Capitulation

DECEMBER 25, 2006

DEAR LEAH,

HO HO HO! I hope you enjoy what I’ve brought you! I think you will. After you’ve read this letter, go downstairs and see what’s waiting for you.

You have to give him a name, OK?

I know that you will take good care of what I have left. You will be responsible for taking care of him, but you should let other people play with him and love him, too. He has enough love for everybody!

I know that when you sat on my lap we talked about how you would need to do a lot of work to keep him. I know you will do well. There are some things that you need to do in particular.

First, read the book that I’ve left for you, starting with the chapter on housetraining. Second, take him for walks on his leash at least twice a day, even when it is cold. Third, clean up after any messes he makes inside or outside. Fourth, he should sleep in his crate until he has been fully trained. Fifth, give him a hundred hugs and kisses a day!

Merry Christmas, Leah!

SANTA

P.S. He’s about ten weeks old. He’s a mix of Cairn Terrier and Shih Tzu.

The telephone conversation I just had with my dad:

He: What time do the Steelers play tomorrow?
I: 1:00, I think.
He: Are they at home?
I: No, it's in Carolina. Well, I guess that means it's a home game for Cowher, but it's an away game for the team.

There have been a lot of complaints about the NHL's unbalanced schedule.

And, to a large degree, I agree with them. While the increased number of intradivisional games have helped to try to recreate some of the longstanding and rancorous divisional feuds, it's also taken away one of the draws of seeing hockey in person. Under the old schedule, I always thought that one great argument for buying season tickets was that even with the sport essentially untelevised on any sort of wide, national level, you'd have the chance to see every great player in person at least once a year. That's not the case any more, and one of the public relations downsides for the sport that I've seen cited a few places is that with the unbalanced schedule there are certain Western Conference markets that won't have an opportunity to see the Penguins' young talent-- Crosby, Malkin, Fleury and Staal-- in person any more often than once every three years.

For his part, Crosby also agrees that the schedule needs to be changed. He'd like to see a setup where the Penguins play the Flyers 82 times a year. In the 5 wins this season, Sid's piled up 15 points (7 goals, 8 assists), or 7.5 points for every tooth of his Derian Hatcher chipped last year. Over a full season, that translates to a SEGA NHL '95esque 246 points (115 goals, 131 assists).

DISCUSS:

(Do not care if this is old webjunk)

OLD JOY

I saw OLD JOY through the Three Rivers Film Festival as the front-end of a double feature with CLIMATES. I think it's an impressive film, and I'd like to see the rest of Kelly Reichardt's work.

To its credit, OLD JOY is not terribly preoccupied with plot. It follows two men-- Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (Will Oldham)-- who take a weekend camping trip to some remote hot springs. Both men are wrestling with adulthood, albeit in different forms, and their friendship (which seems to have originated in college or thereabouts) has faded over time and as a result of their varying stations. Kurt is an unreconstructed hippie; he talks a little about some ongoing schooling and mentions that he doesn't expect to be allowed to live in his house for much longer. When he calls Mark to ask him to go on the trip, Mark seems ambivalent. He'd like to have a weekend away from his pregnant wife, but solicits her permission so as not to appear too eager. The men intended to drive Kurt's shag-carpeted van to the mountains, but settle instead on Mark's more reliable Volvo wagon. Mark's dog comes along on the trip.

The two men start out on their journey, get lost along the way, ask for directions and finally find the place they're looking for-- hot springs reachable after a lengthy hike through the forest. But the act of reaching the hot springs, and the physical sensation of being in the springs, is of lesser significance than the insights into each of the characters picked up along the way.

The trappings of Mark's comparative stability-- the wife with child, the newish car, the talk of a community program he has started-- are the outwards symbols of the divergent ends the friends have chosen, but they're ultimately unnecessary in telling us that these two have less in common than they once did. When Mark and Kurt talk about things, past or present, there's an undercurrent of inequality, as if what Mark regards with a fond but faraway remembrance is still present-tense for Kurt. As Mark and Kurt walk though the backdrop of lush forests that remain unchanged by time, their routine and destination is the same as it presumably was a decade ago, but they're not. There's still the common interest of the springs and the hike, but not much else. The divide is generally played out quietly, with jokes or remarks that seem to be offered plaintively and responded to politely. In keeping with the film's understatement, no attempt is made to plumb the depths of their difference, or to talk things out and relentlessly hammer home the obvious. They've just changed. At one point things do bubble up suddenly, as Kurt tries to rub Mark's bare shoulder while Mark lies in a spring. It's a friendly gesture, meant to show how much Kurt wants Mark to be relaxed, but the intimacy necessary to pull off something like that is long since gone, and it comes off as creepy, with Mark responding angrily.

The title comes from a line in the film which defines sorrow as used-up joy. When the men get back to town, they return to the lives that divide them. Reichardt's subtlety holds at this important moment, and she resists giving us the scene where Mark settles into bed with his wife, hand resting on her pregnant belly and faithful dog at the foot of the bed. It is enough, way enough, to see Kurt not long after he is dropped off meandering around outside a store, fumbling into one ambiguous social encounter or another, searching for the sort of fellowship that can't be revived even by walking together through the world's beauty.

November, 2006 film viewings

11.1 DEKALOG 7
11.2 35 UP
11.3 OLD JOY
CLIMATES
11.4 FRANKENSTEIN (1931)
BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN
42 UP
11.5 49 UP
11.8 TONY TAKITANI
11.11 STAR WARS
BAND OF BROTHERS, EPISODES 1 & 2
11.13 OFF THE BLACK
11.14 DESISTFILM
11.16 UNFAITHFULLY YOURS
11.18 THE ADVENTURES OF SHARK BOY AND LAVA GIRL
11.21 A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
11.23 CASINO ROYALE
11.25 KASABA

Happy Birthday, Ali

The look on your face
Yanks my neck on the chain.
And I would do anything
(I would do anything)
To see you again.

PENNSYLVANIA: Land of Milk, Honey

I knew something was different today. Just knew it. It was something airborne, I think. It floated with me all day and made my steps lighter. It resounded gently in my ears, like a church bell ringing on the hour (Ch-ching, ch-ching). What was the source of my hope? The promise of free money. Money flowing freely. Freely flowing from the pockets of these fools into the pockets of those fools.

It's for the schools, of course. And the aged, too, who apparently are now also impregnated with purpose:

These are people who lead very gray lives. They don't see their sons and daughters very much. They don't have much social interaction. There's not a whole lot of good things that happen in their month. But if you put them on the bus they're excited. They're happy. They have fun. They see bright lights. They hear music. They pull that slot machine and with each pull they think they have a chance to win. ... It's unbelievable what brightness and cheer it brings to older Pennsylvanians.

*cue "Beautiful Day"*

Mark Cuban and I have something in common:

We both wish we owned the Penguins.

Quote of the Day

Following Wednesday's loss to the Penguins, Los Angeles Kings center Michael Cammalleri was asked about his team's preparations for the game, and said, "We had to be ready because we knew none of those guys were out in the bars [Tuesday] night. They aren't old enough to get in."

The next time you think to yourself...

..."you know, Russ cares too much about sports," kindly remember this:

I declined two free tickets to Steelers-Broncos this afternoon because Ali and I have a Sunday afternoon date with Michael Apted's 49 UP and Thai or Ethiopian food afterward. And that 2-5 record had-- seriously-- nothing to do with it.

87's steal-and-backhand...

...is in the below video clip, at about the 2:40 mark. It's the only video online I've seen thus far.

I do understand that this is all just for me.

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The team announced today that they're holding on to Jordan Staal-- at least for the time being-- and not sending him back to his junior team. I suppose they could be simply extending the experiment from 8 to 39 games, but I think this is a huge move. Keeping Staal on the roster not is a matter of both time and money-- time in that he'll be an unrestricted free agent sooner, and money in that the first year of his rookie deal now kicks in. This move says a lot of things the Penguin fanbase hasn't been hearing over the past five years, when there were a succession of salary dumps leading to the competitive absurdity of a franchise goalie spending extra time in the minors just to keep salaries low, while third- and fourth-line forwards were being signed largely because they possessed two-way contracts, and not because they possessed observable skills.

Yeah, this is a big move.

penguins 8, flyers 2

Aside, of course, from scoring the most points in an NHL season for an 18-year old in league history and selling tens of thousands of tickets, one great thing Sidney Crosby did for the Penguins in his rookie year was to resurrect the team's rivalry with the Flyers. It had languished for a couple of years while the Pens bottom-fed. Oh, sure, the local crowds still felt the same antipathy for the guys in orange and black, but it wasn't much of a fight. But last year Ken Hitchcock drove the Crosby's-a-diver bandwagon, and Derian Hatcher put his coach's taunts into composite form by repeatedly bludgeoning Crosby and truncating a tooth or two of the kid's. Sid responded by filling the net with the puck. Over and over.

Last night, he picked up from where he left off last year. The third goal of his hat trick was both poetry and irony. I'm still waiting for it to show up on Youtube (Internet Search-and-Retrieve Team: ACTIVATE!) and will post it here when it shows up. In brief, Hatcher gets control of the puck in front of his own net and starts to skate it out. He's looking to make a pass. In the blink of an eye, Crosby swoops in from behind, lifts his stick and backhands the puck into the net and past an unprepared Robert Esche in one motion. Hatcher never looked so old or leaden-footed.

BEST CROSS-PROMOTION OF THE WEEK

Seasons One and Two of BAYWATCH with the bonus subscription to Maxim: for the male in your life who requires absurdly-prodigious quantities of spank material.

Three Rivers Film Festival 2006

The organizers of the Three Rivers Film Festival have released their lineup. It's so-so. There are a couple of titles I'm quite excited to see, and a couple that I really wanted to see that didn't make it (last year the Fest booked Jia Zhangke's THE WORLD, and I'd hoped to see either or both DONG and STILL LIFE among this year's offerings).

This will be the third year I've bought a six-film pass and complimentary T-shirt. I hope the above didn't come across as a complaint; I'm glad to get the opportunity to see what they're showing.

Here's the schedule. I'm definitely going back for a second viewing of CLIMATES. It was the film of the eleven I saw in Toronto last month that has rattled around the loudest. Ali and I are going to see Apted's 49 UP, probably on Sunday, the 5th at 4:00. We really loved the series when we Netflix'd it last year, so much so that Ali surprised me with the set for Christmas. I'll catch THE CASE OF THE GRINNING CAT on either the 7th or the 9th. Otherwise, I'm open to suggestion. If anyone knows anything about any of the films featured, I'd love to hear what you know.

Game #2/ Penguins 4 Devils 2

Yeah, I'm ditching writing about movies. This is going to become a Pittsburgh Penguins-only blog.

It was happiness built entirely on circumstance-- I freely acknowledge that-- but I was convinced on Tuesday afternoon that I was happier than I'd ever been or I'd ever be. To begin, I was nearing the end of Tom Perrotta's Little Children and I'm just insanely excited for the movie to come out. I really admire Field's In the Bedroom and I've spent some time the last few weeks conjuring a vision of what the novel (or, more precisely, the novel's themes) could look like on-screen.

A little after noon on Tuesday a co-worker stopped me in the hall and asked me if I like hockey. I said: yes. She offered me four tickets to that night's game, and I eagerly accepted. We'd never be able to take the kids to a game normally; it's too cost-prohibitive. The last time I'd taken Leah and Ruby to a hockey game was a couple of years ago when I'd gotten seats from my old firm. Gin had never been to a game, and she's just at the edge of being able to be carried in. So the five of us crammed into four seats in B15, right behind the net where the Pens shoot twice. It was a perfect night.

How perfect? Each of their first-round lottery picks from the past three years scored goals. Crosby and Malkin showed instant chemistry in being stuck together on the top line for the first extended time. Oh, I'll just repost what I wrote at the preeminent Pittsburgh sports blog, Mondesi's House:

...The crowd was smallish-- about 13,000-- but really into the game. The atmosphere is getting back to the 90s vibe, where every time you went to the Igloo there was the chance of something great happening.

We were in B15, so Malkin's goal was right in front of us. I just stood there gape-mouthed. Couldn't believe it. His deke and the backhand with his body twisted the other way is straight out of the 66 playbook. Mark Recchi made that comparison earlier, and while it's pretty heady, there are definite similarities. Plus, after seeing the way Aleksey Morozov (for his whole career) and even Markus Naslund (for the first year or so he played for the Pens) hung around on the periphery and waited for the puck to come to them, it's so different to see the way Malkin makes the play come to him, driving through the zone, seeking out contact, never giving up on a play. The guy's got all of four NHL games under his belt and plays with crazy poise.

Speaking of poise, I've seen Sid take penalties in both the games I've attended, and I think he's matured. He whines less, makes less of a huff and just goes to the box. It's still early, but that's a great sign that he's doing the things that a de facto captain has to do to get ice cred.

It's early, and there's no reason to get ahead of ourselves. It's probably more 88-89 than 90-91 or 91-92, but this team IS going to contend for a playoff spot. They work hard most of the time and are going to hover at least at .500...

Just how great was Malkin's goal? See for yourself.

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Today's Post-Gazette quotes Mark Cuban, who was in town a night early before the Cavs-Mavs preseason game, gushing over Malkin's handiwork:

After watching Malkin and Crosby last night, oh my God!" he said about 90 minutes before tipoff. "No wonder the Russians are coming after that kid. He should have been a state secret. Even if you'd have scored that fourth goal with a basketball, people would still be talking about it. There aren't many times, aren't many things anymore that you're watching and your jaw just drops.

Here's where I'm at with this. We moved into our present house in February of '05 and have been sans cable since then in the latest twist to our on-again, off-again relationship with the Devil's Wire. It's been easy to hold the line when the Penguins have been abysmal, but things have changed. Now it's down to this: if they go into Philly and beat a just-shaken-up Flyers team on Saturday night, I'm signing on the line that is dotted.

The Passion of the...oh, never mind

Yesterday I was still puzzling over how the Steelers could wallop the Chiefs last Sunday, then come out and play as sloppily as they did against the Falcons. Jason Whitlock has the answer. Turns out some of the Chiefs were...distracted.

It's probably going to take 11 wins to get to the playoffs again this year, and with this team's fondness for turning over the ball inside its 30 and awful special teams play, it's tough to imagine them going 9-1 down the stretch. To maximize that possibility, though, I'm now spending my free time finding out where the rest of the season's visiting teams are staying and cross-booking the dildo queens into the same hotel. Just doing my part.

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I'm glad I went to the Penguins-Devils game last week. Despite the loss, it felt like the team has turned the corner. Evgeni Malkin's first NHL goal won't have the replay potential of Mario's first shift steal-from-Ray-Bourque-and-deke-goalie-out-of-his-jock-breakaway debut goal, but it's a fine goal nonetheless, all the more because he showed a healthy disregard for the game's unwritten pecking orders by poking forcefully around the nether regions of the estimable Martin Brodeur. Brodeur was miffed that the slow whistle cost him a goal-against and made him into the answer to a trivia question on the night when he'd rather bask in the glow of getting his 450th win.

It's such a sublime pleasure to watch Brodeur work, even when he's stoning your team. His goaltending is so fluid and measured. There's none of the wrenching or jerking that comes with being out of position or being surprised by a developing play. The best point of comparison I can come up with is a character in the Marvel Universe named Taskmaster. Taskmaster is a bit player of ambiguous loyalties who wears a white skeleton mask and cowl and possesses the odd physical and mental ability to automatically mimic any gymnastic of fighting movement he sees. Back in 1987 when Steve Rogers was replaced by John Walker as Captain America, Taskmaster was brought in to teach Walker some high-end moves.

Brodeur is like Taskmaster. It's as if he has memorized every possible permutation of (a) location of his guys, (b) location of their guys and (c) location of the puck. From any given set of circumstances, there are a limited set of possibilities for how the puck will end up coming to the net, and as that set is whittled down by further movements of men and puck, he chooses that one rote sequence of movements that has the highest probability of keeping the puck out of the net. Of course, he starts the series of movements well before the puck is at the net, and so the end result of a glove save isn't just an isolated physical reaction, but the last of a succession of related movements that, when strung together with ruthless discipline and form, are highly likely to keep the other team from scoring. On television, where sometimes only the shots on net are shown, the effect is blunted. From where I sat behind the net, it's stunning how, well, natural he can make goaltending seem.

LOCAL NEWS

I. Oh, so that's how they're going to handle it.

Today's Post-Gazette carried this discussion with the director of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Rawson Marshall Thurber. The interview and Thurber's expressed affection for Pittsburgh provides a well-timed and welcome diversion from the recent local media feeding frenzy concerning one of his cast members. He also discusses acquiring the story and writing the screenplay, while mentioning that his screenplay eliminates Arthur Lecomte. Huh. Well, that changes things a bit.

Sure, it takes out the extra romantic angle, and rounds the story back into the familiar triangle (Thurber refers to the novel as a "[love] rhombus." Just last week I'd seen it referred to as a love trapezoid.) Apart from the additional relationship entanglement, though, the elimination of Lecomte seems to me to remove a really strong and influential (and hilarious) voice from the chorus of influences pushing in on Art. I haven't lost any faith in the project-- if Michael Chabon can be convinced the idea works, who cares what a meatball like me thinks?-- but I've got to think that subtracting Arthur Lecomte from the screenplay means that there's no guarantee the film couldn't, by some means, slide toward the mean of studio-indie coming-of-age films that arrive and depart quietly each season.

II. Yeah, Malkin.

If you're a huge Pittsburgh Penguin fan (as I am) and you went to five or so home games a year from the mid-nineties to the present (as I did), then chances are that you got to see at least two Mario Lemieux comeback games and at least two Mario farewell games. I know I did. I think I even got tickets a couple of times to coincide with comeback/farewell games. I went to the last home game in the '97 playoff loss to the Flyers where Mario said goodbye by scoring a last-minute breakaway on Islander-GM-in-the-making Garth Snow. These days, sadly, I seem to coincide my Penguin ticket-buying with the occasions where I'm most likely to be given a machine-painted resin figurine with an oversized skull. But sometimes I still get lucky. Like tomorrow, when I'll be able to see Evgeni Malkin's debut game. Yay, me. Of the four games they've played thus far, I've caught parts of three of them, and I like what I've seen. They're alternating great efforts with ungreat efforts, though, but are due for a positive showing tomorrow.

THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU

Just for a bit of context, here's the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's one and one-half star video review of Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu:

It attempts to comment on the failings of the Romanian medical system and a post-socialist society where people talk "at" instead of "to" each other. It's the first of a planned six-part series on Bucharest, and we're sure the story of the unnecessary death of a lonely, smelly old alcoholic could have helped to shed light on the social issue. But in any language, there's something to be said for effective storytelling, and this isn't it.

If you've seen the film, then I hope that dismissal sounds as baseless to you as it does to me. If you haven't seen the film, then I hope you either don't read that paragraph or that it doesn't color your perception of the film. I'm certain that not one word of it is insightful.

I think that Lazarescu is a really well-written film. That seems to me like a strange thing to say first, given that the characters in the film aren't terribly talkative and the narrative is comprised of just a few extended scenes taking place initially at the title character's apartment and then at the three hospitals where treatment for him is sought, with several lengthy ambulance rides connecting the four locations. And yet it is exceedingly well-written, and I have to think that the film's unique power is built foremost on the strength of its script.

Lazarescu-- the lonely, smelly old alcoholic-- is a retired engineer who lives in a shabby apartment in a Bucharest high-rise. He's a widower with a daughter living in Canada and a sister within a day's travel. He has more than one cat living with him, and he frequently takes furtive drinks of some potent-looking homebrew. When he is taken ill with inexplicable pain one day, he has no one to turn to but the neighbors, who know him well enough if not intimately. The neighbors manage to get an ambulance to come quicker than it normally would, and Lazarescu is carried off from one hospital to the next.

Turning to the capsule quoted above, is there some sort of intellectual gag reflex hardwired into critics whereby any film or book taking place in a former Eastern Bloc country is automatically transformed into some meditation on the failings of the socialist state? I wouldn't think of denying that such films and books will necessarily bear the imprint of life under such goverments, but to presume that a film about a man who gets sick in Romania can't simply be about a man who gets sick in Romania seems to me to deny the character an essential humanity that we wouldn't be so quick to impose upon our own films or characters. I'll readily agree that this film doesn't do anything to "shed light on the social issue," but would add that the filmmaker couldn't really care less about that in the context of Lazarescu's journey, and the film is the better for it.

And if it wasn't enough that the film is expected to expose the sordid underbelly of socialized medicine, it's also being showcased as a conversation-starter on the subject of the failings of American health care. My friend Doug pointed out to me that the Region 1 DVD release of Lazarescu contains an extra feature entitled, ominously, "A Perspective on the U.S. Healthcare System." Oh, that will make this a must-rent title for people browsing in Blockbuster.

Why is it that a movie about a man going to the hospital is burdened with a lot of baggage that a movie about a man going to see his lawyer or a movie about a man spending time in his garden wouldn't be so burdened? I suppose it's because a significant portion of our perceptions of social progress depend on the idea that medical science, in theory and practice, is exact and trustworthy. We trust doctors, their training, their elaborate machines and their terribly expensive medicines to find what is wrong with us and to fix it, and the idea that there is still some whim or uncertainty or variation to the act of healing goes against our comfort and our willingness to devote such a large portion of gross domestic product to medicine.

Apart from the health care perfectability delusion, there is another large entry barrier that American audiences must overcome to appreciate Lazarescu. It has a point of view that is as different as can be from the typical hospital drama. All of the hospital shows that run perpetually on American television over the past dozen years are doctor-centered. The stories are told from the perspective of the medical staff, and we see them go about their days as patients dutifully enter and exit the screen. The doctors and nurses are the ongoing characters, and their personal and professional conflicts are the central drama of the show. The patients in ER or Scrubs are merely dramatic foils or props who provide moments of levity or induce some insight upon the doctor. The patient's role in the drama ends a moment before the episode does, when they are no longer needed to act as the object of attention of the highly-skilled but personally-tortured medical professionals. Once they have led the doctor to furrow his or her brow and consider something in a new light, they have served their purpose.

So when Lazarescu spends a collective hour in three hospitals with the doctors and nurses acting upon Lazarescu but remaining largely in the background in relation to the unconscious man on the gurney, there's a moment of dramatic disorientation. Hey, the doctors are supposed to swoop in and fix his problems with a torrent of jargon and surgical genius! What's worse, Puiu makes Lazarescu's experience (and ours as viewer) look a lot more like what we are accustomed to encountering at a hospital. We sit and wait, or stand and wait. We look at the others in line ahead of us and gauge their apparent maladies in comparison to what we perceive our own to be. We become bored and frustrated and wish to return to the life lived outside that place.

Assuming that all of those obstructions can be overcome, Lazarescu is an invitation to empathize with a man in the hours of his apparent death. Lazarescu doesn't say much after the first few minutes of the film. He feels ill, speaks to the ambulance dispatcher and his neighbor about his illness, calls his sister to tell her he is sick, speaks to the EMT who accompanies him throughout the film about his pain and then loses consciousness for most of the remainder of the film, with only a few moments where he is lucid or responsive after the halfway mark. For most of the film he is a passive human centerpiece carted from hospital to hospital or sitting in one hallway or anteroom or another. He is acted upon rather than acting himself, and spoken to rather than speaking.

Empathizing with Lazarescu is apparently a difficult thing to do, judging by the reactions to Lazarescu. He smells of alcohol, which gives rise to the one constant throughout the film: people ask Lazarescu if he is drunk, or wonder aloud (whether he's awake or not) whether his illness is the result of alcohol. When one's unconscious and smelling of alcohol, the latter must have caused the former, right? And so, doctors and nurses and capsule writers for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and viewers like you and I assume that we're being compelled to deal with or watch this sick old man because he has drunken himself into a stupor. At some point in his unconsciousness, he loses control of his bowels, and by fouling himself draws even less sympathetic attention from the hospital personnel. It's an interesting challenge; in the face of the scowls and insults, can we continue to regard Lazarescu as a human being with dignity in spite of his incapacitation, his smelling of alcohol and being covered in excrement? If so, then there is something close to a cathartic release when, at the film's end, a nurse preparing him for surgery shaves his head and then tenderly calls him handsome. It's a beautiful moment, all the more so because Lazarescu has been so much denigrated.

Of course, it would not be fair to say that Lazarescu receives only poor treatment. The EMT who picks him up and stays with him throughout the film is uncommonly kind. Lazarescu spends an inordinate amount of time waiting to be treated, but at one point he is jumped to the head of a CAT scan line because he's held out as someone's uncle. The outright refusal of the medical staff at one hospital to treat him is galling, though it leads to an absurd discussion of consent that's very well-done. The staff at the third hospital, where he is finally treated, is as solicitous and professional as any of us could hope to have.

By his first name, Dante Remus Lazarescu points to The Divine Comedy and its own three-stop journey. By his last name, Lazarescu points to those two New Testament characters, the brother of Martha and Mary who died and was raised by Jesus and the poor man who was despised in his lifetime but sat at Abraham's side in the hereafter. It's those New Testament allusions that really fascinate me: can we, as viewers, see this unspeaking sick man with the same eyes that his Creator does?

MISCELLANY

I. The Cloud Factory

After work two Fridays ago I stopped by this. The waiting room was filled, as mentioned in the article, with lots of twenty year-old Madonna imitators. I don't have a mohawk. Or the parachute pants or Don Johnsonesque suit that would say, "Those are eighties clothes." to someone with a fairly rote perception of a decade's fashion trends. No, all I've still got from the eighties (apart from a few T-shirts) are the ALIENS tie-in sneakers I bought in '86 and a garish wool blazer with suede elbow patches which my dad bought for me at Christmas of 1989. The latter article fit, however tenuously, within casual Friday dress parameters if not within the prevailing weather conditions, so I wore it to the call.

They tell absolutely everyone, "We'll call you." I'd love to get called. Of course, I have no idea how I'd manage the consecutive days off work, given that they don't shoot on weekends. It's difficult to imagine how it could work out.

This wouldn't be the first time I tried to end up in a film. In the summer of 1995 Michael Keaton brought some of the filming of the execreble DESPERATE MEASURES to Pittsburgh. A bridge was constructed over Fifth Avenue to connect the Allegheny County Courthouse to One Mellon Center. These two buildings were directly across the street from the Frick Building, where I was working at that time.

One night in early July I worked late and came out of the building around 7:30 p.m. I went through the revolving door at street level, saw a city cop with his back to me directing all passersby and stray cars to an alternate route, and realized that I had stepped into the middle of a shot. There was a camera on a dolly and a clump of extras standing on a corner. Half of the extras were holding protest signs. I sidled up to them when the cop wasn't looking and did my best to blend in. An AD came up to the group, looked us over and gave a few comments. Your hat's too big. You're dressed too sloppy. To me she said: You look good. She split up the group of extras between two corners, and sent me with a couple of other people to stand on the corner of Fifth and Grant.

They did a half-dozen or so takes of a paddy wagon escorted by police motorcycles driving down Fifth and turning onto Grant. We all jeered appropriately at the paddy wagon, inside which we could see a handcuffed Michael Keaton. After about an hour they herded the extras back to a makeshift prop room with a table full of fake guns. I was a little skittish about being caught (though I'm sure they didn't mind the free labor) so I peeled away when the extras were being sent to their next setup and walked down to the bus stop. I don't show up in the finished film.

The previous winter my friend Shane and I took a break from the drudgeries of law school to sit in on a crowd scene shoot for the cinematic enema SUDDEN DEATH. We sat below thousands of nearly-identical cardboard people at the Civic Arena and chanted the name of a fictional hockey player because the Penguins' goalie at the time was engaged in a petty squabble with management and the media and refused to allow his name to be used in the film. In retrospect, that was an ace move, Tommy Barrasso. My prayers were answered, and thus I don't show up in this finished film either.

From the two films listed above to STRIKING DISTANCE and the DIABOLIQUE remake, Pittsburgh's film production output has generally been qualitatively terrible over the past decade and change. Curtis Hanson's WONDER BOYS is a fantastic film, and Pittsburgh's role in that is more than incidental; the film's location success is directly related to the neighborhoods and the juxtapositions of university people and non-university people that Chabon weaved into the novel. Any of the other above-referenced films could have been made anywhere else and they would still be indistinguishable to anybody but the sad few (read: me) looking for familiar landmarks and buildings during car chases.

I've got high hopes that THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH could similarly find a way to make the locations evocative and meaningful within the context of Chabon's story of post-college months. I read the novel during my first year of law school. I'd leave the insulated law-bubble, walk over to the Carnegie Library (as seen in FLASHDANCE!) and sit in an overstuffed chair for a few hours while that Contracts casebook wasn't reading itself. I remember that week or so of sitting near the Cloud Factory and feeling plugged in to the sort of aimless but purposeful confusion of Chabon's protagonist, in spite of the fact that I'd just been married and was on the sort of vocational conveyor belt that would seem to signify something different.

It's been over ten years, though, since I read the book. Ali reread it this summer and told me that it's as powerful as ever, as removed as we are from those unsteady years.

II. Medallions? WTF?

Two weeks ago we took the girls school-shopping to Grove City. On the way up Interstate 79, about two miles south of exit 76 (and a strong-armed throw from a certain farmhouse in Evans City) we see the strangest sight. Several square miles of tents are packed together like sardines in a campground pressing right up against I-79. What's more, all of the tents are roughly similar: they're all white or off-white simple triangle-style tents made of what looks like canvas. There are none of those red or blue 8-person nylon tents with the rain shields. They're all the same, and there are thousands of them. There are a few torches burning, but no people to be seen anywhere. A quarter-mile or so from the tent city is a field packed solid with thousands of cars. Middle of nowhere, no one around.

On the way back through, we had to stop. We took the closest exit and guessed which way we'd need to go to find the campground. We snaked back a poorly-lit single-lane access road toward the torchlight and drove up to the tent city. On occasion the illusion would be broken by a Pepsi machine or one of the few light poles, but in general, the place was lit with the fires of burning wood. We saw a few people in medieval dress, and became faintly disappointed. Oh, I suppose it would be worthwhile to walk around with the girls to see some of the Renaissance fair baubles and such. Another night, or not.

Driving along the line of tents we eventually come to a road into the middle of them. There are a few more costumed people walking here and there. There are unwashed costumed children following their costumed parents. Now I need to know whether this is just the Total LARP Experience or whether there's any reason I should be hiding my three blond-haired, blue-eyed maidens in the seat stowaway compartments lest they be conscripted into some sort of bloodletting ritual.

We pull into the tent city and an uncostumed man with a parking valet light-wand stops us. I roll down the passenger-side window. Before I can ask him what the hell this is, he says, "Sir, we ask that when you come in this gate you keep your dome light on at all times so we can see your medallions."

Uh, medallions?

The man reads my confusion. "You don't have any medallions, do you?" I'm thinking about what it will take to jam the minivan into reverse before a man with a mace emerges from one of the identical thousands of tents and puts his forged weaponry through the windshield.

No, we don't have any medallions, I admit. We just wandered off the highway to try to find out what this was, I offer politely. (Obviously, all of the 70s-era Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper films I've seen made no impression on me whatsoever.) He tells us that this is the Society for Creative Anachronism's annual gathering. It lasts the full month of August. It draws nearly 20,000 camping medievalists. It is closed to the public.

Weirdly, it wasn't covered at all in any of the Pittsburgh media outlets. It's like an actual small town sitting there for a month, tucked alongside I-79, just jousting and orcing away while the whole region doesn't know or acknowledge it exists.

When we got home Ali immediately went to the internets for elucidation. On the-- no kidding-- Boba Fett fan message boards she found a topic devoted to this thing sandwiched between threads about making your own Fett suit. That led to this link concerning The Wars in Pennsylvania. The salient portions of the linked account are as follows:

Sanitary facilities in the campground are inadequate; twenty or so shower stalls and maybe half as many sinks for nearly ten thousand people. And forget about hot water in the showers, unless you feel like showering at 3:00 AM (and I've had cold showers even then!). Plan to wash in camp. A lot of people build their own showers in their camps, using plastic shower bags available from any store that sells sporting goods. (You fill them with water and leave them in the sun to heat up.) The problem with this is that with everyone using the campground as a drainage ditch, the health situation in general isn't helped. Just the same, if you're camping with a large group of people then a group shower stall and a few shower bags makes sense.

Bathing in the river is possible, but public, and not always advisable depending on the condition of the water. It was contaminated from an upriver spill one year. Another year it had been so dry in that area that the river was barely flowing, allowing all sorts of nasty sludge to clog up the swimming hole. Just the same, if conditions permit I'd rather wash in the river than wait in line for a cold shower.

Yeah.

III. If you had Los Angeles...

...in your own office "Where is Evgeni Malkin holed up?" pool, then step up and collect your winnings. My own bet was that he was in Toronto, rather than that other perennial hangout for Canadian and European NHL players during the off-season, he said facetiously. My greatest concern now is that after spending a month or so on the West Coast in proximity to the sun and beaches and glitz, et cetera, he won't be all that thrilled to have his carriage turn into a Rust Belt pumpkin.

I'm gratified, though, to hear that Malkin's spending time with Alexander Mogilny, who can give him the long-range history of the Russian mafia's threats toward his own family and the years he spent trying to get them out. Really, this whole affair, beginning with Malkin's bailing out of the team hotel under cover of night, is like an old-school, early nineties blast from the past. As one of the fourteen remaining NHL fans left in the United States, I've always loved the way in which the Euro influx wove international politics into the game. As a kid in Kladno, Jaromir Jagr kept a picture of Ronald Reagan in his school book because he liked the way Reagan dissed the Soviets. Then he chooses to wear #68 throughout his international and NHL career to commemorate the Russian tanks rolling through Prague. He even wears the number while playing in the Russian Super League during the '04-'05 lockout. Beyond the colorful stories of players defecting, there are plenty of occasions where players with acrimonious national circumstances played with or against their country's enemies, setting aside those differences or finding a different outlet for them. Until Malkin, though, most of that stuff had quieted down over the past decade.

Offhand, I can't think of any reason to believe that someone who signs a contract at 3:00 a.m. might be under duress. That's pretty common, right? Of course, my favorite detail in the whole run-up is that back in Russia Malkin opened a prison-themed restaurant with framed portraits of Soviet dictators, and he intended to franchise them. Whether this was just a teenager's cheesy business idea or a comically dramatic plea to be released from his commitment to Magnitogorsk Metallurg, I could care less. It's solid gold.

The Monday before he jumped ship in Finland, fellow Russian Penguin Sergei Gonchar was quoted in the Post-Gazette as saying Malkin had told him he intended to play in Russia for another year, which was followed two days later by the early-morning signing ceremony. A local columnist interpreted these details as demonstrating Malkin's inability to make up his mind, but I think it's crystal-clear he had planned this for a while and was just trying to throw Magnitogorsk off the scent. And, more importantly, to make them trust him to hold his own passport.

That last detail can't be overemphasized in making sense of this story. An espn.com columnist portrayed Malkin as less a victim of his national circumstances as the last Russian hockey jewel than as a kid who wants to please everybody, and especially the person he's talking to at the moment. But I think that characterization falls apart given that Malkin was not in possession of his passport until they landed in Finland. When I heard that detail, I thought back to one of my favorite films from last year.

One of the dozens of movies that I'm hoping one day to write about is Jia Zhangke's THE WORLD. It's an amazing film concerning a group of men and women in their twenties and thirties who work at a Beijing theme park which, like an analogue to Epcot Center, reproduces the rest of the world's wonders and attractions in one large-scale, accessible-by-monorail wonderland. The film poignantly raises for both the workers and the visitors issues related to cultural authenticity and the way in which dreams and ambitions are misshapen by circumstances and personal failings. The female protagonist, Tao, is a dancer and singer who puts on the dress of several cultures in successive shows and tries gamely to bend herself into several ethnic traditions. Despite her obvious talent, the effect is slightly absurd. Even the Epcot dolts know you have to get visas for Swedes to work at the Swedish pastry shop.

At one point, three or four Russian women come into the room where the company of Chinese entertainers is gathered. They've been brought to Beijing to add their dancing talents to the park, and they are visibly excited to be taken out of their own dreary circumstances and put into The World. Casually, the Russian man who accompanied them and paid their way asks the dancers to give him their passports for safekeeping. He doesn't want them to get lost. One of the dancers has a world-weariness that the others don't. On her face we can see that she knows that this request, if obeyed, will mean that she will never be free or happy again. She will be a slave. She turns this way and that, pretends not to hear or to be engaged in something else and hopes he will forget to press her for it in the hubbub of the busy hallway. The other dancers are too stupidly exuberant to know what this moment means, and they hand over their lives with alacrity. In a moment made full of terrible tension, the holdout dancer continues to stall, to try to find a reason not to give her passport up. The man persists.

IV. Word economies

I had two great word-related experiences last week. First, I did some topical writing under a fairly aggressive word limit. That's a bit outside my typical professional experience, where word or page limits are generally relaxed and a sort of "more is more" attitude prevails. If a ten-page Brief tells one why a given client's position is right, then a client with a fifteen page Brief filed on his or her behalf must be 50% more right, no?

To look at a block of text that conveys an essential message but uses hundreds of words too many to do so presents a fascinating problem to solve. For someone like me who tends to write in circles and use unnecessary throat-clearing clauses, it's the perfect occasion to find out where the vestigial appendages are. Really, you can cut ten percent of anything along the lines of what I'm writing and not lose much.

Then I did a stand-up at the end of the week for about a hundred and fifty people over an hour of speaking. At thirty-five, I'm actually starting to get the hang of my own voice and am finding that public speaking isn't all that daunting, regardless of the audience.

What's funny is finding where the verbal tics collect and rooting them out only to find they creep back in somewhere else. A colleague sat in on a presentation I did six or so years ago and approached me privately afterward. He pointed out that I was repeatedly saying the word "again" as a sort of intro to discrete thoughts, and not really to signify repeating anything. This was true, of course, and I realized it the moment he mentioned it. It was a comfort word-- more intelligent than saying "uh" or "um," but still meaningless and distracting. So, becoming aware of that tic, I resigned to stop saying it, and did stop. I think, though, that last week I misused "obviously" in a similar capacity.

V. Gimme Gimme (a team that can finish at .500)

Haha. Yeah, I went to this game last week. And the band was fairly awful given that the pointless "script" of the fireworks show called for the original songs to be played in fragment after the covers were performed. Is there any cover band that would want the original, well-loved versions of songs to be played immediately after their reinterpretations? I left midway through before the booing got significant, owing to the aforementioned speaking engagement. Still, though, having seen the musical abortion Big & Rich perform before the All-Star game last month, I'm not going to call this cover band the worst group to play at PNC Park this year.

Leopard-skin Pill Box Hat

Our partial season ticket seats at PNC Park are in the right field stands, about halfway up. Those seats will be ideal for tonight's home run contest. Frankly, I'll be disappointed if I don't catch at least one ball. If you happen to tune in, I'll be the one wearing the '79-era yellow pill box cap and flailing wildly and glovelessly at whatever comes my way.

Top 25 Most Played: 07.06.06

I love, love, love the iPod Play Count feature. It plays directly into the clutches of all the unhealthy quantifying tendencies I've been cultivating over the past three decades. I'm certainly glad that all of my transgressions are blotted out-- really, I am-- but there's still some component of me that is both terrified and tantalized by the prospect of a ledger totalling and categorizing the minutes and hours misspent, the actions taken and omissions omitted. I'd like to see a comparison of the time spent reading Dostoevsky versus the time spent watching Sportscenter. (Aside: this is the summer I read Dostoevsky, and not so much because I am thirsting for the insight into truth and beauty as I simply need to choose a new exemplar for what I should be engaging instead of what I am engaging. I'm sick of having the same reference point. The early leader at present for the successor is Proust.)

And apart from these pejorative associations, I'd like to have an accounting of the positive things, too. The quantity of encouraging words, given and received. The number of times/minutes spent at the zoo, watching movies, swimming, playing with my kids. Time spent inside compared to time spent outside.

To date, only this iPod feature has given me the kind of precision in measuring an experience-- in both tallies of listenings and last-played data. I suppose this veers close to absolute triteness, but it really has value to me. First, it gives me maybe the most accurate picture of where my music-listening desires really lie. Sure, it's tempting to put my thumb on the scale-- I've had to practically shun that Ciara song for the past two months to keep it from ranking higher-- but more often than not, the list reflects exactly what I anticipate it would reflect. Second, having a reference to when I listened to something last is fairly evocative in recalling the events of the last few months. I can't say how many times I've matched a specific event or something to a calendar day by seeing the iTunes info and remembering what I was listening to on a particular occasion. I'd love to have something similar to tell me how many times and when I've watched movies from my collection, or read books from our library (though the latter are easier to place in general seasons or years, for me at least, because the experience is more protracted).

Without further blather, as of five minutes ago:

1. "Digital," Joy Division
2. "The W.A.N.D. (The Will Always Neglects Defeat)," The Flaming Lips
3. "The National Anthem," Radiohead
4. "Airbag," Radiohead
5. "Oh," Ciara
6. "A Few Hours After This," The Cure
7. "Cinnamon Girl," Neil Young
8. "Little Babies," Sleater-Kinney
9. "Niki Hoeky," Aretha Franklin
10. "Clones (We're All)," Alice Cooper
11. "Neighborhood 3- Power Out," Arcade Fire
12. "La'hov," Mates of State
13. "Maps," Yeah Yeah Yeahs
14. "Rebellion (Lies)," Arcade Fire
15. "New World," Bjork
16. "Shake Dog Shake," The Cure
17. "Crazy," Gnarles Barkley
18. "Everyone Needs an Editor," Mates of State
19. "Suedehead," Morrissey
20. "How to Disappear Completely," Radiohead
21. "Paranoid Android," Radiohead
22. "The Hunter #2," The Robot Ate Me
23. "Concerning the U.F.O Sighting Near Highland, Illinois," Sufjan Stevens
24. "It's Only Love," ZZ Top
25. "Mr. Roboto," Styx

SONG MOST LIKELY TO CRACK THE TOP 25 IN THE NEXT 30 DAYS: "Pull Shapes" by The Pipettes.

This is my hometown

This weekend Ali and I and the girls will be travelling to DuBois, where the two of us grew up. The place has apparently been afflicted by a strange new taste sensation. I will take orders for any interested parties.

Holiday

Three hours ago I was driving toward the setting sun on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Cognitively, I know that this fuzzy neon orange bubble in the pleasant dusk sky is the same sun that warmed us for (most of) the last week in Emerald Isle, NC, but it feels completely foreign.

For some unknown reason which speaks poorly of my cellular phone network choice, I couldn't gain access to my voice mailbox until we had crossed over into the Commonwealth of Virginia. I had ten messages, four of which were devoted to informing or updating me as to the status of BENJURY, 2006: WINSLOW, LOSE OR DRAW. Seriously, I'm as devoted to the Steelers as anybody, but I'm so ridiculously thankful that my out-of-town vacation coincided with the resultant media orgy. My guess is that by noon on Tuesday the bike wreck had its own local news theme music and logo. Incidentally, my own preferred design would be an amalgam of the Lombardi Trophy, the medical asp-on-staff insignia and a stylized number seven.

We had a great time on vacation. A few vacation-related observations:

1. I'm trying to think of the big-budget Hollywood films of the past 365 days that have given me as much pleasure as The Disney Channel's HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL. No kidding. I count GEORGE A. ROMERO'S THE LAND OF THE DEAD, THE 40 YEAR-OLD VIRGIN and THE NEW WORLD and no others. I have no desire to ask what this says about me.

2. I've waitied 35 years to name an official beer of Russ. I'm going with the Champagne of Beers. Oh, it's not my favorite. Not by a long shot. It's probably not even in the Top Fifty. Still, it is my official beer.

3. As far as I'm concerned, there are two essential DVD box sets this year: Rohmer's Moral Tales and the 1979 World Series. My friend Foob brought the latter set along and we spent the rainy mornings of two days watching Games Five and Six. It didn't disappoint. Even if watching the Fam-a-lee rebound from a 3-1 deficit against the Birds isn't your cup of tea, the Cosell-Drysdale color and play-by-play is a gold mine for any '70s-era sports fan. Throw in the promos for abc's 1979 fall lineup, and there's something for everyone.

Ali and I took the girls to see CARS. I've got a few thoughts I'll post tomorrow.

BONUS: Dan Laugharn pointed out this great live performance.

A vow to the Internets and the assembled beyond:

I will not allow myself more than five hours of sleep a night* until I have fulfilled all of my sparkly motherf%&@ing dreams. Jesus, help me (make me) do this.






*(does not apply to Friday nights)

The Chris Shelton (Non) Watch

As of last night, the Pittsburgh Pirates have won a mere nine of thirty-three games played.

Sigh.

The impossible dream-- .500-- will not live to see June this year.

Instead, Pirate fans everywhere will have to turn elsewhere for their baseball-related intrigue. In particular, they may find themselves turning to the AL statistical leaders on a regular basis to dream about what might have been.

He's slipped back a bit to the rest of the pack in the past two weeks, but if you'd gone to the AL stat leaders page at espn.com a couple of weeks ago, the batting average, home run and rbi leaders were all denoted with a singular picture of an earnest, eager, smiling young man whose middle name is apparently "Bob."

#26 Chris Shelton
Height: 6-0
Weight: 215 lbs.
Age: 25
2006 Salary: $365,000
AVG .296 HR 10 RBI 21 OBP .364 SLG .661 OPS 1.025 (As of 5/08/06)

The story begins here, with some real and still unsettled confusion over whether the home team understood that it could protect three more players. And I don't even want to consider sifting through the names of some of the stiffs and suckers who were deemed worthy of 40-man roster protection while the assembled executives laughed audibly in the midst of plucking free, raw talent from the Tree of Ignorance.

Being a Pirate fan over the past thirteen years has meant being offered a succession of consolation prizes as incentive to go out to the park. Come and see tomorrow's (potential) stars today! (Several years) Come and see the last season at Three Rivers Stadium! (2000) Come and see the freak show with the $9M payroll that's flirting with .500! (1997) Come and see baseball's greatest new park! (2004, 2005) Come so you can see the All-Star Game! (1994, 2006)

Of course, for at least the next few years, the consolation prize is that you get to see Jason Bay, Jack Wilson and Zach Duke. Some nights that will be enough. On many other nights, fans with even the slightest imagination will look out at the team in the field and imagine a scene where Shelton is playing first base and where Aramis Ramirez wasn't given away to the Cubs to make short-term payroll. That's a scene where signing declining players to stopgap one-year deals doesn't happen.

My hope now is that Shelton regains his early season form and slugs his way onto the AL All-Star squad, where he can get the PNC Park welcome he so richly deserves. And Dave Littlefield and Kevin McClatchy can quietly judge the crowd after the disproportionate applause dies down.

So, yeah. With our shared weekend package, I'll be catching ten to fifteen games. A running diary to follow.

GAME ONE Saturday, April 15, 2006
Pirates 2 Cubs 1.
Nice game. Zach Duke turns in a great performance. The crowd was driven to frenzied ecstasy by the distribution of JASON BAY 2005 ALL-STAR bobblehead idols. The very day it's announced that Sean Casey's out for months with a broken back, Craig Wilson steps in and is the catalyst for the two runs. Of course, the front office tried desperately to trade him before the season started, so only their failure to do so kept him on the team to step in for Casey and produce these runs. YEEHAW.

GAME TWO Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Pirates 12 Cardinals 4
Even better game. Jeff Suppan is tagged for a half-dozen runs in less than three full, but this time he isn't wearing a Pirate uni. The Wilsons tee off, Jeremy Burnitz actually picks up a couple of hits and Oliver Perez pitches well and has a big enough lead that the crowd actually enjoys a mammoth HR off the bat of Albert Pujols. We're sitting in the left field bleachers while on the annual Lutheran Student Fellowship outing rather than our usual right field seats, so the three HRs mentioned above all land in the general area of where we are. Leah and Ruby get some quality Jumbotron tims, and all are sent home happy with an ALL-STAR COLLECTIBLE PIN #2.

GAME THREE Sunday, April 30, 2006
Phillies 5 Pirates 1
Lousy game, gamewise. Beautiful day, daywise. The sunburn I felt on Monday stung nearly as bad as Oliver Perez's lackluster pitching. I'm not even sure the Pirates took bats to the plate. However, having four or five chances to get a thirty-foot view on the scoreboard of
Sal Fasano's 'stache made me glad the Phillies won. Only that facial hair and the fact that this game coincided with KIDS' BASEBALL GLOVE DAY made the day a raging success.

More to come...

Here Comes the Summer

Last day in May, the afternoon: remember?

Black marks off charcoal from the dune: remember?

I thought it wouldn’t be too soon; we’d wait at least until its June.

The twenty-ninth of March it rained: remember?

You looked so sad that I explained: remember?

You knew it wouldn’t be too soon; we’ll have to wait until its June.

I’ve been waiting since I don’t know when and now it finally seems about to start.

I swear, I swear, that I will do my part.

December dark at six o’clock: remember?

The freezing wind gives you a shock: remember?

You knew it wouldn’t be too soon; we’ll have to wait until its June.

October damp on down the street: remember?

The sodden leaves stuck to your feet: remember?

You knew it wouldn’t be too soon; we’ll have to wait until its June.

I’ve been waiting since I don’t know when and now it finally seems about to start.

I swear, I swear, that I will do my part.

July the third we stayed up late: remember?

And thought how long we’d have to wait: remember?

It’ll be so long until it’s soon; it’ll be so long until its June

Three things on my iPod: 4.14.06

I remarked three posts ago that post-iPod I've come to resemble a really happening guy from the year 2004. That's true in multiple ways. If you were privy to my internal thoughts in recent weeks, you'd hear things like "Say, Arcade Fire is a great band" or "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot: fantastic album." I'll be minimizing the number of statements such as those which highlight my out-of-touchitude, but I do want to mention a couple of things which I'm currently listening to.

1. In the golden age of synthesizer movie scores ('78-'85), there are only three that I care deeply about: Goblin's work in DAWN OF THE DEAD, Vangelis's score for BLADE RUNNER and John Carpenter's theme song for ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. $.99 at the iTunes store brought me Carpenter's song, and it's rapidly climbing the 25 Most Played chart. I know that it cannot be defended from a qualitative musical point of view. It's far too repetitive, and not terribly complex. I suppose it's partly a nostalgia choice, but not entirely because, unlike other things of my adolescence, this song really hasn't gotten worse when seen through an adult's eyes. I first saw AoP13 when I was maybe eleven years old and it was playing as the four o'clock movie on the NBC affiliate out of Johnstown, and then I didn't see it again until twenty-two years later. During that entire interval, Carpenter's theme song stuck right on the edge of my conscious recall, always immediately there if I cared to revisit it. I suppose the bombastic, triumphant soundtracks to STAR WARS and STAR TREK were the first bits of movie music I latched on to, but Carpenter's simple theme song was the first to have the ability to evoke a visceral dread and fear.

2. Season One of The Ricky Gervais Show is also downloadable now in full. I've had it now for over a month and I'm shocked to say that I am not in any hurry to get through it. A couple of years after the BBC THE OFFICE phenomenon, I'm still of the mind that Gervais's David Brent is one of the most fascinating characters of recent years. His glaring self-possession and insatiable hunger for approval are common enough, but Gervais manages to infuse the character with the ability to generate earnest pathos because we can see, on occasion, that Brent is himself aware that the tired jokes and servile "friend to his subordinates" schtick is just the thick skin of a lonely man. We understand why Brent is who he is, but we also are shown the effects of his habits and delusions. His tragicomic flaws are played out to their logical and necessary ends in a manner that bucks the eternal stasis inherent in much of the disposable sitcoms. It's comedy with consequences.

How many artists have been able to couple unbound hilarity with real and resonant insights into human behavior? Not enough. Not many. So, with all that being said, am I being unfair in saying that Gervais's podcast show is really disappointing because it doesn't appear to be much more than he and Merchant piling on their dim producer?

3. The local library had a set of read-aloud short stories of John Cheever. Cheever himself reads "The Swimmer," while a couple of actors read other stories. If, like me, you're a fan of GILMORE GIRLS, then you've come to appreciate at length the talents of Edward Herrmann. His WASPy, northeastern dignity is, predictably, a great match.

Six years ago I smashed up my ankle on Memorial Day, which put a Death's Head on the doorway to a summer Ali and I were looking forward to even more than other summers. We were set to leave for the beach, where she'd have to keep a seven month-old from eating too much sand, keep a three year-old from being swept away by the undertoad and where she wouldn't get much help from a husband on crutches. She had mentioned an interest in reading Cheever's stories, so I ordered the complete short stories and a copy of Falconer for her to read on the beach. In the ensuing years we both read Falconer and had mixed reactions to it, and we both dipped only slightly into the short stories. I'm glad we didn't. I wouldn't have responded to Cheever's stories the same way six years ago, and maybe things will be different yet in five more years. For now, today, there's something about them that seems vital, even if I wouldn't really describe the stories as familiar. Obviously, I need to think and write more about this, but it seems to me very important to pay attention to the possibilities of sudden and inexplicable threats to domesticity. I can't explain it.

Hello! says the Voicebox of Nature

On Monday I was walking into a meeting and I heard a dog say my name. I suppose that because my name is Russ this is the sort of thing that should have happened to me previously, but I can say with certainty that I have never, until this time, cognitively believed that I was being addressed directly by a dog. There was a looseness in the dog's bark that came out at the end and made me think I was hearing the S sound. How convinced was I (really) that the dog meant to call me? Well, convinced enough that I turned my head in the expectant way I do when a human calls my name, and not merely the sort of nonspecific looking-about that I typically do when I hear a dog barking and care to discover where the barking originates.

After the dog said "Russ!" it went back to ordinary dogspeak. It was locked in a pickup truck cap, and I couldn't get a good look at it without going right up to the rear window. I was late and I went inside the building.

I tried to brush it off as mishearing or an active imagination, but even after a few moments the strangeness didn't subside, so I became open to the idea that I didn't mishear or imagine it. Indeed, after giving it a moment's thought, I revised my response entirely, and now I believe that man's best friend was delivering to me a message from the bough of the natural world. It got my attention and gave me a message on behalf of the remainder of the Great Chain of Being. "Keep your chin up, Russ," the assembled creation says. "Don't let the frauds get you down or make a dent in you. We know the score."

I only wish I had known the dog's name so I could have thanked it in kind.

I don't...

[content suspended]

Checking in with my 2006 To-Do List...

Two and a half months in, it's time to check on my progress.

1. Watch the Pittsburgh Steelers win Super Bowl XL. Whether the broadcast takes place on network television or on my own private in-head network TBA.

Yeah, this happened. And I wish I had put some money behind the expressed homer sentiment; at the time I said the above, they had just barely squeaked into the playoffs and looked like candidates for an early exit. Of course, the pleasure in these things is more in the anticipating and the improbability than in the actual achieving, or so I've found. There's a strangely blunt letdown after these kinds of things, in my experience. Still, the sublime camraderie of sharing the four playoff games with my daughters and their hand-lettered cheer cards is worth treasuring. Growing up in western Pennsylvania in the 1970s meant, for many boys, some degree of identification or parallelism with the near-invincibility of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Hell, I wasn't all that good at sports and don't remember watching a game before Super Bowl XIV (the fourth win, in 1980) and still some of the pictures of me as a kid that make me smile the most are the ones where I'm proudly sporting a Steeler jacket I got for Christmas or holding up a jar of Terry Bradshaw peanut butter. They're instantly contextualized and not terribly different, in that regard, from the one where I'm holding Star Wars toys.

2. Mount a campaign via the internet and U.S. mail to browbeat the Mattel Corporation into creating a Kryzstzof Kieslowski version of their popular Scene It DVD board game. Imagine the possibilities: the group of players selects a film clip question. The DVD displays a washed-out shot of Warsaw, then follows up with, "Which Kieslowski film is this clip from?" Cut to the assembled faces of the confused.

I posted a comment substantially the same as the following one on the website of the makers of the SceneIt? line of games last week, and I've just posted the following message verbatim on the site:

I wanted to drop you a line to let you know how much my family has enjoyed playing the HARRY POTTER SCENEIT? game we received for Christmas. My oldest daughter is a Harry Potter fanatic, and she has enjoyed having a game that is smart enough to let her show off all the arcane details she has committed to memory. ;) It's been a good time for all of us.

I see that you've started selling base models of the game with different booster packs for particular characters or film franchises. I'd like to recommend that you develop and market a KRYZSTZOF KIESLOWSKI version of the game. I realize that it would be a niche product-- I can't deny that-- but in my experience cinephiles often get together at parties and gatherings and lack a challenging film-related game to play. I think that a game devoted to the filmography of the late Polish master at portraying the spiritual and moral complexities of human volition would be really great.

Sincerely,
Russell Lucas

I intend to post similar messages once per week. Anyone wishing to do the same can follow the link below. (I expect this will work out as well as my Sufjan Stevens thing.)

http://www.screenlifegames.com/about/contact.aspx


3. See/identify 125 different birds.

To realize fully the howling absurdity of this goal as stated, one first needs to know that my birding guide, Birds of Pennsylvania, contains only 117 species. Huh. Should have checked that. Sure, we've got some hikes and camping trips planned, but there's no way I'm going to get anywhere close to that number unless I allow myself to count males and females of a species as two birds. By that fuzzy math, put me at 3: Robin M, Robin F, Cardinal M. In this instance, lameing out is the only alternative.

4. Sit through three theatrical showings of Malick's The New World, preferably on three consecutive nights.

I did make it out to a 9:45 show the night it opened locally. And I really cottoned to it. I didn't make those other two viewings, though, and they'll have to wait until I own a DVD copy.

5. Organize a party or event commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the forging of my car and have the Town of McCandless recognize this party or event as an Official Town Party or Event. Dan Laugharn will be contacted about design of a logo.

Dear reader(s), you have no idea how close we came to this objective being rendered impossible. In mid-January, I was pulling out of a parking lot while taking a break in the middle of a deposition and found that the car had been rendered unstoppable. I arrived at my lunch destination, mashed the brakes a few times and stepped out in time to see the viscous halting fluid flowing onto the asphalt. You can imagine my despair at the thought of a repair bill which would, in all likelihood, exceed the fair market value of my car. Plus, I prefer not to be on the hook for two car payments simultaneously. I was also thinking that my long-term goal-- the goal of keeping that car operational until the day when Xzibit would arrive, fairy godmother-like, and deliver my Pure Stock Vehicle into a state of heightened awesomeness-- would now never happen. Don't fret: the dream lives. Instead of needing a new master cylinder, some sort of tape or plug or tapeplug was applied by the garage, and I have braking power again. So there will still be a celebration (to which all are invited), and there will still be a logo, and perhaps it will be affixed to a T-shirt. I could care less about the Town event part, though.

6. Spend a week in Carolina in June or August.

We're in the book for June. I have even paid the deposit (& everything). I have shared with M/M Otterman my goals for the 2006 iteration: (a) more beer consumed, and (b) more seafood consumed. All else should go just like last year.

7. Spend a week in Toronto in September.

I believe this is still a realistic possibility.

8. Spend more than a week in California at some point in the year.

I believe this is still a realistic possibility.

9. Reawaken my Spanish proficiency and transmit that to my daughters.

This hasn't happened yet. I've probably got to wait until summertime before I can command too much of Leah's and Ruby's intellectual horsepower. To that end, I should start self-refreshing on vocabulary and basic grammar in about a month. My conversational aural skills were always the weak link; to that end, any suggestions on Spanish-language podcasts would be warmly appreciated.

10. Acquire a record player.

I haven't bought one yet, but I still think it will happen at some point before year's end. I've been the custodian of my mom's record collection for over half a year now, and am really interested in playing them and the ones I've kept from my youth. I've actually recently gone the other direction on the music technospectrum. Ali had some family members chip in to buy me an iPod for my birthday, and I've spent the last month having a great time with it and pretending I am a really cutting-edge guy living in 2003.

(not my fault)

I spent an hour on a post tonight in an effort to resume some posting regularity, but found when I tried to post it that three-fourths of it were somehow deleted. It was pretty dispiriting. I suppose the fault lies with me for not saving regularly, but the blogger save feature doesn't strike me as terribly user-friendly.

That new title quote...

comes from the 2005 Most Awesome and Best Picture. If you watched the telecast (Aside: and I did. After three or four years of deliberately scheduling something else during the ceremony, I did not resist this year. Ali suggested, rightly, that this reversal of habit was the clearest indication of how much I didn't want to get myself into the bagful of work I'd brought home.), then you saw a clip containing the above-referenced line proffered as some whiff of the film's genius. Like me, you may have laughed in response to hearing it. Regardless, if you aspire to write for the picture shows and you need to quiet those nagging doubts about whether you lack the necessary creative gifts or appreciation for the vagaries and rhythms of human conversation, then I think we can all readily agree that contemplating this quote is balm for one's soul.

Not-titled

That pit in the stomach says that despite everything, I still respond to the voice that says that I'm nothing but the sum of my accomplishments. Value to be determined on every hour of every day by reference to the direction of my possession arrow. That cross-hung God is a consolation prize and nothing more. He's just a contingency plan when the unthinkable has happened, and an afterthought or (worse) a charm bracelet when favor smiles.

*shrug* (weary)

I had intended to address the matter of my blog-neglect with some bit of unfunniness. Perhaps a Top Ten List of Things Even More Neglected Than This Blog. I could say "O.J.'s search for the real killer" and "the Vice President's hunter safety certification," and it would be cute and mock-serious. Then it occurred to me that I could also say, more earnestly, "my writing life" and "my reading life" and "my movie-watching life." Then the joke isn't even unfunny any more.

Just too busy, or too scattered, or too whatever. I do take it, though, as a real sign of wellness when I'm making time for these things that are good for me-- like deliberate expression-- and a sign of the lack thereof when my habits slacken. This is all just to say that if you still point your browser in this direction and have not yet unbookmarked this, I'm appreciative and intend to restart better habits in updating.

In other news, I'm advanced of age. Thirty-five as of Monday. I celebrated by attending a meeting until ten-thirty. I figure that this birthday, all things considered, still beat the year I turned fourteen and stepped on a sewing needle in my bare feet while getting ready for school. There wasn't even any pleasure in missing school when the time was spent in the ER having them dig the half that was lodged in my foot out.

Of course this birthday was better; Ali threw me a great party on the 19th and I enjoyed the company of family and friends.

Two Rhetorical Questions

First, who are all these people out there who are attempting to take things away from athletes? Is there some sort of concerted theft of identity or accomplishment that we can stop? They seem so concerned with achieving things that no one can take away from them. I would like them to not be worried about this.

Second, I remember the moment when I heard about the story that forms the narrative action of When a Stranger Calls. I was standing in the front yard of the house of a neighbor, right in front of their wood-slat fence, and my younger sister's classmate laid it all out to me with a flair for the dramatic that was precocious for someone who was no more than eleven. I was probably twelve, and I still remember how effective the punchline comes across. It was represented to me to be a movie, but with the addendum that it had really happened somewhere, so the story came to occupy that hazy place in childhood nightmares where even the most outlandish fiction is just standing in for the things that have actually happened in some vague place one county over.

Maybe it wouldn't be possible to recreate that sort of experiential terror on today's twelve year-olds. It's too easy to snopes something and obtain one of many other unreliable sources of authority which can confirm or deny the actual occurrence of something that could have inspired something. Nevertheless, I had no idea they were remaking the film, and while I reflexively think little of these kinds of projects, it seemed to me that for a new generation of teens who aren't familiar with the older film, a well-done, non-gory remake might be a film experience worth having. You can remake a film like this because you can have some confidence that for many of the members of the new audience, the ending will be unknown to them. And because they don't care to read reviews of the films they see before they see them, it can remain unknown for a sizable number of kids.

Of course, it never occurred to me that they might give away the ending, perhaps the best urban legendary twist ending in post-70s American B-moviedom, in a TV teaser. That did not occur to me. And the fact that it didn't strike any of the film's marketing people as something that might want to be kept out of the advertising, what does that say about them? And about us?

SYRIANA

There's this scene in SYRIANA around the two-thirds mark. Matt Damon's character, a wunderkind energy firm analyst, is riding an elevator with a prince who is heir to an unnamed Arab oil emirate. Damon's character has achieved this unfettered access to the king-to-be through both his plucky resolve and his son's timely electrocution in the prince's pool. I can't remember whether the elevator was going up or down, but the hotel rooms cost $20,000 per night, so wherever they were going was an important place. Suddenly the elevator stops and George Clooney's character gets on. He's a little rumpled and heavily bearded in his CIA operative disguise, but he's still plainly the most charismatic man making movies in Hollywood. Clooney's guy says nothing to Damon's guy, but exchanges a few nondescript phrases with the prince. At that moment, I know. I know exactly what's going to happen next. After another moment or two of the elevator descending or ascending the fifty-story hotel, it will stop again. Then Don Cheadle will get on. He will be wearing an emerald green sequined shirt and will be speaking Mandarin. More seemingly insignificant banter will be exchanged, and by the time the elevator reaches the top or bottom, the prince will have been talked into signing over his oil holdings in exchange for nonexistent soybean fields in Illinois and the heroes will be on their way to a helipad. The CON will be ON.

It's strange. I went to see SYRIANA in the middle of making my way a couple of times through the television version of Bergman's SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE. There's no real reason to discuss the two in the same paragraph, but one contrast that occurred to me is too stark not to mention. Bergman's film is a five-hour measurement of the distance between two people and an exercise in creating a complex portrait of two characters and the relationship they couldn't sustain or abandon. In SYRIANA, the only sliver that could pass for character development or detail is the part in which the ambitious lawyer is openly disdainful of his sloppy drunk father in a couple of scenes in the middle of the film, but by the end of the film he has scaled it back to mild resentment.

Perhaps SYRIANA collapses under the weight of its own heft when it decides to separate the various players and assign them various gradations of moral culpability. I suppose that's an arguably necessary device from a conventional storytelling perspective to allow the audience one or two points of entry, but it sets in motion a fairly rote resolution of all those sprawling, interconnected storylines.

For one particular character example, take George Clooney's CIA operative. At the film's beginning, he's a morally ambiguous operator selling missiles to uncertain end-users to further national interests, broadly speaking. I believe, if I understood the labrythine plot correctly, that he was set to assassinate the aforementioned prince. However, he is then provided with a moment of moral clarity which steers him away from the anti-hero path and back onto the straight and narrow role of our moral voice and conscience. His fate is sealed when he meets Christopher Plummer's oil baron character at a diner to confront him. If anything constitutes a beatification in American cinema, it is any moment in which any male lead sticks his finger in any Christopher Plummer character's face and delivers the "Don't fuck with my family" speech. From that instant, he's resolutely the hero, all the more because we're there to watch him fail.

Note, though, that two of the plot points that illustrate Clooney's character's alienation and the ideological inferiority of his opponents are rehashes. Specifically, he discovers that he's being frozen out of the Agency when we see, in real-time, his computer deny him access to information he had just been able to see. Later, while Clooney is on the ground attempting to rescue the prince, we see the high-tech assassination played out from one satellite remove away, in a control room where bureaucrats order missile strikes which show up on computer monitors. I saw two scenes nearly identical to those in a Harrison Ford Jack Ryan movie some years ago. I think it's a safe bet that Tom Clancy and Stephen Gaghan wouldn't write the same position paper on fossil fuels and our national dependence on oil from the Gulf region, but they're using the same narrative language about their character and their government, and that's telling in a way that's hardly flattering to Gaghan's film.

Sure, SYRIANA has the same narrative hallmarks that may have become mainstreamed after Gaghan's own script for TRAFFIC, and the film tries hard to ape the unabashed circa-Watergate political paranoia of films like THE CONVERSATION, THE PARALLAX VIEW and DAY OF THE CONDOR. The problem, though, is that those elements, at least insofar as they are elements of plot and style, have been themselves neutered and mainstreamed into irrelevance. As a result, any outrage or even thoughtful reflection brought about by the film lasts, whether by design or not, only as long as it takes the viewer to get up and walk from the theater out into the parking lot, unlock the car and put the key into the ignition. The film's forgotten by the time the engine is started, because you've got to get home somehow.

If you need CLE credits in March and happpen...

...to be in Pittsburgh on the 23rd, I can vouch for the high-end content of this seminar.

STEELERS: PLEASE WEAR WHITE JERSEYS IN SUPER BOWL

This humble plea (part aesthetic, part irrational, part trite-sports-poetic) is all that I want to say at the present concerning the Steelers' rampaging through the #1, #2 and #3 seeds in the AFC.

Just wear the whites.

THE NEW WORLD

I'm probably going to wait until I've seen THE NEW WORLD a few more times before saying much about it. For now, though, I'm floored by it and can't wait to see it later, someday, in all its various iterations.

FUNNY HA HA

Did FUNNY HA HA play on more than three or four screens, ever? I don't know. 95% or more of the people who will see it over the course of its life as a work of art will do so on a television with a DVD player. After they get past the Wellspring logo and the title screen with the aggressive piano music (a strange choice for a film with no music except for bits of nondescript diegetic music in restaurants and at parties), there's no studio logo or intro. No production company calling card. The movie just starts, after announcing the title, and then later just ends, followed by handwritten credits. Putting aside the fact that the same digital home video technology employed by films with actual budgets is responsible for delivering the film to me, there's something very different happening here. It's as if the film went directly from Andrew Bujalski to my DVD player, with no in-between stops to be vetted or imprimatured or test-audienced.

Yeah, I know. That's willfully naive. Plus, it ignores the couple-years-ago copyright and Wellspring's involvement (aside: finally a transfer even they couldn't mangle). There were stops and starts through the process. People had to be talked into this; it had to be invested in. Sure. But that bit-- the part where you hit play and his movie just comes on, unannounced and unclaimed-- divides the sheep from the goats. The goats will see that transition and think, "What is this? Some low budget thing a guy made in his garage?" The sheep will say, "This is fantastic." And they'll say that even if the movie doesn't strike them as great right away. The confluence of digital distribution, internet niche-creating and digital filmmaking (even if Bujalski's not working with it now) holds the promise of finding new channels of creativity. Bujalski's second feature is available for direct online purchase, and includes a handwritten note of thanks. He's gathered two mentions at slate.com in the past month, though, so he's likely to not stay anonymous much longer among the film-savvy set.

None of the above would matter if the film weren't itself quite effective. It fails conventional QC tests which ask whether a sufficient amount of something happens and whether the central character grows or changes as a result of that something. But who cares about that stuff anyway? I've heard the film referred to once or twice as SLACKER from a young woman's point-of-view, but that just suggest to me that the scarcity of films like this leaves them without convenient points of reference. FUNNY HA HA depicts a few weeks or months in the life of a young woman named Marnie who can't seem to chart a straight course in her love life or her work life. She goes through a couple of jobs which may or may not match her skills and spends time talking to friends (all of whom want to see her fixed up) and going to parties. The actress who plays Marnie was unknown to me, but I think she's one of the most recognizable people I've ever seen in a film. I could try to describe her, but it's really beside the point to do so. Describing her limits her in a way that the film doesn't. She is someone you know.

There are at least two ways in which Marnie's story is like that of the typical lead in a romantic comedy or drama. First, she resolves to improve herself in the unstated hope that different habits and qualities will make her happier. Second, she's in love with someone who wants only to be her friend and friendly with someone who is in love with her. In other words, the most commonplace story elements imaginable.

So I found myself in Hot Topic...

Last weekend we were eating at this hot dog place my dad suggests every time he's in town, and I spotted a college-aged young woman wearing an olive green DAWN OF THE DEAD t-shirt. I'm rendered immobile by booth positioning, so I suggest to Ali that she could make me very happy by finding out where the woman obtained the shirt.

And that's how I found myself pulling into the mall after covering a night meeting last week. I walk into Hot Topic for the first time in my life. I'm still wearing a suit, and if there's an equivalent in this suburban chain ripoff shop to Jack Black's character in HIGH FIDELITY, then he's sure to be making fun of me.

Oh, yeah. There they are. Stacked below the RE-ANIMATOR shirts. They've got the great zombie top-of-skull logo. I've probably wanted a DAWN OF THE DEAD t-shirt for at least twenty years, and these ones are comparatively not bad. I'm not sure exactly why I've retained this infantile desire to make myself identifiable by clothing to things I like, but there you go. Yeah, they've got the right size. I guess I'm ready to go.

For some reason I just keep standing there. Maybe I'd rather not have to pay for it. No, there's something else. Suddenly, I'm just hyperventilating with irony. I'm going to buy a DAWN OF THE DEAD t-shirt at a mall. A shopping mall. What's worse, I'm going to buy it at a store selling fake nonconformity, or at least doing so the best you can while nestled between Victoria's Secret and Mrs. Field's Cookies.

I put the shirt back and walk out of the store.

Hidden Talents

I know nothing about college basketball and find the whole thing too sprawling to follow, and thus I dutifully avoided the annual March Madness pool at my old firm. My new firm, however, runs a NFL picks pool and I just couldn't help myself. And now I have two hundred and fifty reasons to be glad I joined in the fun.

I'm aware it's not nearly as hard as working with point spreads, but I managed to guess 180 out of 256 games right, for a clip of 70.3%, on my way to the title. That's a couple of percentage points better than Gerry Dulac of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, who gets paid to pick the games. Oh, wait. So do I.

In my experience, found money lives on the longest when it's put to something specific and singular. Early in my legal career I worked on a particularly contentious estate dispute. When the matter was concluded, the grateful client wanted to give me a gratuity. After the supervisory lawyers concluded it would be ethically permissible for me to accept the gift, I tried to find something that we would otherwise not have bought then. We had moved into our first house about eighteen months prior, and it made perfect sense to spend the money on a new comforter, sheets and matching curtains. I'd often look at those curtains or that comforter and think of that case and that kindness.

And so now I will contemplate my NFL prognostication prowess each time I gaze upon this, this, this, this and this.