After all that...

It's been a long haul through the desert of adolescent musical interest, 21st century style. Dry rivers of Creed. Endless unpaved stretches of Linkin Park. Wet mashed potato mountains of Limp Bizkit.

Then an oasis of 80s relief -- Buzzcocks, Cure, Clash, even my beloved Gang of Four. But still, who would have known that so many absolutely indistinguishable bootleg versions of Sid Vicious' "My Way" would exist?

I should have never doubted that after all these rocky miles his musical tastes would turn in the end (where else?)...to Lennon & McCartney

It sure 'nuf makes a father proud.

It's Just This Little Chromium Switch, Here: Channelling The Firesign Theatre

Cross-posted at newcritics


Zion, oh mighty Zion, your bison now are dust
As your cornflakes rise ‘gainst the rust-red skies,
then our blood requires we go…
Marching, marching to Shibboleth


On a recent car trip with my high-school-age son, just for fun, I popped into the CD player, Firesign Theatre’s Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers.

“What is this, something from the seventies?” he offered, after a while.

“Yeah. What do you think?”

“Weird.”

“Well, sure. But don’t you think it’s pretty funny?”

He gave me, in lieu of an answer, that pity-the-old-guy look he wears when I’m singing along with a Bruce Springsteen CD or trying to explain why The Exorcist is supposed to be a scary movie.

“I guess,” he damned with faint praise.

At just his age, I found Firesign Theatre to be wildly, chaotically, subversively funny. I still do. So why doesn’t he – this man-child nourished from the very breast of modern satire, reader of The Onion, viewer of The Colbert Report – get the joke?

I attribute his reaction to three possible causes:

1) When listening to Dwarf at 16, I was likely to be – how shall I say this? – thoroughly and utterly baked to the gills. And for my son, much to his mother’s relief, that’s apparently not the case.

2) He’s not my son, but rather a student at Commie Martyrs High, diabolically disguising himself as a God-fearing American adolescent.

3) None of this truly exists.


Tempted though I am by the latter two options, I think it’s the first that begs the question. Could it be that Firesign Theatre – not unlike that dreaded 2-hour Grateful Dead space jam – is to be appreciated only, as they say, under the influence?

I’m high all right…but not on false drugs. I’m high on the real thing – powerful gasoline, a clean windshield and a shoeshine.


It’s possible, I suppose. There is a kind of low-level paranoia that hums behind the whole disc. And paranoia, strangely enough, is funny.

First, you notice that the cop is staring at you. Then, you laugh at yourself for thinking such a thing. Then, you realize the cop really is staring at you.

Don’t Crush That Dwarf works in that way quite a lot. It’s the art of non sequitor moving at a breakneck pace. At first, you laugh at it for being off-the-wall, but when you think about it, you see it’s not so off-the-wall after all. Is it going to be…all right?

Friends, it’s going to be all right tonight at the Powerhouse Church of the Presumptuous Assumption…



I don’t want to put myself in a confrontatory position, either with the United Snakes or with…them. And you can believe me, because I never lie. And I’m always right.


In Firesign Theatre world, the only thing crazier than you is…them. The real world. The world of people who tell you and sell you and teach you things that don’t quite make any sense.

Shoes for industry, shoes for the dead! What chance does a returning deceased war veteran have for that good paying job, more sugar and that free mule you’re dreaming of? Well, think it over. Then take off your shoes. Now you can see how increased spending opportunities mean harder work for everyone…and more of it, too!


It’s been a mighty long month of Sundays since I was a dope fiend. And now, I suppose, them is me. And being them, I now know what’s best for me. What’s been best for me all along…

Hot Dog, Mom, groat-cakes again!


On second thought…maybe I’ll just put that CD away now.

Whole Lotta Halloweens

How swiftly the ghouls go by!

1995: Peabod

1996: Bumblebee

1997: Tinkerbell

1998: Princess

1999: Jack O'Lantern


2000: Princess

2001: Hershey Bar

2002: Witch

2003: Hippie



2004: Hermione

2005: Grim Reaper

2006: Jelly Bean Bag

2007: Masked Avenger



Very scary indeed!

The Island, Part 2

Turns out…you can go home again. In fact, you can return with the speed and regularity of a ping pong ball in a Chinese rec room…but it ain’t gonna do you a whit of good.

That’s because – no matter how many times you go home – you’ll find that the houses, places and things look spookily the same, but somehow…cleaner, and utterly opaque. Stupidly unaware, in fact, of the significance they hold in my memory. How dare they!

There’s the beach, for instance, on which Liz M. and I fumbled so meaningfully in the dark, now less trash-strewn, but also drained of significance, just another stretch of empty sand.

There’s the “dirtbag” bar where I knew everyone, once upon a time. Now it’s a shiny bed & breakfast, frequented by middle-aged (my-aged!) attorneys, now grey, but once, like me, wild-haired and bleary-eyed.

No, I don’t mean to go down this road. It’s not about the passing of time (a dull fact…get used to it!) It’s about meaning and where to find it.

I’ve got to think more on this…

The Island, Part I

Where do you call home?

Is it the place where you pay your mortgage? Spend your weekends? Raise your kids? Or is it the place where you were born…grew up…or grew out of?

A couple of weeks ago, I paid a visit to the place I still call home, even though I haven’t lived there for decades, and barely a soul known to me abides there still.

Shelter Island, it’s accurately called, hidden as it is between the higher-profile North and South Forks of eastern Long Island, and accessible only by ferry. There, I spent fourteen summers (and one winter) immersed in an idyllic cocktail mixed of 1 part natural splendor, 3 parts alcohol and drugs, and not-nearly-enough-parts teenage sex.

Even as a matter of history, Shelter Island was a place apart from the trendy Hamptons and the horsy North Fork.

As far back as the 1830’s – at a time when the Hamptons’ glitterati were mostly growing potatoes – Shelter Island was home to one of the nation’s first planned resort communities. Just a few decades later, in the 1870’s, early developers were transporting eager Manhattanites to the island via luxury steamer to participate in auctions for waterfront lots.

With the advent of the Gilded Age, however, abstemious Shelter Island lost much of its appeal to New York’s taste-makers. Better known for the waves of Methodists who summered at its revival campground, the island was largely overlooked by the wealthy elites who now flocked to trendier neighboring communities.

And so it remained…as late as 1973, my first summer on the island. No record mogul or investment banker worth his gourmet sea salt would be caught dead on Shelter Island, and so left it alone. As a result, it was – and to some extent still remains – a real community. A place where the leading politician had his office in a trailer at the town dump, and the names you’d find listed in the phone book pretty well matched the names listed on a 1870’s property-map.

It was a place where you could quite easily know everyone, and everyone could easily know you. A place with four policeman, 8 bars and endless potential for an eager – oh, so eager – young man with trouble on his mind.

And that’s where my story begins…

If websites were people...

...whom would this one be?

The large sweaty man who catches your eye from across the room. Oh, and you're sorry when he does, because you can already tell that he assumes an appalling familiarity. See? Already, he's making his way across the crowded room -- nylon belly overhanging his khaki lap, bright blazer buttons that will never again meet their long-separated mates.

And when he talks, he talks close, whispering onion-scented atrocities hot on your ear.

Now, for a change of pace, tell me whom this site would be...

Mistah Greenjeans...he dead.

We, all of us, have our inadequacies to overcome. Whether shy or short...pallid or pustular, we learn to live with our shortcomings and, I suppose, become better people for it. But it sure does feel good to get one over on grim destiny.

I, for my part, have been corn-challenged.

Each year, for a decade or more, I've planted row upon neat row of Silver Queen, Chesapeake Bi-Color, Country Gentleman or another of their hybrid cousins, only to see them topple, wilt, become stunted, or turn into a sickening worm-infested goo.

It should be said, I'm not exactly a brown thumb when it comes to growing vegetables. For 20 years, my wife and I have been most successful with our tomatoes (last year, we put up 72 quarts), squash, beans, peppers, cucumbers...even brussels sprouts.

But when it came to corn, my motto was "Sure to die by the fourth of July."

Not this year, however. The ears have been fat, sweet and legion. I stand a-maized. (Insert polite chuckle here.)

Of course, this is all rather ridiculous, since I, like everyone, drive in this season past acre upon acre of towering corn stalks, interrupted by nary a runt seedling. And I suppose if I were a farm kid, the fact of planting a seed and producing a couple of dozen corn plants would be about as interesting as putting coins in the machine and getting back a candy bar.

But as a kid from the suburbs, it really does seem magic to me. There's more complex encoding in that little wrinkled seed than in anything merely architectural or digital. (Oddly, I never felt that way about producing children. But then, they don't taste good slathered with butter. Or maybe they do...)

For the next two weeks, in any case, I'm going to enjoy the marvelous and rare privilege of cooking and eating an ear of corn that's no more than ten minutes off the stalk.

Do you suppose I qualify for a subsidy?

Yeccch!

What in everlasting creation could be worse than the first day back in the office after a beach vacation?

The dull, aching head...the itchy, sun-ripened skin...the weighty clothing (those aren't socks, by God, those are manacles!)...the 362 unreturned emails.

I was driving in to the office this morning -- knowing from 15 years of post-vacation depression -- that I was feeling that sense of placid inner peace for the last time. And I know that while everyone I see today will welcome me home, their faces will say, "Miserable now, aren't you? Just like me!" Poor deluded fools -- don't they know that the truth can only be found in a $4,000-a-week beach house?

What was I doing this time last week? Yawning as I put down the Tolstoy. Grappling with big questions -- 30 or 45? Ice tea or water? Who ate all the salsa?

And now...this. But which reality is real? And which one shadows on the wall of the cave?

I've got the next 51 weeks to decide.

Beach Vacation: Day 1

Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand - miles of them - leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues, - north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite.

There really is something weird about the lemming-like way we water-gazers congregate here at the beach in the high summertime.

Tents and umbrellas; kayaks and big-wheel strollers; shovels and spades; coolers and beer cozies, set out in windrows on the verge of the North American continent. We disciples pinkening above our summer novels, checking our children for dangerous ocean behavior.

Having spent pretty much all my adult life (excepting only the college years) within a short drive of the Atlantic, I too have been a regular participant in that Army’s annual march to the sea. And this is what I continue to see:

• Tattoos. All over.
• Last winter’s cheeseburgers. All under.
• New generations of girls in bikinis, now – disturbingly – the age of my daughter.
• Those extended family units, whose class-tensions and resentments remain appallingly clear, even among the sand and scanty cladding.

And yet…here I am. Again.

All blogged up.

Tag.

It means "day" in German. It's also the nickname of Mitt Romney's firstborn son. What infamy. You begin to see my point.

First, let me say that I absolutely quail at being asked to conjure “8 random facts/habits about myself.” (I don’t, really. I just thing the word “quail” as a verb sounds funny, when you visualize it.)

To begin with, we should posit, no facts are random. While they may start out looking that way, immersed as they are in the spray of phenomena emerging from the…er…spray-gun of phenomena, I can assure you, by the time we process these so-called random facts through the tintinnabulary, fast-food, drive-thru speakers of our cramped consciousness…they are, indeed, random no longer. And habits? As random as the crease in a nun’s wimple (which is to say, not random at all).

But I digress. There will be 8. No more. No less. The rules:

Should you have been tagged, the only alternative to honorable self-slaughter is to do the following:

• Post these rules before launching your 8-part rant.

• Relate the 8 random facts/habits/peculiarities/stigmata, as mentioned above, in your own blog, being sure to also include these key commandments.

• After the psychic dust settles, you must choose 8 new bloggers and/or people to afflict with this quest. Let them know they’ve been tagged via email or comment, and ask them to read your relevant post.

Ready? Let’s rumble…

1. I was confirmed by Bishop Walter J. Kellenberg sometime in the Spring of 1973. This means I have been a soldier of God for nearly 25 years. Am I eligible for a pension?

2. I grow the best tomatoes in the Mid-Atlantic. No, I don’t care what you say. Mine are better. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m not listening…

3. I once went on a ski trip with Neddie Jingo. It was Spring Break of our junior year, and we drove semi-cross-country from Ohio to Boulder, Colorado in the car of a third friend – let’s call him Mark – with the intention of cadging what skiing we could, during the day, and crashing on someone’s UC-dorm-room couch at night.

We were quite thoroughly broke, nearly all our cash sequestered for gas, ski tickets and whatever protein we deemed necessary. Too parsimonious were we even to buy beer, except on the most special occasions – or should an injury or ritual humiliation require immediate medication.

One of those special occasions did occur after skiing one day, when we splurged on a six-pack of Michelob and, searching for a spot to kick back and relax, parked the car by the side of the road, picked our way across the stones of a shallow river, and perched ourselves beneath some picturesque Ponderosa pines.

I should note, that while we were short on cash for beer, we were in possession of other, shall we say, more spiritual options, of which we availed ourselves, my recollection is, in spades.

So we sat. We grooved on the river’s song. We became one with the Larger Way. Until the Larger Way became larger than expected.

From upriver came a roar and a rolling wave of white foam which I could only compare to a tidal wave (which I’d never seen, either) coursing down the river’s channel – exactly like the cheesy special effects you’d see in a ‘60s disaster movie. In reality, some dam had undoubtedly opened its floodgates, in what must have been a regular occurrence at that time of day and year.

Needless to say, however, Neddie and I were absolutely spellbound by these Godhead droppings on the sidewalk of quiddity (Hallucination? Reality? Hallucination? What’s the difference?) and so stayed rooted in place, while Mark, ever the Eagle Scout, sped across the river to make sure he was on the same side as the car.

Me and Ned spent the long ride home sputtering obscenities, flash-frozen feet pressed up against the heater vents.

4. I’m hot for professional lady golfers. There. I’ve said it. So sue me.

5. I never slept with Jamie Lee Curtis. Although I did go to high school with her. And on that basis alone, for years afterward, I claimed to have..well..."known" her. To those who didn’t immediately see through this hollow and pathetic lie, I apologize.

6. I once, briefly, drove a tractor-trailer truck and on one memorable occasion, came within a hair’s-breadth of causing dozens of Long Island Expressway commuters to die a lingering, painful death, immersed in 10,000 gallons of super-heated liquid asphalt. But that’s a (long) story to be shared another time…

7. I have calmly watched my foot burn. 5 or 6 years ago, when I had my plantar warts removed. I woke up unexpectedly from the anesthesia, only to see a covey of doctors huddled around my flaming instep, frantically squeezing a spray water bottle, a bit like barbecue chefs whose coals had become too hot. Apparently they’d gotten a little trigger-happy with the laser gun. I felt not a thing, being pumped up with novocain. At the time, this seemed to me to be of some spiritual significance – my foot, perhaps, acting as a burnt offering to atone for my bad karma…or maybe my pronated ankles.

8. is twice the Protagorean nexus, 4…the square root of 64, one-half the points on a medieval compass rose, and folded in half, looks like a zero. Random? I scoff.

All right, here’s the problem. I know only one person with a blog, and he tagged me. So I’ve tagged 8 “normal” people, and promised to post their replies just here. I’m sure I’ll have more friends, once I get a new haircut and attend a few more mixers.

Balls like...

Despite the deep consternation they've caused in some quarters -- this one included -- the Bush administration probably won't be judged by history as being all that exceptional.

Putting aside the bloody arrogance of the Iraq adventure aside (a matter of heavy lifting, I'll admit), their most recognizable trait seems to be a propensity to foul themselves within their own living quarters. In time, as the full stories come out about the politicizing of the prosecutors, the co-opting of the EPA, NIH and NASA, the outing of Valerie Plame -- and as their continuing ability to harm us recedes into the past -- our reaction to their misdeeds will most likely simply cause us to turn away in disgust, as from a relative with a bad case of halitosis.

Still, yesterday's revelation of the rather detailed throttling of the administration's ex-surgeon general, held some surprises in store, even for this practiced consumer of apalling White House behavior.

According to Dr. Richard H. Carmona, political appointees within the administration blocked him from speaking out about a wide array of public health matters, including stem cell research, abstinence-only sex education and the emergency contraceptive Plan B.

Nothing surprising here, of course. Just more of the same demand for loyalty above truth and the seemingly endless need to pander to the right. New day, same bullshit.

(In truth, the best part was the White House's demand that Carmona "mention George Bush 3 times on every page of his speeches," which seems more a matter of ubiquitous cruelty, sort of like making Muslim men wear women's underwear.)

But it was the reply of the White House spokesman Tony Fratto that really caught my attention:

"It's disappointing to us," Fratto said, "if [Carmona] failed to use his position to the fullest extent in advocating for policies he thought were in the best interests of the nation."

There, from the lips of an administration underling so unknown, he/she was identified in the New York Times as being of both genders, comes a display of Herculean chocks so enormous they seemed positively Rumsfeldian.

"Holy shit," I sputtered to my wife, "that's like...like Stalin blaming Kamenev for leaving his brains all over the kitchen. It's like Yoko blaming the Beatles for not getting along. It's like shooting your neighbor and then complaining about how he lies around all day..." Similes simply fail one at moments like these.

It's not just the cynicism...the bald, corrosive self-interest...the complete disregard for truth -- it's the joy they take in it. They know perfectly well that no one over the age of 6, without a major impairment of brain function, would actually believe they were telling the truth. And that really gets them off.

After all this time, they can still give me the creeps.

Can't You Smell That Smell?

The Problem.

Critters denuding my vegetable garden. Beans blasted. Cucumbers eviscerated. Even squash squished.


The Solution.

Coyote urine. Believe it or not, you can buy it a bottle. The one eau de toilette guaranteed to get you noticed in the lupine set. And man, does it work. Not even a tooth mark on those luscious new bean leaves.

The Unintended Consequence.

Call it blowback. I'd left the bottle out in the sun during the week I was away from the farm. And before replenishing the strategically deployed cotton balls in my garden, I thought I'd better check to make sure the nectar hadn't lost it's...pungency. So unwisely, I opened the bottle and took a great, big sniff.

The watery eyes and hacking cough were instant proof that the bouquet hadn't faded a bit. The smell is sort of like a liquified essence of the Canal Street subway station in August -- but simmered and reduced to a demi-glace potency. So powerful is it, that my ill-considered sniff apparently fused or melted or mutated my nasal receptors such that even today -- 70 miles distant from the coyote urine -- I'm still smelling it, wherever I turn.

In short, I'm swimming in an imaginary cloud of hyena pee. I live in fear that I'll soon see the neighborhood dogs' eyes alight with a desire that they themselves barely understand.

What am I going to have to do to get rid of this?

Shooting A Blank: Army of Shadows and Letters from Iwo Jima

Cross-posted at newcritics

I used to love war movies. In part, because they were so darned…reliable.

Serve up a viewing of Bridge Over The River Kwai or The Dirty Dozen, and you could rely on a heapin’ helping of gunfire with the bare minimum of chit-chat. You could rely on knowing – I mean really knowing, as only fellow warriors can know – your racially-mixed band of brothers. And yes, even sniffing away an unacknowledged tear once payment came due on their ultimate sacrifice. You could rely on the fact that – no matter how many times you’d seen the movie before – your heart would race with the fear for your guys. All at once, you’d find yourself wondering if, in fact, the war had not turned out the way you’d thought it had.

Would Jim Brown still take it “all the way” before that final grenade blew up? Would Steve McQueen finally jump his bike clear of that barbed wire fence?

But above all, you could always rely on the fact that – even though the good guys sometimes lost the battle, or even died a nasty death – their sacrifice always brought an end to the insanity and chaos of war. And that meant the return to a benign world in which an 11-year-old could sit watching war movies instead of working in the fields as a Nazi slave, or even doing his homework.

Even when the post-Vietnam crop of anti-war, war movies came along, the rules of the game didn’t really change. If the soldiers’ world in Catch 22 or Platoon was immoral or absurd, it was the absurdity of the war itself, or the foolishness of the commanders, that made it so. Even more nuanced films (or those 2,500-year-old Greek plays) – hinting that the real chaos resided in the human soul – saw war as the catalyst, the releasing agent for passions otherwise held in check.

As I say, I used to love war movies. But, then, I don’t know much about war.

Perhaps that’s why I found watching Army of Shadows and Letters from Iwo Jima such a queasy experience – both in different ways but, I think, for the same reason. They left me with a feeling I can only describe as existential – the sense that behind the horror and chaos and inhumanity of war lay…the real horror and chaos and inhumanity. War isn’t just hell, in other words. It’s even worse…it’s a total blank.


Together with much praise, Clint Eastwood has also enjoyed a fair amount of criticism for his even-handed treatment of a purely Japanese perspective in Letters From Iwo Jima. In the course of the savage battle, in which 7,000 Americans and 22,000 Japanese died, Eastwood is careful to show – in Letters and in the earlier, American-focused half of his diptych, Flags of Our Fathers – instances both of courage and atrocity on the part of both armies.

This, to some critics, made him guilty of a creeping relativism – there were savageries on each side, the reasoning goes, but there was a good deal more of it on one side than on the other. Fair enough, I suppose. But I’m not sure that was Eastwood’s point.

Why, after all, would a filmmaker go to such lengths to make two different movies built around the same event? Because “war is evil, since we’re all just the same underneath the skin?” As a warning about the toxicity of jingoism and wartime propaganda? Maybe. He would have topical reasons aplenty for that approach, heaven knows.

But I don’t think that’s it. Rather, I think Eastwood wants us to experience the same feeling of nausea…of bottomless horror at the brute fact of mortality, no matter which characters are doing the dying. He wants us to feel like we’re all the same under the skin, all right. But he does it by letting us watch as the defeated Japanese soldiers transform themselves through ritual suicide – not into warrior Shinto spirits – but into bloody, truncated flaps of meat.

No glory in victory, suggests Flags. No glory in defeat, whispers Letters. Half of me wonders whether these really qualify as war movies, at all. On the one hand, of course, the action is all about war. But in another sense, the war is just a convenient place from which to look out at the abyss.


Army of Shadows is another oddity of the genre. Released just in the wake of the anti-Gaullist events of May, 1968, Jean-Pierre Melville’s story of the wartime Resistance is told in the somber voice of a still-numb survivor. Its exquisitely neutral slate-blue and gray images are like those of an often-repeated, little-welcome dream, both familiar and repellent at the same time.

Like Eastwood’s films, Army of Shadows is simultaneously about the war…and not about the war. Although the film fairly seethes with Nazis, for instance, we never see them in an act of violence onscreen. Conversely, we’re treated to a positively excruciating scene in which the men of the Resistance execute – literally by hand – a captured informer.

Again in Melville’s film, as in the Iwo Jima diptych, there is no glory in victory or defeat. In fact, there’s no glory at all. There’s comradeship. There’s duty. There’s certainly courage. There’s pity and fear…but without tragedy.

In fact, the film’s most transcendent moment is one that’s told – but unseen. During an earlier imprisonment, the movie’s protagonist, Phillipe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) is, together with his fellow prisoners, herded into a cavernous tunnel, at one end of which is a machine gun manned by German soldiers.

Told by the camp’s commandant to run for his life, Gerbier, aware of the futility, at first refuses. Seconds later, prodded by the Nazi’s pistol, he finally runs and is somewhat too-miraculously saved by his waiting comrades. Yet he soon regrets his decision to run. Perhaps he feels it was a craven cowardice, perhaps a betrayal of a central truth to his existence. The truth that in order to survive, he and the others must accept the fact that they are already long dead.

Later, in the epilogue, we learn that Gerbier, put before the German machine gun a second time, is true to himself and at last, refuses to run. This – in the still-grim winter of 1944 – is as close to a victory as Gerbier will ever get.

Indeed, Gerbier’s truth is at the heart of all three films. The single, unforgettable image for me is that of the burrowed Japanese soldiers, peering out from what will soon be their freshly dug graves into the flat, blinding sunlight of a world that no longer seems their own. They are, in fact, already dead, peering out from their tombs if only to see how the story ends.

Ahoy, y'all

I'll admit to having gone a teeny-weeny bit obsessive on this America's Cup thing. Risking the scorn of the masses (not to mention the nickname "Skip"), I've spent literally dozens of otherwise useful hours over the past few months watching sailboats hurtle across the Mediterranean at breakneck speeds of 9 mph or more.

I do this, not because I love the America's Cup itself -- it's an appallingly overdetermined regatta, promoted with an appeal to crude nationalism, raced in boats that would collapse like a soggy ice cream cone in 25 knots of wind -- but rather because of the attention it attracts. No other sailing event boasts -- or will ever boast -- full scale cable television coverage (ecce Versus), with all the helicopters, computer animation and logo-ed polo shirts that normally entails.

But express your enthusiasm to anyone -- even family members -- and they will look at you as if you'd just heaved a sigh for the days of the Raj...or that you liked nothing better on a Sunday afternoon than a good, old-fashioned game of capture-the-wog. And then come the questions...

Do you know how many millions they waste on those boats? Wouldn't the money be better spent on a good cause?

Excuse me, but have you added up the Redskins' payroll recently? Yes, they do spend a ridiculous amount of money on boats, sails, gear and crew, but I'll wager that it's only marginally more than Dan Snyder's skybox bar bill.

How can you get excited about which bunch of rich guys beat the other bunch of rich guys?

You're thinking back in the days of Ted Turner. Sailing is a 100% professional sport now. And -- leaving aside the syndicate owners and the stars like Dickson, Baird, Spithill and Coutts -- not a well-paid one, at that. Every member of the top crews -- from the sewer man to the grinders -- is an Olympic class sailor in his own right. The AC offers them a 4-year sailing job, so they don't have to go back to selling hardware at their local West Marine.

What could possibly be more boring than watching them race round and round in circles?

Hello...have you ever watched NASCAR?

Actually, round-the-buoys racing -- particularly when the boats are competitive, as they are this year -- is a kick to watch on TV. Check out the next starting sequence, in which two 25-ton boats will come roaring at each other, head on, in what's essentially a game of chicken played without brakes. Watch the ballet of a crew faking a gybe to make their opponent hesitate for just a second...just long enough to steal an inside position at the next mark.



And just in case you're interested, it's tied 2-2 (Go Kiwis!), and you can check it out for yourself here.

The Horror

I’ve got a bit of a cat problem.

I’m not talking about an “I’m-an-old-lady-with-50-cats-living-in-the-wallboard” kind of problem. Unfortunately, my cat problem rests firmly on the slinky shoulders of a lone tabby named Yoko.

Yoko came to us, her unsuspecting family, three years ago, one of a West Virginia barn litter, irresistible as such furry little kittens tend to be.

From the beginning, though, we noticed something a little…different about her. Not content to playfully gambol with her ball of yarn and toy mouse as other kittens might, our Yoko – all 8 inches of her – treated them more in the manner of Achilles dragging Hector’s bloody remains ‘round the walls of Ilium. In short, she had a genius for murder.

Sad to say, as then went the kitten, so now goes the cat.

It being summer, and good hunting, she’s now out all night, stalking the fescue, crouching in surprise for what little-knowing fauna comes her way. And, oh my, what a feast of fauna comes her way...

So far this season, our front doormat has been transformed into the final resting place for: 3 adult mice, 1 baby mouse; approximately 5 vole-like creatures; 2 baby robins (separate days); one extremely large crow; an unidentifiable rodent, as well as numerous, well-camouflaged bits of gore and organ meat.

Put it this way – we do not venture forth, without wearing our shoes. In fact, my current nightmare involves walking out the door to pick up the paper and finding a small poodle or even an unwary toddler blocking my way.

All this would be fine, were it not for Yoko’s territorial ambitions. Our mere quarter-acre of savannah not offering quite enough prey, she’s recently gotten in the habit of raiding robin’s nests in our neighbors’ yards. Inevitably, she winds up mauling a baby bird in full view of said neighbor’s once-innocent, now-crying four-year-old daughter. You can well imagine the darkened looks that are passing across property lines.

But the final straw snapped one morning earlier this week, when, leaving the house, I was delighted to discover that Yoko had outdone herself, strewing a debris-field which included both a vole and a bird, as well as an ineffable, kidney-like thing.

Picking up the flat garden shovel I keep handy for this purpose (less stomach-churning damage to the corpse), I scooped up the dead and set off down the block toward the storm drain I use as the all-purpose crypt for Yoko’s victims.

At precisely this moment, out of a neighboring home steps a young mom and her two small children, off to run chores or pick daisies in a world that simply does not include what will all-too-shortly be the vision of grim, violent death resting on my garden shovel.

To change course was impossible. I thought for a moment of lifting the shovel high over my head so neither the children nor the adult would see what it was carrying, but I was more afraid of having the little bodies roll off the blade and drop, crushed and broken, directly in the toddlers’ path.

So I just kept going, smiling politely, just as though I were carrying a tray of deviled eggs. I will not attempt to describe the shadow that passed across my neighbor’s face as she glanced at my grim cargo. I will only say that, as they hurried on behind me, I heard one of the toddlers ask, “Mommy, was that birdie sleeping?” I’m sure that Mom was thanking me ardently in her heart for serving up an existential crisis for her pre-schooler.

A bell simply isn’t enough for this cat. Does anyone make an “air-horn collar?” Or where could I find that face-cage thing that Hannibal Lector wore in Silence of the Lambs?

Emily

THE BRAIN is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.


Weird...I was just thinking that.

Now, what are we to make of this?

This photo has been stuck in my head since I came upon it in last Sunday's New York Times. In it, gun-enthusiast and Cat-Scratch Febriac Ted Nugent treats journalist Jim Zumbo to a wheel on his ax -- a popular semi-automatic weapon known, misleadingly in this case, as a "Black Rifle."

Tempting though it may be to wonder once again, in the aftermath of Virginia Tech, about America's Collective Sanity, this post has nothing whatsoever to do with our hallowed and harrowing Second Amendment rights. It is rather to marvel at the design sense still possessed by the erstwhile Minister of Wango-Tango. In short, what's with the neon pink, tiger-striped cannon? I can appreciate a "Free For All" as much as the next wacko...but pink stripes? What do you call that...Vegas camouflage?

Perhaps it's simply the latest indication that -- with age -- The Great Gonzo is at last at peace. No longer, when in close combat with a grouse or illegal immigrant, does he need to broadcast his own masculinity. And if he's okay with that...I jolly well guess I am too.

Not everyone, after all, can have the biggest almonds on the nut farm...

I fixed it! (I think.)

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens


For anyone as rock-knuckled and splay-fingered as I am, engine repairs are simply best left alone. Ever since causing the death of a perfectly good 1970 VW solely through an act of preventative maintenance, I’ve put my motorized vehicles in the hands of people I pay to know better.

That is, at least, until now.

Two years ago, my wife and I inherited 145 acres of Western Virginia hillside, and with them, a vintage-1960 Massey-Furguson MF-35 farm tractor.

With 30 or 40 acres of pasture-land, a tractor is a must. Miss bush-hogging one year, and your fields look messy. Miss it for two…and you've got pasture-land no more.

You’ve probably seen an MF-35 if you’ve ever driven farm country. Massey built about a zillion of them – and they build them to last – out of cast iron and thick sheet metal. There are plenty of them still around, since nothing short of a thermonuclear explosion can do them irreparable damage.



“Irreparable” is the key word, since – every 30 years or so – a part will wear out and require replacement. Require replacement, that is, by me, since the nearest tractor mechanic is two towns away…and doesn’t make house calls.

Where is a tractor dilettante to go in his distress? Online, of course!

You’ll not, I’m sure, be surprised to discover that there is a thriving – nay, flourishing – online community of MF-35 owners, collectors, restorers and amateur mechanics, a majority of which remains poised at their keyboards, ready to provide detailed advice to the likes of me, 24 hours a day.

There are downloadable manuals – 300 pages long – translated into Japanese, if one might wish. There are points and plugs…wheels and widgets in stock and shippable within a matter of days. At 40-plus years, this must constitute one of the longest running aftermarkets in the history of…well, aftermarkets.

This, to say the very least, was a surprise. But true delight still awaited.

For the first time in my appallingly effete life, I fixed a broken engine. Not once…not twice…but three times. The clutch and carburetor last year. And just last weekend, the radiator. And I threw in a new thermostat, as long as I had the thing apart. (What bliss those words!)

But for this I can’t take the credit.

For Fergie, dear Fergie, did not once confound my fumbling advances. She guided my awkward fingers to every wayward bolt and secret cotter pin with a frankness befitting a Venus in sheet metal . When the job was done, she purred as I imagined she had never purred for her previous owners.

“No words but things,” old Willie Carlos Williams said. With a waft of diesel about me, now I know what he means.

Don’t Care About The Book

A Coming (& Going)-Of-Age Film From Kelly Reichardt



Good movies are rarely made from great books.

There are the rare exceptions (think of Sofia Coppola’s Virgin Suicides and Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita) that succeed mainly by trying to be something quite different from the books on which they’re based.

For the most part, however, filmmakers are content to abridge and abbreviate, jogging along behind the novel’s action, cameras in hand. Narrative voice is transformed into voice over – to quite different effect – in which hard-to-film subtleties of language can be slathered over by a fruity accent.

I’ve never read the short story on which Kelly Reichardt’s latest film, Old Joy, is based, and now, I’m not inclined to. That’s because, in her small, lush feature, Reichardt has reversed the usual calculus, and given us an adaptation whose original could only – if perhaps unfairly – prove a disappointment.

Old Joy is a road movie, but one in which the road ends up being a closed loop. In this pocket Odyssey, two old friends cross the perilous straits between past and present, less transformed by their journey, than numbed by the passage of time.

What is remarkable about Old Joy, however, is the way it tells its tale – through silences rather than words. Reichardt’s searching camera is most expressive when focused – not on the characters who are talking – but on those who are listening. As a result, it speaks in a language unique to film, in a register too high for readers to hear.

The action itself is fairly simple: old friends Kurt (Will Oldham) and Mark (Daniel London) reunite and set off on an overnight camping trek to find Bagby’s Hot Springs – a spot both beautiful and beatific, nestled in the heavily wooded mountains outside Portland. On the way, times are caught up on, much pot is smoked (at least by Kurt), and the way, inevitably, is lost.

Forced to spend the night in a trash-strewn campsite, Mark listens, bemused, while Kurt shares his brilliantly stoned grasp of astrophysics (“the universe is a teardrop, falling through space”). But Mark’s amusement quickly turns to embarrassment when Kurt, in an almost unbearably awkward moment, tells Mark how much he desperately regrets the distance that’s grown up between them.

That distance, and the awkward feelings that accompany it, are not so easily to be dispelled. The lives of the two men have gone in quite different directions since the time they were close friends. Mark, now a prematurely harried, father-soon-to-be, senses that it’s time to leave such childish things behind, while dreading the less childish things that will replace them. Kurt, on the other hand, an aging, yet still childlike slacker, seems to have crossed that subtle but unmistakable divide between being a free spirit…and being essentially homeless.

But the beauty of their story – and in Reichardt’s telling of it – lay not in how much, but rather in how little the two men had themselves changed. It’s not we who are altered with time, Old Joy seems to say, but the world that alters around us. And like the urban landscape that gradually gives way to primeval forest, the shift can be so gradual that we don’t notice until it literally surrounds us.

By the time the friends finally reach their forest nirvana -- immersing themselves, naked, beneath the hot waters in a ritual of rebirth that’s at once mocking and loving – they already know there’s no cure for time. Like the hum of samsara that intrudes on Mark’s attempt at meditation, the world will have its way.

It is a rare treat to watch Oldham and London wordlessly express the way that discomfort turns to pity and pity to fear. And it’s an even rarer one to be given the space to watch them, as Reichardt’s camera lingers in reaction shots so lengthy and so tight that they make you long to look away.

In the end, however, it’s well worth keeping your eyes on the filmmaker’s art. With barely a false note, Old Joy offers us a snapshot of the universe in motion, and a reminder of the speed with which it turns.

But for all that, the mood of the movie is less bittersweet than worldly wise. Despite our best intentions, life teaches us that friends will grow apart and beauty will become shopworn. That is the price of living. And perhaps for Reichardt, also the seed of art.

While we are welcome to share in Kurt’s realization that “sadness is just worn-out joy,” she also seems to say that we are bound to remember that corollary in reverse – that joy, no matter how bright, is only unexplored sadness.