Latest Posts

No Escaping Destiny.

Author: August 29, 2016 8 Comments

Source: Wikipedia

Are we born the person we become or are we made by the events that follow? I know that “a little of both” is waffling on the nature versus nurture question, but who really thinks waffles are a bad thing? Excuse me. There’s something I want to discuss but I’m trying to avoid it at the same time. Let me start over.

In different interviews, such as one he gave on Inside The Actors’ Studio or this one for PBS Gene Wilder credited his mother with turning him into an actor, although indirectly. She had a heart attack when he was seven or eight and her doctor told Gene that if he got angry with his mother it could kill her, “but try to make her laugh.”

Maybe that’s why he was so perfect for roles ranging from The Frisco Kid to The Waco Kid, and more than one generation grew up with Wilder as Willy Wonka. In his roles he was so often a man tap dancing on the edge, and sometimes he kept dancing even as he toppled over and went spinning into empty space. Then there were his collaborations with Richard Pryor, where the two played off each others’ weaknesses, turning them into strengths. But was Wilder made into an actor by the trauma he shared with his mother or was it simply the spark that ignited something that was already there?

No actor, especially one whose played such diverse roles as Gene Wilder, can be summed up by a single role, but in addition to being one of my favorite movies–one that always makes me laugh–Young Frankenstein, which was originally Wilder’s idea and co-written with Mel Brooks, seems to me the most personal of Wilder’s films. Frederick Frankenstein is born into an infamous family, seemingly fated by his decision to become a doctor to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps, and yet fate isn’t enough–a whole series of events and characters push or drag him to his destiny. And Gene Wilder runs the whole range, playing straight in one scene and funny in the next, going from morose to manic and around again, always terrified but focused on giving life.

Hail and farewell Gene Wilder.

Hail & Farewell.

Back Of The Bus.

Author: August 29, 2016 6 Comments

backofthebusChuck ruled the bus. He was our equivalent of The Fonz, stretched out across the back dispensing wisdom, standing up for the downtrodden, and generally being the epitome of cool. Except he was short, blonde, didn’t care about the downtrodden, rode the bus instead of a motorcycle, and mostly dispensed wisecracks, so I guess that’s not really the best comparison. He ruled the back of the bus, mostly talking just to his friends but occasionally he’d share something with the whole bus, like the time we had a substitute bus driver who ground the gears, got the bus stuck on a hill, and got lost. Chuck yelled from the back, “Didja get your license out of a Cracker Jack box?” It seems pretty weak now but in the world of first through sixth grade we had low standards and thought it was hilarious.

Anyway Chuck’s place was the entire back of the bus and everyone knew and respected that, at least until one day when I got on the bus and there was a commotion at the back. Another sixth grader, Jim, decided it was his turn to have the glory of the backseat for a change. Most of the time he sat at the front which was the equivalent of sitting at the front of the class. The cooler you were the further back you sat. I don’t know what the catalyst was on this particular day but Jim didn’t have a lot of friends on the bus and he was the son of a teacher. It was hard for him to achieve anything approaching being cool but maybe he thought if he could have the backseat things would change for him. The bus driver quickly pushed her way through the crowd and broke up the fight. She stuck Chuck in his usual spot in the backseat and sent Jim to the front where he’d quietly ride the bus the rest of the year.

There was something weird, almost comical about the way Chuck and Jim fought. They’d both had their eyes closed and were only punching each other in the stomach, and only hitting because there’s not a lot of room to move in the back of a school bus. I guess they were both really cowards but Chuck had found a way to compensate with an attitude.

Adventures In Busing.

De-Faced.

Author: August 27, 2016 10 Comments

face1Most graffiti is a person’s name or nickname–what’s commonly known as a tag. And when you think about it a name, especially when elaborately drawn, is more than just a word. It’s a picture. It says as much about how the artist sees him or herself as a self-portrait would. And it’s the most personal expression an artist can make and have a history that spans artists as different as Rembrandt and Kahlo. So it was really interesting to me that someone tagged a couple of different places with what I think it a self-portrait. It’s a caricature and not realistic, but it’s meant to be a self-portrait. At least I think it is since as usual I don’t know the artist and I can’t ask them about it. So I’m just speculating, but bear with me here.

face2

What made me think of the connection between signatures and self-portraits wasn’t just the fact that this graffiti is a face rather than the usual name. I also thought of Salvador Dali’s massive painting The Ecumenical Council, from his religious period, finished in 1960 when he was fifty-six. In his youth Dali had been an ardent atheist but later would meet Pope Pius XII and converted to Catholicism.

Source: Wikipedia

Or did he? Scholars interpret this painting at representing the union of Heaven and Earth. The figure in the upper center is believed to be God whose hand is up because no one can look on the face of God. The interesting thing, though, is Dali’s self-portrait in the lower left. He’s painted himself as a painter. This has been interpreted as his substitute for a signature. And yet Dali signed most of his paintings with just his name. Self-portraits are extremely rare in his work. He occasionally painted himself as a child but almost always facing away from the viewer. In a few of his early surrealist works he painted himself or figures that represented him but with a hand over the face.

Maybe this is really Dali’s not so subtle jab at religion–suggesting that the real creator is the artist. Isn’t that blasphemy? Well it might have been a blast for Dali anyway. Yes, he went though the motions of converting to Catholicism but at a time when being an atheist among artists was common, even expected. He claimed to support Franco then the Spanish monarchy when most artists were joining the Communist party or at least claiming to be apolitical. I think he did these things solely to shock people, and throwing a little blasphemy into his work was his way of playing both sides. He didn’t take anything too seriously.

I know I’m not saying much about graffiti here, especially not the graffiti pictures above, but I am trying to tie graffiti into the more respectable world of serious art criticism and art history. Why? Because I think it’s funny that it shocks some people who take art way too seriously.

American Graffiti.

Milking It.

Author: August 26, 2016 4 Comments

Source: SkyView app

Source: SkyView app

The other night I was dragging the garbage can up to the curb, one of those routine chores I always enjoy because I always do it after dark and walk through patches of shadow where anything could be lurking which, now that I mention it, is starting to make me wonder why I enjoy doing it and why I don’t do it earlier when it’s still light out even though it’s better to do it late to make sure I’ve gotten as much trash as possible because if anything’s left over we’ll be stuck with it for a week. And I enjoy it because while I’m dragging the can I look up at the sky which is another thing I didn’t think about until just now: the contrast between the earthy, grimy, trash and the ethereal, seemingly eternal sky above me. Really I’m just looking for planes. Or at the clouds. Most of the time I see the stars. At this time of year the night is also noisy. Even in our suburban neighborhood the children of the night, what music they make. I mean mostly bugs and frogs, of course, since we don’t have any wolves, or at least I haven’t seen any, but the little critters of nature know that they’re noisy. And they’re noisy because even though it doesn’t feel like it yet the summer is coming to an end. Their biological clocks are winding down and there’s a special urgency, one last desperate chance to meet that special someone. They’re brooding on the need to make a new brood.

It’s really the stars I focus on, though. Last night at the edge of the street I looked up and even through the pale orange glare of the streetlight I could see three bright stars in a line. They were part of the constellation Sagittarius which might have been more visible if that streetlight hadn’t been there. Beyond Sagittarius, though, is the Milky Way.

Strictly speaking Sagittarius is part of the Milky Way, and so is Earth, which is why it confused me when I was a kid when people talked about seeing the Milky Way. We’re in it, albeit far out in one of the outer arms. If it really were an arm I think we’d be just past the wrist and our galaxy also has more arms than a Hindu deity. So I thought saying “I can see the Milky Way” would be like standing in your closet and saying “I can see my house”. It wasn’t until one night on a camping trip in an extremely remote area on a cool late summer night that I actually saw the Milky Way, the band of shining, stellar clouds that stretches across the sky. According to the ancient Greeks it was formed when baby Heracles suckled on Hera in her sleep and some of her milk spilled out across the sky—a myth that was meant to explain the origins of the breast pump, but that’s another story.

There was something strange about looking into it, knowing that even though I could only see a small part of it I was still looking into the very heart of our galaxy. How did astronomers feel when they first realized our sun is just another star, and a pretty puny one at that? How did they feel when they first realized we only see mere ghosts of stars, that interstellar distances are so vast it takes years, even centuries, sometimes millennia, for the light of stars to reach us? The ground under their feet must have seemed a lot less stable. And in my lifetime alone astronomers, working with geologists, have come to understand the Earth’s long history of being hit by big rocks on a disturbingly regular basis—one about every twenty-six million years. The idea that a nearby star might be throwing wild pitches was dismissed almost as quickly as it was proposed, but the regularity might not be a cosmic coincidence either. Our solar system doesn’t stay in one place. Even as the Milky Way slowly turns the regularity of mass extinctions may be the result of the way our solar system bobs and weaves in its arm, perhaps taking us sometimes into dangerous territory. And some people get a kick out of saying we’re overdo for an interplanetary sucker punch, but a million years is a really long time. It may not happen.

Closer to home is the issue of light pollution, the growing number of photons we’re spewing into the sky nightly that make it harder and harder to see features like the Milky Way and smaller, dimmer stellar neighbors. It’s a scary thought that the more lights we use to light the night here on Earth the more we lose a perspective on our place in the universe, as if we were standing in a closet with no way to know what lurks in the patches of shadow.

The Weekly Essay

It’s That Time Again.

Author: August 24, 2016 10 Comments

bottleIt’s been much too long since I did a pop quiz. It’s state fair time, at least in the northern hemisphere where we’re moving into fall and the inevitable grim reaping of winter.

So here’s the latest pop quiz: amusement park ride or cocktail?

Because cocktails have a long history and are more diverse and weirdly named than Seattle bands I’ve tried to limit that list to the classics by pulling them from the 1922 Cocktails & How To Mix Them, and the list of amusement park rides is pulled from Wikipedia. What I’m getting at here is I didn’t make any of these up even though just about any name I could make up has probably already been the name of either a cocktail or amusement park ride somewhere. In fact I used to hang out in a bar that served a drink called Alien Secretion, which I’m pretty sure was developed by a bartender who read too much Burroughs, but that’s another story. And also I’ve given you easy links which means you could easily cheat on this quiz, but why would you?

 

Enough of my yakkin’. The topic of this quiz, since you’ve forgotten it by now, is, Amusement park ride or cocktail?

  1. Highball
  2. Singapore Sling
  3. Alpine slide
  4. Depth bomb
  5. Cliffhanger
  6. Rum punch
  7. Devil’s wheel
  8. Stinger
  9. Double Shot
  10. Silver Streak
  11. Gravitron
  12. Bosom caresser
  13. Reverse peristalsis
  14. Hayride
  15. Motion simulator
  16. Bloody Mary
  17. Power Surge
  18. Shoot the Chute
  19. Monkey’s Gland
  20. Topple Tower

answerkey2

drink1

Pop Quiz

School Of Hard Knocks.

Author: August 22, 2016 10 Comments

busA book hit me in the back of the head. Hard. It was a textbook. Introduction To Trigonometry, maybe, or European Classics For Dummies. Whatever it was it was thick and it had been thrown from several seats back.
It was the first day of my sophomore year of high school and the first bus ride home. Things were not starting well.
Kevin, a freshman I didn’t know, was in the seat behind me. He was laughing like a hyena. I punched him.
“Dude,” he yelled. “I didn’t throw the book at you.”
I’m still not sure who threw the book at me, and even then I didn’t care. I should have thrown it out the window but I’m pretty sure the thrower wasn’t the owner; I’m pretty sure it was stolen from someone. I had a sense of ethics. I didn’t want to get them in trouble.
I didn’t want to get me in trouble either, and I was sure I’d be held responsible for throwing a school textbook out a bus window regardless of how it came to me.
So I threw it back. My aim was off and hit my friend Angie in the head.
“That’s it!” yelled the bus driver. He slammed the brakes on and stormed back to my seat.
“You’re going to the principal’s office first thing,” he said, poking a finger in my face.
“Sure,” I said. And I stomped to the front of the bus, pulled the door lever, and got out. I went straight to the woods, cut through backyards up to the condos then down the hill to my house and let myself in through the back door.
The phone was ringing. I answered it.
“Chris?”
It was Angie. I felt horrible. I launched into an apology but she cut me off.
“Shut up.” She knew I hadn’t meant to hit her in the head with a book. She didn’t know who’d thrown the book, whose book it was. What she did know was the bus driver and several kids were freaked out by my sudden disappearance. Two of my friends were being driven around by their parents looking for me.
Good, I thought.
The next day I was in my first class of the day, gym, and got called to the principal’s office. I’d later learn that I’d be reported as absent, blowing my perfect attendance record because the gym teacher was a jackass who didn’t pay attention, but that’s another story.
In the principal’s office I told my story. As soon as I mentioned Kevin the principal rolled his eyes and I was told to watch it in the future.
Nobody ever threw a book at me again.
What lessons did we learn here?

  • It’s not necessary to fight back against bullies to make them stop. Sometimes bold action is all it takes.
  • It’s helpful to know your neighborhood.
  • Kevin was a prick. He’s now a moderately successful insurance salesman.

Adventures In Busing.

It’s Complicated, But Not Unusual.

Author: August 20, 2016 15 Comments

It’s not unusual for bloggers to hit on similar themes at the same time. What is unusual is that I happened to run across graffiti that seemed to speak to the theme that I felt three of my favorite bloggers had in common recently. Admittedly it’s also not unusual for me to extrapolate wildly and tie together completely unrelated things which meant that sometimes in English classes my interpretations of stories and poems were so wildly off the mark one of my teachers suggested I stop freebasing banana peels in the parking lot at lunch, but that’s another story.

This week Ann Koplow of The Year(s) of Living Non-Judgmentally is at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and while she writes daily about a variety of subjects and started the week with Wishes. But more broadly there’s something significant about her time there right now because her son is going to be attending the University of Edinburgh.

That’s why it struck me that Gilly, whose blog is Anything Except Housework, has a post contemplating her empty nest, and reflecting on her time raising two boys and what she might have missed, but more importantly she reminds herself of the need to remember the good she’s done.

And Chuck Baudelaire of Always Drunk contemplated moments that changed her life, moments that led her to where she is now.

All three were reflective and I somehow had all three in mind when I saw this:

simple1simple

And it made me think about how quickly a life can change but every moment is complicated. Every moment is embedded in every other moment. Singling out one is like extracting a crystal from a matrix.

If the connection seems vague it’s because, like I said, it’s not unusual for me to tie unrelated things together, but maybe that’s because everything really is related.

And that also reminds me of a joke. A guy goes to the doctor and says, “Doc, every time I pass a park I start singing ‘Green Green Grass Of Home’ and every time I see a cat I start singing ‘What’s New, Pussycat?'”

The doctor says, “It sounds like you’ve got Tom Jones syndrome.”

The guy says, “Tom Jones syndrome? I’ve never heard of that. Is it rare?”

The doctor says, “It’s not unusual.”

American Graffiti.

Entrances, Exits, and Errors.

Author: August 18, 2016 6 Comments

This year for its annual Shakespeare in the Park event the Nashville Shakespeare Festival is putting on A Comedy of Errors. So of course I walked down to Centennial Park on my lunch break to check out the set.

I went to a university with a highly respected theater program and went to see every play but the one thing I still regret not doing is sneaking in and taking a look behind the scenes. Not that there was ever that much to see, but I like to look at theater sets from the back, to see the inner workings, even when they’re not particularly complex. And I’m used to being in the audience so I like to get some idea of the view from the actors’ perspective, although in my limited acting experience it’s best to pretend the audience isn’t even there.

And with its hilariously tangled plot full of mistaken identities–it’s probably the closest thing to slapstick you’ll find in Shakespeare with a story about two pairs of twins who keep getting mixed up–it’s fitting to check out A Comedy of Errors from the other side.

shakespeare1   shakespeare2 shakespeare3 shakespeare4 shakespeare5 shakespeare6Given the topsy-turvy plot it’s also fitting that the stage has its own ersatz version of the world-famous Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge.

shakespeare7

Quick Takes.

Him & His Shadow.

Author: August 17, 2016 10 Comments

Source: The Guardian

Another kid and I were arguing about Star Wars. This was the late ‘70’s and we were both kids so of course Star Wars was on our minds. If we weren’t talking about it we were acting out scenes and making up our own stories, and if we weren’t doing that we were arguing about it. I was telling him about an article I’d read about the special effects in Star Wars and how they were done. He was shocked that C-3PO and R2-D2 were played by people, that they weren’t real robots. He got pretty upset about it too and finally went off in a huff saying, “Well the spaceships didn’t have people in ‘em! They were real!”

I feel kind of bad for spoiling the illusion for him but for me, as much as I would have liked to be in a world of real robots and spaceships, there was something just as cool about knowing the robots were real people.

Kenny Baker, the very real person who played R2-D2 in the first six Star Wars films, passed away recently.

The funny thing is when I heard the news I didn’t think about Star Wars. My first thought was Terry Gilliam’s movie Time Bandits, which came out between the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. I saw it in the theater and while there was a lot about it that stuck with me—I was just discovering Monty Python at the time—the main thing was Kenny Baker was in the main cast. I purposely looked for him in the film, always thinking, That’s the guy who plays R2-D2.

That seems strangely poignant now considering that Time Bandits is about a young boy who gets dragged into a fantastic adventure by a quintet of time travelers—one of whom is Kenny Baker. Fantasy in Time Bandits isn’t an illusion; it’s simply another layer of reality. And he helped make it real.

Hail and farewell Kenny Baker.

Hail & Farewell.

Look Out Above!

Author: August 15, 2016 9 Comments

Sometimes when I’m waiting at a bus stop I get the feeling the drivers speeding by are looking down on me. Metaphorically, I mean. I think they see me and think, “Hah, look at that schmuck. He has to stand in the heat and wait for a bus while I’m moving along comfortably in my 1978 Gremlin with its 8-track deck and AC that I’m gonna get fixed someday.” It’s a lousy attitude because I’m pretty sure most drivers don’t even notice me, and anyway once the bus arrives I step up into the higher seats in the back. Who’s looking down on whom now, suckers? Anyway, what if I could really look down?

The Chinese government has been experimenting with a bus that goes above and beyond…traffic. It’s not a double-decker bus but a bus that’s designed to straddle the lanes, passing above cars rather than simply passing them, and it’s environmentally friendly because it’s powered by its own awesomeness as you can see in this picture.

straddlebus

Source: Shanghaiist

Part of that may not be true but it is a cool idea for making bus routes more efficient, and making public transportation cool. In fact that may be its literal downfall. I could see this bus being so popular it would collapse under the weight of too many riders. On the bright side if it collapsed on a car below it might be the final excuse that guy in his 1978 Gremlin needs to get his air conditioning fixed.

Adventures In Busing.