Happiness is...

...watching The Man Who Planted Trees with your kids on Saturday then, while hiking with them on Sunday, having them fill your pockets with acorns so that later you can separate the good seeds from the bad ones and consider where to plant them.

a la carte

I have substantially the same conversation with someone different every couple of months. I'm going through the twists and turns in my history with and without cable television and explaining how my life is both better and worse in my present cabled or uncabled state. It's rather pathetic, moreso because I go to great lengths to talk about what a struggle it is for me. I can't help it; I have this irrational fixation that apart from all the other comits and omits I've authored, I'll have to face on the Last Great Day some ledger which tells me how much elapsed time I devoted to "Fantasy Island" in comparison to that which I devoted to reading Dostoevsky. Anyway, at some point in the rote conversation I or my interlocutor will say, "It's such a shame you can't just pick the channels you want. I could really do with [five, ten, fifteen] channels."

So I'm sitting in a chair on the beach back in June, reading a copy of Businessweek that was lying around the beach house. I stumbled across this story and couldn't help but laugh heartily. Really, could you have imagined a more hilarious consortium of anti-competition? I won't be able to not-want my MTV, and apparently I have Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson to thank for it.

What's funny is that my reasons for seeking to limit my cable channels jibe pretty well with Robertson's agenda of excoriating cul-too-ral degradayshun. For my sake and that of my wife and daughters, we could do without the stream of sadistic violence and vertically-shaking rumps and sleb worship and shout-down news and whatever is being passed off as programing by the people at E!. And, yeah, I know that among the channels I'd enthusiastically add to my plate I'd get different kinds of nothingness and low-end culture, but at least I'd have more direct culpability in choosing it. But Robertson knows what I know: despite the fact that I'm a Christian and a large plurality of the country similarly self-identifies (at least according to those Gallup polls), I/we would not pay any amount of money to have his cable channel piped into our living room. It just isn't any good.

Unless, of course, we were interested in watching the endless cycle of two-stepping, in which Robertson makes some indefensible statement or another and then spends a few days denying it or claiming misquoting and then a few more days apologizing and clarifying. That might be worth something.

Robertson, for his part, would likely offer some justification for his lobbying efforts rooted not in personal self-preservation, but in advancement of the Kingdom of God. CBN's continued free-riding and the anti-competitive measures necessary to keep it so are worthwhile just because it provides one more outlet for people to hear the Word of God, he'd argue. I'm not going to be the one to put a dollar figure on eternal salvation (I'll leave that to the televangelists), but I would like to see a tally of how much lowest-common-denominator, spirit-killing prepackaged masturbational fantasy Pat and the other 699 members of his Club are willing to stick us all with in order to continue evading the marketplace.

What I cannot abide: self-proclaimed capitalists who don't really believe in capitalism.

ADDENDUM 8.29.05: I intended, but plainly forgot, to address the first half of the article, in which it is announced that the same coalition will continue to agitate, through FCC-applied pressure and other means, to control the content of cable channels directly. We can wonder whether this is because direct-mail campaigns are so much easier to sell when the phrase on the outside of the envelope is HELP US STOP CABLE FILTH NOW rather than MAKE CABLE TV REFLECT THE ACTUAL VIEWING PREFERENCES OF THE SUBSCRIBERS.

Oh, and this makes two anti-competitive efforts spearheaded by Reed. Combine this with that deal a few years ago wherein he was lobbying for a Christian group who opposed the expansion of gambling in Alabama (again, a political stance which I think has merit, at least in theory). At some point in the effort, an infusion of cash was needed, and somehow a pile of money fronted by the Choctaw tribe ends up in the anti-gambling coffers. The Choctaw, of course, owned casinos in neighboring Mississippi and preferred not to have to compete with Alabama casinos.

What these two events add up to is this: if some sort of multi-era crossroads of time allowed for a meeting of Adam Smith and Ralph Reed, Smith would extract Reed's heart from his bony chest and eat it in front of him.

Dan Laugharn projects: Sufjan Stevens's Texas

This is a great list.

1. From Houston to the Moon and Beyond
2. Lights Over Marfa
3. Permian High School
4. Big Tex welcomes you to the Texas State Fair
5. Santa Anna (Remember the Alamo)
6. Crossing the Rio Grande
7. Cut n' Shoot
8. The Grassy Knoll
9. Ten Wonderful Years of the Republic of Texas
10. Texas Instruments
11. Panhandlers
12. The German Towns of Hill Country
13. Waco
14. Beauty Pageants
15. The Battle of Galveston
16. Sam Houston
17. Huntsville Correctional Facility
18. They Closed the Plant in Sugarland
19. Hey Hey, LBJ
20. Approaching Big Bend from the East

"Penn's Woods and Wouldn'ts"

All right, I reorganized my own list into (1) places, (2) events and (3) people. There's always overlap, of course, between the categories.

I. Places

a. Steel towns generally. Pittsburgh, but also Homestead and Monongahela and the Braddock/Rankin corridor. The towns' strange prosperity and ethnic vibrance dating from the late nineteenth century through the middle 1970s.
b. Punxsutawney and their inexplicable groundhog. Also an event.
c. Three Mile Island. Also an event. This will surely displace Midnight Oil's haggard "Harrisburg" as the best song written about TMI.
d. The Monongahela + Allegheny = Ohio confluence. Yeah, homer here, but it's still a neat thing to see, at least in part because of how it's just there.
e. Philadelphia's Independence Hall, Liberty Bell, various statues of Ben Franklin.

II. Events

f. The 1892 Homestead Strike. It reportedly helped in large part to hand the presidential election to Grover Cleveland later that year.
g. MOVE.
h. Dwyer's press conference.
i. The attempted assassination of H.C. Frick. The way I've heard it, as he's bleeding on the floor and people are wrestling the assassin down, Frick is dictating a telegram to Carnegie to tell him he's going to live.
j. Gettysburg.
k. Mrs. Soffel breaking Mel Gibson out of the Allegheny County jail.
l. General Braddock falling at Fort Duquesne in the French and Indian War. Man, this list is too western Pennsylvania-heavy.

III. People

m. Boxers, fake and real: Rocky Balboa and Smokin' Joe Frazier.
n. Satchel Paige and the Pittsburgh Crawfords.
o. Fred Rogers.

Shane Rooney: Sufjan Stevens's Pennsylvania

My pal Shane Rooney has sent in his hypothesis for what a Pennsylvania-centered album might look like. His list has affinity with mine. Shane and I earned our doctor of law degrees at the same time and place and share the same life-sustaining passion for the Pittsburgh Penguins. He introduced Ali and I to the cinema of Wim Wenders. He projects thus:

I will go so far as to predict the album name: "You've Got a Friend In Pennsylvania."

Using your groupings

Obvious but poignant:

1. Flight 93

Strong candidates

1. Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia July 4, 1776
2. Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia 1787
3. Three Mile Island accident
4. Battle of Gettysburg/Gettysburg Address
5. Ben Franklin

Longshots

1. There was some movie(s) about slow moving, carnivorous creatures filmed near Pittsburgh, can’t quite think of the name
2. The Immaculate Reception
3. Johnstown Flood 1889
4. Valley Forge
5. Mother Katherine Drexel (Philadelphia), canonized in 2000. Only Pennsylvania born canonized saint. http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/saintk03.htm
6. Falling Water http://www.paconserve.org/index-fw1.asp
7. Pennsylvania's lost highway: The continuous 12 mile long, abandoned stretch of Pennsylvania turnpike near Breezewood, including two tunnels. Perhaps the longest, abandoned paved road in the U.S?http://www.briantroutman.com/highways/abandonedpaturnpike/
8. "Chocolate Town" -Hershey, PA

Bits of Miscellany

I. Birth Announcement

Belated congratulations to my friend Kirby and his wife Suedehead on the birth of a daughter, Una Lou.

With a name that adorable, she's genetically predetermined to be a superlative cutie.

And therein lies Kirby's problem.

II. More of a Help or a Hinderance: Undetermined

So last weekend I helped my friends the Ottermans move into their new digs. I forgot as I went home that an enormous box representing all of their clothes hangers was tucked away safely in the cavernous trunk of my antiquated automobile. This goes on for five days while they search frantically everywhere, including both their old and new houses, for the missing hangers.

Have I just ensured that my number won't be called the next time they move?

III. That Kind of Summer

Last night Ali opened the DVD closet and stood there looking for something to watch while ironing. I guessed what she was going to pick before I heard the opening rock song from upstairs. Three Kings. It's been that kind of summer for her. Since June she's read Reading Lolita in Tehran, The Kite Runner, Persepolis and Persepolis 2 and we've spent several nights over the past couple of weeks with Kiarostami's 10. Not to mention whatever news is available to a household with one newspapaer subscription and no cable. Sure, a couple of those books have been pimped in the mainstream press quite a bit (my own reading progress from that list is limited to Persepolis and being in the midst of The Kite Runner), but it's been a middle east summer.

Shall We Play a Game? (Sufjan Stevens-related)

Last Saturday I spent the day with the girls at an amusement park with far, far too many people per square foot contained therein. The water park portion was especially unsettling, particularly one shallow pool which contained way too many people on way too hot a day. At one point I became convinced that I was swimming in a refreshingly cool, Olympic-sized receptacle of urine and I had to immediately get out. All that stuffedness, though, will be forgotten as the days roll on, and what I will remember is how on that day I heard over and over in my mind the piano line from "Concerning the UFO Sighting near Highland, Illinois" and how it made that place enchanted. There was a dusklight ferris wheel ride with my oldest daughter fused with that song that I hope I never forget or allow to fade.

And let me tell you that if I was the President I would immediately sign an Executive Order mandating that certain television shows replace their theme songs. The Order would apply to all of the tentacles of the C.S.I. octopus. It would apply to the Cold Cases and Hard Cases and the Without a Traces and that Law & Order spin-off where writers sit around and try to top each other by coming up with more and more outlandish sex crimes involving children. In short, if the show fetishizes violent acts or violent actors, it's covered. My Executive Order would mandate that when you tune in to one of those shows, you don't get to hear some bouncy, procedural tune. You would not hear The motherfucking Who. You would hear "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." in its entirety.

"John Wayne Gacy, Jr." is the song where Stevens spent some time reading about Gacy's growing up, looked up from all of that and couldn't remember which one was the monster. It wasn't because he forgot how terrible and dehumanizing were the things Gacy did. Not that at all. Rather, his awareness of his own sin made it impossible for him to construct the Other. Why did a seemingly gentle man kill helpless people? Because I am a poor miserable creature, sinful and unclean.

There are lots of exciting things to talk and write about when you're animated by an album like Come on feel the Illinoise. You can talk about the way in which Stevens manages to create an aesthetic that accomodates both irony and meaning. You can talk about the way that he answers the question concerning whether Christian musicians have anything to say to anybody other than the faithful (the "faithful" being defined, with both irony and meaning, as people who buy their music primarily in Family Bookstores). Beyond those big things, you can talk about how Stevens improbably makes American microhistory and macrohistory exciting and funny and endearing.

I can't wait until he gets to Pennsylvania. I'm already imagining what it will look like.

So here's my challenge: take whatever state you, my single-digit readership, reside within and love it like Sufjan will love it. Pick twenty or so locations or people or events or oddities and make a list of what you could envision Stevens's album looking like for your state. Then submit them and we'll list them here-- I'll make separate blog posts for each of them. Entries with links or explanatory text for your people, locations and events will be especially awesome, but who am I kidding? I'll just be happy if this doesn't go completely ignored. (To Dan: your state for purposes of this exercise is Tejas.) (To residents of Michigan and Illinois: just put your heads down on your desks.) Then, in years to come, we'll revisit the posts as the prolific musician releases the albums for the respective states and we'll see whether we got any of the songs right. I figure if this blog goes, it's because Blogger goes, and if Blogger goes, Google goes, and if Google goes, it's all over.

I've already got ten or so locations out of twenty or so for the Keytsone State, but am resisting listing them in full because I don't want to scare off others from this fine state. I'll be grouping my guesses into (1) Near-locks (e.g. the Homestead strike of 1892), (2) Long shots (e.g. Rocky Balboa) and (3) Obvious but Poignant (e.g. Budd Dwyer's televised resignation). I'll post mine on Wednesday, August 24, along with the entries of anybody else who wants to play.

Some possible line combinations

Top line: M. Lemieux, S. Crosby, Z. Palffy
Second line: J. LeClair, R. Malone, M. Recchi

And those are just the top two lines. And that's not figuring in Evgeni Malkin, provided he can be signed from his Russian team so that it can be ascertained whether he has, in fact, caught up to Alexander Ovechkin in terms of raw gamebreaking potential. And that's not counting on either of the two enigmatic Eastern Europeans, Aleksey Morozov and Milan Kraft. Figure in the lightning-quick Konstantin Koltsov and the apparently-motivated Colby Armstrong, and the over/under for when Sports Illustrated or some other mass media outlet uses "March of the Penguins" to describe these guys is looking more and more like it will come before Christmas.

BIRTH OF A NATION

A few weeks ago I saw a film in which an honorable family was rent in two by the fruits of an unjust society where lawlessness and corruption reigned. The brave and proud protagonist, heir to the family honor, is helpless to watch as the person who meant the most to him meets a horrible death at the hands of an inhuman criminal. In response, the hero is plunged into despair, but pulls himself out of it by dedicating his life to fighting injustice.

One day he happens upon a symbol that strikes fear into the hearts of his cowardly adversaries, so he adopts it as a costume in order to embody the thing of which the craven dogs are most frightened. He finds others who are similarly outraged by the miscarriage of justice and leads a group of operatives who rescue the innocents from the clutches of corrupt warmongerers.

The delicate balance is struck: we're told that the unjust world is a product of greed and stolen pride and that conflict between men descends from that. The hero embodies the desire to create a world without war and pillage, but also clearly stands for the proposition that it's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. The day is saved, and the costumed hero is left with dreams of a better world which he can serve to bring about through acts of costumed bravery.

Does the above plot summary belong to

(a) Batman Begins,

(b) Birth of a Nation or

(c) both?

Sure, it's a cheap rhetorical gimmick, but consider that only one of those two films had the thumbs up of a sitting president coupled with his stamp of historical accuracy, which meant something given that president's academic inclinations. I'm not talking about the Batflick.

A modern cinephile who watches Birth of a Nation for the first time is likely in for a schizophrenic experience. As the earliest film epic, the sheer scope and scale of vision is admirable. You can see Griffith creating the mode of visual storytelling that is so familiar to every single person living in the modern industrial age. He's showing us how film can walk and run, how it can cover a lot of ground and space and time. Griffith goes from hell to South Carolina to heaven, from melodrama to gritty realism. It's a wild ride.

I wonder if the ride goes down easier or harder if you work as hard to constantly remind yourself that Griffith's up is down. His in is out. And there's a neat opportunity to learn greater awareness of the ways in which the arranged images of film manipulate us when we endeavor to invert Griffith's sympathies. Giving in to the film's length, Ali said, at one point, "I can't think of any other movie where I said to myself, 'I wish the Klan would hurry up and get here.' "

But, wow, there's a scene apparently lifted from a scurrilous political cartoon involving a state legislative assembly that can't adequately be described. And Griffith's decision to make the story's two most treacherous characters mulattos (portrayed by white actors in obvious makeup) kept me wondering throughout whether the decision was spurred by a real belief that interracial mixing was the worst danger to be avoided, or whether there were some outer limits to what Griffith could ask for or receive from his black actors.

It's interesting to observe that as Griffith is creating film language, one of his early innovations is self-promotion. Each and every intertitle card bears his last name in the upper left and right corners, with his stylized initials centered at the bottom.

And then there's that awesome part at the end when they unveil the Klan-symbol.

Note to self:

Next time, proclaim it to be I Post Every Day on My Blog Month after you've posted every day on your blog.

Man, if I knew how much work is involved in leaving a job...

Mix in a persistent summer cold and an out-of-nowhere bout with pinkeye...

These excuses are lame. I've got a lot of posts on deck. Perhaps I can catch up by doubling and tripling up. And they'll be substantive posts, mind you.

I need to figure out how to add photos. On Tuesday Tara took me to a going-away lunch and gave me the bestest present ever. Relevant to our earlier MAGNEAT-O! discussions, she presented me with a custom-made gargantuan yellow magnetic ribbon, crafted to its fifteen inches of derisive height by her own hands. The icing on the cake is the formal script, which bleats "I care more than you."

I will post a picture of this ribbon affixed however temporarily on one of our vehicles or the other.

And: thanks for your patience.

Auto maintenance

Ali had the van serviced today, and asked the Honda garage to look at the tape player, which Ali said hasn't worked for a few months. The mechanic found the problem without much trouble. Exactly twenty-five coins had been inserted into the tape slot.

How we can tell the new NHL financial reality is working

The St. Louis Blues tendered then traded Chris Pronger, all-world and way-gaptoothed blueliner, to the Edmonton Oilers for some guys, including one good defenseman whose name escapes me but who isn't in Pronger's stratosphere. In recent years past (well, dating to when they had to trade Wayne Gretzky) the Oilers have been sellers in deals like this. Nice to see them as buyers for a change.

SUMMARY MOVIES

I've seen a few of those-- what do they call them?-- tentpole movies in the past month and change. I'd wanted to write something about each of them (well, and about some other movies with somewhat less apparent structural significance), but being realistic means just firing off a few paragraphs apiece before the films fade into the fog of irrelevance they were probably intended to achieve from right after their opening weekend until their DVD release.

I. CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is not a great or even a very good movie by most measures, but it is a beloved and evocative one for many filmgoing hearts, mine included. Burton's film has moments of visual brilliance and tweaks here and there which make his film work like a cover of a well-known song, but as a stand-alone film it isn't particularly accomplished. Dahl's story-- in all its three iterations-- paints its human characters in such flat colors that the heightened sentimentality of Mel Stuart's film almost seems justified as a means to finding a human core amidst all the cardboard cut-outs. Burton either mistrusts those moments and rejects staging them or simply can't pull them off. And that's how the improbable finding of a golden ticket or the impossible gift of a chocolate factory ends up being as emotionally resonant as a dance number involving one man digitally replicated a hundred times. Big Fish created some hope that Burton was learning how to create characters capable of being responded-to in a more complex fashion; I think that's on hold again.

Of course, I'm also bitter that I saw a trailer for Burton's Corpse Bride before Charlie and I couldn't help but wish that was the movie that I'd be seeing. Shouldn't he be doing animation exclusively? Really, the film looks fantastic, and I think that's where his vision would translate best. Given the multiplicity of ways in which animated films can be made these days, Burton could probably put together several very good projects.


II. WAR OF THE WORLDS

On Sunday night, July 3, I went to see War of the Worlds. On Monday night I dreamt that I was wading in the ocean not far from a shark. Someone yelled and I looked up and the fin was there, sticking out of the water. I yelled to my kids to stay out of the water, then I got myself out of there. I watched from the shore as the fin stayed, and I thought about what it would be like to be out there, in the shark's path.

That Sunday morning I found my father-in-law and oldest daughter in a quiet corner of their house watching Jaws. More particularly, they were watching the scene where Brody, Hooper and Quint are drinking together in the Orca. She didn't get to see much before our social commitments pulled them away, so it will be a few years before her subconscious is struck through with the image of the inexplicable danger of a shark.

WOTW is probably as close as Spielberg will come to recapturing the spirit of Jaws. It's a shame that Spielberg used up his "it's all a dream" capital on a film as common as Minority Report, because he's tapped into our nightmares in this film. The film's tale of rough, tunnel-visioned survival struck me at the same primal level as a dream, and the attendant destruction and mayhem which sets the story in motion seemed appropriate to the cause. I was glad to see David Edelstein make the same connection to nightmare visions in a recent piece ("I don't know if Tim [Noah] would consider the original Godzilla "pornography," but a respectable body of critics—myself among them—consider it a haunting depiction, by the Japanese themselves, of the trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Farther afield, I can't think of a film that captures the social upheaval—racial and interfamilial—of the middle and late '60s as suggestively as Night of the Living Dead (which War of the World evokes in the cellar scene with Tim Robbins)."). I've also been mentioning how much Romero's zombie films touch me in a soft spot in my subconscious, and they show up in my nightmares much more often than any other films.


It's worth asking whether the film is better or worse for being headlined by Tom Cruise even if the film were released in a year when he wasn't so dead-set on achieving cultural omnipresence. He plays this character well, of course. Sure, he's a bit more deadbeat than the typical Cruise Achiever character, but it's the same self-possessed charm. His appeal as a movie star has never lain in connecting the audience to a projection of deep virtue or benevolence, but rather in hitching our modest and prudent selves to his narcissistic self-confidence. Even here, among the worst imaginable dangers and sights, he's comparatively collected and level-headed even if a large part of the film is about showing how his natural-born cockiness is neutered and he's reduced to running and hiding. That's all to say that he probably doesn't hurt the film. It's also worth asking whether it might have been better-received from a critical point of view if it weren't a summer movie. Clearly, in Hollywood terms anything directed by Spielberg and toplined by Cruise and costing this much money has three reasons to debut between Memorial Day and the end of July, but I think there's a significant film here that gets lost in the hustle and bustle of summer event films.


III. BATMAN BEGINS (and that's a threat)

Batman Begins shows us the origin of the hero at length, beginning with his days learning martial arts in the Far East to his construction of the Batcave, through his development of the costume and equipment and into his first foray into crimefighting, in which he thwarts a villainous plan to kill everyone in sight. As far as I can tell, the villainous plot involves delivering fear through the Gotham City water supply, which I suppose is a neat twist on the general status quo in which people are simply afraid of their drinking water. This plot, again as far as I can tell, is derailed largely because the poisoner (Liam Neeson, Nell) is compelled to take public transportation when delivering the threat.

I'm pretty sure of two things: this film is a meticulous and faithful cinematic recreation of the whole Batman: Year One vibe and I could barely keep myself interested in it. I'm not convinced the themes that are inherent in every Batfilm are enough to engage me. We get a heavy thematic dose of fear. Fear is both good and bad, depending on the user, the circumstance and the intended end. I couldn't keep straight whether I was supposed to respect fear or, well, fear it. I checked the possession arrow at the end of the film and it was pointing both ways. Oh, and there's also the requisite meditation on the justice of heroes who don't kill bad guys. Maybe my memory is faulty, but didn't the comic miniseries responsible (or culpable) for the Bat-renaissance openly reject the line of reasoning that runs through this film? Can I please be teleported to the alt uni where Frank Miller decided to reinvent Aquaman? I'm too old for this shit.

Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding 's.

Using the short form of my first name, I've got two names ending in "s." Sure, it took me a little bit of time as a kid to come to grips with Strunk and White's Rule 1, but it's been worth it if only to enjoy the entertainment provided by seeing the rest of the world struggle with counterintuitive punctuation.

Two weeks ago we went to visit my uncle. Some years ago someone gave him as a gift one of those etched "Welcome to my house" stones. I can just imagine the stone etcher contemplating not taking the order. Do you really say that two people named Lucas are Lucases? Where does the apostrophe go? Are you sure?

I don't know whether the etcher was informed that my uncle is a bachelor, and whether this knowledge would have made the job any better or worse. I only know that the finished stone identifies the house as The Lucas s. No plural. No apostrophe. Just a tiny space.

This is the weirdest imaginable result. It's actually a source of inspiration to me, as I've recently undertaken a regimen of exercises to firm and tone the Lucass.

August is I Post Every Day on My Blog Month

Yes, it is.

7.05 Viewings

7.01.05 Land of the Dead (2d viewing)
7.03.05 War of the Worlds
7.05.05 Arrested Development 1.1, 1.2, 1.3
7.06.05 Arrested Development 1.4, 1.5, 1.6
7.08.05 Dead Man Walking
7.10.05 Arrested Development 1.7, 1.8, 1.9
Badassss Cinema
7.11.05 Arrested Development 1.10, 1.11, 1.12, 1.13, 1.14
7.18 Birth of a Nation
7.19 Arrested Development 1.15, 1.16
7.20 Heart of Light
7.21 Playtime
7.22 Sullivan's Travels
7.23 Arrested Development 1.17, 1.18
7.24 Arrested Development 1.19, 1.20, 1.21
7.25 Charle and the Chocolate Factory
Arrested Development 1.22
7.26 Dark Water (Japanese version)
7.29 Trouble in Paradise
7.30 Fast, Cheap and Out of Control
7.31 The Lady Eve