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?