miss it dearly. <br /><br />(Goddamn certain people.)<br /><br />So, while watching John McCain's concession speech last night, I felt sorry for him. I don't think McCain's a bigot, or anything like that. I think he allowed himself to be coached by people who felt that the "Squeezed" peoples would take the vote, and not the squeezers. They were wrong, and John McCain's reputation will never recover. He came a hell of a long way with his speech last night, where he said exactly what needed to be said in exactly the right way, making him almost Shakespearean in his tragedy; Othello never got such bad advice. What we need to do now is build on what HE said. Obviously, Barack Obama's election is a sign that things in this country have gotten better. But make no mistake, complacency will kill this event. What McCain said about this being a historical event is right, and something many of the people who voted for him will have to understand. I know some people who voted for McCain who feel very left out of this event. While Obama's victory is historical, they see that, but they also lost a presidential election, and that means that, no matter how much they may understand the importance of this election, they can't enjoy it, because they lost.<br /><br />Now is not the time to throw this in their faces. Now is not the time to squeeze against those who can't see this as anything but a lost campaign. Now is the time to engage in two of the things that America seems to have lost over the past few years: Empathy and Altruism. These two things, these two unselfish parts of our psyche have been in short supply the last few years, deadened by a constant negation in the manner our politicians have acted, and also by those who used recent events to greedily take more than what they might have honestly earned. Folks, there's a difference between having money and having all the money you can get. Selfishness and greed are Un-American and "not good". The Drive to Succeed is what we learn about in the history books, and that is why we cherish those people who, upon making their fortune, use it to help others. Those jackasses who can't live with less than 200 million dollars, and who will do anything to attain it want one thing: Independence. And power. Two Things. And the status those levels of income can provide. Three things. There are three things...oh, fuck it. <br /><br />Now is the time to change the way we talk to each other. Instead of referring to all Republicans as bigoted bastards, we need to understand that in doing so, we are no better than those people who saw Obama getting elected last night as a sign that the country is headed to hell in a hand basket. The key to getting people understanding how stupid prejudice is turns on one question: How many of the people you are against do you actually know? How can you say all black people are shiftless and lazy when you can't possibly know more than .000000000000000000001 percent of them? And the same with Conservatives, or Republicans, or whatever side you immediately roll your eyes about when they're mentioned? <br /><br />The country's moving back to the center again, and I hope Oklahoma doesn't take too long to follow suit. The important thing is to make this more than just a fad to follow, like protesting "The War", being "Socialist", or wearing flannel. Please, don't wear flannel again unless you're cold, or you're a lumberjack. Come the fuck on, people. <br /><br />What has to happen is a change in the way America sees itself. Far from the perfect, City-On-A-Hill that's always mentioned by people, and which is almost always misunderstood or misused, we are a bunch of human beings with roots from all across the planet, possibly the first country that can claim that. And, in that, it means we are literally citizens of the World. Not as in the "One World, One Government" stuff many End-Timers scream in terror about, but as in America IS the World, in a microcosm (maybe not so micro). For better and for worse, the rest of the world looks to us. What we do now with this opportunity is how the rest of the world will turn. We can come together, embrace our differences and how those differences make us better, and, thus, make the world better. This cannot be a fad -- something that's hip and cool one minute and then ridiculed on one of those fucking Vh1 (I mean, the "List Channel") "Remember the 00's?" specials. <br /><br />If it is a fad, then we need to ride it as long as we can. Maybe we can get it from cool to crap to kitsch so fast we can turn it into nostalgia. Maybe then we'll remember the things we have yet to do as the time the world got to a turning point.<br /><br />And it did.<br /><br />Cough.Blasmohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01267720628197164493noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6237428121031451017.post-42173641688503371352008-10-28T10:51:00.000-07:002012-08-12T08:17:33.796-07:00THE STALKER OF THE HORRID DEPTHS OF HORROR(as a way of dealing with what was/is actually a pretty emotionally and mentally traumatizing event, I’ve decided to write this blog entry as a tribute/parody to/of the great horror writer, H.P.Lovecraft. For those not familiar with his work, I suggest reading these first:<br />
<br />
http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/thedunwichhorror.htm<br />
http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/thethingonthedoorstep.htm<br />
http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/thewhispererindarkness.htm<br />
<br />
Of course, you might decide to read more of that instead of the blog itself, which is pretty cheesy and full of denial, and the approach I’m using means only this: I. Am. Still. Dealing. With. It.)<br />
<br />
<br />
THE STALKER OF THE HORRID DEPTHS OF HORROR<br />
<br />
The darkest parts of the universe contain some of the most foul and reprehensible creatures known to man. It is, perhaps, only our predilection for covering up the horrors by denial and repression that allows us to survive such things. For myself, I can only hope my memories are crushed -- shattered beyond recognition soon, for the human mind is not built to survive the tests and despairing wraiths of the festering pools of horror I have been subjected to. If deadening blackness waits too long, my mind will eventually shatter under the weight of too many times at the key hole, too many times at the window, too many times at that little...hole thing... in the door, you know, the thing with the lens that bends that allows you to see who’s at the door – the peephole, that’s it! Too many times at the peephole, waiting, listening for the sounds that might come by....<br />
<br />
putt, putt, putt. putt, putt, putt. <br />
<br />
I was once a student at the College of Rose State, located in the City of Midwest in the state of Oklahoma, which is a part of the States United in America, on the continent of America (North), sitting plainly on the planet of Earth in the Universe known as This One. A friendly place, its fountain wet and sparkling with the lights underneath the water in a technically brilliant display of wet light. The buildings sit full of people during the day, but closed and empty at night, possibly to allow sleep to release them from the possible horrors that could possibly exist somewhere on its campus. No man knows.<br />
<br />
For four or five years this campus was my home away from home, since I did not live there, but at home, a place not on campus, making, therefore, the campus not my home. It felt like one at times, and I had developed a friendly banter with its occupants and temporary visitors one might call dialogue. <br />
<br />
“Hey, Dave!”<br />
“Hey, what’s up?”<br />
<br />
We spoke to each thusly, these others and myself. <br />
<br />
At the time of this horrid tale, I was recovering from what would come to be known as the Relationship I Needed To Get Out Of But Couldn’t. A young, red-haired beauty had smitten my heart, and I was hers, heart and soul. After a few happy months, during which we saw each other frequently, my heart grew 3 times as big, full of the love I had for her, and hope for the future it might contain. <br />
<br />
Alas, it was not to be. The woman turned out to be possessive and a bigot, and had concealed such personality “quirks” from me until familiarity bred ease of around-ness, and she dropped her guard. I, for once, was traumatized, knowing my strong feelings for her would make it difficult to leave. After months of mental anguish and physical exploration, I knew I had to leave, but how? I knew that if I was in her presence I would never be able to utter the words I needed. So I did it on her answering machine. A spineless move I admit, but what else you gonna do? <br />
<br />
Thus freed, I spent the next few days both pining for and yearning against the young woman, whose face I saw every day until I took her picture down from the bookcase. I begged off the dating scene for a while until I could get my bearings straight, which I did by looking down and seeing where I was. “Healed!”, I proclaimed myself. But my proclamation was incorrect. I was not healed, just alone – alone and lonely. And horny. Very horny. <br />
<br />
One day in late October, I was venturing around the Humanities building, where I spent most of my time, due to the fact that many of my friends were there, and I had a lot of classes in the building. I entered the computer room through the door, where a Spanish immigrant woman I was acquainted with was typing away, and a woman with shorter hair sat with her back to me, typing, as well. <br />
<br />
“Hey, Anna. What’s up?”<br />
“Oh, hey, Dave. How are you doing?”<br />
“Oh, okay. How’s your grandmother?”<br />
“Oh, she’s fine.”<br />
<br />
It was at this point that the other, non-Spaniard woman turned over to look at us. Her short hair and glasses proved the fact that she was a short-haired woman -- with glasses. <br />
<br />
“Hey, Anna? Who’s this?”<br />
“Oh, hey, (her name removed to avoid accidental incantations of some sort), this is David.”<br />
“Hi.” (me here)<br />
“Are you a student?” (Her)<br />
“Yeah, last year of a two-year program stretched out to five.”<br />
“Nice to meet you.”<br />
<br />
She turned and returned to her typing. Anna and I went into the main broadcasting room for a class we had. It was a class in... NEWS FEATURE PRODUCTION! And kinda fun.<br />
<br />
That Friday night, I dressed myself to the eights and planned to attend a campus theatrical production, something I enjoyed doing, since I was the campus theatrical production reviewer, and took my job very seriously, handing out stars and everything. I noticed some friends in the audience who were not Spaniards, nor immigrants, and sat down next to them, for the familiarity of friends can often overcome the weirdness of... the... inside place with the thingie in the lobby. The short-haired woman was among them, dressed nicely, and looking very cute, I might add, if the horrors of cuteness can cover the deeds of the black soul. And we’d just met, too. <br />
<br />
After the play – a fantasia that Jeff Tiger completely stole, I went to take my leave of the group, when the short-haired woman with the glasses asked if I wanted to meet up with some people to have a drink at a restaurant nearby. Lonely from my broken heart and horny in my soul, I took her up on the offer. We went to the restaurant, drank, and talked. The conversation was pleasant, as pleasant as conversation with a militant vegetarian can be. Yes, she was a vegetarian, a militant one. As I just said. <br />
<br />
Drink combined with more drink combined with horniness to produce what is known as a “make-out session” in my car back on campus, where I had driven to reunite her with her mode of transportation – a small, blue farm truck. The kind with the flat bed in the back and cab all the way front – like the British ones. Before things got too far, I righted myself, said I’d had a good time, and prepared myself for what was next. <br />
<br />
“So, would you like to do this again?”<br />
“Sure.”<br />
“I’m free Wednesday.”<br />
“Okay. What do you wanna do?”<br />
“Let’s get dinner. Do you like Flip’s?” <br />
Flip’s was/is an Italian restaurant in Oklahoma City, with a large vegetarian menu.<br />
“Sounds good,” I said. “How ‘bout I pick you up here and I’ll drive?”<br />
“See you then.”<br />
We separated then, slightly disheveled, and exchanged phone numbers. We also decided what time we should meet, since that was something we needed to know. <br />
<br />
She got in her little truck and drove away, her vehicle making a noise that I thought was cute at the time, but which now reverberates in the moldy passions of my soul:<br />
<br />
putt, putt, putt. putt, putt, putt. <br />
<br />
Between the time I had sucked face and the time of the date, I’d had second thoughts. I definitely wasn’t ready to get involved with someone emotionally, since my heart was still bruised and battered from the Tyson-like beating it had recently taken. I decided that if the date went well, then I’d continue to see the woman, but deep down, I knew this was not the time for such things.<br />
<br />
We met and headed to Flip’s.<br />
<br />
Dinner was comfortable, full of small talk and black bean soup. Eventually, she said something that told me I needed to cut this off, quickly.<br />
<br />
“You know, there are a lot of vegetarian dishes you might like. I’d love to cook some for you. You could come over and I’ll cook.”<br />
“Sounds nice,” I uttered, knowing that any more would give her the idea that I was interested. <br />
<br />
I drove her back to campus to drop her off, and realized I needed to end this now. <br />
<br />
“Hey, I’m sorry to do this, but I don’t really think I can date right now.”<br />
“Oh, what’s up?”<br />
“I just had to get out of a relationship that really wasn’t right for me, and I thought maybe I was ready to go out with someone again, but I’m really not. I’m sorry about this. It has nothing to do with you or anything like that, it’s just that I think I’m going to deal with myself for a while. Okay?”<br />
“Well, we can just hang out, right?”<br />
“Sure.” A BIG mistake. I had left an opening – an opening that I wanted never to be filled, but which turned out to be big enough to drive a farm truck through. <br />
“Okay, well take care, and I’ll see you around campus.”<br />
“Okay, and I’m really sorry. I had a good time tonight, but I’m just not ready to date anyone, yet.”<br />
“Well, I’ll keep in touch.” She got out of the car and closed the door, walking over to her farm truck. She got in and drove away. <br />
<br />
putt, putt, putt. putt, putt, putt. <br />
<br />
What I said was truthful – I had no intention of dating anyone for a while, and just wanted to lose myself in a series of meaningless sexual encounters, not taste delicious black bean soup at her place. “That seemed to go well,” I thought, and headed home. <br />
<br />
Over the next few weeks I began to receive letters from her – letters that were full of friendliness, slight flirtation, and advice for how to deal with my problems. I smiled as I read them, and filed them in the plastic container I kept my more impermanent, scrunched up papers, before I took them out to the big, green, roll-able trash bin. If the letters seemed to be coming more frequently than they should, I was too busy with school and work to notice. <br />
<br />
Eventually, the letters still kept coming. She began to hang out in the broadcasting lab more often than normal, since she wasn’t actually a part of the department. After the 9-10th time I “accidentally” ran into her there, I began to avoid hanging around the lab socially, and only showed up to do my work – a change in my social nature I assumed would be temporary. <br />
<br />
The letters still still kept coming – one of them a card-slash-puzzle, with a picture of the something-I-can’t-remember on it. I began to realize that my plan was not working, and that I’d have to avoid her even more. I kept the letters, for some reason – a reason my subconscious may have been preparing me for – the horrors up ahead, around the turn, over by that grey house on the corner – no, not that one, the one with the white fence and the – yes, that’s it. Those horrors. <br />
<br />
I continued to avoid her, sneaking around the broadcasting lab when I could, ducking around corners, and slipping into the radio booths for a chance at sweet, sweet privacy. I was invited to a Christmas party at her house and politely declined, stopped answering phone calls from her and politely saying I was busy – every single time, and never, ever ventured across campus without looking around first. At the time, I was not quite self-aware enough to notice that I’d altered my normal daily patterns – a sign that should have been obvious, much like the big, golden arch that announces your arrival at McDonald’s. There would be no delicious fried pies for me, though. I was in for a rude awakening, and not by alarm clock, but by Tiger.<br />
<br />
Jeff Tiger was a photographer for the paper, and also enrolled in some broadcasting classes. He was a cool person – cooler than most everyone I knew. His sense of humor dry as the dust on the bookcase I’d neglected to clean and smart as all get out. The Spring semester had just started, and I was delighted that my eternal college enrollment was about to end – this chapter, of it, at least. I showed up at the lab and joked about it “being safe?” <br />
<br />
Jeff seemed weird -- like a weird tale. He walked over to me and spoke softly. There was no stick to be seen.<br />
<br />
“Hey, there’s something you probably need to know.”<br />
“What’s up”, I asked, head slightly cocked with my usual quizzical look.<br />
“Let’s talk somewhere else.”<br />
<br />
We walked to one of the empty radio booths and he revealed to me something I was not prepared for. He had attended the woman’s Christmas party, as had a few other students I was familiar with. What they had seen there and what they had experienced had dumbstruck them enough that they seemed not to think I needed to know this, or were too scared of the consequences to reveal the horror to me. <br />
<br />
Indeed, they had gone to the party at her place outside of town. The hostess without the most-est had given them the obligatory tour of the dwelling, which was normal until they all got to her bedroom. <br />
<br />
There, on the wall, covering much of it, was a collage of photographs of me, taken at various places and events for the school paper and not used, but here blown up and assembled into a larger, more bigger picture of obsession -- obsession with me. While many of the guests thought this was weird, they said nothing, possibly to avoid upsetting the host, which is something you should avoid at parties. After the consumption of much alcohol, she took one of the pictures off the wall and began rubbing it on her privates, saying how much she wanted to fuck me and how we’d made out before and it was “totally awesome,” or something like that. <br />
<br />
Jeff looked up at me, and I’m certain my face had lost all color, and since I am white, that’s not necessarily as impressive as the large brick that fell onto the floor – shat from my very insides. <br />
<br />
It all came crashing around, Keyzer Soze-style, until I had the picture in my head – a picture I would most definitely not be rubbing against my privates. The letters, the “accidental” meetings at the lab, the puzzle-letters – all were signs of obsession. One make out session and some laughs had produced infatuation, for want of a much harder term to actually admit to at this point in the story. <br />
<br />
“Are you shitting me?” was my response. <br />
<br />
Now, my avoidance was filled with more than mere avoidance – it was filled with despair. This despair yanked at my soul with a tight grip, spilling my fears into the open for all to see. This was fucked up. I'd heard about this sort of behavior, but it was usually the other way around. <br />
<br />
Now I ventured around campus even fuller of awareness, noting every time she seemed to show up in the same building I was in or at some event I was participating in. I noticed that I had lost my joy at my impending graduation. Attending classes now became a game of militant vegetarian and mouse, but this time, the vegetarian might eat the mouse, with a black bean soup for an appetizer. The weather seemed colder somehow, as if it was winter, which it was. <br />
<br />
At night, I couldn’t sleep, for my ears were now aware of a noise that I had heard before, but which I now recognized:<br />
<br />
putt, putt, putt. putt, putt, putt. <br />
<br />
Was she actually driving by my house at night? To see if I was home? The answer, it turned out, was yes. I found myself listening for the sound of her farm truck before I passed into merciful sleep, looking out the window from a crouched position to see if – horror of horrors – her truck was out there. If there was a knock at the door, I looked through that hole-thingie to see if the visitor was her, knowing I would have to pretend to be either dead or too busy to actually answer it. <br />
<br />
This went on throughout January, into February. I played avoidance, and she was winning, if the point of avoidance is to avoid, which it is. I finally realized that I was being Stalked. Stalked. Stalked. Stalked. Stalked. Stalked. I heard the <br />
<br />
putt, putt, putt. putt, putt, putt. <br />
<br />
of her truck in my dreams, and they became nightmares. <br />
I decided I needed help. I contacted Darryl, a man who headed security on campus, and personal acquaintance from a few classes and asked what could be done about it.<br />
<br />
“Well, is she really following you around on campus?”<br />
“Yup. It’s really freaking me out.”<br />
“I bet. Well, have you thought about getting some kind of restraining order, or something like that? Using legal means to deal with it?”<br />
“No. I don’t really want to do that.”<br />
“Well, we can do a couple of things. If you want, I can arrange it so that you have an escort around campus...”<br />
“Really? You can do that?”<br />
“Sure. It’s part of our job. You’d be amazed what kind of fucked up people want to scare their wives or girlfriends.”<br />
“Jesus, this is fucked up.”<br />
“Yeah, sorry. The other thing we can do is simply make sure there’s a security guard present by your classrooms when you come out, and not necessarily escort you around. They’d be there just to kind of watch out for things.”<br />
“That would be cool.”<br />
“No problem. Sorry, man.”<br />
<br />
And, with that, I knew what was happening was far more than just a spurned person trying to hook up with me – it was Stalking. I was being Stalked. If man is the most dangerous game, and I am a man, then my dangerousness was being overpowered by her Stalkingness. <br />
<br />
I continued to go to work and school. At the time, and now again, I worked in north of the City of Oklahoma, many miles from Rose State’s campus. I assumed she had no idea where I worked, and, thus, did not concern myself with her possible appearance. <br />
<br />
I could not have been more wronger.<br />
<br />
One Wednesday, about 30 minutes before I was to leave work for the day and head to a Jean Claude Van-Damme hockey/terrorist movie, I looked outside. Her truck was parked in the lot. <br />
<br />
“Jesus Christ,” I softly uttered to myself. <br />
<br />
The woman was still in the truck, waiting, waiting, waiting. And waiting.<br />
<br />
“I do not fucking believe this.”<br />
George walked up, a German immigrant who worked with me.<br />
“Who’s that? Your girlfriend?”<br />
“Oh, fuck no. I can’t believe this.”<br />
How did she find out where I worked? I had never told her about my job. Eventually, it would be revealed that she’d used her – ummm- position to look up some stuff on the college’s computers, including my emergency and work numbers. <br />
<br />
I decided confrontation would be my only chance here. I figured I was safe, since the building had lots of people in it who might help if I screamed loud enough. I clocked out early and walked up to our secretary.<br />
<br />
“Hey, I’m going out to talk to someone. Could you watch out the window and call the police if anything happens?”<br />
“The police?”<br />
“Yeah, this witch has been following me around and somehow she’s found out I work here.”<br />
“Want me to call them now?”<br />
“No. I’m just going to walk to my car and leave. If she follows, I’ll drive straight to a police station.”<br />
<br />
I walked out towards my car. Her truck door opened, and she got out. I tried to avoid contact, but when she got close enough I yelled:<br />
<br />
“What the hell are you doing here?”<br />
“Well, since you’re not answering my phone calls or ever calling me back, and since I can’t seem to catch you on campus, I just wanted to talk.”<br />
“Do not come to work to see me again. Do you understand?"<br />
“Well... I just wanted to talk.”<br />
“Seriously, leave me the fuck alone. Okay?”<br />
<br />
I got to my car/sanctuary and got in. I looked back. She got in her truck and drove off. I waited a minute to catch myself and stop shaking, and stared down at the steering wheel and dashboard. This was getting out of hand. I looked around again for her truck, and then drove off, looking backwards every time I could, waiting for the sound that now filled my head at night, regardless of its actual presence:<br />
<br />
putt, putt, putt. putt, putt, putt. <br />
<br />
I enjoyed Sudden Death as much as I could. There’s a really funny scene involving a fight between Van-Damme and a large penguin mascot in an arena kitchen that is awesome, but other than that, the film’s pretty pedestrian. I drove home, looking around, listening, hoping that she’d gotten the message. <br />
<br />
At home, I continued my routine of looking out the window, listening for the<br />
<br />
putt, putt, putt. putt, putt, putt. <br />
<br />
of her truck, and peering out the door-hole thingie. I was not doing well. Coming off of a relationship that had become too painful to continue with and which I had gotten out of in an admittedly cowardly but necessary manner, I was emotionally and mentally vulnerable, and this was not helping. I had stopped going out in case she showed up at the same place I was, and even the weekend S&M sex club visits had lost their luster. The ass-spankings I provided were lackluster, probably. I don’t know, the ball gag kind of helps cut out any complaints. Do we really need to go into this aspect right now? I’m trying to vent here, okay? We can get into my time as a paid dominant later. Shit, that cat’s out of the bag. Anyways.<br />
<br />
I began to feel as though I needed to talk to her employer. Before I did this, I decided to talk to Karen, a friend who taught at the college, to see if she knew who I needed to talk to. I went to her office and we chatted away. Outside, even though it was mid day, it was dark. Snow was beginning to fall, and the usual “will classes be cancelled” talk was starting to go around. It might get nasty out, they said, so we watched the snow fall from her office. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the Humanities office door open. It was her, the Stalker, I mean. She sat down by the front door, making it so that if I left, I would have to go by her. I was ready to leave, by then. I told my friend what was happening, and she walked out of her office nonchalantly, in an attempt to size up the situation. <br />
<br />
“She’s just sitting there. Of all the nerve.”<br />
“I can’t take this much longer. What do I do? I don’t know if I should call security, hide and try to wait her out –“<br />
“Hell, I’ll call security.”<br />
“Hang on. Can you dial upstairs?” (to the lab, where I had a class later)<br />
“Sure. Here.” She handed the phone to me as it rang. As luck would have it, class was cancelled. I was done for the day, and could leave. Good, I thought. The snow was coming down pretty hard, and everything outside was white, pure. Unlike this situation, which was not. <br />
<br />
“Okay, I’d better do this.”<br />
<br />
My friend told me she’d run interference, and “escort” me out of the office by walking with me. Hopefully, this would throw the Stalker off and I’d get away. As we headed past her and out the office door, towards the exit, we were followed. I exchanged a look with Karen and told her that if I didn’t call her later, to please call me and use the secret “ring once, stop, and then call again” signal we’d worked out so I’d know it was her and not the Stalker. I left out the door, and was followed.<br />
<br />
Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch, my shoes went as they trudged on through the snow towards my car, which was parked in far Hyboria. <br />
<br />
Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch went her boots as she followed.<br />
<br />
She started to catch up.<br />
<br />
“David!”<br />
<br />
I didn’t acknowledge.<br />
<br />
Louder. “David!”<br />
<br />
Head still down, coat closed tightly against my body, multi-colored scarf waving in the wind, all I could think about was that this was it. “She’s not even trying to hide it anymore,” I thought. I wondered if I should break into a run, or keep going and hope she would just get tired and give up. That didn’t happen.<br />
<br />
Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch, scrunch behind me, but much faster. She was running to catch up. <br />
<br />
I was truly frightened here – more frightened than at any time in my life. I really did not know what was going to happen next. My senses heightened, waiting for an attack that might surface: tentacles of black ochre wrapping around my very soul, non-Cyclopean geometry mingling with pervasive chills, a sack full of batteries. She had caught up by now. <br />
<br />
“David!”<br />
I stopped. I figured if she was going to stab me or something, then, fine. It’ll at least be over. I honestly felt helpless. Tired. I gave up.<br />
“What? What do you want from me?” I half-yelled, half-whined. I shrugged and felt my body deflate. This had exhausted me completely, and I just wanted something to happen. The constant getting up, looking out the window, staring out the door-hole-thingie, the constant listening for the <br />
<br />
putt, putt, putt. putt, putt, putt. <br />
<br />
of her farm truck had finally killed me. <br />
<br />
“What is it?” I turned, snow still falling, faster now. I looked at her face. There was no expression on it except misunderstanding. She had no idea. No idea at all. <br />
<br />
“I just wanted to talk to you, that’s all.”<br />
“Please,” I pleaded, sanity starting to slip. “What do you want?” I said these words slowly.<br />
What<br />
Do<br />
You<br />
Want?<br />
<br />
Something happened. She seemed to straighten a bit. We both stood there in the falling snow, which was starting to get heavy, and began blurring the perfectly ordinary geometric buildings around us. <br />
<br />
She stirred suddenly and did something I did not expect. She shook her head side-to-side slightly and looked at me.<br />
<br />
“Relax, David. Sheesh.”<br />
<br />
And then she walked off into the snow, her image blurring and disappearing from view. I stood there for a few seconds and then simply turned and walked to my car, got in, rested my head on the steering wheel, and started the car. I had a long drive home, and it would be longer because of the snow.<br />
<br />
I never saw her again after that. Maybe something clicked in her. Maybe she had gotten tired of it, too. Maybe the helplessness and resignation on my face as I stared at her there in the snow finally told her that this wasn’t working, whatever she was trying. Maybe she saw my face and decided, “Sheesh. What a puss,” and decided I wasn’t worthy. Regardless, she was gone. It took a few days for me to realize this. I still looked around corners, still looked out the window, still looked out the peephole. After those few days, I realized it was over. <br />
<br />
However, it wasn’t. It still isn’t, in some ways. Those “safety checks” I had developed were now habits. I kept looking out the window, the peephole, around the corners. Even when I moved to Norman, I found myself still doing them. I still do now. The whole time altered me. I changed into someone who lost the ability to get close to others, to avoid the possibility of this happening again. I became distant, and it took a long time for someone to break through. "Stalker’s" gone, I guess, probably living somewhere in the Orient, maybe meditating on her vegetable militancy and hopefully not thinking about me at all. <br />
<br />
And the habits are all still there, 12 years later. I still wander in front of windows and look out like a sad, caged animal hoping someone will release it. I find myself walking up and looking out the peephole in the door for something that probably isn’t going to materialize, but which, deep down, I still think can. At night, I still hear the sounds of cars driving by, and listen for the horrid noise of her farm truck, its sounds confined to the repetition of a single, mad onomatopoeia of all too obvious source: <br />
<br />
putt, putt, putt. putt, putt, putt.<br />
<br />
ADDENDUM<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">As an
addendum to this rambling shoggoth of a tale, I’d like to add one thing. What I
really lost after all this, and which has never honestly returned, is Trust. Until
this year, I don’t think I’d ever realized how the two events –bigoted, controlling
girlfriend and Stalker, not to mention my own failures in past relationships
with people, friends or otherwise – had destroyed my ability to do that. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">One of
the most important parts of any true relationship is Object Permanence, otherwise
known as Trust, specifically, your ability to trust that when someone isn’t
around, or isn’t reachable, that they’re still there for you. That is something
that’s always been difficult for me, and these events have made it well-nigh
impossible. It affects every relationship I have with people, and every move I
make as a person. </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">And, of course, that
lack of Trust is also a part of how I see myself. If you can’t trust anyone, that
includes you. I hesitate before every sentence, every time I put something out
there for people to see or read, I am concerned about communication and fear
that what I write or say will never be what it is I mean it to be -- which in a
post-modern world</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">makes it even more
difficult, since all meaning can be and should be questioned. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">
<br />
To lose such trust in yourself and everything in general makes life a horrible
thing to live. You cry out for those moment of real sincerity – real,
unbreakable and unmistakable, true moments when you can relax and allow
yourself the beautiful opportunity to really let go of your self and accept
someone else’s. <br />
<br />
I wrote this as a Lovecraft parody because I wanted to try and find a metaphor
(this was all symbolic? Really, Dave? REALLY??!) for the way you can be altered
by events in ways that never leave you. Lovecraft’s protagonists may win a
small victory, but they never can leave the experience behind. They are changed
for the worse. And while the immediate danger may be over, the universe is full
of other things that will snatch you up into its darkness and spit out the
contents, chewed and desiccated. Even in the Role Playing game based on his
works, you have a Sanity level, which, if you lose too much of it, means you
lose your mind. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">I am
altered. I know this. I cannot help it. I have tried and I have failed and yet I
try again. One thing I despise is the bullshit definition of insanity as “to
repeat an action over and over, expecting a different result every time.” No.
That is Life. Following that idea, then Life itself is Insanity, and it may be.
Lovecraft’s “gods” are nothing more than infinitely powerful, mindless beings
who do what they do because they simply do it. Those of us in the wake are
buffeted around and try to ride out the tempest. And *you* try surviving a hurricane and see if
you don’t come out different through the other side. <br />
<br />
And, something else that’s real and horrible. One thing that is not in the
story, and which I left out as a politeness, is that I did have a girl friend
at that time, at best we were FWB’s, but she was still someone I was close to.
We’d both been hurt recently, and just needed some shelter for a while, and we
did that for each other, even as this was happening, which she was aware of,
and which she helped with just by being someone who demanded nothing and expected
nothing but friendship and some fun. <br />
<br />
She’s not allowed to talk to me anymore. Or her long time friends. (I say “allow”
when I really mean “she’s made the decision to go along with someone else’s
demands on her and her life”.) True, lasting relationships survive on Trust.
When that trust is destroyed, nothing works again as it should. It is only the
truly strong who can overcome such horror and begin again, and I know I am not
a strong person anymore. I am tired. I am tired of being sad, of being alone
when people are all around me, and I am tired of trying. Perhaps the meaning of
all of the experiences related in the story is that the horror ultimately has
won. No truck sound is needed to trigger my fears. All I need is the sound of
my own voice. Sometimes it can convince
me otherwise, but I don’t trust that guy enough anymore to let it be. <br /><br />Putt.Putt.Putt.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<br />Blasmohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01267720628197164493noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6237428121031451017.post-35517926675934783352008-10-27T09:44:00.000-07:002008-10-30T11:01:25.153-07:00END OF THE HIGH-PITCHED YEARSI turned 40 on October 28th. Happy Birthday to me and everyone else who shares it. On the day I was born, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention played their Royal Festival Hall performance in London, which would later be incorporated into the film <span style="font-style:italic;">Uncle Meat</span>, and which is available on the CD <span style="font-style:italic;">Ahead of Their Time</span>. A pretty good concert, the first half is devoted to a “story” that Zappa made up involving the more “talented” band members going on strike because they want to play “real” music, and not that comedy rock crap Zappa kept throwing at them. “They’re making up their lines as they go! Isn’t that amazing?” Zappa intones at one point. Eventually, a monster eats someone and the rest of the concert goes on as normal – again, pretty good, not great. <br /><br />As I sit and recount some of the more outlandish bits of my life for public consumption, I realize I’ve shifted into a weird, second-person voice. Let’s change that.<br /><br />I’ve had a pretty full life. I’ve done some fantastic things and some really bad things. I’ve helped and hurt people. I’ve been self-centered and generous. In short, I’m a human being. If there’s one thing existentialism has taught us – and it has – it's that human beings are flawed critters, and once that part of us is recognized then our very existence is ours. We follow laws not because the laws make us, but because we choose to follow them. There’s no psychic force that makes you follow the speed limit, just as there’s no force that makes you be good or bad to people – it’s just you. I’m not religious, and I don’t want to offend anyone here, but ultimately, you are responsible for what you do. That idea is both liberating and fucking scary. What’s to stop you from murdering someone? You. Even if you’re religious, the choice to follow that religion is yours. Belief in a higher power doesn’t cancel out the idea that you make the moves. Sure, there may be a higher power that puts the idea into your head, but you’re the one who has to put the idea into action. Belief may say that the higher power makes you do stuff, but you don’t always do what that higher power says, right? I mean, if every thing you do is directed, then what's all this crap about "free will" that's used as an excuse for the inevitable "If there's a God, then why is there so much suffering in the world? Why is there good and evil?" You will never get an answer to this, only static like that TV in <span style="font-style:italic;">Poltergeist</span>. <br /><br />Here's an "example": Picture poor Job – no, not the <span style="font-style:italic;">Arrested Development</span> character who performs “illusions” (“a trick is something a whore does for money, Michael” - shot of disturbed children surrounding him – “or candy.”), but the Biblical one – shaking his little fist at the heavens, cursing God for what it’s either allowed to have happen to him, or what it’s done to him. Job has put up with an enormous amount of crap, and has every right to finally snap and curse God. God, of course, snaps right back with a long, beautiful speech known as “The Voice of the Whirlwind.” It’s amazing stuff, some of the best writing ever, but which can be boiled down to God looking down on Job and saying, “Fuck you.” Now, the original pre-translated story ends there, but the Biblical version, translated by monks who simply could not let Job end up that way, throws in a moral where Job, in celebration of his previous faith in the face of calamity, gets pretty much everything he wants: family, money, cows, and a Wii (way before electricity, which is pretty much another smack in Job’s face). <br /><br />I digress in my digression. At this point, the late, great Bill Hicks enters the room and begins reciting a part of his “My Philosophy” routine, where he digs himself into a hole so far down in his routine discussing serious matters that he winds up in China, where he is chastised for not telling “dick jokes:” “Why you no tell dick jokes? No one want to hear your philosophy, tell dick jokes!”<br /><br />Sigh. My point is that no matter what creed or philosophy or religion you might adhere to, you are the one who has to put it into action. That puts an enormous amount of power in the individual, and can be reeeeeally scary. Some people say “fuck this”, and decide to retreat into the masses, letting others tell them what to do and think. Others go too far with the individuality and “there-is-no-higher-power” parts of existentialism and simply give no shit about the effects their actions have on other people. We call these people Objectivists. HA HA!<br /><br />Somewhere in between is the rest of humanity, creeping along, trying to make sure food is there, bills are paid, and there’s some fun around to take their minds off of the fact that life seems to consist of no more than trying to make sure food is there, bills are paid, and there’s some fun around to take their minds of off the fact that life consists of the same shit, day after day. Of course, that’s assuming you’re not somewhere that basic survival is still an “option,” such as the so-called Third World. There, the options narrow down to “eat” or “don’t eat and you die”. Regardless of your philosophy, creed, or religion, all human beings screw up, and all human beings do great things (although some at different levels than others. You think me giving a homeless guy a couple of cheeseburgers matches the woman who bathes a person who can't do that for him/herself anymore?). As the great philosopher John G. Maynard once said: "All pain is relative." So is happiness.<br /><br />I’m a happy person. I’ve done some really nice things, and some really shitty things. I like to think that they balance out all right, but I know I’ve hurt some people so much that they’ll never want to see me again, and might have some sort of psychic damage years of therapy will never fix. I also know that I’ve done some decent stuff I can be happy about. Among my accomplishments is marrying an incredible woman who puts up with my shortcomings as I put up with hers, and we both try to help each other get over the rough spots. We have a child who is so amazing that her teachers thank us for her, and other parents thank us for her, as well. Lori is the main person to thank for that; I had to work most of the time, and pitched in when I could. We’re both still working on that whole “shoe-tying” thing, though. <br /><br />But it’s not as though any of that erases the bad stuff, it just makes the bad stuff fade away a bit. I owe apologies to many people, and I’d like to take the time for one right now: <br /><br />To David Gibson.<br />I am sorry I let our friendship end the way it did. We used to be as close as people get, and, for various reasons that are too stupid to recount here (but let’s just say I was a jackass and move on with it), I let that disappear. Those were great times, and I fucked them up. I hope you can forgive me, because even though we do this “Facebook” thing these days and seem to be cool again, we were once close enough to cry in front of each other. You seem to have a good life, my friend, and I wish I could still be a part of it the way I used to be. I am so sorry.<br /><br />And, of course, there are dozens of others, ranging from people I've worked with to that guy whose girlfriend dumped him at a bar so she could take me home, to the guy whose athletic scholarship got yanked away from him because I flunked him in one of my film classes (Star Thought: show up for class every once in a while and this sort of shit doesn’t happen. Kapeesh?) <br /><br />But there’s a lot of stuff I’m glad I did. The family thing seems to be going well. Lori and I have been married for 8 years, mostly very very happy, sometimes only very happy, and our daughter’s extremely happy. I’ve read to people with AIDS as their eyesight faded, and tricked women into dumping me so they’d wind up in the arms of the person they should have been with. I tried to get Jerry Brown elected president in one of the most lost causes ever – I still can’t find the cause and have looked under the mattress several times – and tried to teach people in my classes that just because you disagree with a point, it doesn’t mean the point is invalid, or below your scrutiny. And my brother and I talk again, and have for 8 years after we didn’t for a few others. Let’s not go into that except to say I love him very much, and I know he does me. And our relationship is better than it ever has been. Rock.<br /><br />I turn 40 today. Everything still seems to work fine, although I stretch out a lot more to make sure it all still does. I still have my hair -- longer than in high school, but not as long as it has been in the past. My legs kick ass, and I have shapely calves some dancers would give their eye teeth for. I still think my eyes work, although the raccoon-esque bags around them – which are more hereditary than sleep-deprived – grow bigger and darker with every day. You can, of course, as my “cousin” Paul Westerberg once said, check my age by the rings, much like a tree. 40 is nothing more than a count – a way to tick off the years you’ve survived, not the years you have left. People use 40 as a marker because it’s halfway to 80, which is “old”, and after that, you’re getting close to death. But you can die at any time, and that’s not based on your age, your philosophy, religion, creed – whatever. You could be halfway to death at 15, or 50. Dwell on that, and you lose out on the enjoyment that the stuff before death can contain. 40 is the end of the “high-pitched years”. You know, when you play hide-and-seek and count out loud, the pitch of the numbers gets higher before you reset to the “10’s” “(get higher as you count) 37, 38, 39! (down again) 40.” However, after 40, most people stop counting and say their age at the same pitch for the rest of their lives. I plan to keep rising and falling, just like I always have. I'm happy. More than that. I feel young -- if young feels like the satisfaction you have with your life before it gets all complicated by shit such as life. <br /><br />So, Happy Birthday everyone! Eat what you want. Drink what you want. Remember to tell people what you think about them, and be nice when they tell you exactly what they think of you. Don’t hurt anyone unless they ask you to, and apologize when they don’t. God or no God, you might as well behave as though someone's watching you all the time, and, as always, there’s no script for you to follow, so make up the lines as you go along. <br /><br />And don’t get eaten by the monster. <br /><br />PS: There will be more dick jokes in the next blog. (As if anyone continues to read this thing...)Blasmohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01267720628197164493noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6237428121031451017.post-36154896481113055792008-10-25T20:26:00.001-07:002009-10-15T11:58:30.498-07:00Ahem. 12 SHORT ENTRIES ABOUT JAY HILBURNWhat follows is all true. It's pretty raunchy, has some raw sex and drug use, and lame attempts to take an everyday situation and make it into some kind of metaphor for the human condition. In this, I freely compare myself to Robert Altman, without the talent. Or the pot. Tonight.<br /><br />1. <br />I used to wear a black, valour bathrobe to school. Initially, it was part of a drama skit I did, then a part of a research paper that couldn't materialize, no matter how hard Mrs. McIntire tried to help. Irregardless, it felt damned comfortable, and comfort was the buzzword for my Senior year.<br /><br />While coming back from a jazz band trip to Stillwater, I heard a cry from the back of the school bus we were traveling in. It was Jay, and he was asking for me to throw the bathrobe back to him. I did. Now, I wore clothes underneath the thing, so don't think I was naked here. After we got back to the high school, Jay was waiting for me to take him home, and he was leaning back on my blue Pinto's passenger door, robe closed, still in his jazz band uniform -- blue blazer, tan pants, you get the drift. As I walked towards him, I noticed the slight grin, slight embarrassment (Jay embarrassed?), and how he held the robe closed around him tightly. He apologized for something in advance. I stopped and looked at him quizzically. He mentioned that he'd been getting a blow job from some girl in the back seat and things had... well...gotten messy. He also said he'd pay for the cleaning bill and opened the robe. It looked like someone had punched a saline breast implant. $15.00 at Rod's Cleaners that Monday. He never paid me.<br /><br />2.<br />My sophomore year of high school, there were tryouts for the No.1 and No.2 jazz bands. Initially, Mr. Coon (Yukon jazz band director, as opposed to Mr. Taylor, the head band director) had simply assigned us to each class, and Jay was in the No. 2 band, probably because he'd been busted for pot the year before, and Mr. Coon wasn't taking any chances. After the dust settled, the three drummers in the 1 band were Jay, a guy named Shawn Thompson (who shall now be known as "DL"), and me. DL shouldn't have been there. An ass-kisser, he'd memorized how each song we were playing went, and played the same fills and riffs he'd heard on the recordings (no matter how lame they might have initially been) -- so much so that Jay and I used to make fun of the fact by repeating those same fills on the conga drums behind him, or singing them to each other. This perturbed DL to no end, and made him do those same fills even harder, as if to emphasize the fact that he was playing the same drum fills over and over. He quit the next year. Jay moved to his earned post as No.1 drummer, and I found myself half the time behind the drums, half the time behind the new vibraphone that the band had purchased, possibly because they had someone who could sort of play it -- me. <br /><br />3. <br />Jay and I never had a single conversation of any real importance. We never discussed life, future plans, politics, anything other than music, drugs, and fucking. I saw Jay every day from 7th grade until we graduated, and I have no idea who he was, except that he got a lot of pussy. And he liked Frank Zappa.<br /><br />3A. <br />"Music, Drugs, And Fucking" is the title of my next album.<br /><br />4. I once sold all my Zappa albums to help out a friend, and had to get back "Zappa in New York" from Jay to do this. I drove over to his house and got it from him, and went straight to the Record Shop on 23rd street, over by the Red Dog Saloon, a strip joint of no mean reputation. Alexander, the owner of the record store, a tall, very skinny man who always dressed in a white tuxedo shirt and black vest, much like Bill Berry circa 1986 (and me, circa 1986-90), looked carefully at my wares, nicely impressed, and then he got to the "New York" album. As he unfolded it to look at the gatefold sleeve, small pieces of pot flecked down the spine onto the glass case in front of him. Jay had obviously rolled a joint on the open album, and he hadn't cleaned it off before he gave it back. Alexander smiled and said, "Well, I guess I can give you an extra dollar for that."<br /><br />5. <br />Jay once tried to get me to sell insurance with him during my Senior year. I always wondered where he got the money for those suits he used to wear. Jay dressed to the nines his Senior year. While I had my robe, he had his sport jackets and dress shoes. I assumed this was what adulthood would be like, and noted the difference between us: he wore dress shoes, I wore fuzzy bunny slippers, since I was highly influenced by Val Kilmer's character in the film <span style="font-style:italic;">Real Genius</span>. I wanted to be him. Jay wanted to be Neil Peart, but a Neil Peart who got laid a lot, and wore nicer shoes. We once picked up a couple of girls at a band contest in Atlanta (Altantia) my senior year. He was wearing his blue, dragon patterned kimono robe, and I made them laugh. No one ever laughed at Jay's kimono. Only one of us got lucky, and it wasn't Jay, for a change. I have no idea what the young woman's name was, but had fun with her in the bottom of the hotel parking garage. Jay thought that was the shit. This may have been the only time the fuzzy slipper was on the other foot. <br /><br />6. <br />Speaking of the Senior band trip to Altantia, Jay made very sure we got all the percussion equipment packed on the buses, along with his two suitcases. When we got to the hotel, he revealed that he'd smuggled his entire home stereo on the bus in one of the percussion containers, and one of his suitcases was nothing but bottles of booze wrapped in socks and other pieces of clothing (this suitcase was much lighter on the way back). In our room was Jay, myself, David Pritner (another senior), and Marcus Perdue (a sophomore who out-matured all three of us). I didn't get to drink very much, because I was still the lookout guy, sitting out in front of the room and sending little signals out when someone of authority was coming by. That "someone" was Mr. Taylor, the only band director who'd made the trip, and who pretty much gave up on the idea of controlling us, since he was the only person of authority there. Bottles were disposed of the same way Luther Mauldin (sp?) disposed of hotel phone books -- out the hotel window. When we drank the last of the champagne, we threw the bottle out the window at the building across the street, and it hit some sort of electrical fixture, sparks shooting everywhere and plunging the abandoned building into darkness. We immediately closed the window and curtains, turned off the lights, and avoided the phone calls that kept coming -- possibly from Mr. Taylor, possibly from the two girls Jay and I had picked up, probably from people wanting us to turn down the Rush and Zappa tapes. Fun trip. We're all going to hell for it, but it was a fun trip. It's called "Altantia", by the way, because that's the way it was spelled on the itinerary we got from Mr. Taylor. Oh yes, on the way to the city, someone threw a bottle of Jack Daniels into the bus toilet, which led to us being stranded in the bus depot for a few hours while they tried to figure out what to do. Good times. <br /><br />7. <br />Jay and I carried on a "war of attrition" or "war of stupidity" on DL for most of our senior year, stemming from the time DL bitched out a band director in front of a few students for no reason than to make himself look good in front of a few students. Jay and I surreptitiously recorded the thing and played it for Mr. Taylor later on, who just shook his head, laughed, and whispered, "Jesus." Towards the end of the year, an event happened that illustrates how close Jay and I were and how vindictive we both could be towards DL. DL was dating an amazing young woman he would eventually dump, whose mother used to bring him breakfast snacks during first hour band. She would open the band room door -- it was a separate building from the main high school -- show DL the snack, and then close the door. When Mr. Taylor wasn't looking, DL, who was our tympani player (primarily because no one else wanted to and DL defended his turf enough to make eyes roll) and who wasn't always needed during rehearsals, would sneak outside and eat. The last time he did it, Jay and I made eye contact, he rushed to the far door, I went to the near one, and we locked them. After a few minutes, a quiet "knock" could be heard, and the door knob jiggled. Same with the other door. I asked Jay, as unloud as loud could be, so as not to disrupt the entire proceedings, "Hey, where's Shawn?" Jay replied, "He went for doughnuts and a Coke."<br /><br />David Gibson, trombone player extraordinaire (no, really, the guy's the reincarnation of Frank Rosolino, but with less violence), turned and asked us the same question. <br />"Where's Shawn?"<br />Jay and I in Unison: "He went for doughnuts and a Coke."<br />From across the room, Wayne Coon Jr., trumpet player. <br />"Where's Shawn?"<br />"He went for doughnuts and a Coke." <br />This spread quickly through out the band until Mr. Taylor finally had enough, slammed his conducting wand down, and yelled, "What the hell is going on?"<br />"Shawn went for doughnuts and a Coke." Mr. Taylor dipped his head down, shaking it slowly, at last beaten. Then, there was a loud pounding on the door. "This is the Principal! Open up this door!"<br />One of us did, and Mr. Lobaugh -- my neighbor and old friend -- opened the door, looked around, and then Shawn came in, head down, no eye contact to be made. Mr. Lobaugh closed the door and left. <br />After a moment of silence, Mr. Taylor got back to the task at hand. Someone behind us, possibly Mike Smith, quietly asked how the doughnuts were. He got no answer.<br /><br />8. <br />DL, of course, stands for "Dickless".<br /><br />9. <br />I've been looking for Jay for a few years now, just to see how he's doing. He and I both received full rides to the then CSU on jazz scholarships, and we both blew them, although it took him a much shorter time to do so. We used to carpool, but after the 10-20th time of knocking on his girlfriend's apartment door to no avail -- or him answering the door half dressed while he played old Chase tapes -- Chase is to Chicago as a high school Stone Temple Pilots tribute band is to Pearl Jam -- and was too high to go with me, I just stopped. The next time I saw him was, I think, at the same party (which will now be referred to as "The Party" because of its ubiquitous-ness in these blogs) where I saw Cindy Gamsjager the last time. Poignant coincidence, or one hell of a party? Your choice. The party thrower wound up re-painting lines in a parking lot, while the rest of us got off scott free. <br /><br />10. Jay took me to a party once, not at Todd Suitor's, where he almost always partied, but somewhere close by. He picked me up and parked a ways down the street, which led to a short walk to the house. We'd just gotten there, popped open beers, leaned against the fence in the backyard and started to talk, when we saw the flashing police lights out front. We dropped said beer, hopped the fence, and ran all the way across town to my house -- quite a ways to do such a thing late at night. We drank beer with my dad out on the patio for a couple of hours until I eventually drove over to the area and let Jay out to pick up his car and drive home. Jay's car was a bitchin' dark-blue Trans-Am (or Camaro, things are shaky here), that looked great, and drove fantastically. It used lots of gas, though. I watched the gas gauge actually go down when he peeled out in the parking lot once. He peeled out that night, too, since the cops were gone. He may have gone over to Todd's to party, I don't know. I went home and continued to think about how cool it was that I actually got to escape a raided party with Jay Hilburn. <br /><br />11.<br /><br />As human beings, we crave closure. It allows our lives to fit narrative conventions that we’ve been exposed to all our lives: beginning, middle, end. When this doesn’t happen, our lives enter the world of tragedy – especially when that closure is not how we’d want it, which life regularly isn’t. Here’s a for instance: I had been looking for a guy named Sean Shepler for a few years. I went to high school with him; he was damned funny – “Hello! I’m Mister Icy Drink Machine! Can I help you?” – and damned annoying -- the Drama Room door -- at the same time, but usually more funny. A mutual friend – Brian Gorrell, yet another fantastic musician I’ve had the pleasure to know, let me know out of the blue that Sean was dead, and had not died in a particularly pleasant fashion. I’d lost contact with Sean after The Party. He and I had simultaneously concocted the same lie that saved Cody (the party thrower) from getting charges pressed against him after The Party. We’d drifted apart, but I had seen him DJ down in Norman a few times before I finally moved down here, when I didn't see him again and then heard that he was dead. The sudden news of his death affected me in ways I did not expect, maybe because I was hoping to find him and reconnect, and maybe because it was not how that story should have ended. Sean was talented, damned funny (again), and should’ve had his own radio show on Sirius, making fun of everyone and everything while playing Miles Davis’ <span style="font-style:italic;">Tutu </span>album. If I’m not looking as hard as I’d like to find Jay, then it’s for that reason: I don’t want to find out he’s dead, or drugged, or some other destiny that he damned well didn’t (doesn’t, let’s be optimistic) deserve. In this, I am practicing Avoidance. <br /><br />As culture advances, mentally – HA!, there’s a concept – we have to become used to the idea that life, ideas, events, whatever, don’t happen the way we’ve necessarily been taught. World War II doesn’t begin with Pearl Harbor and end with the dropping of the A-Bomb. It’s an event that occurred because of multiple historical and cultural problems and multiple stupidities that are much more complex than a Jerry Bruckheimer film might make it out to be. However, it’s easier to think of it as: “We were attacked. We fought back. We built up our strengths, came together as a nation, and then beat the shit out of bunch of racists and fanatics, ultimately leading to the usage of the greatest scientific advance of the time to end the whole thing, and setting us up as world power!” This makes us look absolutely badass, and much of it is true. But there are grey areas: the whole Isolationist Movement and slight turn towards Fascism that people like Charles Lindbergh wanted (and the peace movement, which people Like Edith Keeler would have had us follow before she was wiped from the timeline. Thanks, Captain Kirk.) After the war, we had to deal with the consequences: the A-Bomb opened up the world to advanced means of destruction, we had troubles with prejudices and paranoia of our own to deal with afterward. To this day, many people hate it when their mythology is confronted with reality. Face it, folks. Human beings created this country – human beings who were as flawed as the rest of us, some of whom dug slavery, hated Germans, and fucked around because they could. However, that doesn’t fit the narrative, so we deny it. <br /><br />I link this to my drug using, sex-filled friend from high school because I’m consciously avoiding answers. I’d prefer to remember Jay as this awesome guy who did and said what I wanted to say and do, and who once accepted a best musician award at a jazz contest while wearing my bunny slippers. He’s probably doing just fine, married, has a great job, and prefers his life now to his action-packed life in high school. I’d like to think that, as I slam closer to 40 and still deal with the fact that my life, as great as it is, is nowhere near what I thought it was going to be. In many ways, it’s better; I never thought I’d be able to have kids, and I never thought I’d be happier poor than when I had a nice-sized disposable income that allowed me to eat what I wanted, buy CD’s out the wazoo, and create a laser disc collection that is the envy of many unknown Japanese people who are still interested in such useless things. So, in a futile attempt to avoid the pressures of a non-narrative ending to a narrative I’ve created, I’d like to mis-quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, who once said that American lives have no second act. We get multiple acts, folks, and have no intermissions or entre-acts to consider what the hell just happened before we move on to the next. There are nice pauses sometimes, but, as Boethius said, “It's my belief that history is a wheel. ‘Inconsistency is my very essence’ -says the wheel- ‘Rise up on my spokes if you like, but don't complain when you are cast back down into the depths. Good times pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it is also our hope. The worst of times, like the best, are always passing away’.” Good and bad times mix, and we make the narratives of our lives and read them as we want. Many want their lives to read linearly, from beginning to end, but our lives are much more like Tarkovsky’s masterpiece <span style="font-style:italic;">The Mirror</span>, which he uses as a metaphor for existence: our lives are like dropped mirrors, and the pieces reflect back different parts of us and our lives. It’s messier, but more accurate. <br /><br />12.<br /><br />One last fragment. Jay called me up out of the blue a few days after graduation and asked if he could come over. My folks were out of town, so he said he'd bring a bottle of champagne, drink it with me in the hot tub, and we'd celebrate our graduation. We did this, but after about ten minutes, a young woman we were both acquainted with suddenly showed up to say hi to me, saw the two of us, and proceeded to take her clothes off and get in the tub, with a "come hither" stare if'n ever I've seen one. Jay immediately jumped at the chance, took off his bathing suit, jumped in the tub, and the two of them waited for me. I took a rain check, and closed the patio doors and the curtains to give them privacy. I smiled and drank more champagne. Eventually, someone else came over, and we talked while stuff was happening. Jay and the girl eventually came in, towels on, and went into the bathroom. Water started running for a bath. I waited a few minutes, and knocked on the closed door. The girl opened it, and Jay was lying naked in the bath tub, huge grin on his face. I grinned back, and closed the door. Our lives were all in front of us then, and hopefully, they still are. Wheel goes round.Blasmohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01267720628197164493noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6237428121031451017.post-61078030018085180712008-10-07T15:50:00.000-07:002008-10-07T15:51:32.058-07:00The Apple AgainFor those of you care, The Apple will be on Turner Classic movies this Friday night at 1AM. That's Central Standard Time. Check your local listings for the freak-out near you. <br /><br />Well, that was an easy blog.Blasmohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01267720628197164493noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6237428121031451017.post-54753752626996854172008-10-04T06:59:00.001-07:002008-10-05T00:43:18.842-07:00NOTES FROM THE VICE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATESorry, Jay Hilburn fans, I'm still working on that entry, and still trying to answer the title question, but, in the meantime, enjoy this obviously biased account of Thursday night's cringe-fest that Pat Buchanan still thinks -- oh, who cares what that racist fuck thinks? -- presented as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, former college-level instructor (generally referred to by critics as "That asshole ex-musician, ex-videographer, ex-teacher who made jokes about Bush before it was important to do so") who is a warehouse manager/parts buyer living somewhere south of Oklahoma City that liberals try to pretend is a bastion of open-mindedness, but which actually is just another Oklahoma city with more pretensions and better food.<br /><br /><br />I was looking at myself in the mirror this morning, attempting to count the growing rings around my eyes and thinking in a paranoid manner when it finally hit me. The bar has hit the ground. No more limboing; you have to walk on top of the thing, or be atom-sized small.<br /><br />I used to teach Freshman Comp at OU. Everyone teaches Freshman Comp at OU, because there are 17 million incoming freshmen each year at OU, and those people need to be reminded how to write, even though they've already had 12 years of writing-oriented classes. I taught it for 4-5 years, as I started a Master's Program that ultimately failed me -- there's another blog sometime -- and had the great fortune to gain a family in the meantime. I mean, where do your priorities go when that happens? How could I care about whether or not some freshman knows how to do MLA format when I'm missing CUDDLES FROM MY CHILD!? Oh, yes. It's my job. So I acted just like the head English Dept. Graduate Advisor and did not give a shit. Well, that's an overstatement.<br /><br />I did give a shit.<br /><br />Anyway, I was watching the reruns of the Biden-Palin debate and finally figured out exactly why I thought Biden won and Palin lost. I mean, besides the fact that he did better, and the bar had been lowered so far in Palin's case that all she needed to do was not use the word "thighs" in mixed company and she'd "win." And by win, I mean "survive", which is animal speak for "win". <br /><br />Meaning, of course, that she wasn't eaten by a larger animal.<br /><br />We used to teach these "units" in Freshman Comp, the first of which was an "Essay Exam" unit. It was a way of keeping students interested in the class by trying to provide them with a way to succeed at Essay Exams, a mainstay of colleges everywhere. The Dept. provided you with a teaching packet, and the students had to buy the Comp packet, which was overpriced and which I used to feel guilty about them buying, since I rarely used the whole thing and could not justify the expense. I mean, these kids could use the money to go to Bill's and drink heavily! By the way: Bill's, formerly Mr. Bill's, is the greatest bar ever. Just sayin'. Hic! Hic!<br /><br />So, one of the exercises we used to go over in class was titled "Essay Exam Nightmares" -- ostensibly a way to show how people can avoid certain errors while preparing to take an exam. For me, it was the "Don't Do These Really Stupid, Perfectly Obvious Fuck-Ups So You'll Pass An Essay Exam" section, primarily because you would have to be an idiot not to understand these problems. This turned the Comp class into more of a Gateway class, where students learn about such things as time management, where certain skills are thrown at you so everyone can prepare the same way, because all students are the same, y'know. I betcha thooose students never considered how Joe Six-Pack could....<br /><br />Sorry, got hijacked for a second. Anyway, the questions revolved around being in class for review sessions, not spending every waking hour working on a float of some sort, and this one, which always made me laugh, and which I never gave to the students to answer because I liked asking it in front of the class and giving my own version of the answer. Here it is, copied directly from the packet (all rights reserved -- OU English Dept.):<br /><br />"Karen selects essay #3 on her American Literature exam. The question reads: 'Benjamin Franklin has been called the "first fixer and former of American political thought." (I usually pointed out the alliteration here. Nice touch.) Discuss (key word here) Franklin's contribution to American political thought. How does his life exemplify the myth of the self-made man in pursuit of the American dream?' Karen remembers a few details from Franklin's autobiography, but doesn't think Franklin's life was as interesting as her own grandfather's struggle to build his own business. She decides to focus upon her grandfather instead. The instructor will appreciate her ingenuity."<br /><br />Right, she's going to bullshit, talk about what she thinks is important, and not answer the question. Certainly, her answer might contain some parts that do relate to the question, such as a definition of the "self-made man" or "maverick", and perhaps one or two details from Franklin's life. For the most part, though, she's going to try and bullshit her way through this, not because she actually thinks her grandfather's story is better, but she "remembers (a) few details from Franklin's life". This is shorthand for not actually knowing enough to answer, but enough to convince an uninformed person that she does. <br /><br />I would ask the students what the answer to the "nightmare" would be, and several would yell out that she wasn't actually answering the question. "Of course," I would add. "Who gives a shit about her grandfather? Unless his business involved world conquering, he's not going to be anywhere near as interesting as Benjamin Franklin" -- a man about whom certain rumors persist: he had monkey-sex with every woman in the world.<br /><br />Now, she's answering the question....sooooort of..... I mean, giving some answer is technically "answering" the question, and she might be able to make the connections, but she isn't actually answering the question, since the question itself involved Afghanistan, and not Energy. I mean, Benjamin Franklin and not her grandfather. As a grader, I would give her, at best, a "C-", especially if it was well written because -- and I want to make this perfectly clear -- she didn't answer the fucking question.<br /><br />Which is what you're supposed to do: answer the fucking question you're asked, not the one you want to -- not the one you're prepared to answer. If she got away with this, I would blame the instructor for: 1. Not paying close enough attention to see that she hadn't actually answered; 2. Not forcing the student to do what was actually required; 3. Being distracted by the spin and the glasses and the <span style="font-style:italic;">Fargo</span>-to-the-extreme accent, y'know -- shit, sorry, hijacked again -- and allowing that the student at least tried to answer. All of which is bullshit; the question wasn't answered. <br /><br />If all you want to hear is something, you'll hear it. If all you want is competency, you can see it. If all you're after is survival, then the fact that you weren't eaten by the other animal is enough. <br /><br />All of this is to say that Gwen Ifill did not do her job as moderator the other night, and Sarah Palin got to do what she wanted to do, which was talk about her fantastic grandfather's dry-cleaning business that he built from scratch like a true American, and which represents the self-made man better than Benjamin Franklin, one of the founders of this nation, who caught syphilis from one of his 16,570 lovers, and who still may be alive today (1% certainty here). <br /><br />What failed us the other night, and what no one seems to want to talk about, is that while Joe Biden knew what the fuck he was talking about, and could actually discuss (key word again!) the issues he was asked about, and which would give him at least a "B+" from me, Gwen Ifill allowed the other, cuter student to get away with bullshitting. <br /><br />I, of course, would give the student a failing grade, because even though the answer might sound good (and we are really stretching the definition of the word "good" here), the student DIDN'T ANSWER THE FUCKING QUESTION! <br /><br />I always had make-up exams, in case some students fell prey to one of the other "Exam Nightmares" -- staying up too late, not understanding the material, panicking, being Sarah Palin, all of the above (Sarah Palin again) -- because I was teaching a writing class, and my philosophy was that you could learn from your mistakes, and you should have a chance to fix them, if you were willing to do the work. This allowed students to make "A's" the next time, or at least "not fail".<br /><br />SPECIAL NOTE: My former office mates, Mark and Janson, used to do something similar, but it involved doing drugs, having students murder certain people "who deserved it", and sexual favors of a Ben Franklin-ish sort. <br /><br />SPECIAL SPECIAL NOTE: Absolutely none of that last section is true. NONE OF IT. Sorry, Lori (Janson's wife) and Elisha (Mark's wife). <br /><br />EXTRA SPECIAL SPECIAL SPECIAL SECTION: Mark and Janson are both two of the greatest people I have ever had the chance to be around. I miss them terribly, in that I am terrible at missing people. I can't do it well. <br /><br />So, as I stand here thinking paranoid thoughts in a Russian existentialist style, I hope like hell that people will re-check the answers Sarah Palin gave, because they are, for the most part, bullshitting-on-a-bad-student's-essay-exam level. I don't care how much they try to spin this, it's still bullshit, just swirled around a bit to make it look better.<br /><br />Thank you, I'll be making really obvious comparisons all week! Drink up!Blasmohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01267720628197164493noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6237428121031451017.post-54528863992327834262008-09-30T11:00:00.000-07:002008-09-30T12:32:50.698-07:00KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKERINTRODUCTION<br /><br />“The things that scared the shit out of when you were a child now make you an object of ridicule.” <br /><br />That was the first sentence I wrote down when I started to write the <span style="font-style:italic;">Kolchak </span>blog. It wasn’t until I talked about it with Lori that I realized that it wasn’t entirely accurate. A more accurate statement might read:<br /><br />“Everything you hold dear can and will be ridiculed by somebody at some point in your life.”<br /><br />So why not you?<br /><br />THING<br /><br />When bars close, they usually do so with a “Last Call!” or “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here!” For existentialists and pretentious bars, you’ll hear “Hurry up please it’s time!” The late, lamented Samurai Club in Oklahoma City had a tape they would play with Muzak in the background and various celebrity impersonators saying it was time to go. I heard that tape about a hundred times in my life. Damned good times.<br /><br />R.I.P. Samurai.<br /><br />At my place, I didn’t tell people it was time to go when movie night got too late for my consciousness level – I simply put on an episode of <span style="font-style:italic;">Kolchak: The Night Stalker</span>. Except for 1-2 exceptions, <span style="font-style:italic;">Kolchak </span>would get people out of the apartment faster than a police raid (foreshadowing for next time’s entry on Jay Hilburn?). Now, I love <span style="font-style:italic;">Kolchak</span>, it was one of my favorite shows when I was a kid, and became almost mythological in its magnitude when it disappeared from TV, to reappear in the late 90’s as a cult favorite, which is another way of saying “Geek Favorite”. Aside from four exceptions, the scariest things I ever saw on TV before the age of 10 came out of <span style="font-style:italic;">Kolchak: The Night Stalker</span> (which will be referred to as <span style="font-style:italic;">The Night Stalker</span> from now on – the name was changed to that after 4-5 episodes and just sounds cooler). I watched it sparingly when it premiered on ABC in 1974, and missed the first TV movie completely, but watched it closely and IN THE FREAKIN’ DARK when they re-ran it on CBS as part of the "Friday Night Late Night" line-up a couple of years later. At midnight, everything’s scary to a 6-7 year-old. Everything. Clock chimes? Scary. Random floorboard creak? Scary. Mothra? Scary.<br /><br />It still holds up pretty well, in my opinion, but that’s MY opinion. The show starred the late, fucking great Darren McGavin, he with the slightly raspy conversational voice and the ultra-enunciating rage voice as almost has-been reporter Carl Kolchak, who would stumble onto something evil, the authorities would try and cover it up, shit would hit fan, various peoples would be thrown about by monster, and Kolchak would eventually figure out was necessary to save the day, but usually wind up in trouble in the process. It’s that way in every episode, including the two TV movies that introduced the character. In the first, Kolchak is caught by the cops mid-mallet as he drives a stake into a vampire’s heart. Awkward? Much.<br /><br />In fact, that first “movie”, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Night Stalker</span> , still holds up fantastically. It’s a low budget attempt to make a vampire movie that’s scary, smart, and mildly artistic. The ending’s a downer, too: Kolchak kills the vampire, but is driven out of town by the authorities, his hooker girlfriend leaves without him, and he has to hole up in two-bit motels to work on his story. The second TV movie starts to set up the series, and is a bit more tongue-in-cheek, but does introduce viewers to the Seattle underground, and co-stars the awesomeness that is Jo Ann Pflug: a hottie who didn’t change her name for stardom. <br /><br />ASIDE: Jo Ann Pflug was one of those “TV Guest Stars” that used to bounce from show to show, without any employment but as a Guest Star in a TV show or movie. These people would find their greatest success in the 1970’s, when anthology shows like <span style="font-style:italic;">The Love Boat</span> would continually employ them as different characters, sometimes within the same season, or TV movies, where they might play an econ student who gets caught up with a supernatural horror, or a woman who finds that she has to get a job to feed her family (ah, the days when a woman with the high paying job in the family was still thought of as being fucked up (it’s still thought of that way in some parts of the country)). Game shows used to employ them – hell, <span style="font-style:italic;">Match Game</span> lived off the TV Guest Star racket, and employed many people way beyond their shelf date (Charles Nelson Reilly, I’m talking to you!!) As cable began to flourish in the 1980’s, these areas dried up, and many of them went off to Branson to build theaters or invented devices to sell at fairs. Mrs. Pflug is a born-again Christian who presents seminars on manners and business protocol, and is still the hottie. Check out http://www.joannpflug.com/ for the quick fix.<br /><br />DIGRESSION: And they also showed up on various Sid and Marty Krofft productions, such as <span style="font-style:italic;">Land of the Lost</span> (that guy who parachutes in), or <span style="font-style:italic;">Lidsville </span>(Charles Nelson Reilly!). The Kroffts and <span style="font-style:italic;">Land of the Lost</span> are responsible for one of those four things that scared the shit out of me as a youngster, watching Sat. morning shows in the darkened den. No, not the Sleestak – The Zarn! -- a semi-transparent being with lights all over its body that react to emotions. It doesn’t work at all now, but at 6 years old, the episodes where the Marshalls are skulking around his ship in the dark were creepy as hell – and then the Zarn would detach itself from the wall and completely freak you out. For the record, here’s the other 3 non-<span style="font-style:italic;">Night Stalker</span> scary things:<br /><br />1. The Horta from the "Devil in the Dark" episode of <span style="font-style:italic;">Star Trek</span>. Big blob with great background music and scuttling noises. Lava for blood. Scary, even with Leonard Nimoy saying things like “Pain! PAIN!” in a voice that sounds slowed down and sped up at the same time.<br />2. That damned Zuni hunter doll from <span style="font-style:italic;">Trilogy of Terror</span>, an ABC TV movie starring Karen Black in a triptych of stories, the first two of which don’t matter, because they suck. The third is the scariest thing ever shown on TV: a little fetish doll with a knife and large, sharp teeth runs around after Ms. Black and proceeds to scare the shit out of every child who watched it – traumatically. In fact, the TV-movie was so scary that they showed it a bit later in the evening, so the kiddies couldn’t watch it – I mean, so the kids would stay up and get the shit scared out of them by a puppet. The voice of the doll was the late, great, Walker Edmiston, who played Enik on <span style="font-style:italic;">Land of the Lost</span>. And that weird Confederate soldier they run into, who sounds just like Coily from the <span style="font-style:italic;">Squirm </span>episode of <span style="font-style:italic;">MST3K</span>. Seriously scary stuff. Still is.<br />3. Charles Nelson Reilly on <span style="font-style:italic;">Lidsville</span>. No hidden meaning in any of that.<br />4. The “invisible” monster from the <span style="font-style:italic;">Jonny Quest</span> episode of the same name. <span style="font-style:italic;">Jonny Quest</span> still holds up as one the best, most racist cartoons ever. It hits you on all fronts, from its free-jazz opening music, to the exciting adventures with the browner peoples of the world. Sometimes the show is cringe-inducing for all the wrong reasons, but this episode is one of the best. A scientist accidentally creates an invisible monster, which proceeds to wreak havoc on a small island until Dr. Quest destroys it. When made visible, it’s a giant, pastel blob with one big eye. Scary as fuck. It helps that the <span style="font-style:italic;">Jonny Quest</span> background music is still some of the scariest out there, but what really works is the fact that a cartoon on Saturday morning featured the deaths of characters by various methods (it was originally a primetime show), giving it a real-world terror that kids could grab onto. The question that remains? How did the damned invisible monster leave footprints when – once made visible – it very obviously has no feet? <br /><br />ASIDE: We once had dog named Bandit. <br /><br />Okay, a real No. 5 – The TV-Movie <span style="font-style:italic;">Horror at 37000 Feet</span>, by Richard Matheson, he of <span style="font-style:italic;">I Am Legend</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Duel </span>fame. A demon, through various means, is resurrected aboard an overseas flight, kills a dog, and freezes some people to death. The passengers go nuts, and think sacrificing a stewardess will appease it. Nope. William Shatner stars as the de-faithed priest who finds enough faith to defeat the thing, and then is thrown out of the plane. We assume, to his death, but it’s Shatner. Who knows? Matheson is responsible for a lot of good-to-great sci-fi and horror: <span style="font-style:italic;">Legend of Hell House</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Duel</span>, and, of course, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Night Stalker</span>. <br /><br />The limitations of the series are obvious, and sometimes the show doesn’t overcome them: low budget, “different-monster-every-week” syndrome, non-sci-fi/horror writers writing sci-fi/horror, and an inability or unwillingness to change up the formula. The show was cancelled right before the end of the first and only season, partially because Darren McGavin had tired of the role, partially because of ratings. However, a lot of more creative people than me were also scared shitless by it, and the basic outline – skeptic in supernatural situation must find way out – is the set up to <span style="font-style:italic;">The X-Files</span>. They even tried a remake a couple of years ago that the Sci-Fi Channel still broadcasts. It sucks. End of story. Piece of shit. Horrible fucking thing. I’ve never seen it.<br /><br />The reasons <span style="font-style:italic;">The Night Stalker</span> works so well is the reason why so much 70’s TV still holds up. The main character is an anti-hero: selfish, boorish, not overly athletic. When Kolchak is in danger, he is in DANGER. He doesn’t know how to shoot a gun well, can’t fight, and that makes his attempts to take these “things” on more believable. His outfit – light blue polyester suit with omnipresent pork-pie hat and sneakers – marks him as an outsider, even to outsiders. He’s a dick, and gets involved in these affairs because of selfishness more often than righteousness, although that does show up every once in a while. He’s more of a “there’s nobody else who’s gonna do this, so it might as well be me” hero, like the great PI’s of TV: Jim Rockford, and Mannix. They’d much rather drink than fight crime. <br /><br />There’s also a realism to the show that the budget sometimes worked for, not against. Instead of fantastic effects, the stunts were usually one person, in costume, throwing a bunch of people around. No over-the-top blood or gore here, just cops being tossed around like so many professional football players (see “The Vampire” episode). <br /><br />The music for the show is still scary. The theme starts off with McGavin whistling the title theme – and interrupting his whistle while he takes a sip of coffee (diagetic/non-diagetic sound for you!), which is a nice, almost light-heartened tune that suddenly steers itself into the heart of darkness when the typewriting starts and the strings play the counter-point melody at full volume, creating the SCARIEST THEME MUSIC EVER. No whistling here. Many children wet their pants at the mere mention of the title sequence and its music alone. They are what we call “infants”. For the rest of us, it was just a very frightening introduction to one hour of Darren McGavin doing what he did best: killing monsters and getting arrested. The background music was also some nice, experimental stuff, with early synths and Theremins along with the free-jazz behind the “throwing people about” scenes. <br /><br />The structure of every episode of the show follows the same formula, which I shall re-regurgitate in poetic form: <br /><br />weird thing happens,<br />cops are called.<br /><br />Kolchakshowsupatsceneandnoticesallthestuffthepolicearetryingtocoverup.<br /><br />newspaper office characters act as themselves <br />while Kolchak tries to get story published.<br /><br />Storyiscancelledbecauseofbureaucraticinterference.<br /><br />Kolchak chases down leads<br /> (all of which are played by TV movie guest stars)<br />and finds out how to stop “thing” or “things”.<br /><br />Kolchakgoesmanoamanowith”thing”untilhedefeatsit.<br /><br />the every-nothing heart that opens and closes is felt in the hands of <br /> soft<br /> soft<br /> softer.<br /><br />Or something like that. <br /><br />It’s that last bit, the “Kolchakgoesmanoamanowith”thing”untilhedefeatsit” section, where the show veers away from formula TV, and gets into art. The last segment of the show, from next-to-last to last commercial break is almost always Kolchak, alone, tracking the creature to its lair, and killing it/figuring out what’s it after, so the terror stops. There’s usually not much dialogue, just music and visuals along with whatever gigantic, weird weapon Kolchak has on him to stop the whatever. Here, anti-hero Kolchak rises to the challenge for various reasons and turns into actual-hero: he’s alone, much weaker than whatever he’s fighting, and that makes the evil more dangerous. This last section is best described via my personal fave episode: "The Werewolf". <br /><br />Kolchak manages to finagle his way onto a singles cruise, since the ocean liner they’re using is set to be scrapped, and he has a human interest piece and a vacation, to boot. Many TV guest stars are there, including cabin mate Dick Shawn (Hitler in the original <span style="font-style:italic;">The Producers</span>), love interest (there’s no love interest on the show) Nita Talbot (Marya from <span style="font-style:italic;">Hogan’s Heroes</span>), and Eric Braeden (then, Dr. Hasslein in <span style="font-style:italic;">Escape from the Planet of the Apes</span>. now, Victor Newman on <span style="font-style:italic;">The Young and the Restless</span>) as the werewolf. The werewolf runs amok on the ship, and the crew tries to cover it up by cleaning things up quickly after the werewolf attacks. Kolchak figures it out, gets a shotgun, steals the captain’s silver cufflinks to make ammo, and then tracks the thing down. He’s by himself for this – Dick Shawn is eaten, and his non-girlfriend is locked in his cabin – and off he goes. Kolchak has to walk the length of the ship to get to where the werewolf is fighting the crew. As he does this, various broken, injured crewmembers are going the opposite way: some running, some carried. Kolchak’s movement towards the monster is like watching someone catch up to the frontlines from the back end in a war movie. There’s almost a solid 10 minutes of visuals without dialogue (Kolchak does tell one drunk to get back to his cabin) as he makes his way towards the chaos, his point-of-view blocked by various parts of the ship. Eventually, the werewolf finds him, he shoots, misses, runs away to reload, shoots, hits it, the werewolf tries to throw him off the ship, Kolchak dangles from the side, and finally pulls the thing overboard. God’s eye view of the ship, and we’re out. <br /><br />It should end there, with Kolchak’s delivering of a brief observation brusquely over a shot of the boat, but we still have to finish the wraparound segment. Almost all <span style="font-style:italic;">Night Stalker</span> episodes have a wraparound story that is Kolchak dictating the story that will never be published into his cumbersome 70’s portable tape recorder. <br /><br />Outside of the “Hush” episode of <span style="font-style:italic;">Buffy</span>, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a less-dialogue-y sequence in a normally dialogue-full show. The last 10 minutes of the Werewolf episode play like a great silent film. Beautiful stuff. Oh, and the episode has this exchange, which I include because it shows how the series assumed you were smart, unlike a lot of television. It’s between Karl and his cabin mate, Mel:<br /><br />Carl: I'm a reporter.<br />Mel: A reporter...oh, like the Fifth Column.<br />Carl: That’s the Fourth Estate.<br /><br />And it always runs people off whenever I play it: never fails. Is it because of the incredible “70’s-TV-ness” of the production? The lack of gore and decent effects? The asshole of a character we’re supposed to identify with? Couldn’t tell you. I don’t ask. I go to sleep. When I was a kid, watching <span style="font-style:italic;">The Night Stalker</span> would keep me up at night.<br /><br />I sleep better now that I’m older. <br /><br />(By the way: SPOILER ALERT!)Blasmohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01267720628197164493noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6237428121031451017.post-10636972516124576902008-09-23T11:12:00.000-07:002008-09-23T11:20:36.181-07:00REAL LIFE INTERFERENCEDue to quarterly inventory, the blog's on hiatus for a few days. I hope to get back to it later this week, with exciting entries on such things as:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER</span> -- Essentially, what scared the hell out of you as a kid now makes you look like an ass.<br /><br />WHATEVER HAPPENED TO JAY HILBURN? -- a burning question many people want answered from Yukon High School. What happened to the guy we all wanted to hang around with and who provided us with liquor for all those band trips?<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">ZODIAC </span>-- Best film ever? Maybe not quite, but it does remind me why I liked teaching people about film so much.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">THE UNQUIET DEAD</span> -- An entire entry devoted to the third story of the revived <span style="font-style:italic;">Doctor Who</span>. Why it made me a believer in the new series, and why I almost cry every time I watch it.<br /><br />B-MOVIE HEAVEN -- I look at some of my favorite B-movies, define the term, and fan-wank all over them. <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">FANDANGO </span>-- the movie I "discovered" and forced people to watch over and over again as some sort of life experience. I watched it for the first time in about 20 years. How'd it hold up? <br /><br />Basically, more of the same, but with less <span style="font-style:italic;">Apple</span>. <br /><br />Working on entries about the "Trip to Altantia" and why, contrary to Oscar Wilde, I love it when my friends become successful.<br /><br />See you then.Blasmohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01267720628197164493noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6237428121031451017.post-24552266802119486552008-09-20T20:20:00.000-07:002008-09-21T07:12:44.111-07:00THE APPLE<span style="font-style:italic;">The Apple</span> might be the single greatest movie I have ever seen. Scratch that. <span style="font-style:italic;">The Apple</span> is better than any film ever made about rock music competitions of the future, and has enough energy to fuel a dozen red giants, beat the Kessel Run record and come back home in time for stew. I cannot think of another movie that gets close to what they’re trying to accomplish in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Apple</span>, possibly because I’m not sure what they were thinking when they made it. If there was a cocaine shortage during 1979, this movie is the cause. If there was a shortage of effeminate male dancers in the US during the time, it’s for the same reason. All of it and them were working in Berlin on this film. I shit you not.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The Apple</span> is slightly notorious. I’d read the name a few times, but never knew anything about it until <span style="font-style:italic;">The Onion</span>’s AV Club – God’s gift to the geek in all of us – reviewed it as part of the “Year of Flops” series. Completely intrigued, when TCM scheduled it as part of their “Underground Cinema” series, I Divo-ed it.<br /><br />DEFINITION: “Divo” as opposed to Tivo, which we don’t have. However, we do have a DVR as part of our cable package. I also love Devo. Not as much as my former office mate Janson – oh, yeah, there’s an entry soon – but their early stuff makes me verrrry happy. <br /><br />Lori and I – my wife is now named! Huzzah!! – were going to watch something else while nicely toasted, and I decided to start the movie, just to see what would happen. Hoooooooly shit. We didn’t turn it off for a couple of days. <br /><br />Here’s how out there this thing is: The man who played <span style="font-style:italic;">From Russia With Love</span>’s chess grandmaster villain Kronsteen “stars” as Mr. Boogalow, a record mogul who is actually Satan. He is apparently trying to take over the souls of the peoples of Earth via a future version of the Eurovision Song Contest. I shit you not. At the end, God shows up in his gold-plated Cadillac/Rolls-Royce/Monopoly Token and takes a bunch of hippies to another planet in order to start civilization over. It’s a morality play without the morals. Well, that’s pushing it – the movie tries to make a point about commercialism destroying the heart of music, but who cares about that when people are jumping around, lip-synching to “The BIM Song,” which features the lyric “Hey Hey Hey/BIM’s the only way” (or “On the way” or something else close to it) repeated over and over 24 times. Yup, the movie has a dance break in it where everyone drops what they’re doing and starts dancing as part of a government-mandated exercise program. Best. Film. Ever. How much cocaine did the filmmakers do during this film? They don’t tell you what “BIM” stands for until about 30 minutes after the song first appears, as part of the opening. It stands for Boogalow International Music. Mr. Boogalow, as Satan, appears “normal” (HA!) most of the time, but other times has one horn on his head – not centered, like a rhino, but on the side of his head, as an accessory. <br /><br />Speaking of accessories, at one point, everyone is ordered to wear little, triangular, shiny badges on their foreheads to show their support for BIM. It is the law. The filmmakers apparently thought of the “Mark of the Beast”, but it’s more like the “Star of David.” This leads to the most awkward-to-watch moment in the film, when an incredibly over-the-top stereotyped Jewish woman – played by Miriam Margolyes, who voiced “Fly” in the <span style="font-style:italic;">Babe </span>films – is stopped in the street and cited for not wearing a badge. No extra meaning here, just fucked-up-ed-ness. This movie does everything it can to create a world where a music conglomerate can control the world, a man can wear tight enough pants to give himself a cameltoe, a Canadian couple is torn apart by the woman’s yearning for success, and the man writes a song titled, “Love: The Universal Melody”. Hee hee!<br /><br />If I cannot hide my unbridled love for this film, I hope I can share it. It cures cancer via multiple viewings, can grow hair where once there was no hair, and gives you a serious contact high. Let’s go.<br /><br />I have no real production information I can share with you, since all records seem to have disappeared, possibly in a form of documental suicide, with them jumping into a shredder in order to keep the world safe from possible repetition. The main story is supposedly based on a Jewish morality musical one of the producers – it’s a Golan-Globus film! -- saw on a trip to Israel and bought outright. They then made this film out of it. That’s the equivalent of seeing a version of the Passion Play at a small town church and turning it into <span style="font-style:italic;">Jesus Christ Superstar</span>, a film that is not as good as <span style="font-style:italic;">The Apple</span>. Iris and Coby Recht wrote the original show, and George S. Clinton “adapted” – please tell me that you already know it’s not THE George Clinton – everything and wrote the lyrics for the film’s songs. He also plays the American reporter who wants Mr. Boogalow to say something for the “billion of” Americans out there. I do not believe he misspoke; I think the filmmakers honestly believe there will be a billion Americans by 1994. We have some retroactive fucking to do.<br /><br />The film is a Golan-Globus production, for their Cannon Films, distributors of the <span style="font-style:italic;">Death Wish</span> sequels, Chuck Norris’ <span style="font-style:italic;">Missing in Action</span> series, the vigilante thriller <span style="font-style:italic;">Exterminator 2</span> (sequel to 1980’s <span style="font-style:italic;">The Exterminator</span>), and <span style="font-style:italic;">Runaway Train</span>, an Andrei Konchalovsky film originally written by Akira Kurosawa and one of the best films ever (there's something really fucked up about that). Since it’s Golan-Globus, that means the budget for <span style="font-style:italic;">The Apple</span> might have hit 1643 dollars, with half of that going towards cocaine and little shiny stickers. <br /><br />ASIDE: Did you know they made the two <span style="font-style:italic;">Missing in Action</span> films at the same time, ala <span style="font-style:italic;">The Matrix</span> sequels, but realized the second film was better, so they released it first? Yes, <span style="font-style:italic;">Missing in Action 2</span> was originally <span style="font-style:italic;">Missing in Action</span>, and <span style="font-style:italic;">Missing in Action</span> was <span style="font-style:italic;">Missing in Action 2</span>. Eventually, the first <span style="font-style:italic;">Missing in Action</span> became <span style="font-style:italic;">Missing in Action 2: The Beginning</span>. I shit you not. Back to the coke-filled dreams of avarice.<br /><br />My mockery of this film may seem harsh. It is. But my love for it is stronger. The more I watch the film, the more I admire what they attempted to do: create the greatest movie ever on a 5 figure budget, with no stars (at the time), a lot of cocaine, about 42 frenzied dancers and three locations: an efficiency apartment, a concert hall – all of it: stage, garage, lobby, front desk; and Mr. Boogalow’s office, which morphs into Hell. <br /><br />How can you tell that there were only 42 dancers? Because they use them over and over, sometimes in completely different scenes but with the same hairstyles and make-up. One of the great pleasures of the film is seeing how each dancer pops up playing different characters who all look the same. Sometimes they talk. Sometimes they look at the camera. Sometimes they dance with feather boas in the lobby of the Civic Center, which is used as the office of BIM, escalators and all. I originally thought they were in an airport, because they don’t even try to hide the screens that direct people around, or the carpet, which can only be described as something out of a 1970’s dentist office. But faded.<br /><br />The lobby sequence contains the single greatest moment in the film. It’s a musical number that tells all about the fact that “Life is nothing but show business/In 1994/We fight for the spotlight/We kill for accord (or “the gore”. Can’t really tell.). Here we go. What follows is a cross between Federico Fellini, Peter Greenaway, and Ed Wood. Here’s just enough context:<br /><br />Mr. Boogalow has rigged the song contest so his protégés Dandi and Pandi can win with “The BIM Song”. They’ve even stacked the crowd with members of the 42-person dance squad so they yell “Do the BIM!” at random intervals. They attain 150 ”Heartbeats” – there’s a meter in the control room that measures heartbeats, which is apparently the unit of appreciation in the future, and never explained (if it’s actually the average heart rate, then the audience is made of rabbits). The next act is a couple of kids from Moosejaw, Canada: Alphie – the man has a cameltoe, I shit you not -- and Bibi. Bibi’s played by one of the three people you may actually recognize. The first’s Boogalow (<span style="font-style:italic;">From Russia With Love</span>), the second’s Bibi, played by Catherine Mary Stuart, she of <span style="font-style:italic;">Night of the Comet</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Weekend at Bernie’s</span>. The third is the subject of a drinking game described later. They sing a love song, which is apparently too old-fashioned in the Berlin – s’cuse me, America of the near future. It’s called “Love: The Universal Melody”: “You’re the light within my darkness/ You’re my shelter from the storm/When my hope is dim/And fear shuts me in…” – you get the drift. <br /><br />After a near rebellion in the audience by the BIM plants – “Do the BIM!” -- the crowd settles down, and just when they’re hitting 151 Heartbeats (oh, the poor, poor, rabbits, George), Boogalow’s sidekick, Shake – the single gayest character in any movie ever, Gregg Araki be damned – threatens one of the technicians in the booth with death if he doesn’t play a cassette filled with what sounds like Lou Reed’s infamous <span style="font-style:italic;">Metal Machine Music</span>. Alphie and Bibi lose, but Boogalow sees good stock when he hears it, and invites them to his business. They show up, get to the lobby, and are told to wait. Here’s where it gets fun. The next shot is of a clown in full make-up, sulking, while a guy riding an early version of the Segway putt-putts around. Bibi is entertained by a magician in a wizard’s cap, and Alphie sits next to Dick Diablev, manager of Ballet 2000, from Kansas City. Alphie frowns and says, “Who?” <br /><br />SMAP!!! (snare drum roll and rim shot)<br /><br />The Greenaway film starts here, as the camera laterally tracks across a canvas of dancers in outfits made of balloon mylar, a fire eater spits fire, a man plays a futuristic clarinet, a man plays a futuristic trombone, and Yma Sumac sings. Boogalow sticks his head in from the opposite end of the frame, and we’re off. This is a musical number right out of Fellini, if Fellini had to use an airport lobby as a set: people dance on all levels, the worst tap dance number ever gets performed, and a tall man transforms into a midget by walking around a column while that aforementioned clown tells people to roll up and see the “Incredible Shrinking Man!” as five dancers shuffle sideways to cover the trick. The dancer in the middle also plays the cop who accosts Miriam Margolyes later on in the film. 42 dancers, I shit you not. The Ed Wood bit is the lyrics: “Mankind screamies/For whatever bits of dreamies/We might treat them to”.<br /><br />There’s so much going on in this film that it threatens to overwhelm the blog. It’s a bad movie, do not get me wrong – it’s cheaply made, the lyrics are inane at best, and there are only 42 dancers. Oh, and the cars of the future are early 70’s station wagons with fins welded to them. And there are only 2 of those in the entire city, along with the 42 dancers. I am, however, filled with a great love and admiration for the film. What works doesn’t necessarily show up at first. It took 24-67 times through to really get at what Golan-Globus were after, which was to make the best musical possible with what they had available: lots of cocaine and little shiny stickers. So here’s what works:<br /><br />Everyone in this movie is totally committed to the project, and they give it all their energy and passion, possibly because if they didn’t, they would not get any more cocaine. There’s some great camera moves – that shot in the lobby is fantastic -- and the screen is literally filled with spectacle. You will need a Kleenex. Alan Love, who plays Dandi, is TOTALLY committed. He never breaks character, and seems to be acting instead of playing. He’s got some subtlety in his performance, and a decent voice. When he sings “The BIM Song” (which sounds like a cross between T. Rex and Boney M), it’s as though he’s in a completely different movie: a good one. The choreography and dancing is pretty decent, with some great diagonal movement towards the camera and multiple layers. The title number, “The Apple” (“Magic Apple!/Mystery Apple!”), is an upbeat soul number set in the Land of the Lost cave set – I mean Hell – with people moving everywhere, dressed in costumes that were made by my preschool class. The song contains the most infamous lyric from the film: “It’s a natural/Natural/Natural/Desire/To see an actual/Actual/Actual/Vampire”, but even that can’t stop the music. During the number, Bibi is pushed off a ledge and is rolled – still standing straight up and down – head over foot as she’s passed down the dance line. It’s awesome. <br /><br />Damn, I could go on. I haven’t even gotten to the mutual montage sequences, as our heroes walk down the apartment stairs, get on a monorail, and arrive at their destination. Montage sequences are usually used to compress time, but here, they just compress about five minutes into four as the songs “Where Has Love Gone” (when Alphie rides) and “I Found Me” (when Bibi rides) play behind them while they lip-sync. Bibi’s big solo number, surrounded by mopeds of the future – with fins! – is a song with such a thinly veiled metaphor about America and methamphetamines (“SPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED!”), that it loses its veil. Poor Catherine Mary is dressed here like a cross between a hippie and a Delta Knight, and can just barely perform the choreography. I feel so sorry for her, wearing her long gauntlets while 21 leather daddies flail about. Then there’s a song called “Coming For You”, which contains nothing but entendre – no double to be found: “Make it hotter/And hotter/And faster/And faster/ And when you think you can’t keep it up/I’ll take you deeper/And deeper/And tighter/And tighter/And drain every drop of your love”<br /><br />Then all 21 of the female dancers and their 21 gay male partners pretend to screw in beds as part of the background noise. <br /><br />Towards the end, Alphie montages back to his apartment, placing his back to the wall when he sings “I’ve got my back against the wall”, gets to his efficiency apartment, sinks into a chair, grabs a liquor bottle, and starts drinking. This is cliché conforming at its best. He eventually joins up with group of “children of the '60s... commonly known as ‘hippies’ “, as their leader refers to them. He’s played by THE Joss Ackland, with a fake nose (okay, there’s four people you might recognize in here). Bibi joins, too, leading to marriage and a child that looks three, but can only be one, since there’s a montage – over the song “Child of Love” (and that’s about its only lyric) – that seems to only cover a year. Maybe they adopt a hippie-child. Boogalow shows up. Demands Bibi pay him back. Arrests them. God shows up, also played by Joss Ackland, but with blonde wig instead of false nose. He takes the hippies away. The horribly animated title card shows up. The title song is played again, and we’re home. <br /><br />You have to see this movie. It deserves the <span style="font-style:italic;">Rocky Horror</span> treatment more than <span style="font-style:italic;">Rocky Horror</span> does itself. It is an awesome combination of imagination, energy, cliché, ridiculousness – damn, there aren’t enough adjectives to describe it. Rent it. Buy it. Love it. Go to your next dance recital with a shiny sticker on your forehead and demand to meet an actual actual actual vampire. Roger Ebert once said something about the amazing Japanese superhero movie, <span style="font-style:italic;">Inframan</span>, that once they stopped making movies like it, a little piece of the world would die (or something close to that). The same goes for <span style="font-style:italic;">The Apple</span>, except no one can ever make another film like it, because the documents have committed suicide and the cocaine has run out. I shit you not.<br /><br />EXTRA SPECIAL SECTION: 42 dancers, and one always stands out – Finola Hughes. You might know her from being a regular on <span style="font-style:italic;">General Hospital</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">All My Children</span>, or as the dance diva Tony Manero dances with in <span style="font-style:italic;">Staying Alive</span>, the sequel to <span style="font-style:italic;">Saturday Night Fever</span>. She was also on <span style="font-style:italic;">Blossom </span>as Ted Wass’ girlfriend. Heck, she’s even won a daytime Emmy! You’ll know her when you see her. She’s one of the 42 dancers, and, thus, plays about 38 different parts, some in a great, hot pink, nylon baseball cap. Since she’s so recognizable, every time she shows up in the background, your attention is drawn to her. That means you can play the “FINOLA HUGHES DRINKING GAME!” Take one every time she shows up. You’ll be dead before you can say “BIM!” I shit you not.Blasmohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01267720628197164493noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6237428121031451017.post-35406398724799972222008-09-20T05:15:00.000-07:002008-12-31T10:16:20.645-08:00CINDY GAMSJAGER<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 12"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 12"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CDavid%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="PlaceType"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="PlaceName"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="State"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="place"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="PersonName"></o:smarttagtype><link rel="themeData" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CDavid%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_themedata.thmx"><link rel="colorSchemeMapping" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CDavid%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_colorschememapping.xml"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> <w:lidthemeother>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:lidthemeasian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:lidthemecomplexscript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:splitpgbreakandparamark/> <w:dontvertaligncellwithsp/> <w:dontbreakconstrainedforcedtables/> <w:dontvertalignintxbx/> <w:word11kerningpairs/> <w:cachedcolbalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:browserlevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathpr> <m:mathfont val="Cambria Math"> <m:brkbin val="before"> <m:brkbinsub val="--"> <m:smallfrac val="off"> <m:dispdef/> <m:lmargin val="0"> <m:rmargin val="0"> <m:defjc val="centerGroup"> <m:wrapindent val="1440"> <m:intlim val="subSup"> <m:narylim val="undOvr"> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" defunhidewhenused="true" defsemihidden="true" defqformat="false" defpriority="99" latentstylecount="267"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="0" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Normal"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="9" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="heading 1"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="9" qformat="true" name="heading 2"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="9" qformat="true" name="heading 3"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="9" qformat="true" name="heading 4"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="9" qformat="true" name="heading 5"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="9" qformat="true" name="heading 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="9" qformat="true" name="heading 7"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="9" qformat="true" name="heading 8"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="9" qformat="true" name="heading 9"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" name="toc 1"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" name="toc 2"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" name="toc 3"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" name="toc 4"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" name="toc 5"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" name="toc 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" name="toc 7"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" name="toc 8"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" name="toc 9"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="35" qformat="true" name="caption"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="10" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Title"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="1" name="Default Paragraph Font"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="11" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Subtitle"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="22" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Strong"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="20" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Emphasis"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="59" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Table Grid"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Placeholder Text"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="1" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="No Spacing"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="60" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Light Shading"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="61" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Light List"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="62" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Light Grid"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="63" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Shading 1"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="64" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Shading 2"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="65" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium List 1"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="66" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium List 2"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="67" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 1"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="68" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 2"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="69" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 3"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="70" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Dark List"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="71" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful Shading"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="72" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful List"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="73" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful Grid"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="60" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Light Shading Accent 1"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="61" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Light List Accent 1"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="62" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Light Grid Accent 1"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="63" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 1"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="64" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 1"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="65" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium List 1 Accent 1"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Revision"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="34" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="List Paragraph"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="29" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Quote"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="30" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Intense Quote"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="66" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium List 2 Accent 1"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="67" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 1"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="68" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 1"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="69" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 1"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="70" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Dark List Accent 1"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="71" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful Shading Accent 1"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="72" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful List Accent 1"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="73" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful Grid Accent 1"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="60" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Light Shading Accent 2"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="61" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Light List Accent 2"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="62" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Light Grid Accent 2"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="63" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 2"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="64" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 2"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="65" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium List 1 Accent 2"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="66" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium List 2 Accent 2"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="67" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 2"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="68" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 2"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="69" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 2"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="70" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Dark List Accent 2"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="71" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful Shading Accent 2"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="72" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful List Accent 2"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="73" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful Grid Accent 2"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="60" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Light Shading Accent 3"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="61" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Light List Accent 3"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="62" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Light Grid Accent 3"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="63" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 3"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="64" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 3"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="65" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium List 1 Accent 3"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="66" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium List 2 Accent 3"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="67" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 3"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="68" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 3"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="69" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 3"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="70" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Dark List Accent 3"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="71" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful Shading Accent 3"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="72" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful List Accent 3"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="73" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful Grid Accent 3"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="60" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Light Shading Accent 4"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="61" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Light List Accent 4"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="62" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Light Grid Accent 4"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="63" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 4"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="64" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 4"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="65" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium List 1 Accent 4"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="66" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium List 2 Accent 4"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="67" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 4"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="68" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 4"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="69" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 4"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="70" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Dark List Accent 4"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="71" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful Shading Accent 4"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="72" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful List Accent 4"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="73" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful Grid Accent 4"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="60" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Light Shading Accent 5"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="61" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Light List Accent 5"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="62" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Light Grid Accent 5"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="63" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 5"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="64" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 5"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="65" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium List 1 Accent 5"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="66" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium List 2 Accent 5"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="67" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 5"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="68" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 5"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="69" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 5"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="70" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Dark List Accent 5"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="71" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful Shading Accent 5"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="72" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful List Accent 5"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="73" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful Grid Accent 5"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="60" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Light Shading Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="61" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Light List Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="62" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Light Grid Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="63" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="64" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="65" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium List 1 Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="66" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium List 2 Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="67" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="68" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="69" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="70" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Dark List Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="71" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful Shading Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="72" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful List Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="73" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="19" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Subtle Emphasis"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="21" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Intense Emphasis"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="31" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Subtle Reference"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="32" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Intense Reference"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="33" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Book Title"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="37" name="Bibliography"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" qformat="true" name="TOC Heading"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id="ieooui"></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1107304683 0 0 159 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal">(User’s Note: It’s 39 days until I turn 40, and I’m writing a blog entry a day until I turn 40 to deal with the unconscious pressures of being alive as long as I have -- longer than most cavemen lived. Here’s one that’s mighty personal – so personal you might want to wash your eyes afterwards to get the personal out. And while this is titled “Cindy Gamsjager”, it’s not about her, but about her and me. Solipsism is great; everyone should try it.) </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">The Personal One.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Cindy Gamsjager and I did not hang out a lot outside of high school. We didn’t hang out much after we graduated either. When she died in 1988, a lot of people wondered why I took it so hard. Really. I was a wreck. I cried more than I think I ever have, and I still get choked up about it now, 20 years later. I lost my mind a bit (not far to go for that), and have distinct memories of myself squatting on the ground after the graveside services and crying and crying. I do not do this sort of thing that often. My wife has often said she thinks it’s weird I’ve never cried in front of her – well, I have, but she wasn’t looking. It is possible I ran out of tears after Cindy died and had to make more. And damn that sounds like a lyric Carrie Underwood might sing (more on her big hit to come in future blogs).</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Truth is, Cindy and I saw each other an enormous amount, but I didn’t realize that until after I graduated. We had band together (I was drum major and she held a slight grudge against me for making drum major over her), drama together, English – hell, 90% of the classes I took from 9<sup>th</sup> grade to graduation had Cindy in them. I think it was one of those “Damn, I just realized the most obvious thing ever” moments when I did figure it out. You know what those are:</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">“Oh, I actually did love (blank)!” </p> <p class="MsoNormal">“Damn, I knew I shouldn’t have eaten that!” </p> <p class="MsoNormal">“I am actually happier than I’ve ever been in my life!”<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">“So he was The Doctor all the time!”</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Repeat ad infinitum.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">After high school, I went to what was then known as CSU on a jazz music scholarship that I completely wasted (“Wow! I didn’t want to be a jazz musician after all!”). Actually, “couldn’t” is a better word to use than “didn’t”, but it was free college, and I blew it and dropped out. Luckily, you get a second chance for some things, and I eventually figured out what I wanted to do, started back at college, got a 4.0, multiple Dundies, and am now gainfully employed at the full-time/part-time job I’ve worked at for more than half my life – degree unneeded, debt exponentially growing. Cindy went to OU.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">I saw her very sparingly after graduation: a couple of parties, some concerts we’d both attend, nothing big. I’m assuming we both had the same epiphany about how closely our lives intersected at about the same time, because the last time I saw her, we both mentioned it in the first few minutes. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Needed back story: One day, a mutual band mate named Bonnie Something-or-other told me Cindy had a crush on me. This was my sophomore year, just when I was beginning to turn into the ass I was in high school. I laughed and made a joke in front of Cindy a couple of days later, and she vehemently – I use the word specifically here – denied it. Good job, doofus (me).</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Flash Forward, or Catch-Up: I had just started what would be my first real, long-term relationship that would come to an end about four years later. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">ASIDE: Very smart move on her part. Verrrry smart. I could not agree more -- especially with hindsight. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">I was starting to fall deeply in love with someone, and then I ran into Cindy again. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">It was at a party that a friend of mine threw at his grandparents’ house. He wasn’t supposed to throw a party there, and definitely wasn’t supposed to smash the outside garage door mechanism to break into the house, gather all the precious stuff they had, put it in their car in the garage for safekeeping and have a bunch of drunken teenagers over, but he did. Great party. He got in shitloads of trouble for it, and would have gotten in even more trouble had the late Sean Shepler and I not concocted a scheme to lie just enough to keep them from pressing charges. Sean’s appreciation will come later in the series. Promise. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">My girlfriend – Laura – was not there. Couldn’t tell you why, I don’t actually remember. Cindy was there, though, and we found ourselves drinking beer in the backyard and talking about high school when we both admitted we’d had that aforementioned epiphany about class and stuff. I realized then that we were having the longest, coolest conversation we’d ever had. I think she did, too. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">ASIDE: I haven’t talked to many people about what happened next, and it’s it still hard (See above above above above above) to do so. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">The morning approached, full of house-cleaning and me walking home (the party was close – too close). Cindy and I wandered into the front yard, still talking, and things got incredible very quickly: 4AM, we’d talked for a couple of hours, eventually got to the mutual compliment part, talked about going out some time, stood facing each other, stopped talking, looked into each other’s eyes, kept doing so, moved one hand toward the other person’s until they touched, and we kissed. It wasn’t some grand, movie-style embrace, just us, touching/holding one hand, bending slightly forward (in what my former drama teacher Ms. Franklin would have called a “tent hug”, where you bend forward towards the person, but don’t move your whole body), and kissing – closed-mouth. We moved our heads back, still touching each other’s hand and both said we’d really like to see each other again with stupid Pam/Jim smiles on our faces. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">I don’t think anyone else knew about what happened that night. If she told anyone, I’ve never found out, and she may have gotten home and said something to her roommates, such as, “I will never drink that much again. I kissed <st1:personname st="on">David Murphy</st1:personname>. Bleurgh!” (Stephen’s onomatopoeia, not mine.) We both went home – me two blocks away, her back to her apartment in Norman, where one of her roommates found her unconscious a few days later. She’d had an asthma attack, didn’t have her medication with her, and passed out from lack of oxygen. Her roommates took her to the closest medical facility – I am not 100% on the facts here – but not in time to save her. She slipped into a coma and never woke up. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">I knew nothing about this at the time. I was still dealing with the ramifications of what had just happened. I was just getting serious with someone else, and suddenly an old friend had begun to possibly turn into something else (split infinitives, ho!). I decided to wait a week before calling Cindy, partially to give her some space to make sure she was actually interested, primarily because I was scared to death. <span style=""> </span>A couple of days after Cindy had her attack, I was at my friend Khristi’s house – whose boyfriend’s sister I was now dating, and her mom asked me if I’d heard about Cindy. <span style=""> </span>She told me. Cue Fanfare. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">I wound up having to call Cindy’s ex-boyfriend Ross and tell him what had happened to her, and we both got together and cried a while, but I didn’t tell him anything about that last night, either. I figured it might get weird, as opposed to just depressing-as-hell. I found out they were going to turn the machines off in a few days, as they got ready to – well, she had checked that box on her driver’s license, you get the picture. I planned on going to the hospital next night, to say goodbye. <span style=""> </span>At work the next morning, I read her obituary in the newspaper. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">I think “babbling, crying fool” is a pretty accurate description of what I was like when I went to my boss to ask for the day off to go to her funeral.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Ross and I went together. We cried on each other’s shoulders, I wept pretty much constantly, and people looked at me with pity in some cases, raw hatred in others (I had pissed some people – adults – off by taking the head band director’s side in a power struggle between the band boosters and him. It ended with the director being demoted, and a lot of people not talking to me. Fuck them.). Most were confused. <span style=""> </span>Again, nobody knew about that one night. After the funeral, Ross and I went out to <st1:place st="on"><st1:placetype st="on">Lake</st1:placetype> <st1:placename st="on">Overholser</st1:placename></st1:place> and talked, skipped rocks across the lake (I threw, Ross skipped. I cannot skip a rock to this day), and cheered each other up. Eventually, I dropped Ross off and went home.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Because I never said anything about this, I just went stark fucking crazy. I had a hard time being around Laura, to the point that I distanced myself from her and almost damaged our relationship to the breaking point. <span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">I mentioned second chances somewhere before in all this. Girlfriend Laura and I got better, dated a long while, got engaged, and eventually she broke it off (see above – oh, fuck it). Again, smart move. She’s married with kids, and I am extremely happily married with kid. As the grief passed from all-encompassing to simply painful, I realized I had been given a gift – that’s how you’re supposed to phrase it, but in reality nobody gave that moment to us but us. I had seen her one last time, said everything I ever wanted to say to her, connected with her more than we ever had before, looked into each other’s eyes, kissed, and maybe would have done more, given time. I doubt it. I’m a realist. She was way too good for me at the time. Everyone was, back then.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Most people don’t get that kind of closure, although I guess it wasn’t closure so much as it was a possible beginning, a chance to start over. I at least had that chance. I couldn’t bring myself to visit her grave for a while after that, and I eventually forgot where it was. I haven’t tried to find it. I don’t think I could, even if I could. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">The only other times I ever hung out with Cindy (hung out is such a cool term to use) were at Czech Hall, which was a place you could polka the night away and get beer when it wasn’t too crowded. Cindy and I danced a lot together, another realization I had later on. We loved to do the 7-Step Polka, where you take a couple of polka steps, and then four quick ones in the other direction. We used to like using the four steps to build up speed and ram into people, turning dancing into demolition dancing. It was fun, more fun than racing Brian Gorrell to the bottom of a glass bottle of Coke (he almost always won). Cindy and I laughed and laughed and crashed and smashed. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">I’ve forgotten to tell you what Cindy was like. She was cute. Got rid of her glasses and started wearing contacts her sophomore (junior?) year, and stole <i style="">Bye Bye Birdie</i> as Birdie’s manager’s mother. In the movie, she’s played by Maureen Stapleton. Cindy was better. She wasn’t as tall as me, and when she dated Ross, they had to lean in towards each other just to hug; he’s a tall man. She had blue eyes and brown hair. She had a great smile and a nose some might consider a bit large; it brought out her eyes. She had an old, orange Opel she drove around, and I once got in it with a girlfriend to escape the cold outside Czech Hall. Rumors and Cindy’s screaming to the contrary, we did not have sex in the car. And it was not my idea. It was Dawnetta’s (Yup. Her name was Dawnetta). I simply agreed verrrry quickly. I think she’d gotten another car by the time I saw her after graduation, but memory fails me there where it is embarrassingly detailed most everywhere else. In Senior English, we sat next to each other and shared more “can you believe this shit?” looks than all four full seasons of <i style="">The Office</i> combined. The last time we acted together was in Drama class, where we played a high school couple who found out they were going to have a baby. We had to scream at each other and everything. Not true to life. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">One other moment: Cindy and I sitting across from each other in Ken’s Pizza – which no longer exists – in <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">Yukon</st1:place></st1:state> after summer band between our junior and senior years. I mentioned that I was going to try and grow a moustache that year. Cindy had her glass up to her face, drinking, and never put it down. She simply stopped drinking, glass still tilted, and her eyes widened as if to say, “Oh, that’ll happen.” Given my own lack of facial hair then and not much more of it now, I’d say her reaction was spot on. We never spoke of it again, thankfully. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Last observation: Cindy Gamsjager is one of the greatest names ever.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">I don’t polka any more.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> Blasmohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01267720628197164493noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6237428121031451017.post-61441042233200694112008-09-18T10:24:00.000-07:002008-09-18T12:34:09.772-07:00Depeche Mode GirlsFirst off, I think <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Depeche</span> Mode is hilarious. Someone once called them the shallowest of bands and I agree -- you can't go wrong when you make things easy to understand, so easy that anyone and everyone can identify with your symbolic needs. "Master and Servant" doesn't require anything resembling intelligence to figure out that it's comparing bedroom relationships to real-world political and identity struggles -- hell, they tell you in the first line: "It's a Lot/It's a Lot/It's a Lot/It's a Lot/It's a Lot/It's a Lot/(Pause)/Like Life." Cue Dave <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Gahan</span> dancing like the guy he is, prancing in his half sandal, half loafer shoes with bleached ends on his hair, arms waving around like he has St. Vitus' disease he can't shake. And I mean, he can't shake. The man cannot dance at all, but the video for Master and Servant gives him a 30 second dance break during the keyboard-noise solo. Never ones for deep, intricate thoughts, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Depeche</span> Mode gives you everything up front. Hell, even Shake the Disease, which has one of the Mode's best melodies -- scratch that -- only melodies, must pause while Martin (I used a muffin pan to make my hairstyle) Gore pleads longingly at the camera for someone to "Understand Me/Understand Me".<br /><br />I once had the opportunity to have dinner with two film critics: Michael Wilmington and Bruce <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Kawin</span>, and while discussing Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, we (jokingly) came up with the concept of the "Literal Metaphor" -- a metaphor that's so obvious, it's a literal reading of the visual image. Citizen Kane is full of them: Kane looms large in the shot, he's powerful. Background: he's not. I used the term a lot after that , much to Vicki <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Sturtevant's</span> hilarity, but I think, like my other literary term "<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Verisimili</span>-'dude' ", that it will catch on and be on t-shirts everywhere.<br /><br />I digress. No, really I do.<br /><br />Anyway, here's some background on the Modes: Originally, the band was a nice, happy <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">synth</span>-pop band who had a bench-clearing hit with "Just Can't Get Enough", but that was back when the band had Vince Clarke in it -- he who invented the "bubbly" setting on the synthesizer. You will never hear happier <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">synths</span> than Vince's. He eventually moved onto <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Yaz</span> and Erasure, where he helped create some of the peppier <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">synth</span>-pop songs of all time. You know them. You sing along to them in the car: "Situation", "Only You", "A Little Respect", "Chains Of Love" and "Always", an elegy to a lover lost from AIDS. Well, an elegy in its album form. The best version is the high-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">NRG</span> version, where the tempo's twice as fast, so you can bop happily along to the death rattle. His best stuff might be with The Assembly, a band with former Undertones singer <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Feargal</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Sharkey</span> you've never heard, but that's me smart-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">assing</span>. Clarke left after the first album, leaving the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">Modesters</span> to have to replace him. Eventually, they did, with Alan Wilder, otherwise known as "the cute one" in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">DMgirl</span> parlance (which we'll eventually get to). His keyboard did not have a "bubbly" setting on it. It did have a "suicide tone" one, though.<br /><br />The <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Modies</span> at the time consisted of: Martin Gore, who picked up the lyric writing slack after Clarke left, which makes the first post-Clarke album bloody awful, and does not feature Wilder, who joined to play on a tour, but who did not get to play on the album because the remaining Modes wanted to show they could get along just fine without Clarke. That's like Van <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Halen</span> saying, after David Lee Roth's absence, "Oh, don't worry, Sammy. We'll get to you, but first, we're going to make a Van <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">Halen</span> album without you to show we can do it all by ourselves, at first." Utter, utter failure.<br /><br />Dave <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">Gahan</span> is the singer, who joined the band after Vince Clarke saw him singing "Heroes" somewhere and went, "Ah. There's the operatic, non-tuned, ultra-low voiced singer I need to compensate for my effeminate, bubbly sounds. Fantastic." So <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">Gahan</span> is the voice for Martin Gore. Alan Wilder makes the music, programs the keyboards, samples the factories, and uses too much mousse -- really, the guy's later hairdos look like a pompadour crossed with that guy from <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">Kajagoogoo's</span> fuzzy hair. Slicked back on the sides, of course. But he is "the cute one."<br /><br />And so there's <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">Depeche</span> Mode. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">Gahan</span> sings the songs Gore writes and Wilder makes the music. But wait, you say. There are four members of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">Depeche</span> Mode (three nowadays). The fourth member of the band is Andy Fletcher -- the spiky haired guy who lip-syncs with a great passion. And he should -- he's sort of the band's manager. Yes, Fletch -- as the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">DMgirls</span> call him -- does the paperwork for the band. Yes, he was in the band before <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">Gahan</span>, and, yes, he can play some <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">synths</span> and some bass, but he's primarily there because four guys look better on stage than three, and to press the sequencer buttons when prompted. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">Gahan</span> once noted that they should set a fax machine up for him on stage, much like the time Lester Bangs typed a review in front of a J.<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">Geils</span> Band audience. He's still in the band, BTW, but Wilder isn't. He got tired of inter-band problems.<br /><br />So you have this strange mixture of men who make this music, and sell it really well. Fletch keeps pumping out the reissues (that's what she said) and collectibles, and the band rolls in money. But <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">Depeche</span> Mode always wanted to be a SERIOUS band, and that makes me laugh long and hard (see above).<br /><br />Want to make me laugh? Put on a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">Modey</span> video. There's something completely hilarious to me when <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">Gahan</span> dances, with his complete sincerity and complete inability. He's the guy people look at stunned at a disco when he prances, but he means it...his dancing. The other guys can't dance either. During the video for "Everything Counts" -- in large amounts, hey! -- the three other guys stand in a line, slightly to the side of one another and slightly move their shoulders and bodies as they all lip-sync Gore's vocals (Gore often sings the "important" lines of his lyrics, with a voice that is 27 octaves higher than <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">Gahan's</span>). They all resemble the kids who dance in the front row of the "<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34">Homerpalooza</span>" episode of The <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35">Simpsons</span>, but with less rhythm.<br /><br />Even better is the video for "Master and Servant," where <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_36">Gahan</span> keeps his dancing from the other Modes, but the rest all swing on little chain swings, grab each other around the ankles to be dragged around, and have their hair fucked up in as many ways as they can: muffin, spiky, slicked-sides. They also make arm movements that either resemble bowling or reverse-cricket bowling. I'm sure one of those is correct, and mighty symbolic.<br /><br />Eventually, photographer Anton <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_37">Corbijn</span> started doing their videos, and they went from ridiculous to pretentiously ridiculous. "Enjoy the Silence" is probably the typical one: the Mo-mo-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_38">modies</span> stand intertwined in a group, their fantastic leather outfits glistening in the black and white light, and they stare into the camera as if to say: "Fuck us. Please." Then they disappear, one by one, into the nether regions (see above above). The video then consists of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_39">Gahan</span> walking around despairing lands -- and there is some awesome cinematography in this, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_40">Corbijn</span> is a hell of a photographer -- in his little king robe and cape in colorized color where he lip-syncs the greatest line in music history: "Words are very/Unnecessary/They can only do harm". Actually, it's "<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_41">Un</span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_42">nec</span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_43">ce</span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_44">ssary</span>", so <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_45">Gahan</span> can get the balance right (ha,ha! D Mode joke!). It's the stupidest fucking lyric ever. And yet, the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_46">DMGirls</span> love it. They sing along with heartfelt intensity every time. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_47">Gahan</span> walks over tundra and blasted heath, crooning his little line all the way.<br /><br />The entire verse/chorus is actually this: "All I ever wanted/All I ever needed/ Is here/In my arms/(pause)/Words are very/<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_48">Un</span>/Ne/Ce/<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_49">Ssary</span>/(short pause)/They can only do harm". Here we see a return to themes discussed in the song "Shake the Disease", only much funnier. Trudge on, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_50">Gahan</span>.<br /><br />Flashback! There used to be these things called chain record stores -- huge stores with racks of albums and cassettes, almost 1/4 of which would be filled with <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_51">Depeche</span> Mode singles, remixes, 12" singles, box sets, and the actual albums (Fletch <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_52">makin</span>' the money!) One of these chains was Sound Warehouse, which morphed into Warehouse Music, and then morphed into oblivion. I used to frequent the one on 39<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_53">th</span> and MacArthur in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_54">Warr</span> Acres a lot, since it was on my way home from work, and because, over the course of a couple of years, three <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_55">DMgirls</span> worked there. I picked up all three.<br /><br />How? To answer that question, we must first define the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_56">DMgirl</span>. First, they love <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_57">Depeche</span> Mode. Second, they all think Dave's the singer, Alan's the cute one, Fletch is the other guy, and Martin is the guy they all want to fuck. Yup. Little <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_58">ol</span>' muffin-headed Martin, in his mascara and hot pants, was the one they all wanted to bone. And they all thought he was gay. Most everyone did. He's not. None of them are, but that wasn't known to these girls, so they loved him from afar, wishing all the while they could find someone as effeminate to help through those dark times - someone very <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_59">ne</span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_60">ce</span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_61">ssary</span>. I can't imagine why <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_62">they'd've</span> been attracted to me, with the long hair, skinny (once it was) bod, and big, blue eyes. I also used to talk to them, which sometimes helps. Eventually, I picked up on what they were after (star thought: I will speak of these women as though they were all working at the same time. They weren't, but it's much easier this way). I realized I could shake the disease with them (see above above above) by doing three things. Follow the rules in this order:<br /><br />1. Go over and look at the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_63">Depeche</span> Mode CD section of the store. Sire Records released a lot of their stuff on CD simultaneously, so there was a rack with <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_64">Depeche</span> Mode, Erasure, AND Book of Love on it. Pick up a CD and nod approvingly. Once sighted by the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_65">DMgirl</span>, prepare for the questions:<br /><br />"Oh, you like <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_66">Depeche</span> Mode?"<br />"I dance to them at the Wreck Room, and at the U-Club down in Norman."<br />"Oh yeah? Most guys aren't into them."<br />"I like to dance."<br /><br />Note that at no time did I say I liked the band, or that I actually listened to them.<br />Look into their astonished eyes and then say, "Hey, the next time you're at the Wreck, look for me."<br /><br />"I'm going there Saturday! Cool."<br /><br />Exchange your phone numbers and buy something black to wear that's comfy. The work is over.<br /><br />2. Now, pick a time to meet said <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_67">DMgirl</span> at the club, dress in black, get some comfortable shoes, and mousse up the hair. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_68">DMgirls</span> almost always dress in black, but buy their stuff at mall stores, which means they wear cutting-edge black clothing from a mall.<br /><br />3. Live with the fact that you are going to try and pick up a girl who will sing along to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_69">Depeche</span> Mode lyrics while dancing, and will possibly want to listen to them while having sex. Grit teeth and press on. At least it's not Front 242.<br /><br />Oh, there's a "4".<br /><br />4. Shop at another Sound Warehouse until you know the girl has moved on. Music stores have high turnover rates.<br /><br />Yup. I was an evil son-of-a-bitch. I took <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_70">someone's</span> music -- which they needed for their own mental health -- and used it to get some sort of sexual favor. To quote a former President: "I deeply regret that."<br /><br />I've been sitting her mocking <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_71">Depeche</span> Mode all this time, but there are people out there who need their music -- who need these deep, depressing thoughts espoused in a very matter-of-fact manner -- no symbolism to cut through, no interpretation needed. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_72">Depeche</span> Mode is shallow -- you could not drown in a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_73">Depeche</span> Mode song, no matter what -- but sometimes you need the blunt, "I-walked-to-the-chair-and-sat-in-it" lyrics (I'm quoting Eric <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_74">Weisbard</span> here talking about Lester Bangs talking about Lou Reed's lyrics (I think)) of a band like <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_75">Depeche</span> Mode to help. They need it to have someone they can instantly understand who is talking directly to them. They have pains, and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_76">Depeche</span> Mode helps. And I used both that music and that pain to get laid. What an ass.<br /><br />So I mock <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_77">Depeche</span> Mode, because it keeps me from remembering what an ass I used to be (still am, in many ways), and because it makes me happy. It's easy to laugh to; hard to embrace, but still meaningful to some people. When one of my ex-girlfriends -- not named here -- used to dance and sing along with "Words are very/<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_78">Un</span>/Ne/Ce/<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_79">Ssary</span>", she meant it. She had some dark stuff to deal with, and she did it with <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_80">Depeche</span> Mode (see above above above above). And, for my sins, liked to have sex to them. Punishment enough for me. I haven't seen her in almost 15 years.<br /><br />As an elitist ass about stuff like movies, music, blah-blah-blah, I like to think my opinions are better than the so-called mainstream audience: "How dare they not like <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_81">XTC</span>! It's better than any of that crap out there!" And, to be sure, I do think that, and can prove it using flowcharts and hustle and flow, as well. But that doesn't mean that crap can't be important and personally relevant to someone. I knew a guy who really loved Meatloaf. He sang it at karaoke, he felt it in his heart, and was mocked by everyone, including me. Not for the music, but because he sucked as a singer -- AND sang Meatloaf. But it meant something to him, and that means my mockery was of his personal life and his preferences, and the way those things were put on display. Why should what he feels, or what those girls felt, be any less important than the things I hold dear? I have no answer except to quote Muffin Man:<br /><br />"The grabbing Hands/Grab all they can/All for themselves/After all". It's a solipsistic world, and I rule it. Everyone should join, and we sometimes do.<br /><br />So that's the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_82">DMgirl</span> blog. I still mock <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_83">Depeche</span> Mode, but it's because I find them silly. Someone else finds them important, and those people are the ones Fletch caters to with the constant issuing of product.<br /><br />I am haunted by dark clothing.Blasmohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01267720628197164493noreply@blogger.com3