Failure to Launch

I was hoping by now to be able to write about Hugo, Martin Scorcese's new film from Brian Selznick's wonderful book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. This is a bit of a milestone for me: I've never seen a Scorcese picture before. It's for the same reason that I'll never watch The Godfather films or Apocalypse Now: Scorcese's work is much too dark, violent and intense for me. When Gangs of New York came out, I watched the trailer and thought that it had a really wonderful look. Then I saw the actors carrying around meat cleavers and knew that they weren't going to be used on a roast leg of lamb. No, thank you, Mr. Scorcese. I know that his films are of a high standard and are not exploitative -- but I also know my limits.

Now, for the first time in his life, he's made a film that I not only can sit through but am eagerly looking forward to -- and the stupid local cineplex, which usually is all over any 3-D release, isn't putting it on the schedule. It's not even coming in next week.

Mind you, they have Happy Feet II running on two screens in both 3-D and flat versions. Wasn't one Happy Feet movie bad enough? They have the latest Adam Sandler stink bomb (who goes to his movies, anyway?). They have Arthur Christmas, whatever that is. They have Disney's The Muppets.

I believe they will be serving Ben & Jerry's in hell before I'll sit through any of that rubbish. And if these choices, versus bringing in Hugo, accurately reflect what the average person wants to attend, then Joe and Jane Average have a lot to answer for.

I know that Disney's The Muppets is getting good press, but, former muppet fan that I am, I chalk that up to logrolling and ignorance. There's a reason why it's called Disney's The Muppets and not Jim Henson's The Muppets. No one from the Jim Henson Company was involved in the making of this picture! Even Frank Oz has called it quits. Given the tripe that Brian Henson has turned out in his father's name since the man's death, perhaps this is a good thing (The Muppet Wizard of Oz, anyone?). But two wrongs don't make a right,  and this is a "muppet" movie made out of one hundred percent artificial ingredients.

According to the Disney Company, nothing ever has to die, because nothing was ever really alive to start with.

But the Muppets were alive. They died with their creator, and should be allowed to rest in peace.

Back to Hugo. All I can tell you is that the book it's based upon is a unique combination of words and pictures -- not so much a graphic novel as a novel with purely cinematic sequences embedded in the tale. This approach probably screamed "make me into a movie" to a certain class of people. But to me the entire point lay in that it was printed on paper and bound between two covers. Here is someone who managed to get a genuinely cinematic experience into a book. That the early days of cinema factored into the story only made it that much more appropriate. The Invention of Hugo Cabret is so much a vision of its author that I balked a bit when I learned that it was being filmed.

Time will tell if I ever get a chance to see Hugo in a movie theater, where I imagine it truly needs to be seen. All I can say for now is, I'm awfully glad that Steven Spielberg didn't his damn dirty hands on it. (I'm tempted to ask Mr. Spielberg, in the unlikely event that our paths ever cross, what it feels like to Rape Tintin.)

In haste,

-- Freder.

Destination Unknown

Last night, somewhat out of desperation, I took a hint from an episode of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations and threw a pork chop onto a big ol' bun. It's one of those things that, once you've seen it done, you can't understand why you never thought of it before.

It's good, people.

You need a big bun to soak in the juices and handle the volume. And -- I don't know the proper terminology here -- you can't have the typical kind of pork chop with the bone going down the middle. You've got to have the cut that has the bone going around the edge. Cook up your pork chop any way you like, put in in the bun, and pig out. It's a meal all by itself.

I grilled mine on my Farberware indoor grill. Good luck finding this absolutely essential kitchen item anywhere today, the company hasn't manufactured it in years. George Foreman doesn't have anything that comes close!

Anthony Bourdain and Gordon Ramsay don't need me to do their PR for them, but I know that my mother would have enjoyed their shows, and I regret not getting cable or satellite television while she was alive. Mom deprived herself of very little in the way of "things that she enjoyed," but especially in her later years some televisual seasoning would have been welcome. We were strictly a free-over-the-air antenna TV household, and for some reason we had it in our heads that it was an either / or proposition, that getting cable would cause us to lose the local stations that she depended on.

In fact, my television has about a hundred and eighty-seven connection ports. I currently have three devices hooked up to it and switch back and forth with ease. If I wanted to add an over-the-air antenna, the hardest part would be climbing up onto the roof. (No, maybe the hardest part would be getting down. Something tells me I'd be clinging to the chimney for dear life, sweating and screaming for someone to call the fire department.)

It's not that DirectTV or cable are any better than broadcast TV. Out of a bazillion channels, a veritable tsunami of available programing, sensory overload waiting to happen in nearly any genre you can imagine, the vast majority of it is unwatchable crap. Can you say Ghost Adventures? They build you up for twenty minutes and then spend the rest of the show stumbling around in the dark going "Did you hear that?" "Did you see that?" Uhm, no. There are some nights nights when I can't find a thing to watch. Even TCM lets me down on a regular basis (last night they ran Doctor Zhivago; even if I didn't own the movie on DVD, at something like nine and a half hours long, that's not a movie, it's a commitment.)

But I hate to run across things anywhere that I know Mom would have liked. It always makes me feel sad and guilty, as if I could have done more while she was alive.

Bourdain's No Reservations is a show that I can definitely see her sitting through a marathon for -- who wouldn't enjoy galavanting around the globe with such an experienced guide, even if he does have an attitude problem? Adam Richman's Man Vs. Food is another. It's nice to learn that there are still some regional styles of cooking that survive in the world of Tasti-Freeze and Wimpy Burgers that Peter Cook's Bedazzled Devil has so successfully created for us. I'm not crazy about the challenges, which fall into the category of grotesque, but up to that point Richman's show is pure Food Porn. And of course there's the Gordon Ramsay campaign for Total Global Domination And The Advancement and Promotion of Gordon Ramsay, of which only The F Word leaves me cold. It doesn't know what it wants to be; it has no shape. It's Ramsay's Bridge Too Far.

I dunno where I'm going with this. It all started with a pork chop on a bun. Mom would have liked that, too.

-- Freder.

An Uphill Climb

There's a reason why The Music Box is one of Laurel & Hardy's best-remembered films: it's at the very top of their Hoover, I mean oeuvre, thirty minutes of sustained, perfectly timed comedy. . . not just one of the great short comedy films of all time, but a great film, period.

More than that, I see in it a great metaphor for the Life We Live. It's not just about two guys delivering a piano. That impossibly long staircase, their burden, and all the frustrations and setbacks that they encounter -- that is True to Life, folks, and by giving us such a clear vision of Life's Difficulties, and then making us laugh at it, and laugh uproariously (well, I still have a bit of a cough, so I could only laugh until I started hacking my lungs up), the boys are doing something really special and astonishing.

There's a reason why the steps are a popular tourist stop to this day. I think people "get" it in a big way. Inanimate objects were always Laurel & Hardy's enemies, and this stairway is almost a character by itself, a malevolent entity determined to do them in -- just as they are determined to conquer it, no matter what it takes.

I won't belabor the point, and I really don't have anything else to say about the picture that hasn't been said before, by better writers. Just know that if you see only one Laurel and Hardy picture in your lifetime (and I honestly can't imagine a bleaker life if that's the case), make it The Music Box. Oh, and if you don't like this? Then you can't be my friend.

I'll leave it with a bit of trivia: Did you know that Billy Gilbert, the formidable gent in the photo above, frequent opponent of Stan and Babe, was also the voice of Sneezy The Dwarf in Snow White? It was his then-famous radio "sneeze routine" that got him the job.

*

P.S.: Thanksgiving was accomplished in Good Spirits. It was the right choice for me to face it alone.

-- Freder.

The Thanksgiving Post

I knew that there would be tears today and I wasn't wrong about that (note to self: don't play "Into the West" by Annie Lennox again). Weren't the first, won't be the last. But today I'm going to do That Holiday Thing and count my blessings.

First and foremost, I am thankful that I don't have in front of me what I had in front of me last year at this time. We are well and truly ensconced in our new home, and if I still haven't figured out what to do with the rest of my life, at least I have solid footing from which to plan the launch.

I'm thankful to the people who helped make this happen, especially my father and his wife, my lawyer Joann and her assistant Sue. Without Joann and Sue, and their compassion (never pressure), I don't know what I would have done in the past year and a half.

I'm thankful that my sister wasn't the executor of the estate!

I'm thankful that I still have Patches, Whitey, Pandy Bear, Honey, and, outdoors, Tiger Whitestockings. They mean more to me now than ever before. I don't know that I'd be alive without them in the picture. This year has wrought big changes in their lives and their behaviours, too. Patches is no longer afraid to come upstairs to my bedroom and sleep with me. Honey is willing to share. Pandy Bear isn't "marking" the house. Much.

I'm thankful to have Honey sitting on my lap as I write this, even if it makes it much harder to type,

I'm thankful to my employers and co-workers for keeping me on during what was really not a very productive year. I'm thankful to be coming out of the fully shell-shocked stage at long last, and to be passing into the stage of true mourning. It's progress.

I'm actually thankful to be out of the old house, with all its problems and associations. There, it was raining indoors in more ways than one. There, winters were so isolated that we felt as if we were living on the moon. If I feel as if I have lost much in the way of history, I have lost much more in the way of troubles, concerns, difficulties and sadness.

I'm thankful to be paying down half of my home mortgage next week, and thankful too that there will be enough left over from the estate to provide some liquidity in case of emergencies. After all, life is one big emergency waiting to happen. Lots of people don't have anything to fall back on, and I am one fortunate guy in that regard.

I'm thankful for Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Doctor Who, Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares, for Pee Wee Herman and Turner Classic Movies and all the rest of the high and low filmic and theatrical distractions that have not just entertained me, but helped pull me out of my despair and even sometimes edified me or filled me with joy. The arts have always been That Which Makes Life Worth Living for me. They have been working overtime this year!

I'm thankful to everyone who has followed, perused and commented here at this blog. This has been the best therapy ever. Without it, and you, I would have had nowhere and no one to turn to. For lots of reasons, I can't actually talk about many of these things. Without this, they would go unexpressed and fester and get moldier and more corrupted by the day. So thank you all for putting up with this.

Most of all, above all else, I'm thankful to have memories of happier Thanksgivings. I'm thankful to my mother and my grandparents on both sides, all wonderful people whom I miss dreadfully on this day, for Having Been.

See, there come the tears again.

-- Freder.

The Dreaded Feast(s)

Ah, here it comes, the Traditional Season of Heartache and Suicide, and this year I am electing to spend it alone. It's nice that I actually had two invitations to Thanksgiving Dinner, but I turned them both down. It's time for me to reclaim Thanksgiving and Christmas.

We all know that the winter holidays are about spending time with your Family, and much as I like the people who invited me, they aren't my family and never will be. Attending their personal family gatherings feels all wrong. Part Home Invasion and part Parody. Stranger in a Strange Land. Anyone would feel that way, but with my minimal social skills it feels all the more uncomfortable.

So this year, I am taking the Dreaded Feasts by their horns. Gonna wrestle 'em to the ground. It will be a true holiday in that I will be under no pressure to be somewhere or get something done, and no beating myself up for laziness. I will make myself three nice meals, make sure that Patches, Honey, Whitey and Pandy Bear have some extra treats, raise a glass in my mother's memory, call my father out in Arizona, and spend the day with all that remains of my real, slowly dwindling family.

-- Freder.

The Doctor asks Pointed Questions. . .

She said, "Are you married?"

"No," I said.

"Do you have children?"

"No," I said.

"Do you have a Significant Other?"

I thought, Why are you doing this to me?

"No," I said.

"Why do you think that is?"

Is it a requirement of life? Am I breaking a law? Am I deficient, an Underling, because I am alone?

I thought, Bitch.

Pause. A beat.

I thought of all of my ex-girlfriends, and how the relationships all ended the same way, with them dumping me because I could not be, no matter how hard I tried, the person that they wanted. I tried so hard. It never made any difference. I can't read minds. I Don't. . . Understand. . .  PEOPLE. I can NOT Play the Game of "Guess Why I am Angry at You Today." My last relationship lasted just three months. That was, Christ, a decade ago.

I worked so hard to get INTO relationships, and I never walked out of one, not one single one.

I said, looking at the floor, "I'm not very social. Borderline Asperger's."

Silence.

I said, "I don't have a diagnosis or anything. . ."

And she put up her hands and said, "No. . ." in the way that said, You don't need one. I know all about it. It's obvious.

-- Freder.

W.o.W: Wasting your Time, and Making you Like It

What is it about the Harry Potter books that makes them so compulsively readable? With apologies to J.K. Rowling, they aren't particularly well-written, the characters and themes are in no way original.

I think the reason is that Rowling has created a fantasy setting that is both familiar and deeply immersive. When you finish one of the Harry Potter books, you feel as if you've lived it. (Don't get me started about the movies, though -- when you sit through one of those, you feel as if you've been clubbed over the head like a baby seal.)

The same exact thing can be said for Blizzard Entertainment's online role-playng game, World of Warcraft. In the past week-plus, when I would drag myself home from work with barely enough energy to check email and Facebook and then sit here wondering what to do with myself, I confess that Blizzard's recent offer to play World of Warcraft for free (up to level 20) did reel me in.

And now that I've been playing for a while (my main character, a night elf druid, is up to level 10 and can take on the shape of a tiger!) I have to say that Blizzard's offer is pretty much the same thing as if they stood at the edge of a playground and handed out free doses of crack cocaine to the children!

If you even remotely like this sort of thing, World of Warcraft is unbelievably addictive. And I think the reason is the same as for the Harry Potter books: the setting is deep, detailed and immersive.

The world is huge: I've played for hours and explored just a tiny corner of it. The world is gorgeous: Blizzard has always employed the best artists and designers in the business, and the amount of work that has gone into this is impressive. The world is one of great variety: you can create up to ten characters, each one of a different race and class, who exists in a different corner of the world and experiences the game in quite different ways. As much as I've played over the last week and a half, I'm in no danger of wearing out my free trial.

I could do without all the killing, but the world hardly gives you a choice. There is an adrenaline rush when a hideous monster attacks you for no reason at all, and you manage to put it down (or not; I've been killed myself more times than I care to admit. Fortunately, resurrection and redemption are possible here, very much unlike real life). And there's a rush that goes even deeper when you've leveled up a bit, and can go back to those same monsters that kicked sand in your face, and give them a damn good thrashing.

There is also a plot. The game writers cleverly guide you through a series of chapters, during which thin layers of the larger tale come gradually into focus. As you rise and advance in the game, the plot begins to thicken.

Like all habits, it comes with a dark side. The download is humongous, ten gigabytes -- even with a high-speed connection, it took all night. And just as the game will take up a big chunk of your hard drive, it will attempt to take up a big part of your life.

I think Blizzard knew what they were doing when they made this offer: give the punters a sample, then reel them in as junkies!

For my part, now that I am feeling much better, it's time for me to reclaim my life, tear myself away from World of Warcraft, or at least deeply restrict the amount of time I spend there.

Great, just ducky. Like I needed another addiction to cope with.

-- Freder.

Fingers Crossed. . .

. . . and no, I would still not say that I am feeling anywhere near as perky as this gent. . .

They say that a blogger should never post more than once a day, but I've never put much stock in what other people say, and anyhow, I feel somewhat entitled. The posts have been few and far between over the last few weeks. That's because today is the very first "off-day" in something like a month where I actually have the energy to sit up at the computer and type something.

After a brief period of relative wellness following three weeks of feeling as if I'd been hit by a truck, low and behold, that same truck stopped in the road ahead, backed right on up and ran over me again.

At first I thought that I was just being lazy. This added a unique flavor to the illness, because it meant that while I was unable to move or do anything productive, I had the additional pleasure of mentally beating myself up about it.

But by this past Tuesday I was so far depleted that all I could do was phone in sick, drag myself to bed and lie there in my chilly room, sweating like a pig while my thoughts and dreams raced crazily on about nothing at all. There isn't a thermometer in the house, so I can't actually say with authority that it was a fever -- but it was a pretty good imitation of one!

This morning? Fingers crossed, but I as if there's light ahead and I don't see a truck sitting in the road. It was nice to feel that I actually had an appetite again. It was nice to feel some benefits from eating. It was nice to walk around the house and water plants, and to bring in the rest of my yard ornaments for the winter. It was nice to sit here and type something approximately coherent.

I don't owe it all to my new doctor, a woman connected with Inland Hospital here in town, who said, "You are probably coming off of some virus activity -- but we don't have to do anything about that." -- and then promptly turned my visit into another investigation of my alcoholism.

I get tired of these investigations. I'd been totally honest and up-front with her about it, after all it's something that she needs to factor in to any calculations that she makes. But they don't need to lecture me anymore because I've heard it all and I know perfectly well that it's all true. I'm not in denial about the consequences. But my attitude is that I've modified my behaviour so dramatically over what it was fifteen months ago, and for now that is enough of a step for me. If I'm going to  knock it off completely, I'm going to need better reasons.

I am completely sober from morning light until around ten o'clock at night. That's enough sobriety for anyone. It is nice, at that lonely time of night, to feel some weight taken off of my shoulders, even if that's an illusion. After all, I'm not hurting anyone but myself -- and that's the person I care least about.

-- Freder.