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Keeping the Faith (Smoothies and Sodas)

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:26:30 GMT

I started writing this on Sunday, something I make a point of almost never doing, and by the time I was done typing I was looking at something a little longer than my average posts. So let’s call this a special SuperPost, and let it be my opus of the week—I think it’s a little better than the duo of essays I come up with most weeks, and I feel like taking a little time for other things after my road trip this weekend. Intrigued? If you can get past your awe at my parenthetical title (and I know at least one of you is likely to get a kick out of it), then feel free to read on.

Names do not stay with me easily. My own tends to stick in my memory, of course, but it’s not unusual for me to forget the name of the person sitting in front of me mere seconds after hearing it. Sitting at a table with three people was therefore a predictable challenge. I reminded myself that James and Meg were sitting across from me, and now I was being introduced to Meg’s mother Deb on my left.

“Are you from out of town?” Deb asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “Way out of town. I’m from Pickerington, Ohio.” I could tell she was suitably impressed, and I’d more or less expected her to be. Having just made the drive to Fort Wayne, Indiana, I could’ve told her that I was from just about three and a half hours out of town.

“And how long have you known Amanda?” she asked.

I took a breath. “Actually, Amanda and I met for the first time today.”

This got her attention. Now she was wondering whether to be impressed or alarmed, whether it was normal for someone to drive three and a half hours to see a small concert by a nearly unknown musician he’d never met. She might have been considering how to quietly call the police when Meg came to my defense.

“They’ve been corresponding,” she said.

This was my cue to further explain the situation. In late April, when my post was featured on the Xanga homepage, Amanda decided to read it and comment. That might have been the end of it had I not serendipitously written my next post about the Billy Joel concert I’d just attended and an obscure song of his I loved. Amanda wrote to tell me not only that she knew the song but that it was one of her favorites as well (or one of her favourites, actually), and so started our correspondence. Two months later, she assured me that it would not be thought too stalkerific (my word) of me if I were to drive out to Indiana and see her play at a coffee shop. Now I was sitting in that shop with people I’d never met, waiting for the return of the girl I’d first spoken to all of two hours ago. She’d spoken to me first, actually. In a classic demonstration of my characteristic suavity, I’d had my mouth full of bagel.

I hadn’t set out to impress her, exactly; I just didn’t want to miss the bar I’d set on paper. I’d never lied, never said I was tall, dark and handsome with plans of standing on a chair with the lights off, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t a little on edge. I had already explained to Amanda that correspondence had the advantage of keeping me fairly articulate, largely because I could evaluate and revise my words before sending them. In person, forget about it. I can be articulate in person—biased witnesses hoping for the use of my DVDs or refrigerator have occasionally claimed I’ve been funny and charming in person—but I have no guarantees when I’m communicating in real time. I also had no idea what would happen when she walked through the door of the coffee house and friendship based on correspondence had to translate into personal interaction. Would we recognize each other? Would I have to introduce myself? Did she know I was disabled? It wasn’t necessarily a crucial detail, but I’d seen enough odd reactions in the past to worry a bit about seeing disappointment in her eyes or tension on her face when we first met. There was a lot to mull over while ingesting a makeshift dinner of a bagel and a strawberry smoothie. I glanced up at the door as a cute brunette walked through with her cell phone to her ear. Okay, this looked like her, maybe. Do I get off the couch? Do I go for a handshake or a hug? How long would it take me to swallow this bagel?

She looked my way and walked over to the couch. “Hey,” she said. “How’s it going?”

I kept chewing, raising my hand in a half-wave. She sat down across from me.

Okay, well, that takes care of that.

My chewing mercifully came to an end, and then we were talking. Amanda had come early in the hopes of shopping at the Goodwill store next door, and since it was closed we had a good hour or so to chat. I’d been looking forward to having questions and answers go back and forth in minutes rather than days, so extra time was a good thing. There was an interesting sort of effort involved in the conversation for me, though. Writing involves no nonverbal cues, no tone of voice or certain kind of smiles, and interpreting speech means incorporating all of those things. We’re both polite people with a very dry kind of humor, which led to exchanges like this one:

“I’ll go to Burger King and complain for you after the show.”

“Okay.”

“I’m not really going to go to Burger King.”

“I know. Just playing along with you.”

“Oh.”

I had to sip my smoothie once or twice as things were starting out so I could think of what I’d say next, but things got easier and went well—which saved me the cost of another smoothie. I felt like I had a lot to say, and it was frustrating to only be able to remember so little of it. Maybe I just felt obligated to fill the time. We’d been writing messages of increasing length back and forth for long enough that it almost seemed our conversations should be similarly packed, and yet there was part of me that realized it didn’t always work that way. Conversation involved pauses, lulls and lags and pacing and timing, and despite the writing we’d done and the connection I’d felt, we were still just getting to know each other for the first time. There is a time for expectation and analysis and there is a time to relax, pay attention and enjoy the moment; I’ve never been much good at getting the times right even when I know the difference. I did my best, we made each other laugh, and before too long it was time for her to sing.

Amanda has a great voice, a smooth, unpretentious alto that serves her songs rather than overwhelming them. She’s good with a guitar, and even better with intelligent lyrics that captivate both with their sound and their meaning: “Though endeavoring this memory to smother / should be for me a simple feat / I am not yet ready to replace your voice with another.” My favorite song of hers is called “When It Storms,” an almost hypnotic tune about enjoying solitude and longing for company, and it’s been a while since I’ve been so fully engrossed in a piece of music as a whole—the lyric, the accompaniment, and the melody. There’s something about watching a true musician, someone who performs like she feels the music and writes because she has to, and that’s what I was doing. Watching Amanda play was a privilege and a pleasure partly because she did so without ever fishing for glory or attention from her audience—and it didn’t hurt that one of her covers was among my favorite songs in the world. This is a girl who belongs in bigger and better venues than the back corner of an Indiana coffee house, and yet her eyes were almost always closed or looking down at her guitar. Every once in a while she’d glance up to meet someone’s gaze, and a smile would flit across her face as if to say, “Yeah, this is what I do. Thanks for watching.” She would say a few words in between songs, introducing one or explaining another with a humor that I’d already come to enjoy in our correspondence, and I learned later that she was being more talkative than usual—she credited the caffeine in the soda that she had before the show and tried to blame me for it until I fervently asserted that there was no talk of beverage choice during our extended discussion of a Burger King run. It wasn’t a great surprise to find that she had every bit of the wit and intelligence that she displayed in her letters. Watching her be charmingly self-effacing in person was a treat I hadn’t thought to see coming.

Amanda said she was over-caffeinated after the show (this wasn’t my fault either, but rather the complimentary coffee given to performers), so we all sat around the shop and talked for a little while. Again, I was feeling the pressure, wanting to say and learn as much as possible and watching the time go by as I largely sat in silence. Yet the time wasn’t wasted, because I was learning more than correspondence could have taught me. I was watching my new friend interact with girls she’d known for years, and in a way I was getting to know her better than if we’d spent hours sipping our sodas and smoothies. This was not wasted time, but time I was grateful to have.

It had to end eventually, and I knew it, and it’s very possible I would’ve been talking to Amanda and her friends in the coffee house parking lot until very late at night if mosquitoes hadn’t compelled me to my car. I was gone with a wave and a smile, and there was plenty of time on the long road back to Ohio to think about coffee houses and new friends. I hadn’t been feeling the pressure to impress, and my goal hadn’t been to get in as many words as possible. I’d simply been feeling the minutes pass, and feeling the regret that comes with knowing that three hours and lots of road was keeping me from getting to spend more time with her. She is very much worth the drive.

I simply can’t pass up a signed CD at a concert. Amanda has an album with cover art that she designed herself, and after much deep thought (or a few minutes at the table) she wrote an inscription on the front in Sharpie that made us both laugh.

To Jason, fellow protector of the English language: Keep the faith. –Amanda

It has a double meaning, an inside joke from our correspondence and a reference to a song that I turned on and turned up as I drove out of the coffee house parking lot:

You can get just so much from a good thing / You can linger too long in your dreams / Say goodbye to the oldies but goodies / ‘Cause the good old days weren’t always good / and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.

I’m learning to get all I can from the good things, the trips to coffee houses and late-night conversations in parking lots. I have a feeling I’ll be lingering in my dreams for some time to come, but tomorrow isn’t ever as bad as it seems when friendships can still live in letters and concerts. Thanks to Amanda, I’ll be keeping the faith.

Wanted: A Better Script

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:11:37 GMT

There’s something about being an assassin that appeals to me. This is a job goal that falls in the same unrealistic realm as the vocations of rock star or superhero, of course, with no actual expectation of success or desire for it to come to fruition, but I can occasionally find myself thinking it might be nice to burst through the door guns blazing and take out a few bad guys. Filmmakers must have figured that this is a fantasy shared by quite a few moviegoers, because Wanted plays right to it, with mixed results.

Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) is a twentysomething whose life is going absolutely nowhere. This is a point that is continually made in the first half hour of the movie or so, during which we are shown his dead-end job, his oppressive boss, his manipulative best friend and his cheating girlfriend in unnecessary detail. One day, while picking up his anxiety medication, Wesley is approached by Angelina Jolie (the fact that her name is Fox in the film is truly unimportant). Fox tells him that his estranged father is an assassin that was killed recently by the man standing behind them in the store, and before you know it guns are blazing and stuff is blowing up. Wesley is soon trained in record time to be a member of an ancient group of assassins who call themselves The Fraternity, led by Morgan Freeman (or Sloan—again, unimportant). Wesley’s goal? Kill the man who killed his father, the man who is trying to take out every member of the fraternity one by one.

The premise of the movie isn’t totally without merit—the avenging son bit has been done successfully before (The Princess Bride, anyone?) and a band of professional assassins is pretty cool, even if something called the loom of fate informs them of the evil targets they have to kill. I don’t even think anyone can accuse Wanted of not living up to its preview, because there are enough cool action scenes to keep the average adrenaline junkie busy. I can’t find issue with the acting either, because you can do much worse than staffing a summer blockbuster with two Oscar winners and one Golden Globe nominee. My major problem with the movie is its enthusiasm for death. I could nearly hear the advertising jargon throughout each scene, aimed at every dissatisfied, lonely teenager in the world. Stuck in a dead-end life? Maybe you too can be an assassin, killing with reckless abandon. You can hang out with Angie and Morgan, and in the meantime you can stop being pushed around by those who don’t understand or respect you. You can take control of your life, simply by taking control of a gun. Start today!

I don’t think that Wanted was intended as a recruitment program for the next wave of school shootings; it’s more realistic to assume that Hollywood had revenue in mind rather than anarchy. Still, I think there’s something to be said for working a little harder to balance violence with virtue in the movies. I am a fan of the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon films, and both Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs reside on my DVD shelf. Yet I really don’t think I own a movie that glorifies violence for its own sake. Even the most gratuitous of action movies usually makes it clear that the protagonist is being violent for a good and necessary reason, and Wanted takes a stab at this too—about halfway through the film the screenwriter seems to remember that he ought to remind us about how the good guy is fighting against the bad guys. It seems to be a reminder that comes too little too late, however, and it’s almost negated by the speech at the end of the movie, a speech about taking control of life and accomplishing important things, a speech that plays while a slow-motion kill shot is displayed. I do not have a major problem with violence in movies, provided it’s done in the right way. I cannot even say that my problems with Wanted kept me from enjoying parts of the movie, and I can’t say that you won’t enjoy it. I do think that given the movie’s plot weaknesses, it may have been a good idea to build this film on something a little more substantial than the supposition that everybody thinks it’s fun to kill people.

A Smart Choice

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:50:47 GMT

I’ll be honest: I was getting a little nervous when I asked for feedback on what reviews to write about, gave you four options and got three votes for three different movies. Thankfully, as dread was creeping in and the panic of impending decision was overtaking me, there was a second suggestion for Get Smart—thanks to Kirlynz for the deciding vote. The runners-up have but to wait a little while, as I intend to review all four movies eventually, and as I can’t think of anything else to write about today I might as well get started right now. So, without further ado:

I’m pretty sure I was in middle school when I discovered reruns of “Get Smart” on television. The TV Land network wasn’t around yet, so vintage television was part of Nickelodeon’s evening programming, called Nick at Nite. My mother and father were wise enough to make this part of a routine for me, a reward offered if I brushed my teeth and took a bath and did absolutely everything necessary for bed before I turned on the television, and I always looked forward to sitting down for a half an hour to watch the adventures of Maxwell Smart and the beautiful Agent 99. The show originally ran from 1965 to 1970, and the premise that Mel Brooks and Buck Henry had created was pretty simple: Maxwell Smart was a bumbling spy for an agency called CONTROL, and it was only through insane luck and plenty of help from Agent 99 that he was able to battle the forces of the evil agency KAOS. This was a show far less about espionage than it was about slapstick comedy, and I liked it that way. Given my fond memories of the show, I had a predictably mixed reaction when I heard that there was a motion picture remake in the works. On the one hand, I never truly thought that modern movie makers could really capture the humor and feel of the old show, provided they even cared about making something resembling the original. On the other hand, I knew that they had selected the one man in the world who could fill the shoes of Maxwell Smart: Steve Carell. As it turned out, I was right on both counts. Get Smart never truly recreates the show that inspired the movie, but with Carell’s help the movie manages to be a hilarious homage to the original.

I do not own many comedies; I’m unlikely to find them hilariously funny the first time around and even less likely to find them as funny upon repeated viewing. Furthermore, I’m not always likely to laugh at Steve Carell, despite the fact that he is a very, very talented actor. The problem is that I’m not into awkward humor. If you’ve ever tuned into “The Office” you know that Carell is an absolute master when it comes to saying the wrong thing at the worst time, and I’m the sort of person who actually feels embarrassment for imaginary characters. Despite all that, he charmed me in Get Smart. Why? He brought heart and wit to a character that could very easily not have possessed either one. I really liked the original television show, but its premise left one huge question unanswered, as far as I know. Why in the world is Max a secret agent when he is so utterly bad at his job? This was obviously not a question that needed to be answered for the show to work, but the movie puts a great twist on things. Max starts out as an analyst in the film, a very smart guy who takes his job very seriously and writes voluminous reports on surveillance in which he finds value in something as inconsequential as the calorie count in a bad guy’s muffin. Max dreams of being a field agent, but when he finally passes the test he’s turned down precisely because he’s too good at his job. The fun really starts when a few twists and turns of fate get him exactly what he wants, at which point he’s paired with the capable and beautiful Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway). Both agents try to get the job done in their own way, and much humor can be found in Max’s well-intentioned but ill-fated attempts to help. Almost more entertaining, though, are the moments when he gets things right, the instances where his unique perspective actually comes in handy.

It would probably be sufficient to review this movie by saying that I can’t remember the last time I’ve laughed as loud or as frequently during a film, but attention should probably be given to its flaws. Hathaway is a beautiful and capable actress, but she’s not really given a chance to jump off the screen as a character worth knowing. This might be because she is ever so slightly miscast. Barbara Feldon was in her early thirties when she took on the role of 99, and Hathaway is about ten years younger—in this case, age gave a mature sexuality and capability to the television character that never really shows up in the movie. Also, the script occasionally takes detours into unnecessarily broad humor, most notably a reoccurring gag about how Max once had a weight problem. We’ve already seen actors in fat suits in “Friends”, Dodgeball, Just Friends and America’s Sweethearts, and frankly there is no need to resort to seeing a fat guy try to do an obstacle course when there is already so much comic gold to be mined from Carell’s character. He plays Max as an earnest guy trying to do his best, frustrated by his own inability and coworkers who don’t respect him, and I think he made exactly the right choice by refusing to play Max with idiocy or arrogance. Get Smart is a funny movie. It is unlikely to be included in a list of comic gems years from now, and I can’t promise you’ll like it as much as I did, but the subjective nature of comedy is such that you probably wouldn’t believe me even if I made guarantees. I’ll simply say that taking a chance at the theater almost certainly will not be painful, and it might just be a very good time.

And I was all ready to write, when...

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:06:55 GMT

Don’t you just hate it when you get all set to blog and then your friends start calling you? I have decided that I should forgo being disgruntled at my change of evening plans and simply be glad that I have friends and they are calling me, of course, and so tonight’s movie review will have to be postponed. And just to show you that every cloud has a silver lining, I’m going to take advantage of the delay to let you choose the review out of the movies I was considering for this evening's post. Would you like to hear about Get Smart, Mr. Holland’s Opus, Stand By Me, or Wanted? Don’t feel obligated to weigh in, because in the absence of comments I’m naturally going to do what I always do and choose for myself. Have an absolutely wonderful 4^th of July weekend, my friends.

Midnight Ride

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:47:39 GMT

It is three-thirty in the morning. The freeway unwinds in front of us as something to be embraced, challenged, conquered, and we are punch-drunk conquerors. We are hurtling south, trying to outrun fatigue at seventy miles an hour and only just succeeding—we can feel it nipping at our heels. Our eyes are shining with the remnants of the day’s energy, and we recognize an odd cadence in our own words as we speak with voices that need to be rested. Yet we soldier on, imbued with a purpose that is urgent, if not exactly noble. We will make it home.

It was Don’s idea to just go. We’d been at the bachelor party since five that evening, and after a great steak dinner and a variety of entertaining games with dear friends we were both ready to call it quits for the night. The plan from the beginning was for us to crash on the couches, floors or pull-out beds of our generous host, but at about two in the morning Don and I both barreled beyond feeling really tired and went straight into that surreal condition where your body decides you are past the point when any sane human being would go to sleep and are therefore destined to be awake for the remainder of the night. We were too alert, and we were facing the prospect of eventually having to rise with stiff joints and bleary eyes from whatever recliner or throw rug on which we decided to collapse. Then Don suggested we just go. If we left soon, we could be back in our own houses by five in the morning, which was a very attractive prospect. It was not a complicated or unsafe drive, we could keep each other awake, there would be no one else on the roads, and any alcoholic beverages we’d imbibed (that exact word had been used with gusto several times during the evening) had been consumed a number of hours earlier and were no longer impairing us. It seemed like a great idea to go, and so we went.

And then, of course, we were singing at the top of our lungs to “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” an hour later in an attempt to keep each other awake.

I wonder now whether our decision wasn’t motivated a little bit by anticipation of moments like that one. I will be the first to admit there is nothing like getting to sleep in my own bed after a long day, but hitting the open road with one of my best friends is also an incomparable feeling. Driving is so often an activity full of stress and monotony for me, a form of combat during which I can’t blink for fear the degenerate occupying the car in the next lane will choose to drift without risking the effort to use his turn signal. It is only at night that the teeming freeways are truly empty, and the solitude makes me feel as if the entire world has shut down and I have the key to come in after hours. To share that experience with a friend is to feel that the road is there explicitly to serve as an opportunity to voice my thoughts. No subject is off limits, not with an ally of nearly thirteen years, not when the night can help me face and share my fears as easily as it can magnify them when I’m alone. And so I can’t help but wonder if we knew important conversation and connection would be hiding between the insults and the attempts to stay alert. I’d like to think we knew another memory was going to be made to add to the canon of stories we could tell. We might not have known anything before we departed the party, even in the way that you can realize something in a moment and only truly recognize it upon reflection. But I was as happy about getting home as I was about the way I got there.

City Slickers

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:06:47 GMT

By my calculations, I spent four semesters of high school learning Latin. Another four were spent learning French, and I know I spent at least another four semesters in college trying to learn French all over again. Given all of this, I don’t know that I could speak a full sentence in either language even if someone were to hold a gun to my head as I’m writing this. I can, however, tell you that Richard Dreyfuss was in Jaws with Robert Shaw, who was in The Sting with Robert Redford, who was in Spy Game with Brad Pitt, who was in Mr. and Mrs. Smith with Angelina Jolie, who was in Playing By Heart with Madeline Stowe, who was in Stakeout with Richard Dreyfuss. Mine is largely a useless talent, a blessing only when asked for movie recommendations and a curse when I’d prefer my brain have room for consequential information like what day it is. Practically speaking, my gift serves as a canary in the coal mine of video rental: when my father repeatedly and inexplicably manages to come home from Blockbuster with movies I’ve never heard of, this usually guarantees a very bad review from him and my mother the next day. It was an unexpected treat, then, to discover the other day that Al Pacino and John Cusack had managed to star in a move together twelve years ago that somehow stayed off my radar. The movie is called City Hall, and I think it’s worth watching.

Cusack is Kevin Calhoun, deputy mayor of New York and the protagonist and narrator of the film. I’ll freely admit that I’m a sucker for voiceover narration, and this was no exception: as soon as Calhoun started to describe how he was right hand man to Mayor John Pappas (Pacino), I was willing to listen. In fact, I was willing to listen despite thinking that Cusack had the worst New York accent I’d ever heard, but I was mollified as soon as it was established that Calhoun was from Louisiana. This is a something that is repeated and reinforced throughout the movie, and probably for good reason; even though Calhoun is Pappas’s immensely capable man behind the scenes, we never quite forget that he’s actually an outsider to the Big Apple, a bright-eyed, optimistic, ambitious go-getter who wants to make a difference in the lives of city dwellers even as he’s still learning about the city. Calhoun’s skills and standards are put to the test when a young boy is gunned down as a casualty of a shootout between a mobster’s relative and a well-decorated cop. Was the cop dirty? Why was the junior mobster out on parole, given his violent tendencies? Is there corruption in play here, and how far does it reach? You can bet that Calhoun will get the answers to these questions by the time the final credits roll, but we know what happens to bright-eyed go-getters who investigate scandal: they probably won’t like the answers they find.

By and large, I enjoyed watching Kevin Calhoun uncover the truth. This film is filled with great performances, both from actors I’d forgotten and those I knew well. Bridget Fonda appears as a lawyer who spars with Calhoun, and by the end of the film I was scratching my head and wondering why she hasn’t become a bigger star. Danny Aiello played a political boss made endearing through his love of musicals, Martin Landau shows up as a judge, and it was really a treat for me to see a clean-shaven and meek Richard Schiff appear as an overwrought parole officer several years before he was to win an Emmy for television’s "The West Wing". Pacino and Cusack both have a little fun with their range, Al choosing to rein in his trademark explosive charisma in favor of a more understated performance while John decides to leave his inner dork at home to play a young shark in dangerous waters. I found myself wishing for a more comprehensive knowledge of New York’s geography, if not its politics, but that’s much more an indication of my ignorance than the movie’s flaws. I very much doubt that you can come away from this film feeling that an actor gave less than their best to the director and the script.

The script, then, is where I find what is probably the film’s greatest flaw, and one that I’m not entirely sure is avoidable. Without giving too much away, I’ll say that the film failed miserably if it intended to deliver a surprise ending. This sort of movie needs a bad guy, and it doesn’t take long before you realize whom it’s going to be. I honestly believe this is more a result of the script than any sort of brilliant deduction I may have done, because there are literally only so many people to pin misdeeds on. This may be a problem with movies of this genre more so than this movie in particular, but if the purpose of the entire film was to shock and surprise, than plotting would be its fatal flaw—the entertaining path to its ultimate revelation didn’t exactly take any hairpin turns. Yet I learned something as I watched the ending I had already predicted. I don’t think the film was nearly as much about suspense and surprise as much as it was about the journey of one man and the intentions of another, the efforts of Calhoun and Pappas to do something good and right and lasting. City Hall is a character study draped in the trappings of a thriller, and if you’re willing to spend a little time thinking about what it’s trying to say, I think the movie is well worth your time.

Insomnia

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:42:24 GMT

Considering the number of times per day that I wish I had the opportunity to go back to sleep, having insomnia in the middle of the night is downright ridiculous. I tried to convince myself of this somewhere around one or one-thirty this morning, but my body was having none of it. Trying to fall asleep by convincing myself that I should is about as useful as telling myself not to sweat so I’ll keep my clothes clean. But that didn’t keep me from trying.

It’d be a feeling worth contemplating if I wasn’t always so busy telling myself I’d suffer in the morning. I have to assume that I fell asleep, tossed and turned and then woke up again, because I somehow arrived at the realization that I’d been awake for a while without really being able to figure out how long a while was. My eyes were heavy, but not so that I couldn’t keep them open; rather, they were wide open even as pressure seemed to be working on them from somewhere in my head. Everything around me had a disconnected feeling to it when I sat up and tried looking around, but I couldn’t make the world fade out when I lay down. I was rational and thirsty enough to decide that a glass of orange juice would do me good, but it took me a good ten minutes to decide to leave my room to retrieve it. Why did it take so long? I was almost convinced that I would interrupt a burglary in progress by walking out into the silent kitchen. I didn’t arrive at this conclusion as a result of strange noises, or tales of recent neighborhood crime. My mind just had to show me all the movies I’d seen and heard of wherein a bleary-eyed victim staggers into trouble in the middle of the night, and that was enough for me to have to spend ten minutes screwing my courage to the sticking place before I could venture out into my own empty house. During all of this time I couldn’t stop thinking of the consequences of not getting to sleep. I’d already passed the point where I could expect to be well-rested for work in the morning, but I wasn’t nearly to the point where I’d missed out on enough sleep to consider calling off for the day. And even if I had a legitimate reason to do so I would feel bad about it, since I’d already taken a three-day weekend. Ah well. It was a decision I could make in a few hours…

And then a few hours had inevitably passed, hours during which I’d somehow managed to fall asleep, and now my alarm was ringing and I was holding my cell phone in my hand and telling myself that there were only so many minutes I could waste debating whether I should call in sick for the day. I can’t tell you how it happened, but eventually I was out of bed and walking toward the shower and telling myself I’d just have to see how tired I was after I’d gotten dressed. Then I’d gotten dressed, and even though I never really decided anything it became evident that I was going to work for the day. The car ride came next, and then eight hours of sitting at my desk convincing myself that I should accomplish something. It was not my most productive day at work, nor was it my least productive so far, thanks to the healing power of a couple of Cokes that I’d been swearing to cut back on. It was simply another work day, another time I had to accept that I wasn’t going to be working at my full potential.

At some point today, it registered to me that this wasn’t unusual. I must’ve read somewhere that the human body really needs to sleep eight hours a night to be in good shape the next day, but the schedule I’ve set for myself only allows me seven. That’s assuming I’m actually in bed and asleep by ten, something that very rarely happens anymore, and I know that there are people who run on more stress and less rest than I do. We all live in a world that seems to favor doing as much as humanly possible in the space of one day, and I’d venture to guess that most of us wake up most mornings feeling like we’ve already got to catch up. We slouch into work and swallow our coffee and doughnuts and hope we’ve purchased enough energy to make it back to our beds at night. It doesn’t seem like much of a routine. It doesn’t seem like much of a life.

This doesn’t seem like much of a blog entry, either, and I suspect it’s because I’m still running on the remnants of those Cokes and some cookies. I do think there’s something to be said for the wisdom of a sleepless night, though. I don’t know that I spend more days tired than not, but I do know that I’m tired too often, often enough to drink too much caffeine and wonder what I might be capable of if I spent more of my days operating at full speed. It’s something to think about, something to shoot for, and I think it’s a prospect that will only seem that much more appealing after a good night’s sleep.

Professionals at Work

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:28:39 GMT

If I had to have one person narrate a movie about my life, it’d be Morgan Freeman. If I had to go to a party with one actor, it might be Jack Nicholson. I’m not sure if this says more about my perspective, their personalities, or the personas they display on the screen, but the fact is that most famous, prolific actors get to the point where you can pretty much bank on what sort of character they’re going to play. There are exceptions, of course—Denzel’s been a bad guy a couple of times, Tom Hanks is pretty versatile, and Johnny Depp seems to be able to reinvent himself with every new movie he makes. There are also actors like Hilary Swank or Hugh Jackman who are still relatively unknown enough to retain a little latitude when it comes to finding the roles that really suit them. Generally, though, you know that even when Tom Hanks plays a bad guy, he can’t be all that bad. You know that Denzel will be intense and intelligent as he flashes that winning smile, even if he’s a gangster about to shoot someone. You know Pacino will yell, you know Julia Roberts will have everyone liking her by the end, and you know Clooney will somehow manage to look more elegant and put-together than humanly possible. And if there are two immutable truths about the Hollywood character roster, you know that Morgan Freeman can be trusted to play a wise, reassuring older man as easily as Jack Nicholson will fill the silver screen with manic, cocksure charisma. It’s a fact, and I’m pretty sure it’s why The Bucket List works as a movie.

On paper, or on the back of the DVD case, The Bucket List can be described as a story about two terminally ill men who decide to live what’s left of their lives to the fullest. In everyday conversation, it can be so much more brilliantly marketed simply by saying this: Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman learn they have cancer and consequently go on a road trip together. Freeman plays Carter, an automobile mechanic with a head full of trivia and forty-two years worth of regret at never getting to return to college after his wife got pregnant. Nicholson plays Edward, a crass millionaire who finds the shoe on the other foot when he suddenly has to live by the “two patients to a room” policy that he insists must be adhered to within the hospitals he owns. But the character sketch is almost beside the point, because even the most casual moviegoer probably already knows what to expect. We know Jack’s going to say something inappropriate and stride through the remainder of his life as if he has no room for niceties. We absolutely know that Morgan will act as the knowing, calm compass of the movie, because we’re well aware that he could read the phone book in that resonant voice of his and have us hanging on every word. We know that director Rob Reiner knows how the game is played, because right off the bat he makes sure Freeman gets to do the same sort of voiceover narration that has practically become his trademark in movies like Million Dollar Baby, Seven, and especially The Shawshank Redemption. Fans of Shawshank will not be able to resist a smile when they hear Freeman say, “And that was the first time I laid eyes on Edmund Cole.” It’s almost an homage. Reiner knows these guys, and you can nearly hear him saying, “Okay, get in there and do what you’re good at. I’ll roll the camera.”

I suppose a downside to this sort of comfortable filmmaking is the way that it adds to the predictability of the film. I’d seen the preview and heard the premise before I sat down to watch it the other night, and if I’d taken the time to sketch out a plot prediction before I turned the television on I’m pretty sure I would’ve managed at least seventy-five percent accuracy. Having said that, I don’t think I can honestly view that aspect of the movie as a downside. This is not a story in which we want or expect twists and turns. This is a tale we sit down to with a contented sigh just like we would ease into a familiar recliner. We more or less know what we’re going to see, and we’re watching the film because we want to see it. To me, the beauty of The Bucket List is in its ability to fulfill all of our expectations while still surprising us. There are moments of honesty between Freeman and Nicholson that simply have to be experienced, rather than described. Nicholson sheds his shark’s grin at times to give probably the most vulnerable performance I’ve ever seen from him, and Freeman has enough edge to him at times to remind you that there’s more to Carter than just a kindly old man who knows he’s dying. These are professionals, people who know what they’re doing, and there’s a reason they’ve been in the business this long. The characters we see on screen may be familiar, but we mustn’t make the mistake of assuming that bringing them to life onscreen is an easy process. Nicholson and Freeman remind us that acting done right is a thing of nuance, subtlety and focus, and they’re up to the task.

I liked The Bucket List very much, but I don’t know if it will go on my purchase list. I can’t say that this is a reflection of its quality, because the difference between liking a movie and liking it enough to own it and watch It over and over again is something I honestly haven’t quite figured out. I can say that my hesitation to add this one to my shelf may have something to do with the fact that in a lot of ways this movie is as much about death as it is life. Both of these actors are seventy-one, born within less than two months of each other, and even the thought that they might not be around for too much longer was enough to mellow me out, to say nothing of envisioning a similar situation for people I actually know. This is, however, a movie that handles death and life with dignity and heart, and one of the very few movies after which I actually went back and watched a particularly moving scene again. The Bucket List is worth your time, if for no other reason than to watch two old pros have fun working together.

A final and only slightly related note, while on the subject of death: The beautiful Cyd Charisse passed away on Tuesday at the age of eighty-seven, and I thought it needed to be mentioned. If you don’t know who she was, rent Singin’ in the Rain and keep an eye out for the lady in the green dress. You won’t be able to miss her.

From Out of the Dust

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:01:04 GMT

“I’m not really a dusting kind of guy,” I said. My mother was not amused, perhaps because she was beating a stuffed animal senseless with a rag. “Dusting isn’t really a manly activity. Hunting, fishing, hiking. But not dusting. Dusting isn’t really my thing.”

Hunting, fishing and hiking are far from being my “things,” of course, but it seemed an appropriate point to make while all the dust I had ignored was floating in the air around us. This was yesterday night, as my mother and I were spontaneously working to move two bookshelves out of my bedroom. I’d guess that this is not a spontaneous activity for most people, nor one that qualifies as fun. Most people do not live with me and my mother on the precipice of procrastination. We could easily pitch a tent for years before anything gets done, which explains why all of my old issues of Entertainment Weekly remain untouched in the garage. But it only takes the slightest breeze of initiative to hurl us over the edge into the valley of obsessive progress. There is no middle ground here, and no way to predict when the wind will blow. This is not a home for the faint of heart.

Ironically enough, the bookshelf project had all the indications of a chore bound for the land of Why Haven’t We Done This Yet as far as I was concerned. It wasn’t a task intended for the betterment of the family, for one thing, and it was merely a small step in what will be a prolonged campaign of bedroom renovation. This dream owes its genesis to the moment my mother decided that her eldest son of twenty-five years should not have to occupy a room that looks more or less as it did when I was fifteen. Having gotten this far, she got me involved by pointing out that my plans to move out before the age of thirty were likely to be helped along if I were to start buying furniture and appliances now, rather than waiting until my bank account had the strength to support the purchase of absolutely everything I needed as soon as I moved out. She won my enthusiasm by adding that this may be a good time to get a flatscreen television to put on my wall. While high-definition visions of any movie with explosions danced in my head, she managed to retain my attention long enough to suggest that a flatscreen television deserved a comfortable chair from which one could comfortably observe. Adding a chair meant removing a couple of bookshelves. Removing bookshelves would mean cleaning and organizing my room to best utilize the remaining bookshelf. Cleaning and organizing my room, while a priority of my mother’s, was something I had scheduled for just after earning my first million. My mother is a genius.

Still, even if we both deemed this to be a fantastic idea, I was well aware that it could be quite some time before we ever found the time and motivation to get things done. Imagine my surprise, then, when last night at the dinner table I casually mentioned that it should only take a few minutes for us to determine what books I’d like to keep, which I’d like to move and which I would like to sell. The next thing I knew it was three hours later, dust was all over the place and I was sitting at the kitchen table sorting all of the stuff I’d managed to store on, in, and around my shelves and cabinet. Just because they’re bookshelves does not mean you’re required to store books, my friends.

A fellow blogger has written about what she called “garage archeology,” the discovery of books, papers and journals from your past as you root through piles of stuff that were never supposed to get so big. There were definitely fun moments during this process, the best of them my discovery of all of the “Sliders”-related stuff I had written or purchased in Jr. High (it’s a TV show with the fat kid from Stand By Me). But mostly I was preoccupied with throwing things away. I can get like this, somehow, storing the most inconsequential index card or piece of paper in anticipation of needing it someday only to throw it away when I get to thinking that everything and anything must go. Gone were theater programs from the shows that didn’t mean much. Gone were impersonal greeting cards, given because that’s what you’re supposed to do during that time of year even if you don’t know the person and never care to. Gone, too, were pages and cassette tapes, fragments of journals started and aborted. I simply didn’t care to read about myself again.

My mother wonders why I do this. She likes to listen to the sound of my voice on tape, apparently, and I’m sure that whatever I recorded ten or fifteen or twenty years ago would strike her as touching and unforgettable no matter what I had to say. Yet I can hardly bear to listen, and I don’t like to read what I wrote. Apart from the tedium of daily entries, I think this is the reason I’ve never managed to keep a journal for more than a few days or weeks at a time. I don’t like to look back and know that I was writing about views that would change, loves that would be lost, dreams that would never be realized, even if it was something as inconsequential as dancing with Jeanette at the school dance. For some reason it’s very hard to look at the years of my youth without becoming my own harshest critic, without wanting to reach back and grab me by the shoulders and tell myself that I need to grow up. I don’t like to remember how I made fun of friends who have since become invaluable, or how I ran straight into walls of failure or embarrassment. I can’t do it. I don’t like movies with unhappy endings.

Yet do I really hate myself that much? Am I ripping out pages of old journals in the hope that I can create some sort of revisionist history for myself? I can’t quite believe that. I’m fairly certain that I’ll remember a lot of embarrassment and failure, if only because sometimes I want so badly to forget. Those missteps made me who I am today, those times when I was misguided and overzealous and too shy and too naïve and too young. And because I’m still misguided and overzealous and shy and naïve and young, I try very hard not to fault myself too much for the ancient mistakes that taught me the most about life. I’d rather move on. If ripping out pages helps me to avoid dwelling in the past, then I probably should keep ripping.

Still, I’ve kept writing from my past. I’ve kept very bad writing from the very distant past, and I find myself wondering why it’s okay to keep a laughable story when it’s unforgivable to hang on to a journal entry. I think maybe it’s because even a laughable story constituted an earnest effort on my part. If I had ever been consistently serious about journaling, if it had been something I’d wanted to do and not something I thought I should want to do, I think I’d still have that journal today, It would be something that reminded me of a passion. But the journals didn’t survive, maybe because even as I tried to force myself to write my entries I recognized that they were likely to become random artificial snapshots of a childhood and adolescence that was so much more important and exciting than a brief inventory of the day’s events could ever convey. If I’d written back then more like I blog now, more about what I thought and less about what I wanted to think, more about what I actually did and less about what I promised myself I would do, then I’d want to read my work again. I hope I get to look back on today’s work in twenty-five years, and I hope I won’t want to throw it away.

Brothers and Blogging

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:12:43 GMT

So my brothers are home from college now, except that one of them will very shortly be taking off for Jordan for a few months. Since "I could've hung out with him, but I was busy blogging" is an idiotic statement, I'll be hanging out with my brother this evening and going to his farewell cookout on Thursday. This, for you, means one of two things: either you'll be spending another week grateful that you're not feeling obligated to read whatever I decide to stick up here, or else you'll have to spend another week wishing that I'd quit finding reasons to avoid sticking stuff up here. Whatever your reaction, take my advice and visit this site while enjoying a respite from my words:

http://www.myspace.com/amandadrehermusic

She's great, really, and you need to listen to this stuff. Really. Well, I'd better get going, before I get sucked into a huge post about how I can't post today. You can get just so much from a good thing, after all, and you can linger too long in your dreams...