I Tell Stories. It's What I Do

A Poster Girl with no Poster

2012-01-27T17:46:00.000-05:00

Sequestered in an indie coffee house on a rainy Thursday afternoon, avoiding leaving to keep out of the drizzle, I find myself staring at a wall full of posters. From floor to twelve-foot ceiling, some forty feet from the front door to the edge of the bar, posters, two or three hundred of them, advertising concerts, awareness campaigns, poetry readings, avant-garde theatre and forthcoming 'zines. There's probably a lot going on here that I would like to see.

There's just one problem; I don't know what I'm looking at. While any individual poster is fine, taken as a group, they each lose their center and disappear in a glacier of similarity. There's next to nothing that makes any of these one-sheets stand out.

They are all one of three sizes. They utilize equivalent color schemes. Excepting the band names, all of the lettering is in the same family of fonts. A third are in black and white and all of these involve photographs and copious text, almost to the point that they might have been made with the same illustrator template. Those that are in color all invoke one of a handful or retro aesthetics, mostly from the fifties and sixties. Two are obvious homages to iconic album covers of the seventies.

Moreover, I can't tell the band posters from the film screening posters from the public awareness posters. Though, this might be the result of naming conventions. "Rabies Awareness Month" and "Campaign Against Addiction" might be bands or poetry slams and there's really no way for me to know unless I go to the event.

Only three of them stand out. One is for a film and its poster, glossy and edgeless while all the others are matte and bordered, was clearly produced by a commercial advertising agency.* One, black and white, the original clearly done by hand with pencil and ink, is a compelling piece of art, viscerally difficult to look at such is the agony that it implies. But, the font is too small and I can't tell what it's advertising without walking over and looming over the old guy with the iPad. Finally, the one that is original, legible and independently produced, the drummer for that band lives across the hall from me. I was going to that show anyway.

This is not a complaint, not expressly. A lot of this work, viewed on it's own, is probably pretty good. The composition is solid, the images balanced, the focal points deliberate. Someone with real training in graphic design could parse this more completely than I, but the point is that these posters were clearly not thrown together by an amateur. They just blur to indifferentiation when I look at them at once. They line up, edge to edge and seam to seam like some giant Rorschach test photo mosaic from which I cannot extrapolate an image.

Is there some sort of aesthetic, some agreed-upon set of conventions that governs these texts? Is there a right and a wrong way to synthesize these banners of which I am ignorant? Are they all so similar because, as students who work in the same discipline are apt to do, the illustrators and designers all approach this work from the same angle? Or, are the artists who produce these placards all caught in the doldrums of inspiration. Are there really no new ideas left?

Like my old boss would say, "Who knows? Who cares? Just show me something good."

*As I have been writing this, that film poster has been replaced by someone advertising a poetry reading and this new poster might be the worst one up there.

The Sincerest Form of Flattery.

2012-01-22T12:18:00.001-05:00

Someone told me that the Pet Shop Boys version of Brenda Lee's* "You Are Always on my Mind" was, and I'm quoting, "a sonic abortion, a crime against music that should never have been committed." I felt similar things about Madonna's version of "American Pie," and a number of other cover tunes. Plenty of really erudite people said such things about The Wind Done Gone."

This is fundamentally bad thinking.

No matter your opinion of a given artist or their medium, nothing should be off limits. Artistically, everything should be permitted. This is not to comment on the ultimate quality of the work; some of these remakes are just plain shitty, but that doesn't mean that there isn't value in creating them. To make such evaluations is tantamount to believing in objective taste, which is pretty foolish when you think about it.

What's interesting to me is that these feelings appear oddly specific to music and movies. When someone makes a parody of the Mona Lisa or re-interprets Shakespeare, we don't get all wibbly about it, but every cover of a song more than fifteen years old meets nothing but derision from critics. Why is "Stairway to Heaven" untouchable but we can rework Romeo & Juliet with impunity?

Nothing is sacred in this regard and we need to get over it.

*The version that you know is probably Elvis Presley's from 1972 or Willie Nelson's from 1982.

Promises, of What I Seemed to Be

2012-01-16T16:04:00.005-05:00

And now I'm back here. Just a fortnight away and the place seems so very different with its towering treeline, that close horizon, with its narrow streets, fecund scent and its deep-south attempt at winter chill.

I didn't miss it. Certainly, I was ready to come home for fear of all the things that I had left unattended, of all the obligations that I still kept to. But I didn't pine for it. There was no place within me left empty for the lack of it.

I am certain that I will return there, to that faceless place, not to stay, I shouldn't think, but because it is now so simply convenient and so barely familiar and because there are so many new obligations on the far side of the continent.

What is this, this dwindling sense of place and this lingering sense of departure from I-know-not-where? Have I been too long here? Am I searching for searching's sake? Am I just tired of the weather but afraid of somewhere that has none? Have I habituated to my expectations of my home, of my friends, of my work in the Phoenix city? Have those closest to me been right all along that I was never really meant to stay? Why, then does no other destination seem all that appealing in itself; this new one feels appropriate only out of happenstance.

Time will tell.

And Then She'll Ask Me...

2012-01-14T10:48:00.000-05:00

I love you when your makeup is messed up.

I love you when your clothes are dirty.

I love you when you skipped your shower and when your hair is greasy and your socks don't match.

I love you whether your jacket goes with your scarf or whether you wear your specs or your contacts.

I love you when your breath is bad, your eyelids droopy and when you've buttoned your blouse askew.

I love you just the same in sandals, in flats and in your best come-fuck-me boots.

I love you when you smell good and when you reek to high heaven.

I love you utterly and completely at every moment, unmitigated, unattenuated, undiminished by the vagaries of fashion, by the caprice of clashing colors or by the juxtaposition of spring and autumn makeup lines.

I know that this isn't what you're asking, that you're not inviting a missive on the nature of our infatuation; you just want to know if you look presentable. You want to know that the time and attention you've put into yourself are noticed and valued, and they are. But, I need you to know that any love I have of your outfit is trivial in comparison for the love I have for your soul.

My darling, you look wonderful tonight.

Gold Dust Dreamers Never Warn You

2012-01-09T13:26:00.003-05:00

When I was very small, I traded my time between three places, three parts of the world, each obvious and distinct in memory.

I went to kindergarten in suburban Milwaukee, with its mild summers, deep winters, with its wineblood leaved maples, its hard cement roads, its dapple light woods, its glacier moraine hills and its limestone enriched drinking water.

I spent summers with my grandparents in Florida, with its constant warmth, its high cresting sun, its flood plain flatness, its shoe seeping sandiness, its tropical rot flavored air and its constant warnings about gators and storms.

My earliest formative years, I spent in western England, with its hedge lined paths, its rolling mynds and towering marylins, its scent of dampness, its constantly shifting clouds, its fried food and its distinct accent.

I've spent these past few weeks on the opposite end of the continent, somewhere I've scarcely been before. And, like when I was a child, I can sense the differences here, the textures, the scents, the colors, the gait, the flow of the air, the angle of the sun and the modes of speech. I am distinctly aware that I am not at home.

But, I'm not quite sure where I am, either. This is not to say that I couldn't find this city on a map or that I couldn't give you directions. It's that this place seems indistinct, cobbled together from the effluvium of other places. It's that these textures, these scents and the angle of the sun tell me much more about where I am not than they tell about me where I am. This place has no sense of itself, no set of attributes that cry out "I am here, in this place and in no other!" I could be anywhere. I could be nowhere at all, really.

Is this a product of this place in particular? Is it that this city, in its sprawling, sundrenched, seaside-ness just doesn't have an essence of its own? Is it that the English-speaking world has become less variegated, that franchise eateries and ambient media have robbed regions of their distinctiveness? Or, is it me? Has my own experience with the world inured me to the subtleties of place? Am I immune to geography? Am I jaded about the experience of travel? Am I just not paying attention?

I fly home tomorrow. Likely, almost certainly, I will be back here, sooner than later. I've had quite the good time, even if I didn't quite know where was. Even if I don't quite know where I'm going.

By Hook or Crook

2012-01-03T14:45:00.000-05:00

Why do so many people continue to believe in the myth of meritocracy?

It's not even one of those good heuristics. I understand why people believe in laissez-faire economic theory, even if it's demonstrably false. I get why people get so pernsnickity about their brand of computer, coffee shop or sports team, no matter how foolish I happen to think these things happen to be. I comprehend most of the common wisdom that so often wins out over considered and evidenced positions; it's just easier.

But, you get what you deserve; cream rises to the top; reap what you sew, what obvious bullshit.

These people have never had a boss that was less competent than they were? These people have never known someone who, by virtue of happenstance, got more than they deserved? These people have never been passed over in an opportunity for someone less deserving? Not one time have these people looked at someone with more money or more prestige and said, "lucky bastard"?

I mean, really?

For Auld Lang Syne

2011-12-31T23:10:00.004-05:00

"A long December, and there's reason to believe, maybe this year will be better than the last."

-- Counting Crows

One of the many problems with FB

2011-12-30T18:31:00.000-05:00

One of the problems with Facebook and that family of website, perhaps even with the consumer internet itself, is that much of it is not actively interesting, it's just barely not boring.

When I'm at work, but not particularly busy, or when I'm sitting at a coffee shop putting off doing any sizable bit of writing, I keep flipping back to Facebook, to Google News or to Cracked.com, not because I'm at all interested in what's going on there but because I can't think of anything better to do. I could simply check FB once at the end of the day and see all of the messages, all of the comments, all of the tags that were sent to me and be no more the worse for it. Unless some truly major event occurs in the middle of the day, I've heard all the news I need on NPR while driving to the office. And, Cracked, I don't ever really need to read that, do I?

Checking these sites, and others, I'm never invested in the article, in the tweet or the status. It's just something to do for thirty seconds until I need to find something else to do for thirty seconds. Like a crack addict can pass days and waste thousands of dollars with a chain of ten dollar, ten minute hits, so can we flush away whole afternoons waiting for that little red flag to pop up on our main page.

Once upon the days before ubiquitous internet access, one went looking for an activity on the presumption that one could invest an hour, two hours or even an entire day in that activity. Now, we just need something to tide us over until the server refreshes. This is a bad thing. It causes us to lose focus and it keeps us from contemplation, innovation and self-discovery.

And I can't really think of anything else to say on the subject, so I guess I just proved my own point.

Cry in Your Coffee but Don't Come Bitchin' to Me

2011-12-29T18:44:00.004-05:00

I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Los Angeles, a tidy, minimalist, artsy spot that caters to locals. I quite like the place, despite being more expensive than I am used to by virtue of being in the City of Angels.

A woman just entered, ordered a beverage in Starbucks-Speak* with "double whip."

The woman behind the counter informed this displaced mall shopper that, "We don't have whipped cream."

"Why not?"

"We just don't have it. We don't carry it." Which I point out is much nicer than anything that I would have said about it's comparative health value and what it does to the flavor of a properly made coffee.

The patron shuffled her feet and hoo'd and haw'd before asking for her latte extra sweet and with extra foam. (Is that still a latte?) She commented in an uncalled-for tone that they really should have whipped cream because people expect it, that this place would do better if they kept some around.

But, why should they? Why should people expect whipped cream. This isn't a Starbucks or a Caribou or a Seattle's Best. This simply isn't a chain coffee bar and why would anyone expect it to be? The entire point of such places as this, and the very reason that the good ones thrive, is because they are not the cookie-cutter, ergonomically designed bastions of corporate S.O.P. that germinate unbidden from the urban and suburban landscape. Yes, this place serves coffee, but this place is also somewhere else. That is the point.

The painfully conventional wisdom from such people is that success is the product of imitation of what else is successful. This wisdom propagates much too widely, from the Mom&Pop stores that add piddling bric-a-brak to their inventories based on larger establishments' sales numbers to the myriad of second-rate sports bars that seem to be rightly orphaned Applebees to the triple-digit satellite channels that constantly offer low-budget versions of network reality programming.

This lady, with her whipped cream just, didn't get it. She didn't get that most of the people in here came to this spot expressly to get something other than what's offered by Ahab's first mate's namesake. Might this place eek out a few extra nickels each day if they offered blended, sweetened, milk-shake-esque espresso concoctions? They might, but they'd probably also loose their soul and they'd certainly lose the faith of all the people who come here for the coffee and not the whipped cream.

*I've never mastered the language of Starbucks, the vente, skinny, grande, frappe talk. There was a time, though, when I spoke fluent Waffle House and that's good enough for me.

Brightest Blessings, Everyone

2011-12-25T01:41:00.002-05:00

"The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singin' 'Galway Bay.'
And the bells are ringin' out
for Christmas Day."

-- The Pogues

Yule Blessings

2011-12-22T15:57:00.001-05:00

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around.

-- Richard Curtis

Lift me up from this Illusion, Lord

2011-12-19T19:24:00.001-05:00

Somewhere, there are monkeys playing accordions before the throne of a deposed sausage king who craves waffles because he can't make up his mind about something and there's some symmetry there. In this place the air is heavy but there's not a cloud in the ceiling. The eldest sun of the slug & rugby captain has gone out to water Uncle Satan's testicle garden while the champagne went flat because Barry Manilow gets sick from carbonation. Four dwarves, two blue, one orange and one who's regular flesh colored despite having no regular flesh are looking for their lost innocence in the lye vats they use to clean the stains from the bed sheets of chain smoking turnips, who aren't good for much except that the word turnip is funny to say. In this place gravity is slick with ice, tomorrow tastes purple and hope is a dish best served with nail clippings and broken glass. The world's last honest lawyer lost his toolbox at the carnival because he drove too hard a bargain at the kissing booth. One man in the movie said to the other "You see, Bob," to fill a plot hole rather than just eat someone, blow something up or throw penguins through the air. Neil Armstrong gave a lecture on the benefits of formica in one's diet while twiddling his thumbs out of time with the pulse of the beavers in his brain. The day after yesterday came before tomorrow because one of the monkeys got himself ahead of the beat and the King of Sausage decided now would be a good time to discorporate. A man in a finely tailored blue suit who looks curiously like J. Sigmund Tumlin impersonating a Baptist preacher escorts me to the ebony revolving door and tells me I can come back after the reptilian hegemony is over but, until then, I'll just have to wait, or learn to play the accordion

I Know, I Know

2011-12-18T17:24:00.003-05:00

I've been really quiet these past few months.

There was a show that took up most of my time and I've a large piece of writing in the works as well to which I've been devoting most of my pen-time.

I'll have something shortly, I promise. In the meantime here's an oldie but goodie:

You@17
Look at you. I mean, Christ, just look at you, those clothes, that hair, that demeanor. You’re helpless. Do you want people to see you like this? Do you even care what they would think? Nothing good, I can tell you that. Look at what you’ve done with your life. What happened to your goals, you dreams, your plans?

What would you do if you ran into yourself tomorrow, not another of yourself as you are but yourself when you were seventeen. What would the seventeen year old you say? Would they be disappointed? I imagine they would be. Things haven’t turned out as they imagined and they’re probably pretty angry. Would they think that you got lazy or that you lost your focus? Would they think you squandered your best chances or that you simply fucked up? Worst, would they think you sold out?

No matter what they thought they would be when they got to be you, you’re not it. If you are then you’re either lying to yourself or you had dreams too mundane for any self respecting seventeen year old to have. That or you’ve been given more than you’ve earned in life and it doesn’t count for bollocks anyway. Somewhere along the line you did, even if for a moment, get lazy, lost your focus or squandered a good opportunity. Somewhere along the line, some tiny part of you sold out. Somewhere between seventeen and now you stepped in your own shit and didn’t have the wherewithal to wipe it off and the reek is still clinging to you. You@17 , the you that was eager and feisty, proud and invincible, the you that was ready and capable and jaded in the way that only a seventeen year old can be, that you is really pissed off.

Y’know what? Fuck You@17. You@17 didn’t know shit. Nobody had told them what the real world was going to be like. Nobody had explained to them anything about adulthood. They didn’t know a thing about sleepless nights. They didn’t know a thing about paying bills. They didn’t understand being broke or having to perform on someone else’s terms. They didn’t know about sacrifice, about bruised pride, about long hours or about how the world likes to beat good people down. You@17 didn’t know about lost jobs or heartless lovers. They didn’t know what it feels like to fail, even when you were at your best. They didn’t’ know what it’s like to have more expected of them than they were able to give. You@17 had never been defeated. You@17 had a lot of lessons to learn.

And so do you.

Don’t you dare feel bad. Don’t you dare feel sorry for yourself. Don’t even think about apologizing to You@17. You@17 couldn’t have done what you’ve done, couldn’t cope with what you undertake every single day. You@17 kept fucking up until they became you now and never thought to revaluate the surroundings. You@17 needs to be put in their place.

Now, straighten up, dust yourself off and put yourself in order. There are things to be done, things You@17 would never understand or appreciate. There’s still a world to conquer and legions of left over seventeen year olds’ asses to kick.

Above the Median but Below the Mean

2011-11-03T19:05:00.004-05:00

This Magic Moment

2011-09-25T23:41:00.003-05:00

I've to be to work in a few hours. The night has ground down and all but the off schedule service industry lifers and the most highly functioning alcoholics have gone to ground but I'm not yet towards the door. Today's been too plainly perfect, too simply, subtly sensational for me to be willing to walk away from it just yet.

I've done nothing exceptional today. In fact, today will probably fade from memory in a few weeks time, so devoid of actual events it was. T'was nothing, really: just Sunday brunch, a favorite movie, an hour at the range, dinner and a bit of live blues and every minute in the company of dear, dear friends.

These are the days, the stacked moments that define contentment and that embody joy. We trick ourselves into thinking we have miserable lives because these occasions seem so banal on the remembering. They reflect in the mind's eye as any other day.

They're not any other day, though, and I can feel that now despite the knowledge that I will forget it in a fistful of tomorrows. So, I linger as long as I can because today was a good day, indeed.

Tomorrow, and the forgetfulness of today's perfection, looms, bloated with expectations, desperate for my worthiest attention. And so, I pay my tab, embrace my dearests and turn my feet towards home.

May there be so many more such days.

The Geeks Have Won Tonight

2011-09-10T14:02:00.000-05:00

We've been hearing for some time now about how the twenty-first century is the age of the Geek, about how the stigma of bookishness, the scarlet letters of intelligence and imagination were finally coming into their own, about how fanfic authors, table-top gamers and comic book collectors were finally going to earn some cultural currency rather than ridicule.

I never really did believe it. For all the popularity of super hero movies, for all the MMORG subscribers, for all the traction that major video games have gotten, it always seemed that any fascination that mundane world had with us was strangely academic and always accompanied by an un-annunciated snicker. To the fashionistas, to the taste-makers, to the arbiters of tomorrow's values, Geeks were, at best, a market to be exploited, at worst, a social garment to be tried on, examined and then discarded before leaving the house. We were a curiosity, not a culture.

Though, when I saw this, I realized that we might have that moment in the sun after all.

Kate Moss, on the cover of Vogue Magazine, in a tavern-wench dress. The world's top supermodel is on her way to the RenFaire.

It's not the first time I've been wrong.

The Gathering of the Ranks

2011-08-30T08:56:00.004-05:00

It's that time of year. Geeks like me are counting the minutes. If anticipatory tension were a currency, we'd be seeing hyper-inflation the likes of 1920's Germany. I've always been a nail-biter but now I've practically gnawed my fingertips, lucky not to leave bloody fingerprints wherever I lay my palms. Eight year olds on Christmas Eve have got it so good by comparison.

It's only two days away.

For us this is like The Super Bowl, New Years and a class by your favorite college professor all bundled together into one four-day package. I like to think of it as "Nerdi-Gras."

Costumes, shows, seminars, book signings, parties, demos, premiers, concerts, a parade, old friends, new friends and and six months worth of profoundly irresponsible behavior all distilled into a clock-never-stops labor day weekend. Sixty-thousand hard-core nerds, geeks, dweebs, techies, trekkers, dorks, freaks, phreakers, hackers, gamers and, sadly gawkers, crowded into five Atlanta hotels for four days. It's really kind of amazing to behold.

My costume is prepared. My room is booked. My booze is bought. My schedule is made. My heart is all atwitter. Not that my posting is at all regular, but I won't be online for a few days, in case you were expecting something of me.

Everyone sing together now, "It's the most wonderful time ... of the year."

Why I Don't Go to Art Shows

2011-08-28T11:40:00.000-05:00

I get them all the time, twenty a week perhaps, maybe more. I get them through facebook, by email, by text and even, once in a great while, on a printed bit of card stock. I get invitations to indie-scale cultural events. It's not always art shows, as I mentioned above. It's just art shows more often than anything else. It's also local bands, photography openings in coffee shops, scene studies and short film screenings. Usually by people I know and actively like.

And I almost never go.

First of all, and I hate to say this lest it come back to haunt but nobody reads this blog so I'm not over-worried, most of the work I see is just plain bad. I might be reaching by claiming to be an objective arbiter of culture but, at the very least, I see very little that I find meaningfully evocative. Most of it is self indulgent wanking making the pretenses of art. The truth is that most of the would-be musicians, directors, painters and the like that I know don't really want to make art. They want to be someone who is lauded for making art.

No one is asking me to these events because I'm important; I'm not. No one is asking me to these events because I'm someone's friend or because someone legitimately wants me to be interested their work, even if I am and they do. Someone is asking me because they're hocking wares and need warm bodies to create a false sense of popularity and urgency to prop up a sales pitch to would-be patrons, so that they can play the celebrity.

Screaming from the rooftops, or it's modern equivalent, papering the world with fliers and pestering people on facebook, is not the way to get your work noticed. Spending the bulk of your time and energy planning your showing rather than perfecting your art is not the way go get your work noticed. Playing the salon éclat is not the way to get your work noticed.

Producing immaculately well crafted, emotionally daring, intellectually innovative art, that is the way to get your work noticed. Excellence is very hard to ignore. If you don't have that, there's not much I can do to help you acquire it. If you do have that, then you don't need my sorry ass showing up at your viewing to pimp your pieces.

Moreover, I have my own half-assed hack work to pursue.

I Feel Safest of All

2011-08-21T15:42:00.000-05:00

Inspired by my friend Kimberly, who I've only actually seen once since high school but whatever, I have elected to relate the following.

I tend to name my more important possessions, specifically vehicles and computers. My first car was named Peter. My first computer was named Tex. My bichin' Camaro that I drove back when Kimberly and I were still in school I christened Majje. The laptop I'm typing this on is named Obie2, after it's predecessor Obie, which was in turn named after the hyper-intelligent reality-altering supercomputer from Jack Chalker's Well of Souls novels.

Some people think this an odd habit but I feel that, if we're going to give names to boats, spaceships and B.B. King's guitar, then we should be open to naming just about anything.

The thing is, one can't just name a car the way one names a child. No, a car already has a name when it comes to you and you have to wait for the car to enlighten you as to how it would like to be addressed. It's a little like what T.S. Elliot had to say about cats, only without the help of Andrew Lloyd Webber. You have to take time to get to know the car and for it to acclimate to you. Only then will the car's name occur to you. It will simply pop into your head and you'll know that this is what the vehicle is meant to be called. This is the way it works for me, at least.

I purchased my current car from a friend. I went to see it for the first time in a garage with no lights so I only saw it in shadow. When I returned to test drive it, it was dusk. A few days later, when I committed to purchasing it and showed up with the money, the sun was already down. Having not owned a car for several years, I didn't have a parking space at my apartment and had to park in the side-lot, which was heavily shaded. Point being, I had already owned the car for a week before I saw it in full daylight and realized what color it was. I had thought it was navy blue but it is, in fact, a deep shade of purple, almost violet.

This realization led to the following train of thought. "My car is purple. Lou Reed was the lead singer of the band Deep Purple. My car's name is Reed!" And, I felt that little click in my head that told me I was correct. My car, indeed, wanted to be called "Reed."

I know what you're thinking. I can practically feel your disdain, familiar and comfortable as that is. "Thomas, Lou Reed was not the lead singer of Deep Purple. Lou Reed was the frontman for the Velvet Underground. You're a moron."

I am not, in point of fact, a moron. I know that Lou Reed was not in Deep Purple. I know that those two ensembles didn't produce even vaguely similar music. Simply put, I had a brain fart. An entirely incorrect thought passed through my head and I didn't notice. It happens to the best of us.

Unfortunately, Reed had declared his intentions to me and it was now too late to change up. I could have manufactured some line of reasoning about how purple is the best color for velvet or somesuch but what would that accomplish? And so, my car is Reed and Reed he ever shall be because I had a moment of cranial flatulence.

Such is serendipity.

And Some Days...

2011-08-19T16:00:00.003-05:00

You find yourself in a familiar place, with a familiar feeling doing familiar things. You realize that, at some point in the past few years, you lost your only super power but you're only a bit concerned about how to get it back. You read in the paper that a terrible injustice has been righted. You can smell the approaching autumn and your only real concern is whether you can help HBO save the world.

And that's just fine.

Green is Willpower; Yellow is Fear

2011-08-15T13:29:00.007-05:00

My boss has this tendency of asking idle questions at which I can take a competent swing at the answer. These are usually minor inquiries about the details of modern life that most people shrug over and quickly forget. Unfortunately for me, I have a habit of remembering curious little details and, when I manifest any understanding of these trifling questions, the boss wants to know more. This generally lands me back at my desk, investing an hour in researching some, otherwise ignorable, detail of the modern world. I've now got a stack of these one-page summaries of useless knowledge and I figure I might as well make use of them beyond entertaining my colleagues. So, here we go

WHY DO HOUSEHOLD BATTERIES COME IN DIFFERENT SIZES?

Dry cell batteries, the kind that you load in most household electronics, from remote controls to children's toys, come in two general varieties. There are 1.5 volt batteries, which are the cylindrical ones denoted by letters, D, AA, etc and there are 6/9 volt batteries that are usually square.

With 1.5 volt batteries, the cylindrical ones, the size indicates the lifetime of the battery. Larger batteries last longer so for maximum performance, a manufacturer of a device shoots for the largest battery that is convenient for their machine. Also important is “plate area,” the size of the battery's contacts. Larger plate area allows for greater amperage at the same voltage so wider batteries are needed to power higher amp devices.

Square batteries have similar concerns regarding size vs battery-life but are designed differently. 1.5 volt batteries have only one cell. 9 volt style batteries have higher voltages because they have multiple cells sandwiched together. They are shaped differently in part because it's easier to stack square cells together than round ones, in part to differentiate them from their lower voltage counterparts and in part to make them less susceptible to damage as they are more potentially dangerous than their cylindrical counterparts.

As for why one device would require six AAA batteries as opposed to two AA batteries, it's a matter of how batteries are wired. Batteries wired in series: positive to negative to positive etc, create a multi-cell battery with the same voltage, but a longer life, functionally the same as a larger battery. Batteries wired in parallel, positive to positive to positive then negative to negative to negative, create a higher voltage battery, with the same lifetime as one of the constituent batteries. A device may use a larger number of smaller batteries rather than a small number of larger batteries to take best advantage of amperage / voltage / lifetime wiring combinations.

Other, exotic types, of batteries like hearing aid batteries and those weird 6 volt cylindrical batteries used in light meters, are usually designed to conform to the needs of a specific device, hence why there are so many types of them. Because they are manufactured in such small quantities for very specific machines, there is little incentive to standardize them.

You are thus enlightened.

Swimming Through Sick Lullabies

2011-08-13T17:48:00.003-05:00

"How are you?" she asked. I was a bit surprised to see her and even more surprised that she would speak to me. We've been avoiding one another for a long time. "Are you doing okay?"

"That depends," I answer. "Are you about to realize that you're still in love with me, come rushing home to my waiting arms and promise never to leave me again?"

"No, I'm not."

"Then I'm alright, but not as good as I could be."

And isn't that the truth of it.

Happy Idiot, Struggle for the Legal Tender

2011-08-08T12:17:00.005-05:00

I'm not a conspiracy theorist but one must concede that our government, on all levels, has been getting more and more business-friendly over the last decade or more. While there are those that will assert that there is a vast and sinister cabal attempting to subvert global progressivism and concentrate wealth in the hands of the wealthiest elite, I understand that the ebb and flow of politics and culture lead to times of great progress and to times of regression. I'm not willing to put motives where none need to be.

Think on this, though. The recent debt squabbles resulted in a deal, however poor a deal it was, to raise the US debt ceiling. While the squabbles did make for an interesting vignette in political brinksmanship, in practical terms, the federal government came nowhere near to either a technical nor a practical default. In its two hundred and thirty-five year history, the US has never defaulted on a public debt. We remain the gold standard (metaphorically speaking) of public securities. No major investor or financial entity believes that US debt is a fundamentally less secure or less reliable financial instrument than it was a month ago. Nothing has functionally changed, except for the letters that S&P ascribe to federal bonds.

The practical results of this, mostly arbitrary, downgrade have been well explained. Any variable debt-instrument that is tied to federal bonds will see its interest rate increase. Your mortgage, car loan, student loans etc, all will end up costing you more because the loan your bank gave you is tied to a loan the bank received from the government which is tied to a loan the government took out from someone else. We all lose.

Or do we?

Who stands to benefit from this? Well, who stands to benefit from any hike in interest rates, the creditor. Secretly, Visa loves it when you miss a payment because they get to charge you more; they make more money and they didn't have to do anything for it.

Hyperbolic talk of market apocalypse aside, the nation's creditors are licking their chops. They're going to pocket as much as one hundred billion dollars a year for doing absolutely nothing. Who's going to pay them those billions? You and I, the working Americans, are going to surrender our tax dollars to the banks, the funds, the foreign governments, the corporations and the affluent individuals that hold the bulk of federal debt. Moreover, those of us who hold personal debt will, through no actions of our own, now be obligated to pay larger sums to the financial institutions that own the deeds to hour homes and the notes on our cars.

We're in the tank for billions of dollars to these institutions and they did absolutely nothing to earn it.

Nothing, unless of course, you count contributing millions of dollars in campaign and soft-money contributions to the very politicians that just engaged in four months of bad faith dog-&-pony show that they knew would tank our credit rating.

Like I said, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I'm starting to be more forgiving of those who are.

Color Coding for Scripts and Film Documentation

2011-07-30T07:39:00.002-05:00

A recent visitor to my house snuck a peek at my collection of callsheets, production reports and scripts that goes back the better part of a decade. She was struck, not by how data-dense, nor how specific they were, but by the fact that, like folders full of 8 1/2 x 14 Skittles, they came in assorted colors.

Almost all production documents are color-coded by edition. Callsheets, Production Reports, Travel Movements, Memos, Shooting Schedules, One-Line Schedules, DooD Schedules, Exhibit G's, Cast Lists, Crew Lists, Vendors' Lists and even the pages of the script, will go through several versions in the course of production. Some of them will change dozens of times as the studio makes changes, as new rolls are cast, as new crew are hired, as weather plays havoc with scheduling, as re-writes are ordered and on and on.

Even though a movie work day starts at thirteen hours, there are still not enough of them to accomplish every last task or to read every piece of paper that passes through one's hands. To streamline the transfer of information across departments and to make sure everyone is operating from the same assumptions, every set of changes leads a document to be printed on a new color of paper. This way, a person can tell at a glance if they have the newest edition of a document.

The editions generally go as follows:

1st Ed White
2nd Ed Blue
3rd Ed Pink
4th Ed Yellow (Sometimes called "Canary")
5th Ed Green
6th Ed Goldenrod
7th Ed Salmon
8th Ed Buff
9th Ed Cherry

And then it starts over with "Double White," "Double Blue" etc.

The system is nearly standardized, but not quite so. Some studios and some production entities abbreviate or modify the list and, once you get past the Goldenrod version, you should probably double check the studio handbook.

What struck my friend most were the scripts. It would be truly wasteful to reprint a hundred or more copies of a hundred page script to indicate a re-write of only one scene, so the color-coded edition changes affect only one page at a time. The new pages are printed on the appropriate color, the old page is removed, replaced with the new one and the script is re-bound. By the end of a show, copies of the script are piles of colored layers, an edge-on pastel rainbow, the edition of which is indicated by the cover page.

I wish the IRS, the DMV, my bank and the other institutions with which I'm forced to deal would adopt a similar policy. It would make the world a whole lot more colorful.

And Some Days...

2011-07-24T13:32:00.005-05:00

After a precarious landing and a trip to the ER, you find yourself sipping coffee with with a sloppy grin on your face and a bass drumming ache in your shoulder. Your arm is in a sling and you can't do much but marvel at how such great and terrible things can happen in the same day. You consider whether it's appropriate to smoke that celebratory cigar you've been saving for months, lament that strangers won't ask how you hurt yourself and ponder how long the ligaments will take to heal so that you can do it all again.

Here's to Blue Skies and the Skin of our Teeth.

Hate is a Strong Word

2011-07-13T05:38:00.000-05:00

Rawksta'hr got me started on this one. When I started thinking about this, I didn't realize that there was this much to contemplate. Just goes to show, I suppose. I had set the whole thing aside but now the advent of Google+ makes it seem newly relevant.

It's is oft lamented by Facebook users that there is no "Dislike" button. Users of the social media giant can express their approval of everything from sports scores to vacation plans to articles in the New York Times with a single mouse click. There is no similarly easy way to express one's disapproval and a vocal plurality of users have been clamoring for team Zuckerburg to add one for years now.

They shouldn't and I'll tell you why.

As the web goes, Facebook is a pretty polite place. I'm not saying that Facebook is a land of courtly manners but, by the standards of the internet at large, it's fairly civil. Adding a "Dislike" button will only encourage trolling by codifying a method of psychological bullying. 13 year-olds with ego problems should not get a 30 billion dollar company's help in ostracizing their fellows by giving them a one-click method of voicing their disapproval.

Pictured - A Troll Ass

Advocates of the "Dislike" button hugely underestimate the veracity of internet trolling culture. A "Dislike" Facebook is one on which emotionally stunted individuals will constantly post racist, misogynist, violent or inflammatory material just to see how many "Dislikes" they can accrue. Some will point out that such statements would already violate the FB ToS and could be removed by administrators. Given, however that the turnaround time for such things can be weeks or months and given the increase in such statements that a "Dislike" button would foster, chocking it up to the ToS doesn't seem all that practical.

In the culture at large, positive thoughts can be taken at face value. When viewing someone's photographs, eating their food or touring their home, it's quite enough to say, "This is good; I like this." Obversely, when one manifests disdain, one is usually expected to explain why. "I don't like this; it's too spicy," for instance. The "Dislike" would upend that social norm,* giving any asshole in your circle of friends the ability to censure without reason, to express their disapproval without having to articulate it. Nobody with a functioning vocabulary is at all impaired by not having a "Dislike" button. There's a comment box. If you dislike something, you can express that in words.

Proponents of the "Dislike" function will point out that one can "Like" that my grandmother died. That would be an asshole thing to do but, since most people don't post "My grandmother died," they post something like, "My grandmother died after eighty-seven long happy years. Please keep my family in your prayers," if someone were to "Like" that, one would presume that it was a show of support. A simple solution to this, by the way is to allow users to disable the "Like" button.

As I've mentioned in the past, there are still a lot of opportunities for communication and a lot of methods of communication on the internet that are still coming to fruition and I'd be a fool to simply dismiss a new angle for expressing one's self. The problem with a "Dislike" button is that it would not be a method of expression. Instead, it would be a method to dodge expression, a way to simply belch a half-formed, and quite rude, non-thought out into the public sphere and I don't see that doing anyone any good. To sum up, kids and assholes will abuse it. Adults don't need it. Let's not bother.

*I'm usually all for the upending of social norms. On the other hand, I'm also a fan of civility. I don't see a contradiction here. Social norms should only be discarded if they are, in fact bad, and I don't see that being the case here.

Prestige Matters

2011-07-11T15:28:00.001-05:00

"You get paid, right?" She asks. I have to confess that I do but I don't know how to explain to her that that isn't really the point. Sure, one doesn't wait tables pro-bono, but if I was doing it just for the paycheck, then I'd be better off doing something else.

This was some time ago, of course. I haven't waited a table in years but the revelation of that conversation has stuck with me. I understand that, for many people, the compensation is all that matters but for me it's not that way, going all the way back to my years in restaurants, it wasn't ever just about the money.

This whole realization happened when I discovered that a friend, who worked third shift at a Waffle House, took home nearly as much as I did despite the fact that I worked at a three-star bistro full of high-dollar clientèle and classically trained chefs. To be clear, my tips were better but she didn't have to tip out a half-dozen other staff and she made her tips in cash while I made mine on credit cards so she could dodge some tax obligation. Finally, I had to outlay a portion of my money to stay up to par with the establishment, getting my uniforms and aprons professionally laundered and starched, haircuts twice as often as I would have had otherwise, my subscriptions to two industry publications that I read religiously lest one of my diners ask how they're doing it at Les Halles this season. This is not even counting the uncompensated time I spent outside of work studying culinary concepts and brushing up my Japanese and my French.

She suggested that I say "Fuck it," and go to work with her. The standards I kept to appalled her. While she strolled in approximately when her shift began, cut lemons and made tea as it pleased her, dried her apron in the microwave, and was never expected to know whether the vegetables were organic. I, by comparison, was constantly faced with white-glove inspections, expected to know every answer, to pronounce every foreign term correctly, to anticipate my guests' every need, to stay as late as my diners cared to stay and to always be no more than one point shy of flawless. Despite the money, comparative ease and shorter hours, I would still never have traded places.

Why, because prestige matters, perhaps not to everyone, but it matters to me.

I kept the fine dining job because, even though I was part of an oft-denigrated profession, I wanted to be high in the waiters' pecking order. Now, making movies, I work very hard to stay attached to large-budget studio shows even when local indies have the same pay scale because it matters to me that my projects are recognizable. When I'm off, I skydive because bowling doesn't quite capture others' imaginations.

Perhaps I'm shallow, but I want to know that the things I do are considered important when compared against similar endeavors. Despite everything my elementary guidance counselor told me, it is not enough to simply know my own worth. Now, I don't define my entire self based on this. I'm not going to collapse into tears and cease to function because I have to take a gig that widens no eyes, but, given the choice I'll take the harder, less lucrative work that carries a modicum of eminence.

Is that wrong? I don't know, but it's what's informed the arc of my career and it's worked out pretty well for me so far. If I'm overworked or less wealthy than I would have been otherwise, I'm comfortable with that.

By a Crystal Blue Italian Stream

2011-07-05T06:59:00.004-05:00

A long weekend is never quite enough. It leaves one hanging. The extra day is more a distraction than an opportunity to recharge. That unassigned Monday is always taken up with other obligations, family gatherings, public observances and that accumulating list of things that stay undone during the work week. We all find ourselves on the clock come Tuesday but just a bit out of place, shifted just far enough in time that the minutes don't add up the way we feel they should.

The better part of it is the four day week that follows, though that does as much to break the rhythm and make the following week seem disproportionately longer.

I'm lucky, in a sense. Though my workdays are half again longer than those of my friends in cubicle-farms, the freelance lifestyle means that I usually end up with several weeks off work each year. Granted, they're unpaid weeks, but they're weeks off nonetheless. That's when the batteries get recharged. That's when I get to be lazy and also when I get to take care of all those wouldn't-it-be-nice-if-I-could-only-find-the-time things. I realize that most people don't get that.

Two weeks' annual vacation isn't enough either. Bereft of free time, we try and legislate every moment of these clots of free days with cruises, road-trips, family outings or projects better left to professionals.

I think we should scrap the holidays, at least that collection of bank holidays that have been divorced from their intent, the holidays that most of America observes only through beer and bratwurst: Columbus Day, Presidents' Day, Memorial Day and Labor Day. Let's take all four of those and any others that I've forgotten, combine them all together, tack them onto the back side of Thanksgiving and let the whole country take a week and a half off at the end of November. Let's just shut it all down for seven business days, and I mean everything, all non-essential businesses and institutions, because retail workers, call center techs and bartenders deserve some time off as well. Without mandating a single additional bank holiday, lets just take a week away from the business of business. Let's take a week and all say, "Hey, we all get a little time to ourselves."

I think it would be much better for us than a stray barbecue Monday every few months.

Job vs Calling

2011-06-30T06:57:00.001-05:00

I just got a resume that highlights the PA applicant's "flexible schedule."

Talk about just not getting it.

If there's one thing that knocks people out of this industry, it's the hours. Your schedule is from when-we-tell-you-to-be-there until sometime after when-we're-done. There is no wiggle room on this. Once you've been around for a while and you're part of an established team, you can work it out where you get to attend family events like weddings. We're not so big a bunch of assholes as to tell you that you can't attend your mom's funeral but taking the evening off to go to a concert or to celebrate an anniversary just isn't in the cards if you're a rank and file filmmaker. You just have to learn to make life accommodate work because the reciprocal won't happen.

It would be nice to go do the things that everyone else gets to do, like have drinks on a Thursday evening, arrive at or leave work while the sun is up or know what my nieces and nephews look like. But, that's just not how this works because the culture of shooting-unit film makers is much more akin to that of presidential campaign staff, deployed Marines or lifetime missionaries than it is like that of the modern office professional. We do this, all day, every day and, as long as there's still days until picture wrap, everything else is secondary. Frankly, that's the way we prefer it. Life is just simpler this way.

The very notion of a "flexible schedule" gets snickers of derision because it smacks of someone unprepared for the lifestyle and you have to be prepared for the lifestyle if you're going to be any good or at all happy doing this.

In Which I Pick Some Nits

2011-06-13T16:56:00.000-05:00

Not to be an elitist asshole, but there are certain twists of phrase that absolutely give you away as an on-set first-timer. It's not that there's anything innately wrong with being new at a job, it's just that, in this business at least, a distressing plurality of the greenwoods are cocky and entitled well beyond what their level of experience would justify. If you're going to be that guy, fine, but try to remember these things:

Length of a script or of a scene is articulated in eighths of a page and not by some common denominator. We say that a scene is one and six-eighths long, not one and three-quarters.

The vacuum tube and filament in a light fixture that actually produces the illumination, it's called the "lamp" not the "bulb."

Those products that we use up in the course of shooting a film: tape, sash cord, recordable media, canned air, office supplies, razor blades, p'touch tape, cleaning supplies, batteries etc. are collectively referred to as Expendables, like the 80's action homage. They're not 'consumables,' 'disposables' or 'supplies.'

PR means "Production Report" -- Not Public Relations

Time, especially for the purposes of payroll, is articulated on a decimal clock, the minimum unit of which is a "tenth" of six minutes. So, if I get to work at seven in the morning and leave work at seven thirty in the evening, my time card will read 7.0 - 19.5. Also, the clock does not reset at midnight so if I come in at noon but don't leave until ten after two in the morning, it will read 12.0 - 26.2 .

NDB stands for "Non Deductible Breakfast." What that actually means is a discussion for another time.

These are just a few little bits of jargon but they're a few of the ones that seem to be misunderstood the most often and they're the ones that I've noticed today. Learn the lingo is all that I'm saying.

Corp-Speak

2011-06-09T05:53:00.002-05:00

Going Forward

On the Same Page

Goal Oriented

Synergy

Prioritizing

Team Player

Metrics

Productively Actualized

On Deck

Outside the Box

Core Principles

Action Items

Critical Mass

Dovetail

Go. Fuck Yourself.

Pretty Little Soldiers

2011-06-06T11:28:00.000-05:00

Dash and I went to junior high together but we went to separate high schools. We flew in similar circles, went to all the same parties and had lots of friends in common but we weren't all that close. Fifteen years on, though, he's one of only two childhood pals that ended up in the movie industry and our two lives, while superficially similar, could hardly be more different.

First, I planned for this to be my life since my earliest days. Once I got over those half dozen when-I-grow-ups that all little boys have: astronaut, fireman, paleontologist, president, I knew that I wanted to make movies. Dash, on the other hand, wanted to be a stage actor, to be a Broadway triple threat.

We spent fifteen years wandering our respective early adulthoods. He did a spate as part of a roaming troupe that did educational theater all across the country. He was a stage hand and then a PA. I did the rounds as a bartender, customer service rep and then a boom operator. Ultimately, I landed in the production department and he found himself an East Coast AD.

Owing to the different roads we've taken, we have huge differences of opinion as to the nature of each other's careers. He works in indie world, helming small shows destined for the festival circuit and second-tier DVD release. He manages edgy, original, artistically daring films made by aspiring auteurs and small crews that are lauded by critics, coo'd over by kinophiles and ignored by the world at large.

I'm at the other end of the spectrum. I work on mult-million dollar studio pictures. Behemoth movies created largely by committee that are often forced to side-step grit and gumption in favor of spectacle and profit. But, the food is always good, the accommodations always comfortable and the checks always clear.

The cultures of these two worlds are different. His colleagues are mostly young and eager idealists, people who are looking to do what has not been done before. One perpetuates a career through enthusiasm and willingness to suffer, in the form of long days and low pay, for the artistry of the endeavor. My compatriots are slightly older, deeply jaded, fantastically ambitious, mercenaries who covet the number one slot at the box office. One keeps working in the studio world through one part luck, one part schmooze, one part grit and three parts professional flawlessness.

We've never worked together and we probably never will. On the rare occasion that we see one another, there's always a bit of tension, a complex tension built of posture, opposing experience and perhaps just a touch of envy. He ranks higher than I do but I make more money. I get to rub elbows with celebrities but he's integral to his productions in a way that I am not. On some level, he thinks that I'm a sell-out and, on that same level, I think that he swims in the shallow end.

In a way, though, we sometimes look at each other with eyes for what is greener. Dash's work will never have the prestige or recognition that mine has and mine will never have the legitimacy of his. I wonder what it would be like to make a movie without having to kiss above-the-line ass and I bet he wonders what it would be like to know that you're going to get paid on time and that the catering isn't going to suck.

It's of no consequence, though. We've each carved out our niche and, despite some puffing of chests to one another, we're making the careers that we want and we're both doing better than most at it. It's just funny how careers turn out, how our intentions brush with and sometimes push against reality, how our opinions of our work evolve as we learn and mature in our fields. It's strange how we end up in places we never thought we'd be and places we always knew we belonged and it's even stranger that sometimes they're the same place.

I'll Won't Hug Your Elephant and I Won't Kiss Your Ass

2011-06-02T06:33:00.000-05:00

I try to be above it; I try to be aloof. I try and watch politics with the same casual disinterest that I read industry trades or financial reports, keeping a conscious distance and knowing that my ability to influence events, while not null, is negligible. It doesn't work, though. I can't muster the detachment and the more I pay attention, the more angry I get.

Like I said before, I'm a registered Independent and have been for my entire voting life. I used to think that there was a happy middle. I used to think that Conservatives and Progressives, each a group of fundamentally good people working towards what they thought was best, each holding a kernel of truth on a variety of issues, each acting in good faith and each willing to work with the other would move the country forward by inches. But, I stopped believing that a long time ago.

For a while I believed that Conservatives, especially religious conservatives, were actually bad people. I thought they were greedy, power-grubbing bastards who cared much more about money and victory than about the welfare of the nation. At this same time, I thought that Liberals, probably in the form of Democrats, were poised to rediscover their principles and make the nation great again. I don't believe either of these things anymore.

I've realized that we're left with a one party of idiots and one party of assholes and frankly, I'm sick of it. I don't want legislative progress. I don't want new party initiatives. I don't want process stories and horse races. I don't want hand-holding and I don't much care if the two sides find common ground. I just want them to quit being a bunch of fuckups with their heads so far up their asses they can probably lick their own tonsils.

I don't want bipartisanship; I want politicians to do the right thing.

I want Republicans to realize that 'the free market' is not a panacea for economic and social ills and I want Democrats to realize that not all social and economic problems can be solved by state intervention.

I want Conservatives to quit fetishizing Personal Responsibility [TM] and admit that far too many people are victims of circumstance. I also want Liberals to quit facilitating a culture of victim-hood that insists no one is at fault for their own station in life.

I want the Right to stop quietly blaming minorities for the country's problems. I want the left to stop loudly proclaiming that middle class White men created all the worlds evils.

I want the Republican Party to have a sense of moral justice & I want the Democratic Party to have a spine.

I want both parties to kick the religious right to the curb and tell them that this is a secular nation and that these false debates about evolution, abortion and public faith are over, the way they should have been thirty years ago.

I want both parties to realize that you can't enrich a society by impoverishing art and science.

I want everyone in public office to realize that flag burning, gay marriage and gun control aren't even close to being our biggest problems right now and I would really like it if they would stop calling each other Socialists and Nazis.

I want the leadership from both columns to look at the financial crisis, the housing crisis, the debt crisis and all the financial woes of the last several years and realize that, Democrat and Republican, this is your fault. And, I want voters all over the country to realize that it's our fault as well for putting these power mad, bread and circus, cocksuckers in office in the first place.

Fuck Everybody.

What Does Pagan Mean?

2011-05-30T12:42:00.005-05:00

Nearly every book on the subject, nearly ever person asked, has a different idea of what defines "Pagan." Of course the word is derivative of "pāgānus," old Latin for "Country Dweller" and Church Latin for non-Christian. We need, though, an agreed upon definition that is suited to the modern nomenclature, to the current cultural phenomenon and to the family of faiths that have been gaining momentum in the Western world for more than a half century.

Through the decades, a number of individuals and organizations have, in mission statements, in charters, in workshops and in craft publications offered a myriad of definitions of the word "Pagan." Though I confess these explanations are so prolific that I cannot have read them all, most that I have read seem inelegant or incomplete. Many are phrased in opaque language, full of empty signifiers. Many are addressed to those already familiar with the Pagan community, family of faiths and way of thinking. Many are lists of grievances against more populous religions. Many are constructed expressly to separate one Pagan sect from another rather than to define the community as a whole.

While I understand that we are a spiritually amorphous lot, often seeming to defy definition entirely, and that not every single practitioner's beliefs will fall perfectly within, I propose the following.

A Pagan faith will generally have four characteristics:

1. Polytheism.

There must be a plurality of deity or spirit. This can take many forms, as a literal cadre of Gods, as multiple but distinct aspects to a single being, as an ephemeral essence that manifests in many ways.

2. Pantheism &/or Animism

Those plural deities must be deities of something. Again, this can take many forms, literal Gods of fire, war and harvest, in deification of the life cycle, spirits that dwell within object and creatures.

3. Attention to the Earth or to a natural cycle.

We are embedded in the world, part of it, made of it, rather than masters of it. Again, this belief has many incarnations but the moral and philosophical ramifications of this truth are never far from mind.

4. Self-Identification

I understand that this final tenet is debatable, but it seems important that a faith define itself as Pagan in order to be thus. This is first because we cherish self-determination and second because it delineates us from some other world faiths that would generally not be regarded as Pagan in this sense, Hinduism and Shinto as examples.

I confess that I have some issues with the language. Abrahamian monotheism is so ingrained in Western culture that it can be difficult to talk about modern Paganism without resorting to oppositional terminology, without explaining ourselves based on what we are not rather than what we are. I ask my fellow Pagans to help me make the verbiage more precise.

While I would never suggest any sort of canonicity, the above is, to my mind, the simplest definition that addresses the largest segment of the community while being easily explainable to non-Pagans.

I invite criticism, suggestion and discussion.

A Bit of Brilliance for a Saturday Afternoon

2011-05-28T13:49:00.003-05:00

I've been told that I don't update the blog often enough and I can't argue with that. In a vain and probably foolish attempt to keep my handful of readers happy by offering some meager pitch at content, I'm now going to fall back on some of my least favorite blogger tropes, just to keep the posts coming despite my seventy-hour work weeks. I'm posting a link.

It's content and it's good.

What else do you want.

I Went to School with 27 Jennifers

2011-05-26T00:32:00.001-05:00

Dear Everybody,

Years ago, my sister had a friend named "Thunder." I was in a theatre troupe for some time with a guy named "Sundance," and I had a friend in college named "Seven." These were not nicknames; these were the words on their birth certificates. Of course, we all know of someone who has christened their child with some invented combination of phonemes that isn't a recognized word at all. Such cases not withstanding, almost all common names have some legacy meaning that is no longer in popular use.

For instance, my name, Thomas, is derivative of the Aramaic word for "Twin," and it is from this that the Biblical character gets his name. It's foreshortening "Tom" means "honest" in old Hebrew. I'm also told that, in the Latin of the early Catholic Church, "Toma" was occasionally a synonym for "Infidel."

My recent breakup from a five year relationship and subsequent re-admission to the dating world has made me realize how difficult it is to really get to know a stranger. (This connects, I promise). One can simply not trust their first-blush assumptions about another person. We are such protean creatures, easily tailoring our behavior and choosing or words to create the desired impression in eager and unsuspecting strangers. Who hasn't met someone in a bar or at a party, someone full of charm and disarm who, down the line turns out to be a complete jack hole. Who hasn't had a devoted friend who, even after years, exposes a personality defect so egregious that, long after abandoning the friendship, leaves us wondering how we ever missed it in them. Wouldn't have been great if we could have known these things all along?

Psychologists tell us that we make assumptions based on others' names but I consistently find that the nominative stereotype is rarely correct. Ryan is probably not rugged or daring. Pheobe is probably not bookish. Gabriel is probably not sensitive or artistic. Jackie is probably not carefree and Edgar is probably not keeping a gimp-slave in his basement.

I think we need a new system both for getting to know people and for identifying them.

As such, I suggest doing away with names altogether. At least, I suggest doing away with the Biblically or historically inspired words that we tend to use simply to identify individuals and not for any other purpose, words like William, Olivia, Sara, Michael, Ben, Miriam and, yes, Thomas. I think we should return to descriptive, tribal-style names that identify us by some meaningful aspect of ourselves.

I don't mean that we should go back to having names like "Little Tiger," "Fleet as the Wind," or "Sits in Silence." And, I don't mean that we should somehow update such a system for a modern and industrialized world. We could hardly take each other seriously with names like, "Drives Real Fast" or "Immaculate Hairdo."

I think that one's name should be one's single worst quality. That thing, that one overriding personality trait that invariably leads a person to be palatable to certain folks but not to most others, that should be the way we identify ourselves to one another. That way, when you meet someone for the first time, you already know the worst and, if you can accept that, everything else about them is, by contrast, a pleasant surprise. Contrawise, you know from the first introduction whether this person has some deal-breaking part of themself that you would otherwise discovered only after devoting emotional energy in the befriending.

This cold be tremendously illuminating:

"Hey, do you know what Can't Keep it in His Pants and Never Shuts Up are doing tonight?"

"Yeah, those two, Thinks He's Elvis, Indeterminate Gender and Drowns Kittens for Fun are all going to a Fellated a Record Executive concert."

It would make the interactions between persons that are somehow so opaque much easier to understand:

"Did you hear that Always Compensating, Condescendingly Erudite and Never Been Wrong got in a big fight at the bar last night?"

Or perhaps:

"Smells Funny, and Always Flirting broke up because he caught her talking to Date Rapist. On the other hand, I think Beats His Kids is going to pop the question to Daddy Issues."

This system is not perfect, of course. One can always just lie about their name. I suspect we would all learn to be suspicious of those strangers with innocuous-sounding signifiers like, "Doesn't Use His Blinker," "Coffee Snob" or "Hugs too Hard." There are also some insidious and life-destroying character faults that large numbers of people have so there would be a lot of people named "Alcoholic," "Compulsive Materialist" and "Desperate to be Loved." We'd also have to get pretty creative or a third of everyone would be named "Ugly," "Asshole," "Dickhead" or "Bitch." Finally, it's likely that individuals' names would changes several times through their lives so I'm not sure what this would to do to tax collection but none of these things are insurmountable in the face of the benefits to our psychic wellbeing.

All that said, I've got to go. Speaks in Movie Quotes, Always Asks if She's Fat and No Tact at All asked me to go to see Can't Keep a Job's band. Be good to yourselves.

Love,

Legend in His Own Mind

Things I Hate - Redundancy

2011-05-22T12:54:00.001-05:00

Repetition. Repetitiveness. Duplication. Reiteration. Tautology.

Hate it. Despise it. Disgusted by it.

The Wallflower at the Orgy

2011-04-30T14:52:00.000-05:00

There is no such thing as objectivity in news, especially not in televised news.

I don't say this because I am a cynic or because I have some bone to pick with journalists but because I recognize that the very nature of news is anti-objective. By simply pointing a camera at something or committing words to paper, objectivity has been discarded and significance conferred. This is not to say that fairness in reporting should not be the greatest goal of the profession; it should be. Objectivity, like any other form of perfection, is impossible but nonetheless worthy of being pursued, no matter how asymptotic the path. Because this latent bias is often so subtle that even the journalists, themselves are not fully conscious of it, the public must be attuned to the many ways that media, through design or accident, subtly alters the perception of its subjects.

This whole tirade was inspired as I watched a rerun of Christiane Amanpour's recent documentary series God's Warriors, a trio of works that I found both inspiring and terrifying and that I highly recommend. It is also a terrific example of what I'm trying to explain.

Amanpour interviews a number of Iranians in the course of the series and she states openly at one point that she is originally Iranian. According to her Wikipedia Profile she lived in Iran until her adolescence. The reasonable assumption is that she speaks Farsi and can probably communicate clearly with the people she is interviewing. Despite this, she is never seen or heard speaking Farsi. All of her questions to interviewees are delivered in English and responses are delivered in the speaker's own language, which we presume to be Farsi. The answer is then translated in voiceover by someone other than Amanpour.

This raises some obvious questions about how the interviews are framed. Since the interviewees begin responding immediately after the question is asked in English without waiting for a translation, they have obviously been primed on the question in advance. With whom did they speak? Did Amanpour ask the questions herself? Did a translator? Was there even a translator present? If there was, why? Is Amanpour idiomatically fluent in Farsi or did her day to day use of the language end when she left Iran as a child? Did CNN or any of the interviewees request an additional translator to be double sure of correct communication?

I'm not suggesting any malfeasance on CNN or Christiane Amanpour's part. In fact I hold Ms. Amanpour in the highest of respect. This could have been a basic production decision made based on the fact that the primary audience for this program is American. It could be a time issue. CNN might simply have wanted viewers to identify with the reporter. It is also possible that Amanpour is not comfortable enough in her Farsi to conduct such interviews. In the minds of the production team, this was probably an innocuous decision. For the most part it was and likely, few other people even noticed. This does not change the fact that what we saw on the show cannot simply be taken at face value.

The television programs we see on the twenty four hour cable cycle or on our local affiliates are the result of some very complex interplay between public welfare, professional ambition, cultural relevance, pleasing sponsors, attracting viewers and trying to get a hold on that ever elusive beast, the truth. But we, the viewing public, must be careful to watch closely the subtleties of reporting and of television production and always wonder if they conceal some deception. Television is the greatest tool of public opinion and the greatest weapon of ideology ever created. We must be skeptical lest that weapon be turned on us.

Play Jesus to the Lepers in Your Head

2011-04-23T14:22:00.004-05:00

What do we do when our own values fail to match up with one another, when one holds two sets of prescriptive ideas that collide?

São Paulo, Brazil, recently banned all outdoor advertising: billboards, placards on buses, corporate murals, neon beer signs and sponsorship-fetishist artwork, all gone. The UK, where I spent much of my childhood, has never allowed highway billboards. I approve of these measures. Advertising has crept into every crevice of our lives such that we cannot consume media of any kind or move about public space without drowning in a putrid bog of Madison Avenue barking.

There are a number of people in the US who want to criminalize the burning of the national flag. There is another group, though containing many of the same people, who want to mandate English-only signage in public places and declare English the official language of the US. While I understand the desire to preserve an established cultural identity, I disagree with such measures.

There is a cadre of information anarchists who, because of the changes that the last twenty years of digital technology have wrought on the media landscape, basically want to do away with intellectual property. On the other hand, there is another cadre of entrenched content producers who, because of that same technology, want to enact laws that will further tighten copyright controls and even introduce intellectual property law into niches where it previously did not apply. I agree with both camps on certain aspects of that debate while simultaneously disagreeing with both camps on other aspects.

The issue in question in all of these cases, is Freedom of Speech and herein lies my conundrum; I believe in Freedom of Speech. Enshrined in the Constitution, it is arguably the most precious and sacred freedom my country offers. Any attempt to curtail it, any move to abbreviate it, I find viscerally offensive from both a considered, intellectual angle and from a raw, emotional perspective. I want, very much, to believe that Freedom of Speech should be simple and absolute.

Though, like all profound freedoms, like all actions of first-principle, it is not nearly as simple as it would seem. Speech can cause real harm to individuals and to the world at large. The actions people take in response to speech can do likewise. Now, in the age of ambient computing, information, in the form of programming code, can be action. The Supreme Court has held, rightly so, that there are certain limitations on expression. Though I abhor even the suggestion that speech should be regulated, I am forced to concede that many such restrictions are just and necessary.

I'm not intending to start, or even further the centuries-old debate about the nature of the First Amendment. I am simply pointing out that one can hold to contradictory ideas and be correct about any and all of them at once. It is in realizing the contradictory nature of the principles to which we all keep, it is in finding the ways that our principles work for or against one another for the good of the world at large, it is discovering those times when principle should give way to practicality that should form the backbone of our discourse.

Virtually no concept governing human endeavor is as simple as we would like it to be.

Half Thoughts

2011-04-21T06:56:00.000-05:00

It was there, just now. I had it. It was mine and I lost it.

The other night I began a new section of a large writing project at which I've been picking for a long time. It had been vexing me for a while. Starting as a bursting, eager, aggressive idea more than a year ago, the first forty pages fell out of my head and onto the page practically unbidden.

Since then, I've had to work at it. Not forcing it, per se, but making a conscious effort to put each new addendum and amendment down on paper. I have to coax it forward from the back of my mind rather than feeling it rush to the front as if it were running from obscurity.

This morning it flashed in my head again, like a crack of gas escaping from a burning log or a slow-fused firecracker finally meeting it's ember. I shot out of bed like I'd been bitten and ran to the bag where I keep my computer and my notebooks. Furiously, I plugged up, turned on and went digging for pens.*

Perhaps ninety seconds had gone by before I planted my ass in my desk chair, and it was gone, just gone. Had I not found myself in my chair, still in my pajamas, with pen in hand, it might never have been there at all. It evaporated like a fart in a high wind.

I'm sure it was a brilliant idea that was powerful, evocative, that flowed from behind my eyes. I'm sure it would have been a revelation. I'm sure it was the best thing I've ever thought of and I cannot even begin to remember what it was.

Couldn't have been that good, could it?

*You can never find one when you need one, a fact complicated by my habit of color-coding my writing.

Be Mine, Sister Salvation

2011-04-17T15:56:00.000-05:00

I was eighteen. She was twenty-two and we both waited tables at the same high-volume theme restaurant in downtown Atlanta. Her name was Carla Mazer and, sweet Jesus, I was in love with that girl. I don't mean that I had a passing crush or a case of puppy love. No, I mean I was obsessed in the way only a hopelessly romantic, fresh into the grownup world, college freshman can be.

She was slender but powerfully built with flashing eyes and a raven hair that she would sculpt like plasticine. She had a unique combination of quick wit, sharp tongue, lazerbeam glare and martial artist's posture that made many people viscerally afraid of her. Though hugely articulate, she rarely made public conversation, such was her distaste for explaining herself to people she considered her intellectual lessers. Though normally carrying a Vulcan-like reserve, on the rare occasion that she did smile, the lights in the room would dim in comparison to her glow.

She was, or perhaps has become in the remembering, the gold standard against which I measure all other women.

Most importantly to me, she was the first Woman, with the capital W, who ever paid attention to me. We were never romantic and, as badly as I wanted it at the time, it would have been strange for us to have been. She was, however, the first adult woman of romanceable age to treat me as an equal, to be interested in me as a person, to acknowledge me as a fellow adult. She recognized in me a kindred spirit, worth knowing and worthy of knowing her.

She took me to my first goth/fetish club. She appeared in one of the first play-scenes I ever witnessed. I did my first whiskey shot with her. She was the one who bullied me into overcoming my reservations and hitting on a stranger for the first time.* She turned me on to much of the music that now defines my taste. I can say without reservation that I would not be who I am now had I not known her then.

I'd not seen her, nor spoken to her since the twentieth century.

Last night I went to a reunion event for the denizens of that long-defunct club to which she introduced me. She was there and she didn't recognize me at all. This is not so strange as I look nothing like I did a decade past and old acquaintances often have to look twice before realizing who I am. When I said her name and looked in her eyes, though, there wasn't even the tiniest flash of familiarity.

I was never, not even back then, under the misapprehension that our relationship was anywhere near as significant to her as it was to me. There was no presumption of reciprocity. To her, I was a casual work friend that liked industrial music and could be counted on not to be a dick in mixed company. To me, she was a earthbound demigoddess who held the keys to everything alluring about adulthood. It's no surprise I have distinct memories of her while she remembers me not at all.

It's for the best, I suppose. She's not the person she was. She weighs at least half-again what than she once did. She seems to stay quiet, not because she's bored by her company but because she has nothing to say. Her eyes have lost that flash. That sense of quiet aggression that captivated me and terrified everyone else is simply gone. She didn't just get older; that's unavoidable. No, she let herself get old and she let the woman I adore fade away in the intervening years.**

As wonderful it is to have a reminder of those times, of those days when one of my very favorite people helped me learn who I wanted to become, I think I would have preferred not to have re-encountered her as all. I suppose it's for the best that she didn't recognize me. I didn't really recognize her either.

How disappointing.

* Said stranger rejected me but that's not the point.

** Strangely, though, the stranger Carla once badgered me into approaching was also at the event last night. She has aged much more gracefully and is still patently uninterested in me.

I'm Still Talking & You're Not Listening

2011-04-10T23:49:00.001-05:00

I hear a lot of talk about how discourse in this country is crumbling but I'm not that convinced. Sure, the sound-bite, short attention span, hyper-kinetic transmission of ideas seems to dominate popular media but, for those that are interested, a much more substantial conveyance of ideas is still available.

One thing is pretty much indisputable, though. Each successive generation of social networking lends itself to utterances that are less substantiative than those of the generation prior.

People who study such things will argue at great length about which online service constituted the first Social Networking site, at least as we have come to understand the term, but the first that I was aware of was Live Journal. Though it was clunky and offered virtually no services by today's standards, I think of LJ kind of fondly. Being almost entirely text based, having very few formatting options, offering no games and having no character limit, Live Journal was great for lengthy diatribes. In-fact, long windedness was a desirable trait in those days. Though posts could be as short as you liked them, the formatting of the page lent itself to texts of some length as if implicitly saying, "If you can't fill the space, what you think can't be that important." The idea was not so much to get responses, as to see how long one could hold readers' attention.

Live Journal was supplanted by Myspace, which was much more rapid-fire. It did still have a blog option though, allowing for longer, more detailed, posts. Myspace offered much more functionality and thus could take up much more of a user's time on things other than composing text. The most convenient means of communicating information was on a front page, where ideas were kept pretty short.

Of course Facebook is the Social Network De Jure and it promotes even greater brevity than it's progenitors. With no option whatsoever for lengthy treatise, Facebook puts a limit on the number of characters in a post and the limit isn't all that high by the standards of informed discourse. Posts are limited to a few hundred words at best.

And most recently, Twitter limits you to a text message, to a scant one hundred and forty characters, no exposition, no elucidation and no extemporization. This is near to the minimum length for a syntactically correct English language utterance.

What does this do to the expansion of discourse that the internet initially promised us? Certainly, there are plenty of doom-sayers that point to the sound-bite nature of modern media and that assert that discourse, as a mode of human activity, is on it's way out. They may be right and this constant foreshortening of utterance is the first plague in an information apocalypse.

On the other hand, I don't know that this is necessarily a bad thing. We were told from the time the internet first entered our homes that the future would involve more and more information, more and more access to that information and that more and more of our lives would be taken up with interacting with that information. We accepted these premises at the time but didn't stop to think that, with that much more information, we'd have to find new ways of consuming it.

Obviously, I'm a fan of the elucidated statement and I presume you are as well, since you've read most of a seven-hundred word blog post on the subject. I'm simply saying that the method I've used here is not and should not be the only valid means of information conveyance. Perhaps this push towards brevity is an opportunity. Perhaps this is a chance to distill our ideas and prune our statements. Perhaps these communication tools will force our expressions to be denser and more impactful even as they force them to be shorter.

We can hope, can't we?

...And Women, And Song

2011-04-10T02:59:00.004-05:00

This bottle. Oh, this bottle; how you've haunted me.

I've had this bottle for at least five years. I don't remember the date that I got it but I do remember the event. As the head server at a long-defunct semi-fine dining establishment, I was dragooned into working the Executive Chef's wedding reception rather than being invited to it, such is how French chefs view their floor staff.

My payment for the evening was fifty dollars, a box of gourmet leftovers and two bottles of the wine the chef had ordered from his home town. When I got home that night, I cracked one bottle and drank it in small sips with my then-roomate as she listened to me complain about how much I hated working for French chefs.

The other bottle I tucked aside. I was saving it for a special occasion, something important, some life milestone. I'm not sure I knew what I had in mind, my engagement, a graduation of some kind perhaps? I've glanced at it a number of times, snug in it's corner of the cabinet where I'm not likely to see or think on it. On nights I've made dinner for lovers, I've wondered what it would taste like and whether tonight was the night to find out. I've done plenty of celebrating and looked at it furtively in mornings and said, 'If only I thought of you last night."

Well, I'm at that age when life milestones rarely announce themselves in advance and tonight is a night for goodbyes and remembrance. So, tonight, I will open this bottle that I've been sitting on for a third of my adult life and I will take a sip of what I've been anticipating the-anticipation-of for all this time. I will do this because we spend too much time and effort on plans and regret. I will drink this bottle because it's Sunday in Georgia and I want another glass of wine. I will drink this long-awaited bottle, not because I'm commemorating some occasion, but because, any time you go to something that is so long-awaited, it is an occasion unto itself.

We don't get or acknowledge nearly enough such days I won't dare feel bad about it.

Here's to the next however many years, to the next however many milestones and to the next however many tokens of things done and undone.

As I've written this, it's had just enough time to breathe. A votre Sante!

I Know, I've Been Slacking

2011-04-08T14:28:00.002-05:00

I'll get back to it soon. In the meantime, I'm reposting one of my favorites; enjoy.

Why Do You Want To Do This?

She keeps asking me, my Aunt. She is a deeply loving but deeply disappointed person. She spent as long in art school as I did in film school and, poised to retire, she has never gotten to be the artist she wanted to be. Because she loves me, she keeps asking, “Why do you want to make movies?”

The answer is simple, “I don’t.”

What I want is to be a spy. I want to save the world through guile and guts. I want to be a gangster, a Mafioso, a keeper of a criminal code and underworld ideology as seductive as sin, itself. I want to be a vigilante and dispense justice on my own terms. I want to die and talk to the living. I want to travel in space, to see things that others have scarcely imagined. I want to overcome a disability so debilitating that others had always assumed I could never be anything but a burden to society. I want to lead a revolution. I want to be a Kung Fu master. I want to be arrested for a crime I didn’t commit and lead a jailbreak so daring it will never be forgotten. I want to be a cop that was sold out by his own people and go outside the system to avenge the death of my partner. I want to be the most inspiring English teacher in the world. I want to be a war hero, a sports hero and an antihero. I want to hunt zombies. I want to rescue the princess. I want to die slowly of a degenerative illness and change everyone else’s outlook on the world in the doing of it. I want to dodge bullets with grace and ease. I want to get the girl. I want to win the game or diffuse the bomb with one second to spare. I want to have subtitles.

At one time or another I have said to myself that I want to do each of these things, and many others and I want to do them because I saw each in a movie. When I was a lonely little boy in suburban Milwaukee I would waste my Saturdays hopping theatres in the Marcus Cinemas at the end of my block. It was there that my dreams were born, on a yellowing screen, at the rate of twenty-four frames per second, in the twilight of Plato’s cave reborn. I will never get to be a spy and I will never get to be a Kung Fu master. I will never go into space and I will never get to hunt zombies but I can help make dreams for some other lonely little boy.

The Last Temptation of Pop

2011-03-05T01:03:00.001-05:00

In an earlier post I mentioned the Super Bowl commercial for which I will one day win universal acclaim from the people that aren't threatening to kill me. Were I to be allowed to make said Super Bowl commercial, this is the follow-up commercial that I would then want to air during the Oscars.

Picture this; You're in the Desert of Bethsaida. Jesus, surrounded by his flock of five-thousand, turns the bread into Dorito's and the water into Pepsi. All of his followers bow down before him, chanting, "Lamb of our Lord, bread to Dorito's, water to Pepsi."

From over the next rise in the desert we hear the distinct "CRACK!" of a soda can opening.

The flock all rise and turn, their eyes brimming with curiosity. The shamble with trepidation up and over the rise and there, in all his glory, riding boots shining, hair coiffed, black guitar slung over his back, is a young Elvis Presley ... and he's drinking a Coke.

He drinks the can of Coke in huge, thirsty gulps. Lowers the can and glares at the recently assembled flock. They stare slack-jawed at him and then, a few at first, followed by the rest, they bow down in awe.

Title, in a bold font: "CHOOSE YOUR KING"

Following the winning of my second Cleo, I will spend the rest of my natural life taking travel hints from Julian Assange.

Why Did You Leave the Swamp in the First Place?

2011-03-01T07:11:00.000-05:00

The film, more than any other, that made me want to one day work in the movie business was the original "The Muppet Movie."

I can even remember the scene, right at the very beginning, just after Kermit is done singing "The Rainbow Connection." Dom DeLuise, lost in the swamp and beset by alligators, says to Kermit as he sits on a log in the middle of nowhere, "Singing, Telling jokes, playing the banjo, who knows, if you get your tongue fixed, you could make millions of people happy."

As Arnie, the agent, paddles away in his rowboat, Kermit muses for a moment and says aloud, "Millions of people happy?" And, the scene cuts to Kermit, riding his bicycle and on his way to the dream factory.

Kermit left the swamp, traveled across the US, gathering a band of dreamers, dodging the machinations of a murderous fast food entrepreneur and having all sorts of misadventures with the express intention of "Making millions of people happy."

It's been more than twenty-five years since I first saw that movie. Since then, I've seen it at least fifty more times. I even wrote a paper about it my senior year in film school. More than any lust for fame; which I'm not likely to get, more than any greed for riches: a losing proposition in today's media market, that one statement did more to inform and inspire my younger self to this career than any other, "To make millions of people happy."

I don't much acknowledge that ideal anymore. In the interim decades and through two different movie careers, I've become much more of a mercenary. I don't pick my shows based on their message, their artistry or what awards they might win. I pick my shows based on the rate of pay, the length of the engagement, the places I might get to travel and how much I like the UPM. Owing to the fact that my work is administrative and virtually none of my contribution actually ends up in the screen, whether or not anyone who watches or likes the movie doesn't much figure into my professional calculus.

This morning, though, I remembered what that old desire was like. I got a hint of why I got into this in the first place combined with a token to my own adult vanity, a touch of mercenary pride and the chance to "Make millions of people happy."

Weekend of February 26th, 2011, we're number one at the box office.

Starve on Crumbs from Long Ago

2011-02-21T14:30:00.000-05:00

The place is different, but I can't say quite how. Certainly, there are details to be noticed: this business that closed and the new one that opened in its place, a road that's been widened or stoplight added, things that were once shiny now showing their age, old things refurbished or replaced. The absence of familiar faces. It's different in spirit now as well. I was once a stitch in the fabric of this place. I knew its rhythms; I could sense its intentions. I knew all the shortcuts and shorthands. The sense of the place, its vernacular, its expectations were simple, obvious, pleasing in their familiarity.

That's not the case any longer. Now I despise this place and every aspect of it. I experience no reverie, no pang of nostalgia for my youth. I feel only my guts turning over with disgust. What was so redeeming about this place that I spent so many years here? I must have appreciated it for something, mustn't I? Perhaps I hated it all along and never noticed? Had the tawdry-ness of it, the duplicity of the environment, the ignorant self-satisfaction of the denizens somehow escaped me or has the place changed in my absence?

I would be perfectly happy never to come here again, to let the place to its own fate and to let my memories to whither until I am an aged pickaroon, unsure if it had ever been real at all or just an idle imagining.

The truth is that we do not have memories. We have memories of memories, half-faded impressions, recollections of feeling, lingering disappointments and dismissed expectations, known as well from meditation and retelling as much as from the experiences themselves. The tragedy of time is not that things pass away but that they remain, changing by degrees each day until they become something else, something reminiscent of what we once knew but still only an echo.

Obligation and idle habit brings me back here from time to time. I will, for now, choke back my own bile and hope for the day that the degrees of shifting turn this place into something less hateful or until the day I need never return.

A Writing Starter Someone Sent Me

2011-02-17T16:02:00.000-05:00

Your good friends at Merriam-Webster called and you've been asked to create five new words for inclusion in next year's dictionary. What are your five words? (Don't forget to include each word's definition.)

Flurritize: v (Flur it iz), 1. To cause needless fear in another based upon their perception of their own inabilities. Orig: Drivers in Georgia cannot intellectually separate snow flurries from once-in-a-century blizzards.

Flustrated: adj (Fluh stra ted), 1. To be simultaneously in an awkward and unsettling situation whilst feeling discomfort at being unable to rectify that situation. 2. A combination of Flustered and Frustrated.

Jamammered: adj (jah Mam erd), 1. To be put upon so heavily or so quickly as to become incapable of action. 2. Helplessness in the face of odds that seem impossible but are, in fact, easy to overcome. 3. A state of intoxication in which one can no longer accomplish basic tasks such as signing one's name or counting money but that can be explained as some other ailment such as exhaustion or hunger.

Retcamp: v (Ret Kahmp), 1. To sit in a a restaurant beyond the period which the staff of the establishment considers reasonable.

Unlegal: adj (uhn Lee gal), 1. To be technically within the law while deliberately trying to skirt the law's intent. 2. Being within the letter but outside the spirit of the law. 3. (business) Having been altered in a meager fashion in order to meet legal requirements while undergoing no fundamental change Ex: the relabeling of sexual aids as "novelty items" to skirt decency statutes, selling an incidental item and including some non-salable item as a "bonus."

One Year to the Day

2011-02-13T08:30:00.003-05:00

Of my friend, I can only say this:

Of all the souls I have encountered on my travels, his was the most human.

What the Fuck are you Talking About?

2011-02-11T15:00:00.003-05:00

Do not read this if you are with the press.

"What the fuck are you talking about?" is probably the question I hear most often. While it comes in response to approximately a third of everything I say, it comes most often in regards to a particular far reaching topic that I am going to take a few lines to explain for the sake of the vulgar masses.

My friend Kitten, who shall remain nameless, and I once hatched a plot to conquer the world. As everyone knows, global domination is impossible without a stranglehold on the international vanilla trade. Madagascar, the large autonomous island off the East coast of Africa, is the world's largest supplier of organic vanilla. Naturally, my nameless friend Kitten and I stole Madagascar. It is currently folded up on his desk and thus the fate of our future world oligarchy is secure and I can feel comfortable explaining all this to you.

We were also able to secure the glass skull from Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which makes us nearly invincible. As you can see, all that leaves is to secure the cooperation of the Semite Eating Gorillas of South Congo[TM] and the world will be ours.

It is important to note that none of this would have been possible without the gospel stylings of John Kerry's campaign staff, the insight of Brian from Vancouver/Boston/London/Tokyo/Lhasa/Melbourne, the nano-football that created walled city and lots and lots of coffee.

Please be advised that once the domination has been completed, the following will be required of all people of Earth:

1. All men must get haircuts akin to a young John Travolta or have their scalps implanted with microfilaments that will all stand directly vertical. All women must adopt hairstyles equivalent to Lita Ford c. 1986 or shave their heads.

2. The word "Cyberpunk" will replace all curse words and most common adjectives and irregular verbs much in the manner of the word "Smurf" in its respective fictional setting.

3. Drum Corps exhibitions will replace Monday Night Football and DCI championships will replace the super bowl. Additionally, a distinction between 'games,' competitions which do not require a significant degree of athleticism: bowling, baseball, shuffleboard, golf, Statego, poker, racecar driving etc and 'sports' which do: gymnastics, football (erroneously called soccer in the US), synchronized swimming, Iron Man etc. Anyone who plays a 'game' for a living, barring chess or go, will be limited to an annual salary of $15 and a case of Charmin.

4. The owning of stock in a corporation by which you have never been employed will be outlawed as it is patently immoral and has gone on way to long.

5. The annual compensation of any government or corporate employee not employed in education will never exceed that of a first grade teacher. Moreover, thirteen compulsory years of education will be used to actually educate the youth of the world in a critical and meaningful way.

6. All male nurses will be required to find other gainful employment as the only thing a man should nurse is a bottle of scotch.

7. At designated weekly sessions, everyone will boogie.

This will all wait, of course, until Kitten comes to acknowledge that my Wife is not, in fact, a figment of my imagination.

I hope this clarifies the situation for everyone. Please make a note of these things and remember that no one is to talk to the press.

Like Sands Through the Hourglass

2011-02-08T17:31:00.001-05:00

The guy at the next table over sat down at the same time that I did. By happenstance, he and I both pressed the power buttons on our laptops at the same moment. My machine is now fully on, booted up, logged into and wirelessly connected. I have started my browser, checked to see if I have any emails, which I didn't, navigated to Blogger.com and written all of this and he is still waiting for his long-on screen to come up.

I should point out that his machine is obviously much newer than mine. I think that's Windows 7 that he's running. (He just got to the log-on screen) I remind you that we started our machines at the same time; this post will be finished and on the internet before his desktop icons appear.

By best guess, it's taken three and a half minutes for his machine to come up and it's not done yet. Mine did it in under thirty seconds.

All Linux, all the time, baby.

The Passion of the Cola

2011-02-04T19:28:00.000-05:00

If I ever have the opportunity to produce a Super Bowl commercial, this is the commercial that I will make.

Picture this; you're at the crucifixion. Jesus hangs on the cross. The Roman soldiers taunt him, tear apart his clothes and spear him just as in the gospels.

Suddenly, we hear a choir of angels soar above the roar of the crowd. The clouds part and a shaft of holy light shines down onto the face of Jesus, who looks skyward and smiles.

Jesus clamors down off the cross and picks up his soiled rags that are suddenly pristine white. The crowd parts as the holy light follows him across the plateau and up to a Roman pavilion. He cocks a finger to the sky and the holy light waits patiently as Jesus walks up the steps and through the archway.

There, inside the pavilion, is a vending machine. Jesus doesn't touch it; he just holds his hand to it and it clicks, dispensing a Pepsi. He cracks the can and drinks the Pepsi in huge, thirsty gulps. Exiting the pavilion, Jesus crushes the can and tosses it into a bin labeled "Be Kind to Mother Earth." He steps back into the shaft of holy light and whistles. The light follows him back through the crowd and he clamors back up onto the cross.

In a final close-up, Jesus turns his face to the light above, "Ahhhhhhhh."

Title, in a bold font: NOTHING ELSE IS A PEPSI.

After I win a Cleo for this particular spot, I spend the next several years living in hiding, reading my fan mail and death threats.

Help Me Save the World

2011-01-28T09:54:00.001-05:00

There it was. It happened just now. It happens millions of times a day, on every continent, in every culture. In the time since you began reading this is has happened thousands of times and it will continue to happen, every moment or every day. It has the potential to unmake humankind. It is dangerous, it is continuous and, I have realized, there is nothing we can do to stop it.

People are having bad ideas.

Everything of substance that has ever occurred in human history, both good and bad, began as a single though, an inkling, an inspiration, an intellectual tick in the back of someone's brain. Every work of art, every scientific discovery, every act of exploration, every religion, every symphony, every engineering marvel is the result of a person's conception made real. Likewise, every atrocity, every act of cruelty, every machination of corrupt government, every war, every scandal, every lie ever told is also the result of a single embryonic thought that gestated in a human mind.

I used to think that we could eliminate these bad ideas, these thoughts, these inventions that corrupt society, that erode human achievement and that ruin or end so many lives. I believed that we could educate ourselves, that we could see past our ambitions, our egos and our own plain stupidity and put an end to bad ideas But, I have realized this is not possible. We all have bad ideas, probably a lot of them. I've had half a dozen bad ideas since breakfast, I'm sure. There's simply nothing one can do to stop them; they come of their own accord.

I then realized that it is not the idea, per se, that is dangerous. Bad ideas erupt in our brains constantly, spiraling up from the eddies in our thought flow like sea serpents and then fading away back under the waters of our intellects. No, bad ideas aren't the problem. The problem is that, though most bad ideas pass away unheralded, a scant few get spoken aloud. Most of these are recognized for what they are, bad ideas, and are addressed as such, immediately or in due time. For a small section of these, a fraction of a fraction of the world's bad ideas, someone else hears them and says, erroneously or maliciously, "that's a good idea."

That person is dangerous.

Bad ideas may never stop but the people that agree with them, those people can be dealt with. I don't know exactly what method we should use handle these people. I suppose it depends on the nature of the idea, how vociferously the extolled it or how far in action they carried their support. I suppose it also depends on whether the second person legitimately thought that the bad idea was a good idea, in which case they need to be educated, or whether they deliberately pushed an idea they knew to be bad, in which case they need to be punished.

I will grant that not all ideas are fully understood when they first germinate. Some bad ideas may seem legitimately good at first examination, "Boston will be so much prettier if we put all the highways underground," while some good ideas initially seem bad, "Nobody's ever going to pay two dollars for a cup of coffee." I'm not so sure what to do about those, unless of course someone advocates for too many good ideas turned bad. In which case, they can be held accountable for consistent lack of foresight.

Someone said, "Hey, we should build civilian Hum-Vees that get three miles to the gallon."

Someone else said, "Sounds like a good idea."

Tell that guy to shut up.

Someone said, "Let's use injected botchilism as a beauty aid."

Someone else said, "That's brilliant!"

Slap that person.

Someone said, "I've got this idea for a TV show about a girl named Hannah Montanna."

Someone else said, "You might be on to something."

Fire them.

Someone said, "Look what I invented. It's a flat piece of metal that becomes a bracelet when you slap it on your wrist!"

Someone else said, "I wanna order ten thousand."

Tell that person how stupid they are.

Someone said, "We can end world terrorism if we invade Iraq."

Someone else said, "You might be on to something there."

Lock that person up.

Someone said, "I think we should change the formula for Coke."

Someone else said, "I think that's the future of soft drinks."

Shoot that guy in the head.

I'm not saying that we can make the world perfect but I'm sure we can make it better. Who's on board?

A Confession - I Failed High School English

2011-01-21T16:18:00.002-05:00

"It doesn't matter what you think the definition is. It matters what it says on your syllabus," she said, "It matters what it says in your student handbook." She was smug, way too smug, at least I thought so at the time.

I'm often struck that I didn't do as well in High School as I probably should have, that I didn't care much about my grades. I got B's through all four years because I had so much talent. That's not bluster. I sat in class every day, read next to nothing that was assigned, did next to no homework and got A's on virtually every test I took. In contrast to other members or the "if only he applied himself" clan, I really did like learning, so I coasted through all of it without much inconvenience.

Here's my bit of shame. My sophomore year, I failed out of honors English. I got an F, one of only two I've ever gotten between kindergarten and college graduation. I will grant that I underperformed. I tried to coast through that class just as I had through every other class I had ever taken. The first semester I was lucky to have a teacher that rarely assigned homework and put a premium on written understanding and class participation, both strong points of mine. The following semester I landed a teacher who was precisely the opposite. The grading scale was skewed towards busywork, minutia and extensive take-home projects that barely interested me. By the end of the term I was anticipating a low C on my report card. I was in danger of being dropped from the honors program.

We were assigned a final project, a massive (by high school standards), literary analysis. I remember very clearly the moment that I realized that I would fail the class entirely unless I really kicked ass on this paper. So, for once, I read the entire work in detail rather than just skimming it. I took extensive notes. I researched legitimate academic analysis. I turned it in on time. Altogether, I think I put together a second-to-none English paper, at least as much as one can when one is fifteen.

I got an "F".

I don't mean that the teacher found it lacking, that she had some major beef with the substance of the paper. I mean that she gave me zero out of a hundred possible points.

"Mrs. Lehrer," I asked after class, "I don't understand why I got this grade."

"Simple," she said, "You got a zero for plagiarism."

This hit me pretty hard. While I confess that I was a piss-poor student, I did take being smart very seriously and was offended at the suggestion that the work might not be my own. It's one thing to be lazy, which I was. It's quite another to be dishonest, which I certainly was not.

"Beg pardon?"

"You did not turn in a works cited page. That's considered plagiarism."

"But, the definition of plagiarism is stealing, taking someone else's writing and saying that it's yours. I didn't do that. I wrote this." I was still trying to understand that she was gutting me on a technicality.

"It doesn't matter what you think the definition is. It matters what it says on your syllabus," she said, "It matters what it says in your student handbook." Like I said, smug.

The truth was that I had a works cited page. A very detailed one that I'm sure I had turned in. I explained to her that the entire paper, with the citations, was all one computer file that would have printed all at one time and that I was sure it was all there when I stapled it and turned it in to her. She was unmoved. I offered to run to the library and re-print the missing page right then but she would not accept it. I pointed out that I had made dozens of citations in the text of the paper and that I would not have done that without a works cited page to refer to but she didn't care. I'd come to the well without a rope or a bucket.

I appealed to the school administration and my mother met with that teacher's superior but nothing came of it. While the head of the English department thought I was brilliant, I was correctly known to be the kid that turned everything in late, that had a knack for gaming tests and that never did a lick of homework. Moreover, I was absolutely unrepentant in these regards. Despite all my pleas, when that teacher brought her fist down and said, "It matters what it says in your student handbook." no one came forward to be my advocate.

The "Fail" stayed on my record. I was booted out of honors English and had to take "Intermediate Grammar & Literature," the standard sophomore class, as a Junior. Then I had to take two English classes the second semester of my senior year rather than having early release. Ultimately, it didn't affect the arc of my life overmuch. The rest of my grades were still strong enough to garner me a state scholarship to the university I'd always planned on attending and the replacement class, "International Literature," was much more interesting than the class that I had failed. Despite this, it still sticks with me that, the one time I did everything just right, I got fucked over.

Maybe that's why I hate by-the-book types so much.

From the Mouths of Decadence

2011-01-12T08:11:00.000-05:00

I'm not big on bitching about the Main Stream Media, largely because I don't claim that my blog contains anything resembling "news" and because and because I think that media, as an enterprise, is currently in such a state of flux that making any kind of statement or prediction about it is simply a waste of breath. That said, unemployment statistics have been in the news quite a bit for the last two years or more and, despite this, most people on the street don't seem to really understand what the "unemployment" rate really is.

They seem to think that is' some sort of job-debt or a basic arithmetic expression. Contrary to popular understanding, "unemployment" is a fairly complex statistic. The DoL doesn't simply take the population of the US and subtract how many jobs are available. One is only counted as unemployed if one meets a certain set of criteria. Notably, these criteria include being available for and able to work but do not heed the type of work that one is able to do. The be counted one must also apply for unemployment assistance.

If you've decided that your spouse is going to be the breadwinner and you're just going to stay home with the kids, you are not counted among the unemployed. This is true even if you'd rather be in the workplace than the home.

If you go back to school, you are not counted among the unemployed.

If you have a PhD in nuclear engineering, a culinary certification from Le Cordon Bleu or an Olympic gold medal but can only get a gig passing out flyers on a street corner, despite the fact that your skills are being radically under-utilized, you are not counted among the unemployed.

If you are on full disability or a pension, you are not counted among the unemployed even if you would like to have a job if one was available.

If you are in jail, you are not counted among the unemployed.

If you have started your own business but are not yet seeing profits, you are not counted among the unemployed (in most states).

If you are over the age of 62, you are not counted among the unemployed.

If you are under the age of 18, you are not counted among the unemployed (in most states).

If you are on unemployment assistance until the end of the maximum term and your benefits run out, you are not counted among the unemployed, even if you're still looking for a job.

The "unemployment rate" as so often reported in the news is only one of many economic indicators that can be used to parse out the state of the nation and it is mis-used by both politicians and pundits, to the detriment of the country at large. If we needed one metric, we would be better off with something that reflected standard of living, quality of life or general wellbeing. Unfortunately, those things are fairly hard to quantify and don't seem relevant to a nation bent on profit.

Be careful with who's advice you buy is all I'm sayin'"

To the Desert, Just to Lie Down Beneath this Bowl of Stars.

2011-01-05T13:51:00.001-05:00

I didn't feel it.

Everyone told me that I would but I didn't. They speculated. They questioned. They dared and they told me that all would be revealed to me once I got there but it wasn't. It wasn't.

I argue with religious folks of all stripes on all occasions and I can put one single supposition to rest. The Grand Canyon does NOT make me concede the existence of a single and all powerful god.

Though I've heard it many times and in many incarnations*, I've never understood this particular argument. "How can you look at the Grand Canyon and not believe in god?" The argument, and a poor one, is that the scale and the beauty of the Grand Canyon is so overwhelming that one becomes instantly in touch with god and understands that all of their atheist leanings were self-aggrandizement.

What bullshit.

I spent most of this past weekend becoming intimately familiar with the Grand Canyon. I rode down one of the only passable road to the canyon floor. I floated a soft bottomed boat half way to Lake Mead. I explored one of its waterfall caves. I rode its rapids. I climbed its sheer sides and then dove into the tepid and opaque river below. I rode a helicopter out of its depths and drew hard breath at the scope of it from both below and above.

And, not once, not for a moment, did I feel compelled to concede the existence of god.

What did I feel? I felt very, very small indeed. I felt very young and I understood, if only barely, the transience of my own life in comparison to six million years of geology. I was confronted with the insignificance of my own deeds against the pulverization of a billion tons of stone by the driving force of one of the continent's most powerful rivers. I was dazzled by colors and dwarfed by the rim, some four thousand feet above. I was entranced by the sheer, unadulterated glory of it. I was humbled by nature.

But, I see no reason to invoke a singular god. Is it not enough that this place exists, carved from hundreds of thousands of layers of sedimentary stone in the Colorado plateau by millennia of pure, hydro-kinetic force? Does it not cheapen nature's glory to infer that this place must have been imagined, created, by some force of will rather than by the pure happenstance of geology and climate? Is there not enough wonder in the knowledge that this place is the result of laws of nature and that those same laws of nature can also result in the Amazon, the Himalayas, the Tundra and even in self-sustaining, motile, sentient organisms like us that can then parse out those selfsame laws?

I love this place and I will go back but I certainly will not go back to pray.

*And the Grand Canyon is just one example. Any awesomely large natural formation or sufficiently frightening natural phenomenon can be used to posit this same argument and none of them make it particularly convincing.

Buildings & Bridges Are Made to Bend in the Wind

2011-01-01T15:35:00.001-05:00

The world can be, sometimes, so hard. There is so much to balancing the realities of today and the assumptions of tomorrow, the hopes, the dreams, the expectations of who we once thought that we once might be.

Were we really made to fight like this, to struggle each moment of our lives, the work days, the abbreviated weekends, the ignorance of our own needs, the subservience to money and to people that wield it?

As children, we see adults as invincible. As adolescents we lick our chops at that rapidly approaching moment when we will become something important. As young men and women we are clueless as to our place in the world. Sometime between nineteen and thirty the world comes crashing down and, like miners deep within a mountain of our own making, we're helpless to extricate ourselves from the crush of everything above us.

The truth is that adulthood is not freedom. It is not authority. It is not everything for which we were waiting. Adulthood begins the moment that you realize that you probably don't matter, that the expectations you must meet might be beyond you, that nothing of import will ever be easy. Adulthood is anxiety. Adulthood is ambivalence. Adulthood is compromise. Adulthood is duty. Adulthood has consequences.

I freely admit that I'm not terribly good at being an adult. I want to be the grown-up that the eight year old version of me imagined, the one that stayed up as late as he wanted and that drank as much chocolate milk as he pleased, both of which I do. I want to be the adult that never tolerated a discouraging word and that never followed a directive with which he disagreed, both of which I also do, sadly.

Sometimes I wish being a grown-up was more like kids imagine it to be.

There's more to this thought but it's past my bed time.

No Man Is an Island, But Sometimes He Should Be

2010-12-27T05:41:00.000-05:00

The restaurant is nice, too nice, really. The table cloth is starched and the portions are tiny. The staff is well spoken and the service exceptional. I'm very familiar with such surroundings yet never quite comfortable. It's the kind of place I've spent too much time in as an employee and very little as a customer.

After a nice dinner I found myself in for quite a shock, my own fault really, for having failed to anticipate. Working so long in this industry, I always used the staff toilet, the sterile cubicle by the back door and never the palatial, sharply decorated customer facilities. And what did I find there that raised my ire? I found a man standing the the restroom waiting to attend me. Don't misunderstand, he was a fine fellow, polite, well spoken, amicable, competent. He ran the water for me, offered me a towel and cologne. I'm sure he's exactly the kind of person one would want doing these sorts of things. Except, I don't want anyone doing these sorts of things at all.

I don't trust bathroom valets.

I don't mean the individual people that valet in bathrooms and I don't mean the profession, itself.

I mean I don't trust the cultural impetus that says we should have valets in our bathrooms. It is to each person to be an autonomous being and to make there own way in the world. Ergo, there are some things that each and every person who is able should have to do for themselves. Making one's toilet is at the very top of the list. Moreover, these are activities in which I do not feel comfortable being offered assistance.

I don't trust the people that want to be waited upon in the bathroom. It's fine to have someone else cook and bring you your food, make your coffee, wash your clothes, mow your lawn, pump your gas and the like. It is perfectly reasonable if one is too busy, lacks the relevant skills or simply chooses to pay someone else to perform these tasks. In the bathroom, though, we should draw a line. What person feels that they are so important or so entitled to luxury that they cannot be troubled to turn on a faucet or to dry their own hands after taking a piss?

I don't like that presumption. More than that, I don't like going somewhere and having it presumed that I might make that presumption. I like it even less when I do go to such a place and want to wash my own hands I'm somehow considered out of line for wanting to perform my bodily functions and the requisite cleaning in private.

I admit that I'm not all that classy a guy but that I can fake it for a few hours at a time. If this is what upper-crust is supposed to be, I'll just have pizza.

The Long WInter's Nap

2010-12-24T08:02:00.004-05:00

I have some trepidation about winter and spring holidays. Too much of this part of the year has been rent and wrought with heartache and loss for these months to be anything but sorrowful and bittersweet.

We buried my grandfather on Christmas eve.

I am reminded of my first lover and first betrayer on her birthday: Christmas day.

I faced my first bullet on new years' eve.

I nearly lost my leg the first week of February.

My best friend from my college years passed away this Valentines' gone.

There is something deep an ominous in the coming and going of winter. There is something eternal kept in the souls of those that passed in the dark season. The cold makes the difficult memories all that harder to salve. The nights are long and the things that try our souls seem so much more immediate.

That said, it is still the time of gifts, trees, feasts and family. It is the one moment in all the year when everyone agrees on what is important and that thing is not profit, not career, not sports, not politics, not any half-designed victory but rather the immediacy of kin, kinfolk, the giddy joy of children, the touch of a lover in cold nights, the roll of a full-feasted belly and the rememberence of times past.

This time of year will never be easy for me, but that does not at all diminish it's meaning.

To the boys of the NYPD choir, still singin' 'Galway Bay.'

Happy Xmas. Brightest Blessings.

Shelter'd Under Paper

2010-12-20T11:37:00.002-05:00

I was four and I had stumbled into my father's workshop. My father was a puppeteer, a master of wood and silk and string. I had seen all of his shows, the dance of shapes and styles, the characters of mâché and feathers come to life. Now, I was in the room where the dancing had stopped.

My mother was mortified. She had heard anecdotes about children who had been scarred by encountering such a sight, friends and animate educators dangling, motionless, lifeless, powerless from hooks upon the wall. She had heard of children damaged for life, concepts of life and death, of reality and fiction trounced, compromised by a casual stroll into a puppeteer's work space.

In fear for my future sanity, she made my father take each one down and show it to me. The Dogon-inspired puppets he turned inside out so that I could see the control rod and the slot for the operator's arm. The rod puppets he would hold low and manipulate so that I could clearly see him animating the head and arms. The more complex characters with machinery of his own design he carefully dis-assembled and demonstrated. Over the next week he had me sit with him as he carved, stitched, painted and practiced with an entirely new creation.

I'm told that, when some people meet me for the first time, they experience a sort of disconnect, a feeling that I am not of the same culture as they are, as if I were born in some far-flung and alien land but had no accent. I understand this feeling; I simply do not share the concerns of most mundane people. I'm not interested in the same things. I don't approach the world the same way. Perhaps this is part of why.

When I was very young I rarely had a crib. I slept in road crates as my parents' company performed. My mother never worried about bumps and bruises as I played pop-warner sports nor that I would be bullied on the playground. Rather, she worried that our livelihood would become a toddler's house of horrors. Others had fathers that would play catch with them when their friends weren't around. I had a father that could conjure them from scraps of wood and cloth.

So, yes, I imagine I do seem a bit different, but at least I'm not emotionally scarred.

Ain't the Kind of Place to Raise Your Kids

2010-12-17T02:27:00.001-05:00

Imagine that you were asked to go to Mars. Suppose NASA came to you and said that you are uniquely qualified to join the first colonization mission to the red planet. You will be compensated financially. You will receive all the training required. The work expected of you is rewarding; it interests you and is compatible with your current skill set. Simply, it's an all around good gig.

There's just one catch; it's a one way trip. The mission is for colonization, not exploration. You are creating a permanent toe hold in space. You will grow old and die there. You will be buried in rust-colored soil.

Would you still go?

Lately I've been meditating on the spirit of adventure. What makes someone break an aviation record, ski across the arctic, plumb the depths of the oceans, summit the word's highest mountains or crawl to the depths of the planet's interior? More mundanely, what makes people hike the Appalachian Trail, cross the continent by motorcycle or train as a pilot? For that matter, what makes me do What I Do?

There is something momentous in these people, the trail blazers, the consummate adventurers. There's a sliver of it in us more prosaic picaroons. But, I don't know what it is. It might be an insatiable curiosity, a burning need to explore, a perpetual boredom, an addiction to experience or a pathological disdain for all things average. It's probably these things and many others combined in differing measure in each person.

Whatever it is, most people don't have it. When asked the above question most people say no. A large fraction say a vociferous no, frightened, unsettled by the very idea. When offered the opportunity to do what no one has done, to go where no one has gone, to do do anything outside their narrow band of experience, to do something incredible, the overriding bulk of humanity would rather just stay home.

Where is the spirit that pushed us out of Mesopotamia, across continents and oceans, to the furthest reaches of the Earth, the highest mountains, the driest deserts, the densest forests? What happened to climbing the mountain just because it's there? Where is the drive that put us on the moon? I used to think that it lived deep in the heart of each person, waiting to be awoken, but I don't believe that anymore.

Maybe I've been watching too much Discovery Channel and spending too much time on TED.com. Perhaps I'm a little too enamored with Richard Branson and Bear Grylls. Maybe I've just reached the stage in life where I have to watch all of my old friends surrender their dreams and abandon their ambitions to the harsh expectations of middle-class upbringing.

What's so seductive about security?

People need more adventure. The soul craves peril and the spirit needs experience. For the sake of the world's psychic wellbeing, everyone needs to get out and do something that excites them, amazes them, scares them. And I mean real exploits, not manufactured stunts. Weekend rafting, manicured campsites and tandem skydives don't cut it. We should live in a world full of Shackletons, Hillarys and Yeagers. We should live in a world of people that, when asked the above question, would all say yes.

So, what would you say?

My (Old) Problem with the Coming (Last) Election

2010-12-14T11:58:00.001-05:00

I was trawling my old drafts the other day when I came across this. I never posted it because, sometime in October of '08 I started getting a little optimistic.

If any of my fellow progressives are of the opinion that this November's electoral contest and presumed Democratic victory are going to change anything, allow me to disabuse you of that notion. Neither Clinton nor Obama, once in office, will do anything to curb the the unchecked power of the executive branch that has been established over the last seven years. The constitution will remain in torn bits upon the floor no matter who is elected and no one is going to reach for the tape.

There will be pretenses, surely, but nothing with the weight and permanence that the situation demands. We might see a much-touted executive order vowing a certain mode of presidential behavior, one that does not carry the force of legislation and that could be rescinded quietly if it were ever to get in the way of a party's agenda. There's sure to be some words about temporarily retaining such privileges to more easily undo the damage of the previous administration and thus, no change. All we can really hope for is that the new guy or gal won't be as terrible as the last one.

This is the legacy of the W years. Neither major party is going to give up this expanded executive power when it's their guy in the round room. The nonchalance with which the Republican party abused it's power only becomes an excuse for the Democrats to do the same. The public is going to have to be much more vocal about making its will known if we still want to have a country in another generation.

I should have trusted myself and posted this when it was relevant.

'Tis Better to Reign in Hell

2010-12-12T16:42:00.001-05:00

"First, I want to say that the food was excellent," he said, slurring a bit. That's a good thing for a restaurant manager to hear. The fact that it was preceded by a "first" is bothering me a bit, though. I keep listening. "But at our table we've got three corporate attorneys, two brokers and a vice president for a fortune five hundred and I've got to say that the service was piss poor."

Now, this bothers me. I manage a restaurant* so it behooves me to make people happy. Poor service makes customers unhappy. What the professions of six of the eleven people at the table matter, I don't know, but displeased customers are displeased customers.

The complainer, who I should reiterate was a bit tipsy went on for a bit, alternated between compliments on the decor, and the food and laments on the service. Most of his complaints seemed to revolve around my server not being impressed enough by this customer's station in life. He used the worlds "Two million dollars in annual income," at least four times in five minutes.

I comped him a beer, carefully apologized without ever using the word "sorry" and then let him stagger off to contemplate his wealth. Again, leaving a customer unhappy is a bad business move but what on earth makes this man think that bragging about his party's income is going lend more urgency to his complaint?

I understand mentioning the possibility that, if pleased, he might spend a good sum of money here; that makes sense, But, to allude to your financial standing as often as you blink makes me think that you might not be the caliber of person that I want in my restaurant.

*I wrote this several years ago whilst in the midst of my old career.

A Recent Conversation on Facebook

2010-12-10T17:04:00.002-05:00

White Lightning: When did "compromise" become such a dirty word? I was under the impression that that was the idea of our system of government. There are politicians on both sides of the aisle who are engaging in a war to advance their own agendas, and the only casualties will be the American people. I hope their constituents remember that. Also, I think puppies are cute. That's right, I said it!

Tall Knife Guy:The only thing better than puppies are American puppies who are willing to put aside their differences and work together for the benefit of our nation.

White Lightning: I think my voting record will show that I've always been pro-puppy. Even when it wasn't popular in mainstream politics.

Tall Knife Guy: I seem to remember a time when you were leaning towards a more pro-kitten agenda, but I like that you have been able look past the partisan politics on both sides.

Thomas: It's also important to remember that we are not just a nation of Puppies and Kittens but also a nation of Fish, Reptiles, Exotic Birds and Pot-Bellied Pigs and that they are Americans just as much as any other non-biped.

Tall Knife Guy: Cripes, can't we have have one political discussion without dragging all the minorities into it?

White Lightning: There may have been a couple of occasions, during college, where I was in the vicinity of a kitten and I may have stated that the kitten did not smell overly offensive, but I did not inhale! As for non-bipeds, I welcome them to our culture, as well as they follow the legal immigration process. Or if they complete two years of college or serve in our military.

Thomas: Then, Sir, do you support a repeal on the NLNL (No Lizards with No Legs) policy that has been the rule of law in the Armed Services for more than twenty years? Is it not time that Serpentine Americans be allowed to serve openly, with pride and dignity?

White Lightning: A good question, an important question. I believe NLNL is an outdated policy and should be repealed. However, in a time of war, when so many reptiles will have to serve so closely together, I feel it is not the time. I feel many Lizards will be weary of having their legs ogled by Serpentine Americans, whether those fears are valid or not, and that could have a negative effect on morale.

Tall Knife Guy: This is getting a little too left wing up in here.

Thomas: Which brings us to the very important topic of the Avians with Asymmetrical Disabilities Act.

Such was my day.

Your Real Daddy Was Dyin'... But I'm Glad We Talked

2010-12-04T04:36:00.004-05:00

Is it not enough to love the world?

Is it not enough to be content with one's self?

Can we not subsist on our own dreams and the manifestations, for better or otherwise, thereof?

We have been given, told, sold and shouldered with a lifetime of middle-class, white-bread, generation-old expectations that tell us that we should want the things that our parents and grandparents had.

The truth is that our grandparents were simply glad to have survived the first half of the last century and our parents were so entitled as a generation to never know to want something else.

Mine is the first generation never to be told that we will do better than the generation before, that we cannot expect to make more money or live in a better world than that left by our fathers. We have inherited responsibility, expectation and guilt without being given promise or purpose and we've not bothered to speak up.

We need not struggle for salary and success. We should not have to prove ourselves to a power structure that keeps aging but not dying. Our desires, our ambitions, our plans should not have to be passed over and approved, but we keep finding that this is the case, nonetheless.

By virtue of this moment in history, the time when the largest, vainest and most entitled generation ever born, the generation that birthed us, grows old in step with constantly extending possibilities of human life expectancy, we will be left with nothing but scraps and vinegar from a table that should long have been abandoned, cleared and reset.

Why do we not get the chance to remake the world in our own image? Why do we not get to define the terms of our own adulthood? Why does the moment when we assume never seem to come to pass, not in terms of authority, not in terms of creativity, not in terms of generational significance? Why do we always seem to answer to those older or younger than we but never to ourselves?

We are the generation that will never inherit and we should be much more pissed about it than we are.

Sweep the Leg, Johnny

2010-11-27T15:50:00.001-05:00

Several times a year, some major league athlete/asshole does something profoundly stupid and socially unacceptable. They issue a public apology, give an interview with a major sports news* outlet about how the situation got away from them. They get suspended or fined by the league and they get some sort of token legal punishment. There are several hundred hours of commentary on the twenty-four hour networks but that's pretty much all there is to it: some chit-chat and a slap on the wrist.

Notice, though, that these overgrown teenagers never really get hurt, not in the literal sense. Commercial athletes are, by virtue of their profession, in very good physical condition, highly confident and of larger than average stature. Generally speaking, they're not the kind of guys that get their asses kicked in public.

For a few months during my junior year in college, I bounced at one of the toughest clubs Atlanta. (This connects, I promise). Most such establishments hire steely-faced men better than six and a half feet tall to marshal their patrons. This makes a certain degree of sense. Your run-of-the-mill bouncer type is intimidating and can, without being overtly hostile, get what he wants out of people simply by his imposing size and threatening glare. This works very well if you need to inspire fear in belligerent frat boys. However, if you club is full of disenfranchised skinheads, bar-wrecking urban motorcycle gangs and South American futball hooligans**, then you have a plurality of your clientèle that is constantly itching for a fight and that probably knows how to win one. Simply being big and mean-looking doesn't cut it with any these people.

During my time at the club our security staff consisted of one former prison guard, one Marine reservist, three former cops, five discharged Army Rangers, and five part-timers that all had day jobs as martial arts instructors. One of those part-timers was a one-hundred and five pound woman named Liz who I once saw shatter a cinder block with her bare hands. Then there were a half dozen college kids like me that were all aspiring bartenders or DJ's. Most of us didn't know how to handle people when we first got hired but the "fifteen brass men" brought us up to snuff pretty quickly. Nobody on our security staff was taller than 6'1" and we were very good at marshaling an inherently violent clientèle, even when outnumbered.

Well-trained bouncers can easily marshal a person, even a person that outstrips them in size, without causing injury. That is unless the person being marshaled is gunning for an all out fight and is sober enough to actually have one. That usually ends with the instigator taking a ride to the hospital.

What happens if one of these pampered tough guys from the world of multi-million dollar emotional children were to get in a row with someone like one of my old colleagues. What if they got in a fight with someone with the experience and wherewithal to competently fight back? Suppose a star NFL quarterback were to swing a broken bottle at my old friend Liz and ended up with a shattered kneecap, a blown-out elbow and thirteen fewer degrees of peripheral vision than when he arrived? Exactly this did happen to a pipe fitter. He spent six months in jail for assault and, when he tried to sue the club, he lost and was successfully counter-sued.

I doubt it would come out that way if the pipe fitter had been a nationally famous athlete. Sure, he might have spent the night in jail or in the hospital but he wouldn't have actually done time. His suit probably would have been successful and, though his athletic prowess is probably insured through Lloyd's of London, he'd be awarded a million dollar judgment against a working class woman who was only defending herself against a man thrice her size.

People wonder why I hate sports so much.

*"Sports News" might be an oxymoron.

** This was on Sundays, Thursdays and Saturdays, respectively. Ska night, 80's night and Brazilian Carnival night.

The Food is Terrible and the Portions are so Small

2010-11-24T18:19:00.004-05:00

"I'm sorry, but we just don't have anything for you."

Those are hard words for a waiter, someone who makes their living by providing for others and by winning their good graces. Unfortunately, it was what I had to say.

This family was of middle-eastern descent. The mother wore a hijab. They asked polite but in-depth questions about how our kitchen was kept. They were clearly Muslim and devoutly so.

"Do you take issue with food that is fried in the same oil or cooked on the same surface as haram?" I asked.

"No, we can't have any of that, I'm afraid," the father said.

"Then, I'm sorry, but we don't have anything for you. The pork sandwich and the burgers are cooked on the same flat-top. The pork ribs and the steaks are cooked on the same grill. We cook the pork egg rolls in the same fryer as the chicken and everything else. You could, perhaps, have a green salad, but I have to warn you that we have chopped bacon on that kitchen station. I'm really very sorry."

The father started to get up and his family followed suit. He shook my hand and said, "No, don't be sorry at all. Thank you for letting us know. I'm sorry we can't eat at your restaurant."

They left smiling, albeit without having a meal.

The general manager saw them leaving and pulled me aside. I explained what had happened and he took me back to the office and admonished me never to do such a thing again, indeed that I would be written up if I ever told customers to leave the restaurant.

Their religious proclivities do not matter, he told me. If I hadn't told them the configuration of our kitchen, they would never have known. They're being overly sensitive and I'm costing the store money by coddling them. According to him, we're there to make a profit and not to cater to "every religious fringe crackpot that walks into the place."

I'm glad I don't work there anymore.

Man is a Giddy Thing

2010-11-21T13:30:00.003-05:00

I don't often get startled by a twist of phrase, particularly not by song lyrics. I'm too widely read and too jaded. Once in a while, though something leaps out in a moment of half-paid attention.

Love it will not betray you
Dismay or enslave you, it will set you free
Be more like the man you were made to be
There is a design, an alignment, a cry
Of my heart to see,
The beauty of love as it was made to be

From Mumford & Son's Sigh No More.

In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle

2010-11-19T18:49:00.001-05:00

I cannot sleep tonight.

I normally sleep like a narcoleptic rock that's recently had a concussion. I fall asleep after only a few minutes and you'd have better luck rousing Kurt Cobain that you would have waking me.
I can sleep through storms, traffic noise, neighbors' parties and street concerts.

One Saturday, when I was in high school, my stepfather suffered a mild heart attack just after dawn. My mother woke me for the fifteen seconds it took her to tell me what was happening, that I shouldn't worry and that she would call me after the ER doctor had seen him. She tells me that I asked if I should come with them and that she said no, though I honestly don't remember the conversation because I was really still asleep. I then proceeded to sleep through an ambulance and three fire trucks, with lights and sirens on, pulling up to the house, a half dozen EMTs tramping through the house, dragging a stretcher up the stairs to my parents' bedroom and hauling my stepfather out through the garage. I slept through my mother calling three times from the hospital. I only woke up four hours later when my parents returned home and actually shook me to wake me up and tell me that everything was okay. I'm not heartless; I just sleep that deeply.

I own four alarm clocks. It takes that much to wake me up.

And I cannot fathom why I can't sleep a wink tonight. Nothing's on my mind. I've no deadline looming and no personal crisis to contain. I'm good for money and pretty much happy all around. Things have been going pretty well for me lately, save a bump on my bike but I'll heal from that in short order. I got plenty of sleep the last few days and I'm not hugely off my circadian rhythms but here I am looking dawn in the eye on a one cup of coffee day and I'm not even drowsy.

WTF?

The Secret to Low Budget Film Making

2010-11-06T14:42:00.003-05:00

Actually, the two secrets.

I've worked on a number of small shows, from the simply low-budget where I was paid on the lowest tier union contract, the one specifically crafted for producers that don't have any money to throw around, to micro-budget shows where I was paid less than I would make frothing cappuccinos, to all deferment shows where I was paid nothing at all.

Some of these productions ran like well oiled machines; some were agony for producers and crew alike and this had next to nothing to do with available funds. Despite all the warnings from college professors and indie rags about the difficulty of getting a good crew for little money, it's not actually that hard provided you do two things right.

Film crews, even crews full of seasoned professionals, will strip naked in the winter and crawl miles over dirty broken glass* provided you remember two things: food and paychecks.

Simply, you must feed your staff. You must feed them tasty, hot, professionally prepared, abundant food and you must feed it to them on time, everyday. No matter how small your show, find someone with experience on big movies and have them handle your catering and your craft service. Do not be afraid to spend and even waste money in this regard. If it comes to a choice between catered meals and a second camera, or a fancy crane or an expensive location, put your cash into the chow. It will save you money and time in the long run.

The Crafty table must be stocked with hot coffee, bottled water and an abundance of beverages and snacks every minute of the working day. Lunch must have several hot choices, as well as salad, side-dishes and other accouterments and there must be enough of it so that the entire crew can eat as much as they want without risk of running out. Your crew must be able to sit down somewhere warm and dry and have a full thirty minutes to eat. Lunch must be served six hours from general crew-call time and not one second later. Do not serve pizza. If your shooting day goes more than twelve hours, you need to serve an additional meal. You should also serve breakfast if you can afford it.

The reasons for this are two fold, first, food keeps your crew well-fueled. Set work is physically grueling, emotionally taxing and the hours are horrendous. Making sure that your people stay fed, caffeinated and hydrated ensures that they will have the energy and the will to carry out your vision. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it makes your crew feel valued. It is the most obvious, most visceral thing you can do to let them know that their hard work is appreciated. It goes a lot further than a pep talk or assurances of how great the finished movie is going to be.

If you have any real budget to speak of, you will have a professional crew that expects to get paid. Paychecks must be delivered on time and they must be correct to the penny. There is no wiggle room on this. While the popular conception of American film shows us a world of glitz, glamor and wealth, the truth is that most people in the industry are working-class mercenaries that are doing it to make a living. They are probably taking a steep pay cut and enduring a major headache by working on your project. You have to show that you respect their experience and participation by paying them the correct amount and paying it to them when you say you are going to.

If your project is truly micro-budget and you are either paying your people a token stipend, (I did a show for $20 a day, which worked out to about $1.40 and hour), or if your crew is entirely volunteer, you must make up the difference in pay with food. The less your people are getting paid, the better you have to feed them.

This post is probably a let down to those of you that googled independent film making looking for tips on how to get your movie picked up for distribution or how to get slots at prestigious festivals. The truth is, how well your crew is treated, how much faith they have in you as a producer or director and how committed they are to your project, affects the entire endeavor. Keeping your crew on task and moving efficiently by force of will alone is going to burn you out, turn you off to your own work and make you unpopular with the very people that should be most behind you. Keep your people full and properly compensated and your production will be a thousand times easier.

Heed my advice, food and paychecks. Everything else will take care of itself. Here endeth the lesson.

*This is a metaphor any hyperbole. Do not actually ask a crew to do this.

A Quarrel, Between the Present and the Past

2010-10-30T13:06:00.006-05:00

The woman at the table beside me is fairly old. I'd peg her for mid to late eighties, though in the the new millennium, one can hardly tell. Some people seem elderly at sixty-five and some are vital and young as they approach a century. I only guess her age thus because she's sitting with a sixty-something woman with all the trappings of an aging baby boomer who keeps calling her 'Mom.'*

The younger woman is sensibly dressed in a style quite fashionable and appropriate to her age. She has a short-chopped hairstyle that is business-presentable but will morph into old-lady-puff inside of a decade. She has all the speech patterns, mannerisms, posture and bearings of level-headedness and passing authority. It's easy to imagine her as a department administrator, a case supervisor or an assistant principal; she's someone's boss, but no one important. She's been nursing the same glass of white wine for more than an hour now.

The mother, though, is something else entirely. Gruff in manner, abrupt in mannerism, she sports a beaten up mens' work shirt, loudly-colored sneakers and she curses constantly. She's dyed her hair dark and wears it long despite her obvious sheaves of years. She entered with a banjo slung over her shoulder and, from hearing her talk, she's in a bluegrass band and has been for most of her life. She's something of a rascal and it's hard to imagine her as anything sensible at all. She's finished four Amstels since arriving.

Though with affection, the younger woman treats her mother with some obvious distance and more than a little impatience as if she were senile, which she clearly is not, or perhaps an unruly child that has chosen to behave for an afternoon. The mother chafes at her daughters admonition. They see eye to eye on nothing at all and are used to this immutability.

I am forced to wonder how one such woman could produce another that is so clearly different. Perhaps the daughter was raised by her father or by her grandparents. Maybe being straight-laced and professionally sensible is a daughter's way of rebelling against a libertine mother. She could be adopted.

I have heard that we are all doomed to become our parents but, in this case at least, that is not the case.

*This particular utterance, "mom," though I've been hearing it all my life, has always sounded a bit awkward to me. Having spend my earliest years in England, I call my mother "Mum," despite having lost all the other apprehensions of an English accent. My American relatives never called my maternal grandmother, the Matriarch of that side of the family, 'mom' either. She was always "Ma" to her four children. To me, "mom" is an alien word spoken by others to others.

And Some Days...

2010-10-24T16:07:00.001-05:00

...you find yourself on an unswept porch wondering how many ducks the devil would take into a bar. You'd slept into the afternoon, waking just in time to see the dapple light of decaying afternoon in autumn. You take a long walk only to find that you're destination won't see you until Monday and you resolutely decide not to worry about winter peering ominously at you from the other side of November. For just one moment, you sip tea and wonder if it might all turn out okay and then wonder why these moments seem to happen less and less as each year goes by.

I Would Walk Five Hundred More

2010-10-19T16:47:00.000-05:00

I wrote this a few years ago after an accident that nearly cost me my leg but never posted it. I guess it's time.

"Can I help you?" I keep getting asked.

Not at a store or in a restaurant or some other establishment where "Can I help you?" indicates a culturally sanctioned business arrangement. No, people keep saying this to me because I look like I actually require assistance.

I banged up my leg a week or so ago. It's all my own fault and I had it coming. I'll heal up pretty well, save for a scar, in another week or so. In the meantime, my knee is badly swollen, making walking awkward and a bit uncomfortable. This being the case I am temporarily using a cane and ambulating with an inelegant gait. This has led a number of people, mostly strangers but even a few friends, to exercise their limited samaritanism and offer to help me move about, again and again and again.

It's not that I don't appreciate the good will of those around me. I do, in fact, appreciate it very much. I'm privileged to have so many people about me on a daily basis that are willing to concern and even inconvenience themselves on my behalf. On the other hand, I'm injured, not crippled. I need to move about under my own power, without assistance, because I should be the one to deal with my own inadequacies and I am the one who should deal with the consequences of my own actions.

The big issue, really, is one of pride. Permanently injured or not, to suggest that one is not capable, as offering help does, bruises the ego. It is important, to me at least, that everyone understand that I am not less of a person because I walk with a different stride or because I need to pace in a circle every so often to keep my knee from stiffening. It is vitally important that I prove to others and to myself that my injury, however temporary, can't keep me down. It hurts, just a bit, when someone insinuates, even unintentionally, that I may be less than who I was two weeks ago.

It's not that I'm ungrateful. It's that goodwill doesn't always take the form of charity. Sometimes goodwill needs to be faith in someone one's ability to overcome.

Half the Man I Used to Be

2010-10-14T18:03:00.002-05:00

We have been hearing for years about how society's expectations of women are unreasonable. And, they are. Women should not be expected to be the nymphomaniacal, perfectly understanding, macho, waifs they are often portrayed as in normative popular media, both mother and lover and somehow perfectly not either. Women, as a group, have every right to disapprove of and rebel against stereotypes and I applaud every such effort.

I hear very little said, however, about the unfair expectations regarding men. While the female image of perfection is often unattainable and therefore unreasonable it is exactly that, an image. The female ideal of perfection is, in large part, a physical ideal.

The expectations of men, however, are pervasive and invasive, reaching into every aspect of a man's life. Moreover, these expectations, emotionally, intellectually, professionally, financially and spiritually are every bit as unreasonable as those expectations heaped upon women. A man is expected to be a feminist and respect the equality of women in all things but is still put upon to open doors and buy drinks. Men are supposed to chagrin the objectification of women, to be unconcerned with sex, but are still expected to be world class lovers. Men are expected to be sensitive and open to the needs of others, compassionate and understanding, but men are also expected to keep a level head and never need such understanding themselves. Men are to be sensitive and understanding while never complaining about being the butt of jokes about body hair, toilet seats and shaving scum.

A man is required to suppress violent and competitive urges but is still expected to defend his mate and his family and be professionally and financially successful. Additionally, a man is charged with the second hand success of his mate. A powerful male lawyer, for instance, can date or marry a waitress and her looks or her charm are enough justification. On the other hand, an equally as successful woman does not have leeway to do the reciprocal as the man's level of success reflects upon her. Women can take credit, by proxy, for the success of their husbands but men cannot do the same regarding the success of their wives.

Men are supposed to express their emotions, unless those emotions involve fear or uncertainty. Men are to be tender and gentle but are never to cry and are still the ones expected to go downstairs with a golf club in hand if there is a burglar in the house. Men are to be rugged but metro, carefree but dependable, brave but sensitive, uncompromising but understanding.

On top of all this, the male body image is changing and, much like that of women, is becoming unattainable. We are now constantly barraged by pictures of swollen, abs, slab-like pecks and chiseled jaw lines. At some point in the last decade someone decided that it was no longer enough for a man to simply be healthy but that he had to be some sort of Greg Louganis - Marky Mark - LL Cool J - Adonis but was disallowed from being a workout obsessed muscle man, since that's just too macho.

I am not trying to make this a man versus woman argument. I confess that women probably have a tougher time of it. The fact remains that the expectations of modern manhood are hardly effortless.

What I really want to know is why, in a world that constantly complains about its own superficiality, is my gender supposed to manifest such a plethora of irreconcilable traits, being provider, victor, father, friend, defender, confidant, brother, teacher, therapist and soldier when we still cannot be relied upon to put the toilet seat down?

At least that last one I have mastered. Damn I'm a badass.

The Queen of Hearts is Always Your Best Bet

2010-10-09T15:35:00.004-05:00

The couple at the table beside me at the coffee shop is on a date, by all accounts of eavesdropping, a first or a second date. They're both decently good looking people, educated, articulate and they seem to be getting along famously.

But, oh-sweet-Jesus does everyone sound like such gits on a first date? How do two obviously intelligent people go on at such length without saying anything of substance? They've been at it for an hour. Granted, they now have an exhaustive list of statistics about each other: place of birth, alma mater, names of siblings, professional history, favorite foods, sports teams of choice but what they haven't done is actually get to know one another. It's like they're both on the worst job interview of their lives, every word guarded, every statement tailored not to offend, every laugh deliberate.

They haven't even tried to challenge one another. Neither of them have said anything that might risk the other's umbrage. They've not exposed the tiniest parts of their soft emotional underbelly, so to speak. And, when crafting a relationship, this is something a couple should do right out the gate. Sure, one risks being wounded, risks spreading one's secrets but is that not better than spending a dozen more dates or the balance of one's lifetime with someone unrealized as a stranger?

The worst part is, they're probably going to go out again and again and again. They'll probably end up married and buried without ever having unpacked each other's hearts.

I can't take it. I'm putting my headphones on now.

You've Got to Have a Little Grace

2010-10-08T16:48:00.000-05:00

At the coffee shop today the radio went from the Los Lobos' 1980's remake of "LaBamba" right into the Weird Al Yankovic classic, "Lasagna."

I was transported back to my childhood, to the two or three times each year when my mother and I would drive from Atlanta to Milwaukee. I was in junior high school and had a real penchant for grunge and heavy metal, before someone decided that alternative rock and hair rock were antithetical. My mother, an ardent fan of Carol Carpenter and Celine Dion, and I had the requisite disagreements about music on the sixteen hour drive.

Ultimately the only things were could agree on were Weird Al and Jim Croce. This music has, in the years since become, a point of bonding between us and remains the only non-seasonal songs to which my mother and I both know the words.

As it turned out, the barrista had a nearly identical childhood experience. Curious.

The Imperfect Storm

2010-10-05T19:51:00.000-05:00

They told me there was going to be a storm tonight. While I'll admit that there was a bit of thunder, if that's what passes for a storm these days, then I'm disappointed.

I've had a bit of a love affair with storms since I lived in the midwest as a child, since just after I was old enough to stop being afraid of them. I'm not interested in storms in any scientific sense. My fascination is purely aesthetic. I love the flash and the rumble, the trickle and the splash. I like to sit just outside the reach of the rain and simply experience the grumblings of he atmosphere. That's when I get my best thinking done.

The meteorological community promised me an "autumn storm." I got medium showers with thunder no louder than my stomach when I skip breakfast.

Somebody owes me some weather

Autumn and Discontent

2010-10-01T16:53:00.004-05:00

I never used to check the weather. It didn't seem to matter. The sky would do what it did and there wasn't much to to be said or done about it. Then I took up movies and skydiving, two things that are often dependent on the machinations of the atmosphere.

I checked today, as I've taken to doing, and saw that, come Monday, the high won't break seventy degrees.

Summer is finally over. The sweltering, sweaty, sticky, sizzling, scalding, steaming, oppressive, torrid, energy sapping, soul crushing, unrelentingly hot Georgia summer is finally coming to an end.

I despise heat. Summer revolts me. Say what you like about baseball, barbecues or bikini's, I'll take the long dark winter. I feel slow in summertime. When I exit an air conditioned building the heat and humidity slap me like a pillowcase full of fresh ash. They hang about me like venomous cloud. Clothes cling. Blacktop softens. The very air gets lazy and stupid even as it ripples and rises.

Soon, though, I can let my front door hang open. I can cross the street without acquiring a slick of perspiration. I can put the top down on my car without the shoulder belt drawing a diagonal of sweat across my chest. I can stand outdoors without getting feverish. I can be comfortable without machinery.

Long pants, long sleeves, jackets, heavy blankets, mulled cider and lower electricity bills. I can't wait.

Empty Glasses, but a Tear-Filled Eye

2010-09-30T23:53:00.001-05:00

I'm giddy today. I can't begin to tell you why but I'm just all sorts of smiles. Everything seems so jolly that I just want to laugh out loud. If I were to go to the movies I would have to see a comedy because I might laugh in a serious drama and make everyone think that I was a nutball and ruin their night out. If I'm out in public I need to have a book or the funny papers in front of me in case I chuckle then the folks around me won't assume I'm insane and laughing at nothing.

In truth, I am laughing at nothing. I'm laughing just because today seems like a good day to laugh.
There's no real reason for this. There's been no particular windfall that would make me feel this way it's just one of those days when it seems like everything is going to be okay.

I can only hope that I'll have more such days and that everyone else will as well.

Got my Vaccination from a Phonograph Needle

2010-09-28T12:17:00.000-05:00

I like what I like and I don't feel the need to justify myself to others.

I recently had some friends over for an evening of Full Contact Drinking Trivial Pursuit[TM]. Not content with the sounds of banter, question&answer and the aggressive guzzling of Miller Highlife, the Cham-pag-nay of beers, I plugged my MP3 player into the stereo and let the music play.

Now, I have eclectic taste in music. I don't mean that the way most college radio DJ's mean it: music so obscure and so unlistenable that, though varied in it's sonic stylings, only other college radio DJ's will acknowledge as music at all. I mean that I listen to a bit of just about everything from Boston Punk to German Industrial to American Classic Rock to Hair Metal. I even listen to a bit of those three most reviled genres, Country, Rap and Top 40.

While several of the gathered friends complimented me on the depth and range of my aural offerings, one or two were so profoundly offended by my choice of songs that they could not help but repudiate me for having, "the most abysmal taste in music" they'd ever heard. They weren't even college DJ's.

Now, I'm not going to besmirch my friends' taste, though one listens exclusively to 80's era punk and classic metal and the other prefers experimental trance, but "most abysmal taste in music"? Really?

The people who champion their own tastes as superior to another's are generally either cutting-edge early adopters of tomorrow's fashions or self-styled experts on the fashions of yesteryear. One group tends to be wrong more often then they are right but lack the memory or self-conciousness to ever admit it and the other has the benefit of history to inform them.

Sure, Disco was probably a bad idea but without it we wouldn't have modern club music. Hair Metal was pretty ridiculous even in it's own time but remember that it was the dominant template in American rock for more than a decade. Folk music gets popularly reinvented every decade or so only to be trashed in the interim lulls but that style and form keeps coming back, generation after generation. What so many aspiring taste makers never seem to realize is that whatever traits make a song or an artist popular, enjoyable or historically important are probably unrelated. Put another way, more people bought Ratt's Out of the Cellar than ever bought a Ramones' album. If they were to realize, they'd probably be pretty pissed.

But, what's it to them? We've only decided in the last generation that pop music is anything other than entertainment and then only because B'Boomers have pushed to historicize the music of their coming of age above others forms. While it's okay to say, "I hate this song, can we skip it?", it's quite another to say, "My largely arbitrary and generally fickle ascriptions of artistic value are superior to yours such that I question your judgment and moral capacity."

So, that said, I'm going to listen to Flogging Molly, Johnny Cash, VNV Nation, Aerosmith, Queen, TMBG, Dresden Dolls, Big&Rich, Depeche Mode, Carol King, Tupac, Patti Griffin and Kelly Klarkson in succession if it pleases me and I'm going to listen to them loudly and all the self-styled shepherds of acoustic propriety be damned.

I Came Here for Forgiveness; I Came to Raise the Dead

2010-09-25T12:41:00.003-05:00

My coffee shop closed.

I'm told that the owners had a drag-out with the landlord and decided to part ways. They're remodeling a space a few doors down with plans to reopen in the winter but that's not for months yet. So, the squat brick building where I've read, written and regaled so much these past five years sits dormant and I go elsewhere.

The new digs are okay. It doesn't have the art-house feel, the sense of careless disregard, the essence of happenstance that the other place had. The other spot was for the young and disaffected and for people who pretend so. It was staffed by tattoo'd twenty somethings that all had other plans. It had a wide facade and they often left the windows open so the air and the sounds of the thoroughfare could waft through. None of the shelves matched and they were constantly being rearranged in a vain attempt to make the place feel symmetrical. The food was terrible. The internet was slow and the whole place was strangely loud of spirit, even when it was completely silent.

This place, by comparison, has an air of responsibility to it. It feels every bit as deliberate as the old spot felt accidental. Everything is more closely planned. Everyone's tone is more hushed. Nobody smokes on the patio. The space is long and narrow, presenting only a sliver to the street. The doors seal tight to preserve the air conditioning. Everything is stacked neatly and even the chairs at the high-bar seem mis-matched on purpose. The staff is more presentable and much cheerier. It certainly feels cleaner in here.

Just as the other spot was full of artists aspiring to despondence, young floaters who spent more time eagerly expounding on their current projects than they ever spent working on them, this room is full of dutiful professionals and determined students, pecking at laptops, reading reports, studying textbooks in practiced silence. The customers around me at the old place all seemed, regardless of their numerical age, to all be younger than I. Here, they all seem older.

Are these two different places or are they two different life eras manifested in brick and mortar, in steamed milk and pastries, in roasted beans and flavored syrups? Is it only a city block that separates these two establishments or is it the divide between youth's dreams and adulthood's duties?

When I first started going to that, now vacant, coffee shop, I was different. I was still in college. I was eager, mean, expectant and terrified of the unknown future. I worked long hours at a job I hated because I didn't know what else to do with myself, because I'd not yet carved out a career. I dallied long hours at that coffee shop in impassioned discourse with other eager, mean, expectant and terrified twenty-somethings about all the books we'd yet to write, the movies we'd yet to shoot, the worlds we'd yet to conquer.

Five years on, I find that I'm one of those dutiful professionals pecking away on a laptop, just as eager and expectant but not quite as mean. I find that I'm still terrified of the future though not for the unknown of it but because I have witnessed the consequences of capricious and fickle fate. My words are softer and fewer and I find that I talk as much about things I am doing and things I have done as those that I am going to do.

It is perhaps best that that place closed and left me caffeine-homeless. Such transitions force introspection and punctuate the chapters of one's life. I don't quite know when I changed but I know that I did and it took the shuttering of that business to make me realize. When the old place reopens, I will go. But, will I stay? I find I've come to like this new place, the orderliness of it, the age, the practiced silence. Five years ago I would have hated it but that was five years ago.

Also, this place serves beer.

It's Just the Way the Medication Makes Me.

2010-09-23T14:44:00.001-05:00

Here's to crazy.

Here's to the Midtown Majorette. Here's to that lone lunatic who's idea of fun is to dress up in a hybrid tutu/drum major's uniform, hoist a baton and prance about piedmont park tooting his whistle and marching in time to a beat no one else takes the time to hear.

Here's to the old guy on Ponce with the bicycle shorts and the massive schlong.

Here's to New York's Naked Cowboy.

Here's to street preachers and guys on cartoon bicycles. Here's to the end is nigh types and buskers and the cross dressers that don't shave their legs.

Here's to all of you that make life that bit more colorful, even if you are all a bunch of nutters.

Thanks.

The Fundamental Lessons of Skydiving pt 5

2010-09-21T11:15:00.001-05:00

Bad things will happen and you must be ready for them.

A cutaway is inevitable. While there are a number of things you can do to minimize the likelihood of a malfunction, it cannot be avoided altogether. No matter how good your packing technique or how flawless your body position, one day you will experience a major malfunction and you will have to ride your reserve. It is only by internalizing this unavoidable eventuality and by learning to tell a nuisance from an outright equipment failure that you can ensure your survival.

Moreover, understanding that bad things will happen also means preparing for the consequences. Cutting away usually means losing your main canopy and the hundreds or thousands of dollars you've invested in it. Cutting away also has a set of risks that must be evaluated whilst dangling from a malfunctioning parachute: altitude, decent speed, possible canopy entanglement, landing pattern, RSL or no RSL*? These are all factors that have to be considered and rehearsed in detail before you get on the plane.

Wise, measured preparation and swift action under pressure are all that separate a reminder of your mortality from a demonstration of it.

* A Reserve Static Line and it's sibling, the SkyHook, are safety devices built into some parachutes that automatically deploy the reserve canopy in the event that the main canopy is jettisoned. There are good reasons to have them and good reasons not to.

A Suicide Rap - We've Gotta Get out While We're Young

2010-09-17T08:52:00.004-05:00

This is a strange day.

It seems that I've said this on each of my last several shows but this gig isn't closing out as usual.

I've gotten used to being that last man out, that single soul left to shut down the facility, to send back the office rentals and to walk through with the landlord. There's something cathartic about it, about walking the ghostly halls once so abuzz with the clatter and cacophony of movie making. I like the spiritual punctuation of locking the door behind me, ending the project with the loose ends all tied, knowing that that chapter of my professional life has been proofread and sent to the archives of my career.

Times are good for film makers in Atlanta, though, and a new project from the same studio is moving into this space directly on our heels. Thus, I've not sent back the copiers or the furniture. I've not cleaned out the kitchen. I'm not going to lock the door behind me. All I'm doing is closing the vendor accounts, tidying the office and changing the sign on the door. On Monday a new Production department strolls in, takes over the vacated desks and resets the clock.

I'm left to float in the void of idleness, without a gig and bereft of the neat coda that normally concludes a job.

No complaints, though. The next job will come soon enough and I will be redeployed to the front lines of the celluloid campaign. I should enjoy the R&R while I have it.

Good gate. Moving on.

And Some Days...

2010-07-03T22:10:00.003-05:00

You find yourself among the musty stacks, wondering if such places ever change. You can't find a coffee shop that's still open, though you're napping on your feet. Someone tells you that they miss the insects from where they grew up and you find that old friends can still be who you thought they once were.

The Fundamental Lessons of Skydiving pt 4

2010-07-01T13:41:00.000-05:00

Stay humble.

Skydiving is the only sport of which I know in which the more experienced one is, the more likely one is to hurt one's self. This holds true even when the numbers are normalized for total number of jumps. Put another way, on any given skydive, a jumper with one thousand jumps is statistically more likely to be seriously injured or killed than a jumper with only fifty.

The reasons for this are myriad. Veteran jumpers fly smaller, faster, more aerobatic canopies. They attempt more ambitious dive flows. They deploy at lower altitudes, fly canopies in formation* and perform aggressive hook-turn landings at high speed.

Simply, their level of experience allows them to attempt more dangerous things. This is fine, provided the level of danger does not exceed the level of experience and provided the jumper does not come to assume that they are invincible.

The number one killer of skydivers is operator error. For that matter, the number one killer of people is operator error. Whether it's things that can kill you instantly, like driving too fast, mixing recreational chemicals and, yes, skydiving or things that can kill you slowly, like smoking, overeating and a job you hate, if you ever want to have the wisdom of old age, you have to know your limitations.

*We call this Canopy Relative Work (CReW). It is arguably the most dangerous discipline in skydiving and it might be the most badass thing on Earth.

The Fundamental Lessons of Skydiving pt 3

2010-06-17T13:23:00.000-05:00

If you ever stop being nervous, quit.

As I approach my seminal 100th jump, the jump widely considered to separate the casual jumper, the dabbler or the mid-life crisis thrillboy from serious skydivers, I am still consistently having butterflies on the ride to altitude. I know and have experienced how safe the equipment is. I am familiar with all the procedures and I am proficient in all the aspects of safe jumping but I can't shake that feeling in my gizzard each time the plane lifts off.

Recently, I approached the most experienced jumper I know and asked if this was normal.

"I always get butterflies on the ride up," he told me. "If you ever stop getting nervous, quit."

This man, who I consider something of a mentor, has fifty skydives for every one of mine. He has a master rigging certificate and an AFF Evaluator rating, two of the most difficult certifications in the sport. He's been jumping for longer than I have been alive, starting out with military surplus gear and borrowed football helmets in the mid-seventies. He still gets nervous on the climb to altitude.

His point was two-fold, first, that we do something that would be, if not for our equipment, our training and our wits, outright suicidal. When you stop worrying about the consequences of failure, you've begun to believe that those three things are infallible; they are not. Forgetting this can be fatal.

More broadly, though, anything worth doing should challenge you, thrill you and, yes, scare you. Trepidation, whether fear for life or fear of failure, should accompany any worthwhile endeavor. If it does not, you've ceased to grow and should move on to something else before your actions become rote, before you get bored, sloppy and stupid.

The Fundamental Lessons of Skydiving pt 2

2010-06-11T13:12:00.000-05:00

The second installment in my ongoing series about skydiving's effect on jumpers' psyches is about one of the least discussed lessons of the sport. Though we don't talk on it much, it is one of the starkest realities, one of the harshest truths one can learn in both freefall and in life at large.

You are on your own.

When I took my A License oral exam, there was a particular question that, by the SIM,* I got completely wrong but that the instructor gave me credit for anyway. "Who is responsible if a jumper exits into a cloud?" was the question. Per the FAA, the pilot is responsible for picking a jump run that is free of clouds. My response, though, was "I am responsible, because I choose whether or not to exit the aircraft."

He meditated for a second and said, "That's not actually correct, but I like your answer better."

And that's the truth of it. Ultimately, you and only you are responsible for your own safety and those moments in the air when you are most likely to find yourself in life-threatening danger are precisely the same moments when no one will be able to help you.

All movie antics aside, once you wave off and reach for that deployment handle, you are too far away from other jumpers and too short on time to receive assistance. Any malfunction of the canopy, any wrestling of the winds, any complication on landing, you and you alone have to handle.

What can be really scary is that, even while you're utterly alone,someone else's mistake can harm you. They could be a low-puller that didn't see your wave off and that falls directly into you. They could ignore lower canopy's right-of-way or forget the direction of the landing pattern and cause a mid-air collision. In any of these situations, you're in trouble, and there's still virtually nothing that the other person can do to help if you're not prepared for the situation.

As with virtually everything else, you have friends and comrades but ultimately you have to know to count on yourself. Confidence in your own skills, training and discretion is the only way to ensure a safe and successful trip across the sky.

*SIM stands for Skydiver's Information Manual, one of several publications by the United States Parachute Association that details regulations, recommendations and procedures for all aspects of jumping. It is the closest thing to a bible that the sport has. It is available online if you'd like to take a look at it.

The Fundamental Lessons of Skydiving pt 1

2010-06-08T09:57:00.000-05:00

I don't know a single skydiver that can't say skydiving has fundamentally changed their life. Whether introducing them to a new community, challenging them beyond their assumed limits or just giving something to brag about, everyone comes back down from their first solo jump with a different worldview than the person who went up. So universal is this that there is a monthly column in Parachutist magazine called "How Skydiving Changed my Life."

What's interesting is that the life changing aspects of jumping seem to be different for every skydiver. For some it instills confidence and allows them to overcome adversity. For others it provides them with a second family. For others it is a profound escape, a feeling of freedom that trumps all other forms of distraction.

Still, there are certain lessons, certain aspects of the skydiving experience that become ingrained in all jumpers' characters. First among them:

Ambivalence Kills.

You must either do, or do not, never something in between.

This is best exemplified when landing a parachute. Once you begin to flare the canopy (engage the brakes) for landing, you can't let them up. If you flare too early, or too aggressively, you can stall the canopy, in which case you will fall straight down and will probably have to do a bracing, rolling landing*, and even then you still might still hurt yourself.

On the other hand, if you release a partial flare, the canopy will surge forward, gain speed rapidly and send you face first into the ground, which will send you to the hospital if it doesn't kill you outright. Once those toggles start to come down for landing, they can't go back up.

This is, by virtue of happening on landing, the most often observed such example. There are others.

Cutting away a malfunctioning parachute is an all-or-nothing proposition. When you reach your Decision Altitude,** you have to know, not suspect, not hope, but know that your canopy is land-able. If it's not, you have to know to chop it or you're in deep trouble.

Moreover, if you've made a mistake, and stayed under a malfunctioning canopy for too long and are now below the safe deployment altitude for your reserve, you have to commit to that mistake and ride the malfunction down. A partially inflated canopy can slow you enough to only injure you but a fall with no canopy at all is certainly fatal.

Reaching out an arm for a partner in freefall rather than flying your whole body towards them will cause you to backslide and put you further away from that person than when you first reached for them.

Failing to commit both hands when reaching for your deployment handle makes your wind resistance asymmetrical and can put you into a spin that will twist up your suspension lines as the canopy comes out of the bag.

I almost forgot the single most important decision a jumper makes. You have to either exit the aircraft or land with it because once you're out, you're not getting back in. Well, unless you're this guy.

This lesson, like all good lessons, speaks to everything we undertake in mundane life. Do something or do not do it. Commit to every action. Commit to every inaction. Mistakes are forgivable, failures of will are not. If you are going to fuck up, fuck up like you meant it.

Here endeth the lesson. Pull Low, Hook Low.

*This is called a P.L.F. - a Parachute Landing Fall. It's a standard maneuver that we all learn.

** Decision Altitude is the height above the ground at which you must cut away from a malfunctioning parachute in order to have time for the reserve to safely deploy. It varies depending on the experience level of the jumper and the kind of canopy they fly but it's usually in the 2000-2500 foot range.

"I Have Killed my Captain - and my Friend"

2010-06-03T11:42:00.001-05:00

If one were to ask a thousand Americans to make a list of the most well known quotes in the history of science fiction, a few statements would predominate. "May the Force be with you," would probably be on every single list. "There can be only one," "E.T. phone home," "A robot may not harm a human being, nor through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm," and for anyone who groups fantasy and SciFi together, "One ring to rule them all and, in the darkness, bind them," would come up again and again.

There's one other quote, perhaps the only one that approaches the near-universal recognition of the Star Wars saga's most famous utterance, that would be on nearly every list. This would be Star Trek's most famous statement, Mr. Spock's trademark line, "Live long and prosper."

What few non-Trekkers know is that these iconic words do not exist on their own. They are, in fact, the customary response to another well-wishing. It is the "you're welcome" to a "thank you." It is the "alaikum assalam" to a "assalaam alaikum."

The complete exchange is, "Peace and long life." Replied with "Live long and prosper."

I can think of no other pair of mantras, no other statement made between equals that is more beautiful or more elegant. It's true, similar statements, nearly identical utterances have been enshrined in the world's vernaculars for eons, from the Arabic statement quoted above to the "Peace be with you" that opens so many Catholic services.

Star Trek, though, introduced this idea and popularized this expression not as a statement related to religious liturgy nor even as declaration of brotherhood of nation but as the perfect articulation of good will made under the auspices of perfect logic. Here is this idea that, by virtue of originating with a purely logical, mathematically trained and atheistic character, is stripped of it's superstitious baggage and it's tribalist undertones. Within it's fictional context, it is the ultimate statement of benevolence and amity because it is intoned by characters who are bound by neither blood nor creed, who share no common distinction beyond sentience. It is a mutual approbation by characters who are of different species.

Well versed fans will counter that the Vulcan Salute, the "V" shaped hand gesture that traditionally accompanies these words,* is lifted from rituals of Kabbalah. This is true. It is also a point of Hebrew mysticism so arcane that even most observant Jews were unaware of it before the publication of Leonard Nimoy's autobiography. I don't think this fact diminishes the fundamental beauty of the statement.

This is one of those moments in popular culture. This is a catch-phrase from a television show that speaks to the best parts of us. It underscores our understanding of universal brotherhood. It highlights the fact that we can only enrich ourselves by wishing well to others. We should all wish each other so well.

Peace and long life.

*Legend has it that William Shatner cannot execute this gesture without putting his fingers into position with the opposite hand.

The Wisdom of Pop Culture - An Introduction

2010-06-01T22:16:00.006-05:00

Popular culture is artistically bankrupt, so the common wisdom goes. When it is not preoccupied with the irrelevant, the inane and the sensational, it is bound up in the trite, the banal and the self-satisfied. At the same time, self acclaimed stewards of artistic legitimacy seem obsessed with all things bleak and dispiriting. The heart of the artist, we're told, is the one that knows pain, despondence and lack. Cultural critics insist that we must choose between the vapid schmaltz of prime time television and the intellectual agony of the gallery or salon.

But, this is a false choice. Wisdom, revelation, growth of spirit, antagonism of intellect are all abundantly present in the best works of popular culture. Granted, the majority of what we see on television, read in magazines and consume over the internet is garbage, but so is most of the stuff hung on the walls of art galleries, read aloud in coffee shops and performed under the lights of black boxes. Occasionally, though, for-profit television, top forty radio and pulp paperbacks offers us a glimmer of something both positive and profound, something that can lift the spirit, something that can teach us about ourselves.

I need to disclaim that I'm not really talking about Pop Art, those works that are afforded intellectual esteem and that garnered a place in popular culture at large because of this esteem. The works of Warhol, Dali and even Hundertwasser are obvious examples. They are a different animal altogether. I'm also not talking about those bits of historical Americana that have been retroactively elevated to the level of art, the recent addition of the "@" symbol to the MOMA and a recent touring exhibit of toy robots, for instance. I'm talking about mere entertainment, about distraction and fluff.*

I've been meditating on this often lately, on these rough-found diamonds amid the vast wasteland and on how they are so often ignored, dismissed or their wisdom unrevealed. I'm starting a new series of posts on exactly this. The idea is simple, find those ideas, those memes, those manifest moments in popular culture that say something truly beautiful. I'm not looking for hidden gems. No, I'm looking for works of popular culture with which any American-raised adult would be familiar. These are creations that teach us something positive about ourselves and that are generally not considered "high art" by the people who claim to understand such distinctions. John Lennon's "Imagine" springs immediately to mind but I feel that's a little too obvious.

I'm going to be working on this for the next bit. If you have any particular ideas, let me know.

*Now, if you want to make the argument that there really is no discernible or definable border separating High Art, Pop Art and Mass Media, you're probably right. This doesn't change the fact that the distinction is implicitly made in the minds of a plurality, if not a majority of people that lack a degree in cultural studies.

This Is My Least Favorite Kind of Post

2010-05-30T12:28:00.005-05:00

And I'm kind of sorry that I'm having to make it at all but I feel I've got some explaining to do. When reading other blogs, I'm often frustrated by posts that interrupt the flow of ideas to give a laundry list of complaints or equivocations about the author's mundane life. That said, I'll keep this brief.

This blog is not widely read but I like to think that it is well regarded by those that do read it and, for my recent silence, I owe an apology to everyone who has honored me with their time and attention. I've now worked three movies back-to-back-to-back with only bank holidays and a four day weekend at New Year's as respite from the work I do love, but that demands more than most are willing to give. Ten uninterrupted months of seventy-plus hour weeks, combined with the emotional weight of relationship tribulations, an ailing parent and the sudden passing of one of my dearest friends has left me creatively drained.

Beginning next week I will avail myself of some well earned time off and I hope to regain my creative composure shortly.

Any blogger who claims they only blog for themselves is a liar. Acting without an audience is just a game of pretend. Music without listeners is naught but a tree in the forest. A film without eyes to see it is firelight in an empty cave and a blog without readers is less than a diary. So thank you to everyone who has kept checking back hoping for a new post and thanks to everyone who will continue to read into the future. My rut is nearly over.

Thanks for sticking with me.

And Some Days...

2010-05-03T01:55:00.001-05:00

You get tired in the late afternoon and nap until midnight, only to find yourself awake in the wee hours with naught to do but smell the air, ignore the cacophony of traffic and wait for the promised rain.

I've Been Letting the Blog Slide a Bit of Late

2010-04-08T12:34:00.001-05:00

To hold everyone over, here's an oldy but goody.

Tom's All Encompassing Theory of Life

This may be the only bit of legitimate wisdom I have ever produced.

Everyone has those days, the days when things just don't come our way, the 'mamma said' kind of days. Our lottery tickets loose; every light is red. Keys break off in locks; passing cars throw up unavoidable walls of water as they pass through puddles. We find that everything in the fridge has gone bad or that our checking account is five hundred dollars short. The computer crashes and the car won't start. We're the target of everyone's venom. So many things can go wrong in a given day that we're bound to have crappy days from time to time. It's something we just have to learn to handle.

In the interest of staying sane, I have concocted a method of coping.

When those days happen, when you're tempted to say, "Wow, my life really sucks today," stop and list for yourself all the reasons that your life sucks. I mean the real reasons, not the minor complaints or the life excuses, not "I got lemon juice in my hangnail, whaaaaaaa." No, I mean, "I lost my job." "I got locked out of the house in the rain." "My favorite pet died." "I got rear ended on the freeway and the guy drove off before I could get his tag number." "I discovered I have leprosy," etc. List for yourself all of the real reasons why your day or your life is so bad. Go into excruciating detail to the point that a potential listener might be overcome with despair at the pitilessness and pain of the world.

Then, once you've done this, you need to contemplate a single idea. Internalize this concept as it might be your only defense against the onslaught of worldly trials. Once you've listed all the reasons that your life sucks think about how much worse your life would be if you were forced to add to the end of that list, "And, I am currently on fire."

Nothing will seem that bad after that.

Contrawise, you may have a day where you say the reciprocal, "Wow, my life is really great!" You land the big promotion. You get home in time for your favorite show. The kids are calm and happy. The test comes back negative. You win at cards and the world generally agrees that, whatever it is, it's not your fault. When this happens, you can get some perspective by listing for yourself all the reasons that your life is good in much the same way that you previously listed the things that were bad. As before, go into frightening detail to the point that some theoretical listener would be overcome with despair at the knowledge that their life will never reach the level of perfection that yours has.

Then, once you've done that you, again, need to contemplate a sigle idea. Think of how much better your life would be if you were forced to add to the end of that list, "And, I am currently receiving oral sex."

Things won't seem quite as good as they had a moment before.

Now I know what you're thinking. "Tom, what if I were, perchance, already A) receiving oral sex or B) on fire?" I bet you think you're pretty smart you smug little shit. I have pondered this at great length and come to the conclusion that if you are either A) receiving oral sex or B) on fire, then that is the wrong time to be taking personal inventory. The thoughts in your head at that time should, in both cases, be dominated by animal instincts and guttural noises.

I will admit that there is one possible situation that my theory cannot encompass. So, perhaps I should not call it "Tom's all encompassing theory of life as I confess there is a singluar situation in which this principle cannot apply. If you were to ever find yourself simultaneously receiving oral sex whilst on fire, then you have reached some sort of zen-nirvana-yin-yang-dharmic perfection that I am not wise enough to address. I'm just not prepared to comment on that eventuality. If anyone finds themself in this situation, please comment or email so I might complete the theory.

I am confident however, that any of the readers of this blog will probably not encounter that situation so you can now sally forth into the big bad world, knowing that you are prepared for nearly anything, confidently armed with Tom's very nearly all encompassing theory of life [TM].

Here Endeth the Lesson

Following Akela

2010-03-26T14:50:00.001-05:00

I think I was seven. It was the end of the year Cub Scout meeting, the one where all the dens of a dozen kids each came together into a pack of two hundred and filled up the local high school cafeteria. Most of the pack meetings were pretty boring. They were dominated by business announcements, calendar reminders and other items of note only to our parents.

This one, though, was the big one. This was the graduation meeting at which we would all be promoted to the next level in scouting. I was a Wolf at the time and I was excited about moving up to Bear, the level at which we started doing real scout stuff like hiking and archery rather than morality skits and macaroni pictures.

The WeBeLo's made the ceremonial crossing of the bridge and were given their Boy Scout hats. The Bears were given their WeBeLo patches and scarves. Then the Wolves came up to receive their Bear patches, each boy from each den called by name to deliver the Cub Scout oath and shake hands with the pack leader.

Except for me. They never called my name. I was not asked up to receive my patch and I did not shake hands with the pack leader and when my den had all stood up, I was left alone at our table, still wearing the accoutremonts of a Wolf Cub and doing little but wonder why.

What had I done wrong?

I'd completed every exercise in the scout book. I'd attended every meeting, done every project. I'd earned the longest chain of conservation beads in my den and more silver arrow points than any but one other boy. Sure I came in second to last in the Pine Wood Derby and I wasn't well liked by most of the boys in my Den, but that should have been of no consequence. Cub Scouting isn't supposed to be a popularity contest.

It seems silly now but scouting mattered to me. The son of an overworked single mother and speaking with a pronounced English accent, I had struggled at such a quintessentially American, father/son activity as scouting. Despite this, I'd done well in scouts that year and I was, rightly I think, proud of myself.

But, the rest of my den marched forward and were each in turn awarded their Bear patch and were applauded by the rest of the Cub Scout pack while I sat, obvious and alone, without that honor and without an explanation.

A week later, after making quite a row with the local scouting administrators, my mother discovered that she had transposed two numbers on the check for the next year's dues, effectively post-dating it. My mother, who worked fifty-five hour weeks while raising a budding super-villain of a child, was up late doing bills and, as was the style back in England, wrote the date DD/MM/YY, rather than MM/DD/YY. The twelfth of April became the fourth of December, the BSA didn't get their forty-four dollars and I was held back without so much as a phone call of inquiry.

I did get my Bear patch, a month later, without ceremony or apology. It was simply handed to me in afterthought as I left a weekly den meeting. That was when I began to realize that I was a bit of a pariah in scouts, rather than simply unpopular. Apparently our predominantly Catholic midwestern town had trouble stomaching success on the part the English kid with the divorced single mother. The following year, my Bear year, I'd finished every project in the guidebook by Christmas, had more silver arrow points than anyone in the pack, won the Pine Wood Derby and then quit scouts before the last pack meeting of the year.

Granted, the tribulations of my scouting career are trivial in the face of others' much more substantial adversity and I'm probably being self indulgent by bothering to think of it. It is funny, though how some things stick with you.

I learned a lesson that day, perhaps the first truly adult lesson of my life, a lesson far removed from "to do my BEST for GOD any my Country." I learned that the world is not a meritocracy, that circumstances often conspire and that the actions, omissions and prejudices of others can hold more sway over one's success than one's own efforts. I learned that the Cub Scout motto, "Do Your Best," sometimes counts for fuckall.

In retrospect, I think the words of Teddy Roosevelt count for much more than a thousand occasions reciting the Cub Scout oath. "The boy who is going to make a great man must not make up his mind merely to overcome a thousand obstacles, but to win in spite of a thousand repulses and defeats."

Rule #2 - Double Tap

2010-03-21T17:02:00.005-05:00

Rawkstar and I went to the pistol range yesterday. Lacking my enthusiasm for exiting airplanes in flight, she insisted that we find an exiting hobby that we could to together. So, we took up shooting sports.

We've not been at it long. We've only gone to the range together a half dozen times or so but she enjoys it a lot and, for her experience level, is on her way to being a shooter of some skill. Her pattern is tight, her stance solid, her hands steady. She's actually a better shot than I am, though for the sake of my pride it tell myself that that's because her .22A is much more manageable than my 1911. At 25 yards, both of our patters were decently tight. Neither of us is going to qualify for the FBI but we'll both be okay in the event of a Zombie Apocalypse.*

I did notice something the last time we were at the range, something important in regards to this post from a few weeks ago. Excluding the guy in the stall next to us, who I garner is an ex-cop that likes to keep his skills up, nobody else in the place could hit a fucking thing. Seriously, we're talking about the firearms' equivalent of broad side of the barn here. Of the eight occupied lanes, only the two of us and the cop could consistently hit what we aimed at.

Were these novice shooters? No, they all talked the gun talk and they had all brought their own weapons. Granted, there was a guy a few stalls over that was obviously coaching his son, but I really got the feeling that his son had been shooting since he could first talk. Everyone there seemed to be a veteran shooter and not a single one of them had a pattern that would garner a Boy Scout merit badge, let alone a confirmed kill. Most of these people had no pattern whatsoever; they couldn't put two slugs within six inches of one another. At the same time, Rawkstahr and I, who've not fired five thousand rounds between the two of us, can each put half the clip in a target's vitals every time. I even triple stacked, a rare achievement for me.

Was this a fluke day and everyone else was off their game or was I right in my previous post and most gun owners are yee-haw types who care a lot more about getting off on shooting guns than on actually being competent to shoot one?

*In addition to the usual bulls-eye and silhouettes, our range offers several varieties of Zombie targets. Aim for the head.

Everyone's Irish Today, Except Those of us that Aren't

2010-03-17T00:53:00.004-05:00

Granted, I'll take just about any excuse to raise a pint and perhaps a bit of hell along with it, but I'm not much a fan of St. Patrick's day.

Though it's not a holiday of any spiritual significance, for Pagans, this might be the least auspicious day in the year.

Apparently, a number of people think that St. Paddy's is Irish Independence day, akin to our 4th of July, England's Guy Fawkes' Day or Mexico's Cinco de Mayo (which isn't Mexican independence day either but that's another post entirely). Those people are idiots. It's nothing of the sort.

Lá Fhéile Pádraig, the seventeenth of march, is the anniversary of the death of an English-born, French-educated* former slave turned Catholic zealot that led a campaign of Xian conversion throughout Ireland in the late fifth century. Bishop Patricius' notable intellectual achievement being the use of the shamrock as a visual aid to teach the Xian concept of holy trinity.

His famous miracle of "driving the snakes out of Ireland," the very act that ultimately canonized him as the patron saint of that country, is a euphemism for his systematic conversion of the nobility of the island, ending the influence of the Druidic orders and disenfranchising the Animist peasants from their governors.

So, drink up to the memory of this culturally genocidal theocrat, and give a nod to your Pagan friends with the knowledge that, while we're raising one as well, we're all drinking to forget.

Oh, and if you pinch me, I'll fucking stab you.

* To be precise, neither England, nor France, as we understood them today, existed at this point in history. Patricius was born an Angle or a Briton and studied for the priesthood in Gaul.

I am the Screen, I Work at Night

2010-03-03T23:29:00.001-05:00

Crew call was 18:00 hours and they will be working hard through the night, lunch at midnight, camera wrap sometime just after dawn, weary eyes and welcome beds come morning rush hour.

I'm not with them, as much as I would like to be. I've worked many such nights. I did one show that was nothing but. Since that time I've traded my career on location for the life of the production office.

The junior-most of administrators, I arrive shortly after my colleagues have had lunch and remain until the wee hours of the morning. Someone has to be here, you see. Like a flotilla upon the sea, the shooting company on location needs a connection to port, a single voice on a telephone waiting to take messages, deliver documents, record milestones and sometimes to extinguish fires.

I can't do much besides wait. All our vendors are closed on east coast and the west. No deliveries will arrive until morning. The accountants and gate keepers have all gone home to whatever semblance of a regular life this industry can offer.

And I am here, alone, a single sentry soul amidst a quarter million square feet of production space, left to stoke the braziers and email the wrap report.

It is the life I have chosen, and proudly so.

Republicans Will Get us All Killed

2010-02-21T12:32:00.001-05:00

I'm not too happy with the Democrats right now. They've squandered a staggering number of great opportunities this past year. This is not entirely their fault, mind you, just mostly their fault.

Despite my present discontent with the Democratic party, I can't see myself ever voting for a Republican, as their party currently stands, in a major election.

This is not for any of the obvious reasons. It's not because they're corporate shills, warmongers, fearmongers and authoritarians. It's not because they're anti-education, anti-regulation and anti-abortion. It's not even because they're largely corrupt. The Democrats have most of these same problems to nearly the same degree as the Republicans.

No, it's because they're Christians, specifically, that the party is overrun with Evangelical, Dominionist Christians that believe in the infallibility of scripture including, as Bill Hicks once expressed, "That wacky, fire & brimstone, Revelations ending."

These people believe that, sometime very soon, God is going to rend the flock from the faithless, send the believers to heaven, the rest to hell and leave the Earth to ashes. Moreover, they're looking forward to it. They're counting the days to armageddon like a kid to Christmas. I can't speak for anyone else but I cannot cast a vote towards giving the nuclear launch codes, the CDC and the mightiest fighting force ever assembled under one flag to someone who thinks the end of the world is a good thing.

Don't believe the rhetoric. Don't believe anything about saving the unborn, preserving the free market, defeating the terrorists or restoring the framers' vision. Fundamentalist Xians don't want peace, they don't want prosperity they don't want to curtail government. What they want is what they've read in the last chapter of a book they don't even understand. What they want is a generation of bloodshed and suffering followed by the snuffing of the human race in a global halo of holy fire that would leave the Earth a stone cinder.

And, they will do anything to get it. Vote for anybody else.

Liberals Will Kill You

2010-02-13T12:49:00.001-05:00

Any discussion with someone more than a standard deviation to the right of center is going to go nowhere. The nowhere shoals that such conversations like to splinter upon often involve the assertion that conservatives are better armed that liberals, that they have more guns.

Ignoring the implicit threat in that statement and what it says about conservatives' ability to win an argument on it's merits, I have to concede that it's probably a valid assertion. I don't know if there's any hard data on the subject, but I'll bet that a majority of gun owners are right leaning and, in a related but slightly different statistic, most guns are owned by right leaning people. At first glance, I'll concede that, were the political polarization of America to turn violent, as many wingnuts insinuate that it will, the conservatives are better equipped for such a conflict.

Better equipped or no, they'd still loose.

I'm going to take a minute to explain why using some gross generalizations.

It's true, in the aggregate, liberals tend to be much less enthusiastic about firearms than their conservative counterparts. However, there is a large segment, maybe 30%, that are perfectly comfortable with guns. Some of them, like my friend Joker, were raised in gun culture and came to hold liberal beliefs in adulthood. Others, like me, made an active decision as an adult to become knowledgeable and competent shooters. The point is, while most liberals have probably never picked up a gun, there are millions of us who have and who know to use them with great proficiency.

More important than the pure numbers, those liberals that possess firearms are probably better shots than conservatives. The minority of progressives that own guns value learning for its own sake. We treat shooting as a skill to be developed through study, practice and careful attention to detail and not as a way to get our rocks off. If you ever find yourself at a large commercial gun range, a majority of the lanes will be filled by guys with a half dozen guns, intent on sending lots of lead down range or impressing their friends with their supposed combat skills, people quick-firing until their clips are empty and then grinning and laughing over it, one handers and folks shooting high power weapons just because they like the boom. I call this the "Yee-haw" factor, and it's much higher among conservatives than among centrists or progressives.

There will probably be one other person there, the person who brought a single, mid-caliber pistol or sensible rifle, the disciplined individual who calmly and slowly fires off round after well-aimed round. This person is level headed with a gun and they did not come to the range for fun, they came to learn. For this person a gun is a tool and shooting a challenge. While they probably don't carry a pistol on a day to day basis, their pattern is tight, their aim lethal, their Yee-haw facto close to zero. They probably don't make much conversation with their fellow shooters and they probably didn't vote for McCain.

I don't know when the expression "peace-niks" went out of style but I miss it because it speaks to a core part of the progressive philosophy. Liberals don't value conflict for conflict's sake and we chagrin martial prowess as a personal trait. Thus, we are less likely to have bulging muscle, blazing guns, save the princess, win the medal, Rambo-style homoerotic combat fantasies. We have less desire to rack up a body count, less need to be a hero in the bad way. Thus we'll have a tactical advantage on account of not being idiots.

Also on the subject of liberals' tactical abilities, one stereotype holds true. Generally speaking, liberals are better educated that conservatives. A majority of college graduates are politically left of center. Most of the officers will be with us and not with the wingnuts, at least most people who are officer material. While basic competence with a firearm can be taught in fairly short order, command skills and tactical acumen take a lot more time to internalize. Well armed, though the conservatives might be, a functionally leaderless force isn't much good in a real fight.

Armed conflicts aren't won by bullets alone. It takes money, supplies, political cover and often international pressure to mount a resistance any more significant than a cult-compound standoff. More often than not, that support comes from another country who's interests are allied with the goals of the instigating movement. If Bushite/John Birch/Teabaggger types rise up in insurrection, no other nation will come to their aid. Their leaders have spent most of the last nine years, if not the last three decades, proving to the rest of the world that a conservative American government cannot be trusted. Republicans have consistently held the entire rest of the world in contempt. Between the bombing, the saber-rattling, the sanctions, the murderous rhetoric, the opposition to immigration, the refusal to honor treaties and the constant stonewalling of the international community, who in the world would raise a finger to help them?

I hesitate to bring up this next point at the risk of sounding racist but it's the one that'll scare the wingers more than any other. You know all those supposed pistol waving gang-bangers, all those young, lawless, disaffected Black men that, until 9/11, the conservatives used as civil bogeymen to scare god-fearin' White folk into supporting all sorts of racist public policies and draconian police practices? None of them are Republicans, not a single one. Though there are a lot fewer of them than any tough-on-crime gubernatorial candidate would ever admit, they do exist and they're all a lot more likely to have been in a gun fight than any second amendment blow hard. America's real experts on urban warfare, yeah, they're on our side.

Finally, I would like to remind everyone that, discounting minor upheavals like the Whiskey Rebellion and the Battle of Blair Mountain, there have only been two major armed insurrections in the history of this nation, one began in 1776 and the other in 1861. Both fights were won by the forces of progressivism. While I grant that this is of little tactical relevance, there's a major psychological advantage in knowing that conservatives have never won a fight that mattered.

Liberals are a strange breed. By this I don't mean the things conservatives wish I meant, that we approve of homosexuality, tolerate plurality of faith and believe a number of counter-intuitive things about the nature of human industry. I mean that there is a rarely acknowledged disconnect in our collective thinking. We value consensus. We value inclusion. We value peace and civility to the exclusion of almost all else. We take pride in understanding the subtleties, the shades of gray in so many situations. With armed conflict, though, we see no gray whatsoever. A cause is worth taking life over or it is not, with no middle ground. We will go far out of our way to avoid a fight but make no mistake, when forced to meet violence with violence, we are exceptionally good at it.

We would really prefer that conservative America play by the rules, respect America's best ideals and do their political business in good faith. It is becoming increasingly apparent, by their own rhetoric and actions, that they will not. They boast that they are better armed and they are correct about that. We, though, are better trained, smarter; we have all the tactical advantages and we've never lost a fight of significance.

So, to all the teabaggers, all the xian dominionists, all the birthers and all the NRA zealots that insist that, if your legal usurping of government fails, you'll get your way at gunpoint, bring it. I dare you.