How Cold Is It?

While the car's thermometer waffled between 0 degrees and 1 degree on my way to work this morning, the real indication is this: in my fully-heated car, my fully-charged iPod wouldn't play.

AN OLD PHOTO (FOR KAETHE)

January, 2007 film viewings

1.1 TALLADEGA NIGHTS
1.2 10th DISTRICT COURT
1.3 MONSTER HOUSE
1.5 LEMONY SNICKET'S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS
1.6 ARMY OF SHADOWS
1.7 M. HULOT'S HOLIDAY
1.12 LITTLE CHILDREN
1.13 CHILDREN OF MEN
1.14 SINGIN' IN THE RAIN
1.20 PAN'S LABYRINTH
ARMY OF SHADOWS
1.21 STORY OF A LOVE AFFAIR
TO BE OR NOT TO BE
1.22 THE LOST BOYS OF SUDAN
WEDLOCK HOUSE: AN INTERCOURSE
1.24 A SCANNER DARKLY
1.27 THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE

Yeah, this.

Insight:

There's an excellent chance the next Steelers coach will be a no-nonsense Western Pennsylvania tough guy, who, despite such a style, is loved by his players. He'll be a coach who will give time to the media, but not gladly. He'll be angry in defeat and step to the back in victory. He'll have little use for small talk and will have an extremely small circle of confidants.

No, Bill Cowher is not being rehired.

By most indications, assistant head coach Russ Grimm is being promoted.

A Query

What has two thumbs and is glad he didn't take his two HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL-mad kids to see the stage version when it came through town last week?

This guy.

Hypocrisy?

http://attorney-wastrel.blogspot.com/2005/08/birth-of-nation.html

Sid's 20th Goal

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Seriously, the Calder Trophy is nothing, and I fully agree with that result on the basis alone of Ovechkin's twenty or so highlight reel goals from last year. There are bigger trophies out there, like the Ross and Hart, and Crosby's making a run at both of them this year. He's a better passer than Ovechkin, and now he's got his own off-his-skates goal for the For Your Consideration clips. He's still running roughly 1:2 in goals-to-assists, but if he keeps playing with Malkin and Recchi, I don't see anything other than an injury keeping him from the scoring title. I have doubts as to whether a one-line team, even with its one line like that one, will be able to make the playoffs this year, but we'll see an uptick in team defense when Mark Eaton returns from his wrist injury in the next month. At the very least, it should go down to the last few weeks.

2007

These are not resolutions.

First: In 2007 I vow to do everything within my power to eradicate (or, at the very least, mercilessly ridicule) one of the two stupidest rhetorical devices in common use by nonfiction writers.* Recent examples read in just the past few days are this article from the Post-Gazette's sports page and also in this article Bill Gates wrote for Scientific American about robots. The device is nearly always found in the opening paragraph of the piece and is easily spotted. The writer will describe a thing or condition in somewhat vague detail, but without actually naming it. Then, after painting this inexact portrait, the writer pulls the rug out. It turns out that instead of broadly describing the thing we were all thinking, the writer was actually describing something else obviously similar to it! Ho HO! You mean to say you weren't describing the Steelers, but rather the Bengals? I surely never would have suspected there were such similarities between 8-8 football teams. Can this be? You're not actually just talking about the present state of robot technology, but reiterating the recent history of personal computer technology? That's clever!

I'm inclined to label this rhetorical time-wasting a Plainly-Obvious Switcheroo, but that's due in part to the acronym it yields. I'm open to suggestions as to what it is called. I'll be spending some part of 2007 linking to and mocking the worst uses of this device.

* In case you were wondering (you weren't), the other stupidest rhetorical device in common use is the "lead off with an unattributed quote that seems to be describing a present-day state and then grandly reveal that the quote was said at a time and place commonly thought to be idyllic and free from the menace described in the quote" manuever.

Second: Because this worked to perfection last year, I reiterate it here in modified form: I vow to watch the Pittsburgh Penguins win the Stanley Cup in 2007. Whether the team then promptly relocates to Kansas City is another matter.

Third: I vow to wait until at least January 19, 2007 before getting a haircut.

Fourth: I vow to have my 1040 completed and filed on or before February 20, 2007.

Fifth: I vow to housetrain the one on the left.

December, 2006 film viewings

12.9 SUPERMAN RETURNS
12.10 LITTLE CHILDREN
12.31 CHARLOTTE'S WEB (2006)

No, not a misprint. This might provide some insight into what I'd like to see change in 2007.

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.