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.