Sunday, June 14, 2009
BANG! BANG! BANG! SHE SHOT ME DOWN
Just when you suspected that I only watch the same five or six Alfred Hitchcock movies on a permanent loop, I am at long last shifting the conversation to another of my favorite directors, Billy Wilder. In fact, for his excellence also as a writer and for the sheer breadth of his body of work — dramas, war movies, films noir and comedies (including arguably one of the two or three funniest movies ever made1, as well as a very funny movie titled One, Two, Three, for that matter) — I rank Mr. Wilder at No. 1 on my personal list of the greatest directors of all time.
On this particular occasion, I was only half watching 1950’s Sunset Boulevard, a movie I’ve seen several times in its entirety and at least two or three times on a big screen. (Pause a moment here while I pine for the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles.)
The first time you watch Sunset Boulevard, you know right away that the story is going to end badly because — and I don’t think I’ll be ruining the film for anybody here — it opens on its narrator, the screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden), floating facedown in a swimming pool.2
On subsequent viewings, you already know how Joe came to be facedown in that pool, but because the movie is more about madness than murder — and here is where I might begin ruining the movie for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet3 — you’re forever anticipating the big finish, in which faded, forgotten, crazy-as-a-bedbug silent-film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) is coaxed down the grand staircase of her mansion amid a swarm of police and press, believing that the great director (and her frequent collaborator back in the Silent Era) Cecil B. De Mille is at the bottom waiting to film her triumphant return to the silver screen and one of the greatest closing lines in movie history.4
It’s the sequence before that, though — the actual climax of the movie — that is sort of easy to gloss over until you’ve seen it a few or several times. No one ever really says, “Well, I didn’t see that coming,” but it is easy to miss The Insignificant Detail.
Joe, in love with his best friend’s girl, another contract screenwriter named Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), and beyond the limits of his patience with the drama queen Norma, finally blows up, tells Norma he’s through with her and storms out of the house to go reclaim his former life.
Norma follows him into the yard and fires a shot, which appears to hit him in the shoulder. The shot stuns Joe, and Holden does this fantastic little zombie three-step before the next two shots ring out, and this time both we and Joe know he’s been hit. His legs fold up under him just as he arrives at the edge of the swimming pool, and down he goes, face first into the drink where we first met him.
It was only on this last viewing, though, that I caught something for the very first time: Norma does not shoot Joe at anything close to point-blank range.
When she fires the first shot from the bottom of the steps, Norma’s a good 20 feet away from Joe, and she doesn’t move very far from that spot as the stunned but determined Joe continues to stumble away from her. By the time she fires the two coups de grâce, he is maybe 40 feet away.
OK, now this is a 50-year-old woman living in a fantasy world of her own fuzzy design, and as far as we know, the revolver itself is a recent development. We learn about it only in the previous sequence, during another desperate attempt at emotional blackmail, when Norma informs Joe that she has obtained a gun intending to use it on herself. We’re given no reason to believe that she has any prior experience with guns, and yet in the heat of a moment fraught with emotion, she goes three-for-three shooting Joe in the back as he’s walking away from her.
I’m not saying this is as unlikely as Oswald acting alone on the sixth floor of the book depository, but it’s a pretty impressive display of marksmanship from a presumed first-timer, a novice at the very least.
Try not to let it interfere with your enjoyment of the film, though. Norma Desmond’s sharpshooting is only the most minor of details in one of the greatest of motion pictures.
1 That would be Some Like It Hot, of course.
2 Pretty much every writer in Hollywood wakes up feeling like this every day.
3 And to those readers I say, “For hell’s sake, people, what are you waiting for?”
4 Mr. Wilder and his collaborators were good for a few of those. In this case, of course, it’s “I’m ready for my closeup, Mr. De Mille.” The honor roll also includes “Nobody’s perfect” and “Shut up and deal.”
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
The venerable British doyen of belles-lettres Sir Michael Philip Jagger once wrote, “You can’t always get what you want1, but if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need.”
Herein I will relate to you, in plain contemporary English less florid than that spoken in Sir Michael’s day, how exactly one goes about getting what one needs, whatever that might be. In my case, the basic modern necessity in question was air conditioning.
But first, the backstory:
Since I moved in mid-April, my new apartment complex’s management hasn’t gone out of its way to earn my undying (or even grudging) faith and appreciation. My initial impression is that the leasing agents and other staff are practitioners of the fine art of passing the buck, as if it’s more a modus operandi than an incidental impediment to effective property management.
From the very beginning, they have directed me to do a lot of legwork on their behalf, the sorts of things that I have taken for granted during previous moves, things that had already been taken care of by the time I signed my lease and picked up my keys.
To begin with, while attempting to verify my employment in this brave new 21st-century world, the leasing agents informed me that it would take the better part of a week to receive the necessary information from my employer using such archaic devices as telephones and fax machines. On a Friday afternoon, they asked me to contact my employer to ascertain for them the procedure and point of contact for verifying my employment, and when I called back the following Monday with the information they had requested, I was told that they already knew it and had begun processing my verification. Four days later, it finally occurred to them to suggest that the process might be expedited if I would bring them copies of my last six pay stubs, which of course contained all the information they required in the first place.
Their delay in verifying my employment begat a delay in their approving my lease, which begat a delay in my being able to contact Kansas City Power & Light to establish an account and to have the electricity turned on in the apartment. On this count, the leasing office never actually called to inform me that my lease had been approved, which news I was awaiting before I could contact KCP&L; instead they called me midafternoon the following Friday, the day I was to take possession, to ask if I had obtained the necessary confirmation number from KCP&L.
“Oh, yeah,” the girl said matter-of-factly, “you’re approved. But we’ll need that number as soon as you can get back to us with it.”
Because I was contacting them so late in the day, so late in the week, KCP&L informed me that they would not be able to turn on my electricity until Monday, meaning that I was taking possession of an apartment that I couldn’t actually move into for three days because I wouldn’t be able to see in the dark, operate any appliances or refrigerate any food.
Monday I arrived after work, expecting to move my stuff into the apartment, only to find that I still had no electricity and no light, and by which time the leasing office had closed for the day. Contacting the emergency maintenance number, I was informed by the on-call maintenance man that he was 40 minutes away and didn’t want to drive all the way into work just to flip a switch or to learn that KCP&L had not actually turned on the power yet. (In fairness, the latter turned out to be the case — KCP&L had turned on the power but hadn’t sent anyone out to activate my meter — but if I may: What the hell kind of property has an emergency, on-call maintenance tech who a) lives 40 minutes away and b) argues with the tenant experiencing said emergency? In the end, having thrown all my breaker switches to no avail, I decided I didn’t want to wait around for him after all, and spent the night at my parents’ house instead.)
So it’s Tuesday now, I’ve been paying rent for four days, and just now I’m beginning to move my meager belongings into the apartment for the privilege of sleeping on an air mattress on the floor.
The apartment now illuminated, I was finally able to walk from room to room, appraising conditions and filling out the itemized move-in checklist I’ve been holding onto. While I described my findings as explicitly as possible, most of the features and fixtures on the list rated an “OK” or an “N/A.” One notable exception was the air-conditioning unit, alongside which I noted simply in eye-grabbing block letters “DOES NOT WORK.”2
Apparently the move-in checklist just gets stuck in a file with your lease application and other paperwork, because after two weeks in the apartment, no one had made an effort to contact me about any of the possible trouble spots I had called to their attention. Most of it is not a big deal so long as, upon moving out, I don’t get billed for any damage not of my making. But the weather here has been warming up lately, and soon a working air conditioner would become non-negotiable.
So I filled out the maintenance request form they had given me with my paperwork (the one that still read “2008” next to the date line): “Air conditioner does not work. Please repair or replace.” I walked the form down to the leasing office on Saturday, May 2, so I could hand it in with my rent check.
The woman who seems to be in charge — in much the same way a baby with a razor blade seems to be shaving — looked over the form and asked, “Is this an emergency?”
“No. But the weather is warming up and pretty soon I’ll need air conditioning, so I just wanted to get my request on your radar.”
Apparently, she wasn’t even listening to me, because she countered with, “Because it’s the weekend and our maintenance staff is off, so it would be Monday or maybe Tuesday before anyone could get to this, unless it’s an emergency.”
“No. No emergency,” I repeated. “Anytime in the next week is fine, whenever you can get around to it.”
“Because if it’s an emergency, we’ll have to call someone in.”
I could feel my hand curling into a fist, which would have received the launch codes if she had said “emergency” just one more time, so I simply thanked her and excused myself from the office.
The following Monday morning she reached me at work to inform me that I would need to call KCP&L again. It seems that they had turned on the electricity to my apartment without turning on the electricity to my air-conditioning unit. (Who knew they were on separate grids?)
When I called, though, the utility’s customer service representative pulled up my account and assured me that all the power to my apartment had been turned on. And so, armed with this information, I threw all my breaker switches one evening, completely powering down the apartment and hoping against all hope that everything would power back up when I threw the switches on again.
Everything did.
Except for the air conditioner, that is.
So, in the brief but thorough letter I dropped off in the leasing office’s mail slot Sunday evening, I closed with: “I give up. Whatever is required to make my A/C unit fully operational will have to be performed by someone who knows the building, the A/C unit and the power coursing into both better than I do. … I appreciate your attention to this matter,” et cetera and so forth.
At 9:19 a.m. the following morning, my phone rang, indicating that the leasing office was calling. I picked it up expecting the caller to be the feckless, emergency-obsessed woman I’ve been dealing with all this time and that I’d have to explain to some degree the intent, content, context and/or subtext of my letter.
To my surprise, a man’s voice greeted me. He identified himself as an attorney for the complex’s new management group and, without demanding any explanation of my circumstances or who the hell I thought I was, proceeded to apologize in such a gracious, self-effacing manner that I almost asked him if he was shitting me about his being an attorney. He informed me that a couple of HVAC guys were on site that day, that they’d get right on my case, and that I should not hesitate in the future to contact the office with any issues or concerns I needed addressed.
Sure enough, when I returned home that evening, a couple of lights had been left on, and the air conditioner was filling my apartment with a pleasant arctic chill.
Being a writer is not without its benefits, not least of which is this: When I craft my correspondences, whether on paper or electronically, people tend to take me more seriously than I even take myself. Something about the written word wielded just so makes people nervous, skittish, even a little paranoid. I can’t explain it, but you’d better believe I’m going to exploit it.
Here, then, are a few simple tips to getting it in writing, getting the other guy’s attention, and getting what you need:
1. Make it look official. I have letterhead. Nothing flashy, nothing I paid some stationer a lot of money to emboss on 24 lb. linen stock — just a modestly designed block of text containing all my basic contact info in a clean, bold font that adds a little bit of visual interest atop a blank Word document and casts about me the aura of an entity as opposed to a mere individual.
2. Be direct. Be specific. Project intelligence. You don’t need a college education or a degree in journalism, but it helps if you can string sentences together coherently. (And a couple of well-placed five-dollar words help too, just to let them know you’re not some lummox from the sticks.) Failing that, enlist a friend who can write well to edit your letter for you, just enough so that it reads like you’re smart and you mean business. (Most of you already are. Most of you already do.)
3. Create your letter on a computer. Save it to your hard drive. I’ve always done this, but the reasons why it is perhaps the key to the whole process became clear to me only after I received the attorney’s call Monday morning:
More so than a handwritten note that you might dash off and slide under the door, a dated letter, word-processed and laser-printed, suggests ever so subtly, especially to the sorts of people who are paid to worry about such things, that a paper trail and a record of individual grievances exists. It also implies that the full extent of your correspondence can be reproduced at will with just a click of a mouse and delivered in triplicate to whomever might take an active interest — say, your own attorney, the local housing authority or the “Call for Action” reporter at the local TV station.
If, as a bonus, you deliver your letter in a sealed envelope (see letterhead entry, above), you create for the price of a few extra cents an aura of mystery and anticipation about what’s inside the envelope while they’re fumbling to open it and unfold its contents.
These three things combined create in the recipient’s mind the picture of a formidable individual who must be dealt with seriously or dismissed at one’s own peril.
Then again, it could just end up being you and the woman in the leasing office locked in a pissing match until your lease expires.
But I already like my odds in that battle of wits.
1 Pronounced “wah-ahnt” in the original Middle English.
2 Had there been more space been provided on the form, I would have described in more explicit detail the pervasive skankiness of the air conditioner, a motel-style wall unit encased in sheet metal so as to mask the generally disgusting condition of the machinery within. It’s dirty, greasy, infested with dust bunnies, and at some point I’m going to have to bite the bullet and get in there with some rubber gloves and industrial-strength cleaning products just to make it so I’m not afraid to reach in and operate the controls.
Saturday, May 02, 2009
Wow.
I mean, wow.
All right, then. Let’s settle this once and for all:
Bring. On. Mayweather.
UPDATE, 5/10/09: Instantaneous.
That is to say, the instant Manny Pacquiao’s left hook impacted Ricky Hatton’s chin, at 2:52 of the second round, the night was over. Before the red leather of the Filipino’s Cleto Reyes glove withdrew even a millimeter from Hatton’s chin, before the Englishman even began his arc toward the canvas, his entire face had gone as pale and blank as a dry-erase board. His eyes were black slits — “dead eyes, like a doll’s eyes,” to borrow a line from Robert Shaw’s shark hunter Quint. It took the fine referee Kenny Bayless less than seven seconds to reach the fallen fighter and determine that he didn’t even need to start the count.
Observers had time to expect that left hook, the one Hatton never saw coming, thanks to the first two knockdown shots, which in and of themselves are almost too incredible to ponder. I mean, a guy like Ricky Hatton doesn’t just go down in the first round on any given night, and certainly not twice.
By sheer virtue of Pacquiao’s blinding hand speed and the camera angle that the HBO Sports director had called at that particular moment in time — not even a moment so much as a mere blip on the space-time continuum — his first knockdown of Hatton, a devastating right hook, resembled in real time nothing less than Muhammad Ali’s so-called “phantom punch” of 1965, the one that floored Charles “Sonny” Liston in Lewiston, Maine, of all places, and became arguably the greatest sports photograph of all time, the one that hangs on my wall thanks to my very good friend and fellow fight fan back west. (Other camera angles, however, left no room for doubt about the pinpoint accuracy of Manny’s right hook.)
The second knockdown, occurring at the end of the opening round, was an overwhelming assault. It was Pacquiao pushing Hatton down a flight of stairs, like Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death.
It should be noted that, in the spaces and moments in between these three surgical strikes, Hatton wasn’t just standing around waiting to be hit. He was a man who came looking for a fight; he just didn’t anticipate the one he got. He consistently charged toward Pacquiao and threw punches that would have unspooled lesser fighters, but he just couldn’t land them. It wasn’t that Pacquiao was running away from him; Pacquiao just wasn’t there when the punch arrived, as if Hatton were trying to thread a moving needle.
Make no mistake: Ricky Hatton is not some tomato can. With his great flattened mug and pint-raising bonhomie, he is a working-class soccer hooligan from Manchester, England, built to brawl. If unpleasantness broke out in a pub anywhere in the world, Ricky Hatton is on my short list of guys I’d want at my flank, aside from which he’s one of the three or four greatest ever to enter the ring at 140 pounds. But I will tell you now that it has been a very long time since I’ve seen a porch light extinguished the way his was last Saturday night in Las Vegas. Hatton is not a pushover. God bless him, he is a fearless fighter who walked face first into boxing’s Perfect Storm.
I have now seen Manny Pacquiao dominate opponents in four different weight classes (to say nothing of the two divisions he conquered before I became aware of him). I believe that, if he ever settles down and makes a home in one of them — or even if he moves back and forth between two or three of them, always sizing up the most formidable opponents, the most interesting and lucrative fights — he stands a chance of becoming one of the greatest champions in the history of the sport. We can’t know now just how great that is, because he’s only 30 years old and shows no signs of being anywhere close to finished.
The self-aggrandizing loudmouth Floyd Mayweather Jr. spent the last few years of his prime avoiding the best fighters in the welterweight and junior welterweight divisions, then beat Oscar De La Hoya in 10 rounds, mainly by running away from him on a night when the Golden Boy rarely took a step backward. In the inevitable pound-for-pound showdown to come, Mayweather had better hope Pacquiao never catches him.
To Floyd Mayweather Sr., who trained Hatton for the Pacquiao fight, I have only this to say: If you are presently on speaking terms with your son, you’d better let him know there’s a propeller out there with his name on it.
Friday, May 01, 2009
“NEITHER RAIN NOR SLEET NOR SNOW NOR
THE FAULTY WIRING AND FUZZY LOGIC
OF THE CUSTOMERS WE SERVE
SHALL STAY US FROM OUR APPOINTED ROUNDS”
The first thing I do every morning at work is weigh and sort the incoming mail, the preponderance of which is reporting paperwork submitted by hundreds of grocery stores, each envelope and its contents looking not much different from the next. I sort it according to regional divisions and file it in the mail slots of the administrative assistants assigned to those regions, after which it is out of my hands and I don’t really think about it much until 8 a.m. the following morning.
Every now and then, though, one distinguishes oneself from the rest of the pack.
For example, there’s a woman at one of the Kansas City stores who eschews address labels and instead transforms her plain white #10 envelopes into tedium-inspired works of art. We might receive a half-dozen or more from her on any given day, and each one will be addressed in different colors of felt-tip marker, the letters drawn in bold flourishes and embellished with outlines, polka dots, fattened endpoints, what-have-you. (One of our admins has even pinned a small exhibition of these minor works to the wall of her cubicle.)
That anonymous artist represents the high-water mark of the morning mail, though. More often, when someone pulls out the stops to make a name for oneself, it is one of the rabble who resides in the muddy shallows of intellectual achievement — like the people who wrap two layers of heavy-duty packing tape around the flap of an envelope, signaling, among other things, their naked distrust of modern advancements in mucilage.
Friday morning, one such undeveloped tadpole wriggled free from the primordial ooze in Wichita, Kansas, and staked so bold a claim on the mantle of workplace idiocy as to dare all others to strip him or her of the title.
Which is not to say that the achievement lacked imagination. No, it takes a mind unburdened by guile and conventional logic to devise a solution so far outside the box that even Plato, who first declared necessity to be the mother of invention, would likely respond, “OK, I didn’t see that one coming.” Behold:
For desperate want of a 9” x 12” envelope in which to mail a stack of paperwork about a quarter-inch thick, the anonymous office drone in question apparently dug through the trash and salvaged halves of two separate 9” x 12” (or perhaps 10” x 13”) envelopes — one a darker brown shade of manila, the other a brighter yellow shade — then stapled them together to enclose the aforementioned paperwork before applying a return-address label and printing the forwarding address on the makeshift “front,” applying postage, and sending the “envelope” on its way.
In point of fact, the two manila halves were stapled together on only three sides, so the result was more like a pita pocket than an envelope per se. Because the fourth side was unstapled, I checked to see if this master of innovation had perhaps stapled the whole package somewhere in the middle as a means of keeping the paperwork secured inside the “envelope.” Alas, he or she had not.
Also remarkable is that the U.S. Postal Service delivered the item exactly as it was originally posted. Ordinarily they might secure such an item in a clear plastic bag to ensure its safe delivery, particularly in the event it had been damaged in transit or handling. But in this instance, it’s as though the Postal Service wanted to let the item stand on its own merits, even as they disavowed any responsibility for its condition and disposition. (Time will tell whether all the original paperwork arrived safely at its destination, against all odds, like the animal protagonists in Homeward Bound.)
However one slices it, though, this is a personal achievement of jaw-dropping magnitude. In the annals of human endeavor, I’d say it ranks just ahead of the redneck inventor and marketing wiz who gave the world TruckNutz.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
It’s an arbitrary milepost that amounts to less than one-fifteenth of his first term, so right now there’s no way of knowing whether Barack Obama will go down in history as a great leader, a failed one or merely a mediocre one who didn’t quite attain all the lofty goals he set for his presidency.
Has it been a perfect 100 days? No. Have I agreed with everything the Obama administration has done so far? No. Has the business of the nation proceeded as smoothly as possible? Heavens, no. Do I occasionally question the wisdom behind some of the decisions made at the top? Of course.
I will say this, though: One hundred days isn’t quite enough time to get me past the night terrors of the last eight years, either, but I still feel a little surge of giddiness every time I hear the words “President Obama.”
Barack Obama is already the statesman America deserves, and though his detractors may still dismiss him as a “rock star” and a “fad” whose glamour will fade as soon as the going gets really tough, the fact remains that he has already improved our relations with our allies by the virtues of his intelligence, focus and charisma, and he has set the tone for improved relations with our antagonists and enemies by addressing and engaging them in the spirit and tone of actual diplomacy instead of cowboy bravado.
The greatest difference, however, may be the manner in which he addresses the American people. One of the things that most infuriated me about George W. Bush was his habit of squinting down over the podium after one of his pronouncements, a quizzical look on his face that read, “I can’t believe you people don’t unnerstan’ this.” (The subtext, of course, being, Why, hell, they just ’splained it to me a half-hour ago an’ it makes perfect sense to me now.)
Obama, on the other hand, seems to treat every question he is asked as though it is the most important one he’ll be asked all day. His responses are measured and thoughtful, and though he is at times long-winded, it is not the sort of circuitous rambling that was Sen. John Kerry’s liability during his 2004 presidential run. (I admire Kerry greatly, but listening to him respond to questions back then was often like watching Phil Mickelson putt: “Get there… Get there…”) Obama, by contrast, already knows where he’s going when he speaks, and he wants to take us with him. It is becoming almost a cliché at this point, a verbal tic that now belongs to Fred Armisen’s impersonation of the president on Saturday Night Live, but I find it invariably comforting to hear President Obama preface any remark with “Now let me be perfectly clear…”
One hundred days isn’t much time at all, but this much I already know: Barack Obama wants to govern, and he wants to lead. He doesn’t wield fear like a cudgel to keep us in line and the rest of the world at bay, but neither does he back down from telling Americans or anybody else what they need to hear. He’s the smartest guy in the room, and he’s surrounded himself with other smart people, starting with his vice president1. He hasn’t embarrassed himself — or me — yet.2 I haven’t for one moment regretted casting my vote for him. To those who say he’s taking on too much too soon, he seems to reply, “Well, that’s what you hired me to do, isn’t it?” He’s got big ideas and an honest-to-God vision for America, and if he fails, it won’t be for a lack of trying to achieve that vision.
Barack Obama has 1,361 days remaining in his first term, and I still like his odds.
1 Laugh all you want, but God help me, I love Joe Biden.
2 OK, that time I was talking about Obama, though.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
One more reason I’m grateful for our new chief executive is that there’s now a real chance for a meaningful long-term payoff to a scene that is likely to play out at dinner tables across the nation tonight. It goes something like this:
“Dad/Mom, I had a lot of fun spending time with you today and following you around the office/warehouse/sales floor/abattoir, so I hope you won’t take it the wrong way when I say that, after watching you at work and learning more about what you do for a living, I’ve decided that I’d really like to pursue a career in the arts.”
It’s a terrific bonus to have a little youth and vitality in the ordinarily staid environs of the office workplace — it changes the tenor and tone of the building ever so slightly, relaxing the mood and putting people on their better (if not in fact their best) behavior.
But the truly depressing thing about today is seeing a shy, tentative 11-year-old girl, who stood by only once and watched me operate our enormous Canon ImageRunner 7086 — the tireless mechanical heart that incessantly pumps paper through the arteries and organs of this otherwise lifeless cadaver — return about a half-hour later and operate it fearlessly, without any help from me. Meanwhile, there are people who live in this office 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, who are sometimes puzzled by the simplest functions of the most common machinery.
I realize it’s specified in my job description that I am to know how these things operate, but c’mon, people — it’s a copy machine, not the NORAD missile-defense system. You needn’t imbue it with mythical powers; apparently it’s so simple, even a child can operate it.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White’s essential primer on grammatical style turns 50 this year. Bourbon is timeless.“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”— Dorothy Parker
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Saw them today on an unlikely candidate in an unlikely locale. Wondering now if Duran Duran is launching a comeback bid.
Brown. Tastefully baggy and not (thank God) skin tight. Fashionably understated, casually complemented, but still a pretty bold statement for this neck of the suburbs.
File under “Things You’ll Never Find in My Closet.”
Friday, April 17, 2009
I signed the lease on a new apartment Friday evening.
From the initial impetus to make the move to the discovery online of said apartment to the signing of said lease, the whole thing happened pretty quickly — so quickly as to make one wonder whether one has leapt without first considering one’s trajectory and various angles of incidence. But there you have it.
Other factors sped the process along (I won’t bore you with them), but perhaps the biggest reason for this accelerated time frame is location, location, location. Call it not being able to see one’s own tree for the forest, but certainly I was seduced foremost by the notion of living in this particular forest for all the options and conveniences it places in immediate proximity to me. As suburban neighborhoods go, this one rates high for the quality I refer to as “New Yorkness” — that sense that everything you might need is just outside your door.
Just off the top of my head, I will be within walking distance of a coffeehouse, an arthouse movie theater, a post office, two barbershops, a liquor store, two sports bars, two Mexican restaurants, two pizza places, an Italian restaurant, a venerable Chinese restaurant, a barbecue dive, a donut shop, a farmers market (Wednesdays and Saturdays), a spice emporium, and a highfalutin dining establishment about which I have not yet formed an opinion. And that doesn’t even account for all the corporate giants — McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, QuikTrip, Walgreen’s, what-have-you — who ply their wares on the major thoroughfare a few blocks over.
For Adriane there’s a yarn shop and the frozen-custard stand she loves, the walking distance to and from which would justify (in our minds, at least) whatever caloric travesty we might perpetrate upon ourselves there, and the two swimming pools in my complex that formed the basis of her insistence that I must live there.
Time will tell whether I love the apartment itself even a tenth as much as the neighborhood that surrounds it. I won’t actually begin to sort out my feelings for it until Monday evening, however, as, for reasons beyond my control, my apartment will not have electricity until then. Upon receiving my keys Friday evening, I was unable to make even a cursory evaluation for the move-in checklist I am to return to the management, as my south-facing front windows didn’t let in enough sunlight to illuminate the rearmost reaches of the apartment. I had already seen it, of course; I just haven’t seen it yet.
Already I can attest that the kitchen is the size of a phone booth, and the apartment in general is lacking in storage. Both situations will require creative problem-solving on my part.
On the plus side, though, all the kitchen appliances (including a dishwasher, thankyouverymuch) appear quite new, and I’ll have a separate bedroom and living room for the first time in over a decade. Also, my building stands literally at the foot of the downtown water tower, so I’m hopeful that will translate to exceptional water pressure in the shower. (Having my own dedicated water heater will address the second half of that equation.)
Now begins the gradual process of moving out of my parents’ basement as many of my personal effects, archives and furnishings as my new fortress of solitude will hold. It will be a little like Christmas — opening boxes and discovering things I’ve all but forgotten I own. (For all I know we’ll find the Ark of the Covenant filed away down there.) And by this time next week, I hope to have established some semblance of a household, a power cave, a base of operations in the heart of my inviting, enticing, intriguing new environs.
I hope they prove to be worth the leap.
Friday, April 03, 2009
Friday at work I was on Yahoo! Yellow Pages attempting to confirm the street address of a small-town grocery store to which I was sending a package. While doing so, I linked to a feedback page where I discovered the following review of the store from a disgruntled customer, identified as “Cindy M.”:
I’m assuming of course that “witch” was a misspelling of “which” (also used erroneously in place of “who”) and not an allegation of occult practices on the part of Debbie’s son’s, who — not to put too fine a point on it — would actually be considered a warlock.The Manager Debbie [last name redacted] is a Slut and has slept with my husband she should be fired. She has employed her son witch [sic] was charged for drugs. She is a whore… And should be fired. I am going to turn her in to her managers.
Posted 03/11/09
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Tuesday, March 03, 2009
LIKE THE MAN I KNOW YOU ARE
T.J. Houshmandzadeh (pronounced just like it’s spelled) is a world-class wide receiver who is coming off his third consecutive season with 90 or more receptions. Perhaps more important, he has performed at this level while playing for the woeful Cincinnati Bengals and keeping his mouth shut while the team’s star receiver and insufferable blowhard, Chad “Ocho Cinco” Johnson, has strutted and preened and jabbered nonstop about how freaking great he is, when really? not so much.
I’ve always thought Houshmandzadeh was a better receiver and a class act who deserved to play somewhere outside of the shadow cast by the poor man’s Terrell Owens, so I was delighted when I learned that he signed with the Seattle Seahawks this week, after turning down the Bengals’ offer and dismissing the Minnesota Vikings because of their dodgy quarterback situation.
But then today I read this article, in which T.J. is quoted as saying, “I never had stress in my life — until this weekend. I was waking up in the middle of the night.”
Stress, T.J.? Really?
The economy is tanking. Every day another major corporation announces a new round of layoffs. Unemployment figures come out every Thursday, and they’re holding steady at over 650,000 claims a week. Those who do still have their jobs no longer have pension plans or 401(k)s worth the paper they’re printed on. People are getting foreclosed out of their homes, and homeowners who aren’t are learning that their homes aren’t worth as much now as they were three years ago.
But you, T.J., were stressed out this weekend because you were trying to decide whether to move to Seattle and let them pay you $40 million? (I, on the other hand, would be thrilled if someone in Seattle would offer me $40 thousand right now, but as of this writing, my calls aren’t being returned.)
All right, it’s tough-love time. Now I realize that, for the past half-dozen years or so, there isn’t a microphone in Cincinnati that actually made it to within a foot of your mouth because Chad kept jumping in front of them and pushing you out of the way. But now that you’re going to Seattle, you’re going to be a big deal there, and people are actually going to be interested in the words that are coming out of your mouth. So for the love of God, T.J., don’t get flustered and just say the first thing that pops into your head. Chad does that, and you know how we all hate his breathing guts.
Now stand still and brace yourself for your bitch-slap. It’ll only take a second, then we can go grab a beer together.
Of course, you’re buying the first round.
Sunday, March 01, 2009
A word of advice to the owners of a local sports pub from someone who’s spent time in a pub or two:
If, at 6 p.m. on a Sunday evening, you insist on three-fourths of your two dozen or more flat-screen satellite TVs being tuned to CBS’s 60 Minutes, at least turn down the Van Halen so we can hear Morley Safer’s interview segment with Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.
Then again, perhaps the preceding paragraph is riddled with clues as to why there are only seven people dining and drinking in your sports pub, with its seating capacity of 211.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
or, What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?
I have mixed emotions about the year in film that was 2008. I witnessed some truly remarkable individual achievements this past year, but I’m having a hard time getting worked up about some of the films themselves. Does that mean that I arrived at some of my conclusions by default? Not necessarily. I think we’ll be watching and talking about some of these films and performances for years to come. I just wish there had somehow been… more.
Anyway, this is the ballot I’m casting in 2009:
Sean Penn, Milk
Frank Langella delivered a great performance but (I thought) a weak Nixon impersonation. Mickey Rourke gave a career-defining performance… as Mickey Rourke. And Sean Penn…
That was Sean Penn?
The best compliment I can pay any actor is that I forgot I was watching him or her while watching his or her performance. This is not the bombastic, overly emotive Penn who won his first Oscar for playing a man in Mystic River not much different than we perceive him to be offscreen. This is a Penn who disappears into the role of slain San Francisco district supervisor Harvey Milk. This is a man you want to throw your arms around. And when was the last time any of us felt the impulse to give Sean Penn a hug?
To further support my thesis, I direct you to hulu.com, where you can presently stream and watch the outstanding Oscar-winning 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. You will get a stronger sense not only of how precise Penn’s embodiment of Milk is but also of how meticulously Gus Van Sant’s production re-creates the Castro district of the 1970s.
Meryl Streep, Doubt
Admittedly, this is a category about which I am conflicted. Each of the performances is excellent in its own way, but I have trouble identifying a clear-cut winner among them (which in a way is its own reward and yet may also have more to do with the way films in general have underwhelmed me this year). I feel as though my leaning toward Meryl this year is a bit of a copout because — well, let’s face it — she’s Meryl freaking Streep. She’s the money. She’s the fallback position in any serious conversation about the great film actresses of our — or any — time.
Meryl does, however, play Sister Aloysius to the hilt, in a way that sort of makes me thank God I’m a Southern Baptist (although I’ve always carried with me a decidedly Catholic sense of guilt that would have made me a natural in Shanley’s Bronx). And because the movie in general shone a spotlight on the deficiencies of the stage production I saw (more about that to follow), the immutable fact of her Meryl Streepness is all the more difficult to discount this year.
Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
It has nothing to do with Ledger’s tragic, unexpected death a year ago and everything to do with this: Perhaps more so than even Penn, Heath Ledger transformed himself so completely into a force of pure, nihilistic evil that I might not have recognized him even without the makeup and transformed the character itself into a creature that bears no resemblance even to Nicholson’s Joker. That this is the same actor who portrayed the taciturn cowboy Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain is a testament to what a remarkable talent was lost last year.
Viola Davis, Doubt
Wow! This category shouldn’t even be open to discussion except to say again, emphatically, Wow! In a single sequence that amounts to the most devastating nine minutes of drama I saw all year, Viola Davis walks into the middle of a production headlined by two of the finest actors of this generation and pretty much yanks the picture right out from under them. By the time she exited the screen, this remarkable actress left me dumbfounded, forcing me to sympathize with Mrs. Miller in ways that the stage production I saw utterly failed to inspire.
To quote no less than Meryl Streep herself, “Viola Davis: My God, somebody give her a movie.”
Wall-E, screenplay by Andrew Stanton & Jim Reardon
story by Andrew Stanton & Pete Docter
The guys (and girls) at Pixar are — how shall I put this? — geniuses with hearts the size of watermelons. It’s not enough that they fill the screen with dazzling images. Before they animate a single frame, they make sure first and foremost that they’re telling a great story. Case in point: They once made me cry using nothing but Tom Hanks’ voice and some rough storyboard drawings. They’re that good.
This time out, the story can be boiled down to three questions:
1. Who among us hasn’t longed to hold the hand of the prettiest girl or handsomest boy we’ve ever laid eyes on?
2. To what lengths would we be willing to go just to make that happen?
3. What if Charlie Chaplin were a robot?
Boom — there’s your movie, right there. And it’s magical.
Wall-E also happens to be the first movie Adriane and I ever saw in a theater together. So Andrew, Pete, Jim — thank you for that. I hope you guys walk off with some more hardware tonight.
Slumdog Millionaire, screenplay by Simon Beaufoy
As happy as I’d be to see my idol John Patrick Shanley win an(other) Oscar to go along with his Tony and his Pulitzer and become Oscar’s second-greatest triple threat — trailing only Vice President Al Gore and his Nobel — I don’t think it’s going to happen.
Despite one dramatic detail I still have a small issue with, I’m casting my vote for Simon Beaufoy’s adaptation of the Vikas Swarup novel Q & A, because it plays so wonderfully as a fable, a Dickensian epic and a love story all rolled into one and it employs the best MacGuffin I’ve seen in a long time. It plunges the audience into the filth and muck of a world many of us can’t begin to imagine and pulls out a diamond, revealing to us such ecstatic joy and wonder as we never imagined could exist there.
Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire
You will read in the next entry why I believe Danny Boyle should win in this category. Instead I will use this space to posit that, if The Curious Case of Benjamin Button does reap a major award from its 13 nominations, it is most likely to come in this category.
With Benjamin Button, director David Fincher places his name in the same breath with which we utter the names Zemeckis and Cameron. As I wrote of Cameron in the run-up to Titanic’s big night, there are times when one is reminded that the category’s official title is “Best Achievement in Directing,” and Fincher’s balancing of cutting-edge technology and human drama here, I feel, is more impressive and fulfilling than Cameron’s. If Fincher’s film suffers, it is because (in this of all years) there is so little emotional payoff from a film that runs 2 hours 45 minutes. But a David Fincher film is never boring, and with Button he commands that he be regarded as seriously as any of the great technical artists who have preceded him.
Slumdog Millionaire
I didn’t trust my feelings, so I went back this past Thursday evening and watched Danny Boyle’s Mumbai slum fable one more time because I had to be sure. I’m accustomed to Best Picture winners that kick my guts out — films like Schindler’s List, Million Dollar Baby, Crash and No Country for Old Men. One would think that the Best Picture of 2008 should inflict the same kind of emotional distress, right?
Well, in Slumdog’s defense, I should point out that it tries to do just that: The film depicts enough poverty, squalor, crime, violence, torture, corruption and human cruelty to fill five films, and yet…
I left the theater exhilarated. Twice.
If only all movies were as alive as Slumdog Millionaire is. It is electric. It is delirious. It is breathtaking. It is precisely the film I anticipated after hearing an interview with Boyle on NPR. Often filmmakers sound a little pretentious and serious when they’re interviewed about their movies, but Boyle sounded like a kid on Christmas morning. At first I thought that maybe that lilting brogue of his just makes everything he talks about sound more fun, but that’s not it. This is a man who loves his job in ways that you and I never will, and you can feel that thrill in every frame of his movie.
What’s so bad about going to the movies to feel good? This year, absolutely nothing.
Monday, February 16, 2009
I’d like to challenge all 178 House Republicans to a street fight. Not a metaphorical one, either. I’m talking about a bare-knuckled, bottle-smashing, bicycle chain-swinging, Bronson-style street fight. I’m talking about soccer hooliganism on an epic scale. I’m talking about Scorsese’s Gangs of New York.
I’m pretty sure I can take them, too.
You know how I know there are 178 of them?
Because they’re that much easier to count when there isn’t a single original thinker among them who’ll stand apart from the crowd. (They’re like the Redcoats that way, and you remember how we gave those guys the ass-kicking they so richly deserved at Yorktown.) Not one breathing soul among them has the stones to stand up to that feckless child John Boehner, whose idea of leadership is to band them all together like a cafeteria full of jealous, catty, bitchy little high-school girls who say mean things about the pretty new girl in the hopes that she’ll develop an eating disorder and transfer to another school.
That’s 177 people so desperate right now to matter to anyone — even if it’s only to the person who imposes his ineffectual leadership upon them — that not one of them will vote against the rest of them by daring to stand for something resembling an actual principle.
That’s 178 people who still behave as if they have a mandate, who still lead with their glass chins and their wounded egos, who still believe this is about winning, not governing. Even when they’re up against an insurmountable Democratic majority, they want to make it clear to the American public in general and Republican voters in particular that no matter what happens, they intend to stay the course. Their game plan will always be about winning instead of governing because, after all this time, it’s easier for them to identify enemies and opposing ideologies than it is to contribute to a solution or to let anyone else take the credit for progress. It’s about being so firmly entrenched in the house that you yourself set ablaze that you won’t accept the help of the fireman who comes to rescue you.
I’m not arguing that the stimulus plan is perfect, and I’m not saying that there aren’t Republican representatives who don’t have good and valid reasons for voting against the stimulus plan. I’m just saying, how can any one of those good, valid reasons be at all meaningful if it can be so easily trumped by the party’s lemminglike impulse to leap into the chasm en masse? How can any one of those representatives look like a visionary or a voice of reason if he’s going to ally himself with a bunch of people who will vote as one to save face instead of voting as 178 individuals interested in serving their constituents in their districts back home? How can any of those citizens believe their representative is looking out for them if he or she doesn’t distinguish him- or herself by truly representing them — and not his or her party’s unquenchable hubris — in the ongoing debate about our economic survival?
And that’s why I like the odds. That’s why me against 178 House Republicans is a mismatch like Uma against the Crazy 88s.
I’ll even let that pussy Boehner throw the first punch.
