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December 14, 2012

I know it doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone anymore that most of what we consider traditional Christmas symbols-wreaths of holly, boughs of mistletoe, spiking grandma’s egg nog-are actually appropriated from pagan traditions. It’s even no accident that Christmas is celebrated pretty close to the Solstice, both of which fall close to New Year’s Day. They’re all celebrations of renewal, of the old passing away and ushering in a new world, although I kind of wonder why Christmas is celebrated in the winter while Easter-also borrowing from pagan tradition–is celebrated in the spring. Maybe whoever decided when the Christian celebrations should be held just flipped a coin, because it seems like they could just as easily be the other way around, although winter is bleak and dark enough as it is, so I suppose reminding everyone of the crucifixion right in the middle of it would be too depressing even if Jesus does make a triumphant comeback in the final reel.

The one tradition I don’t understand, though, is the Christmas tree. Don’t get me wrong-I love Christmas trees, and have fond memories of putting one up. I even had a few relatives who would send me an ornament as a Christmas gift, which I would open and immediately put in a box for a year, so it was a nice way to acknowledge that we each thought of each other once a year. And I always loved the ornaments. When I was young I especially loved those metallic red and blue and silver balls, but after a few years when we’d accumulated a sizeable collection of reindeers, snowmen, lace stars, little tiny Santas, and brass cutouts with "Cihrs-1983" engraved on it my mother wouldn’t let me put those on the tree anymore. She said they were tacky, but I think the truth is that whenever they fall-and there would always be fifteen or twenty that fell every year-they’d break into a million pointy shards, and no amount of vacuuming would pick them all up, so you’d always fine at least one in the summer whenever you walked across the floor barefoot. And I remember how I begged my parents to get bubble lights, and then we did, and I would watch them intently, in spite of being told that a watched bubble light never bubbles.

Anyway, at first glance a Christmas tree seems like an appropriate seasonal symbol. Christmas trees are traditionally evergreens, after all, so they’re symbolic of surviving through the winter, and somehow chopping down a leafless or dead tree and bringing it inside just wouldn’t be that festive, no matter how many bubble lights you put on it. But as I said Christmas and the Solstice are celebrations of renewal, of rebirth even, or at the very least of survival, so it seems contrary to the spirit of the season to celebrate by killing a tree. Pine trees are also, according to some British folklore, unlucky, and it’s especially bad to fall asleep under one, which leads to the tradition of older siblings encouraging the youngest ones to sleep under the Christmas tree. And we don’t just kill the tree. We chop it down and bring it inside and decorate it while it slowly dies and dries out, and since that’s not already enough of a fire hazard we decorate it with frayed strings of electric lights that have been scrunched up and stored in the attic for more than eleven months. And some people still like to go for that air of authenticity and use candles, because nothing celebrates the holiday spirit like setting a giant tree on fire right in the middle of your living room.

Actually the equally old, equally pagan tradition of the yule log makes more sense for a celebration, especially since there is a tradition of placing small gifts for children under each end of the yule log, because nothing celebrates the holiday spirit like getting your children gifts and then burning them. And I don’t have any childhood memories of a yule log, at least in part, I think, because for most of my childhood we didn’t have a fireplace. I never thought of this as a problem for Santa, though-I figured he just picked the lock. In fact I was a teenager before I first heard about the tradition of a yule log, and my first thought was, "I’ll what?" For a couple more years I thought it had something to do with "The King And I" always being on television around this time of year, but that’s another story. Although, speaking of Santa, I guess the Christmas tree is more festive than a big sign that says "LEAVE PRESENTS HERE". You know the guy’s so hopped up on milk and cookies, not to mention wind chill and reindeer farts, that if there weren’t an obvious place for him to drop the presents there’s no telling where he’d put them. So having a Christmas tree can be a nice thing, although I think symbolically and ecologically it’s still better to have a fake one. And aesthetically, since you don’t have to worry about sticking it in the corner right next to the heating vent to cover up the bald patch. But I still prefer the ones that actually look like trees. My grandparents had one of those solid white monstrosities that looked like it was made out of twisted garbage bags. The only fond memories I have of it is the time I tried to set it on fire, and it wouldn’t even burn. It just melted.

December 7, 2012

According to a scientific study I heard about third-hand people will spend more money in stores that have certain scents in the air. Vanilla and orange seem to be the smells most likely to make people fork over their cash, so if you ever get home and wonder why you bought a digital banana extruder think back and see if you noticed the store was unusually citrusy, or smelled like they were baking cakes under the cash registers. I don’t know when exactly this study was conducted, and they may have even tried to keep the findings under wraps. I remember several years ago when there was a minor panic over subliminal messages being used as advertising. People thought it was mind control, although, technically, that’s all advertising is. It’s a very sophisticated form of mind control.

Or maybe it’s not that sophisticated. Sometimes advertisers seem to come up with exceptionally bad ideas, like putting ads for candy bars on fuel pumps, because there’s nothing like the smell of gasoline to give you a craving for chocolate and caramel. It’s no accident, though, that when psychology was still a nascent field advertisers took an interest. The psychologist B.F. Skinner worked contributed to the advertising industry, although the psychologist who’s had the most lasting impact is definitely Freud. No matter what the ad is selling a cigar is never just a cigar, but that’s another story. And it’s not just advertising. Stores will also employ elaborate tricks, although I guess that’s also a kind of advertising since it’s all about selling. And we’ve been so brainwashed into thinking a sale means we’re getting a good deal people will buy almost anything that’s marked down. I had an aunt who bought an escalator.

Then there’s the whole array of impulse buys at the cash register, which was a brilliant idea. Stores took the one place where we want to spend the smallest amount of time-the checkout line-and have turned it into a mini shopping area all its own. There have been too many times when I’ve been waiting for the person ahead of me to check out and have taken the opportunity to get a self-tattooing kit, a dry ice maker, and a TV screen repair kit. And I’ve bought some stupid things too. What I never can figure out is why every store in the universe now has to have a selection of miniature gourmet chocolates right at the checkout. Stores that don’t even sell anything even remotely close to food will still have a wide variety of chocolates. And who buys these? I see them in the big hardware stores, and I wonder if some construction foreman ever comes in and says, "I need two square miles of plywood, a quarter inch of drywall, and, ooh! Raspberry truffles! The boys down at the job site love those."

I also find it interesting that grocery stores sell little recipe books at the checkout. It seems like they’re missing a real opportunity there, and they should be selling recipe books at the entrance. I know I’ve bought one of those little recipe books, thinking, hey, that asparagus-artichoke-aardvark torta looks pretty good and easy, only to get home and realize that I didn’t buy anything I need to make it, so I throw it away, thinking, yeah, I’ll never cook that crap anyway. If they sold the recipe books at the entrance customers would spend more money buying all the ingredients they need before going home and throwing it all away because, really, no one’s gonna cook that crap anyway. Although selling magazines at the checkout does make sense. It gives you something to read while you’re waiting for the ninety-eight year old woman in line in front of you to bag her own groceries because she has a special way of doing it, and then you get so engrossed in the article about what life is like in exotic and remote places like Kansas that you feel you have to buy the magazine. And it’s interesting seeing what magazines people buy. I’ve seen men in business suits buying issues of Cosmopolitan, maybe because they think their wife really will read that article about three-hundred new ways to dutifully serve her husband without laughing, or maybe they’re just too embarrassed to buy real porn. And I’ve seen harried women with litters of children pick up issues of The Economist, maybe because they’re desperate for news from the adult world.

And yet I’ve never seen anyone buy an Archie comic. I’ve never even known anyone who has ever been given an Archie comic that someone else has purchased for them. Why do they even keep making them? Aren’t our landfills overstuffed enough without every single issue of every single Archie comic being packed up and dropped into them every week? Okay, I might actually buy the new issue with George Takei in it, but it would be the first and only one, which raises the question of how Archie comics have managed to live this long and prosper. Anyway, what I intended to say was that I think it’s absurd to believe that the smell of orange or vanilla makes people more willing to purchase things, although the more I think about it the more willing I am to buy it. Hey, is that a cake baking?

November 30, 2012

When I was sixteen I showed my mother a poem I’d written, and she said, "That sounds like Dylan Thomas." I’d never heard of him, but she went to the library and checked out his Collected Poems and brought it home for me. In the front was a picture of Thomas, and I thought he was the saddest looking man I’d ever seen. It kind of put me off of his poetry, so I didn’t read it for a while, but I kept his name in mind and just before I went to college and bought a copy of his Selected Poems. And I read a brief biography of him in a reference book and learned about his heavy drinking and early death.

Before I read his poetry I was intrigued by his life. He was a rock star of poetry: he drank heavily, acted outrageously at parties and in hotels, and beat up his wife. (She hit back, but that doesn’t make it right.) From some of the stories people tell about him it’s a wonder Thomas survived as long as he did. But I wasn’t just interested in his biography. He was the first poet whose work I read seriously and deeply, and I thought I wanted to be a poet like him. Well, not exactly like him. I hoped to live to be older than he did, and so far at least I’ve achieved that. Shortly after his thirty-ninth birthday, supposedly after downing eighteen whiskies, he collapsed.

One night, in a British pub, I foolishly decided I wanted to live like Dylan Thomas, and drank most of a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Fortunately I had friends who made sure I woke up the next morning. That was a couple of weeks after I’d I’d made a special pilgrimage across England and into Wales to visit his home. I knew he was born and spent his early years in Swansea, then moved around and finally settled in a little Welsh town called Laugharne. I set out from Grantham, England, home of Sir Isaac Newton and Margaret Thatcher. Find Grantham and Laugharne on a map and you’ll see I was cutting diagonally across most of Britain, from northeast to southwest. Although you might not find Laugharne on a map. I couldn’t. At least it wasn’t on any train schedule I could find, so I set out for Swansea. And then what? Look for Mumbles Road and Mermaid Park, I thought, and let the rest take care of itself. I figured in Dylan Thomas was the Welsh Elvis, so I thought Swansea would be like Memphis, just with different accents, and everyone would know how to get to Dylan’s equivalent of Graceland. I settled into my seat on the train and watched the green English countryside and little brown shacks in the middle of nowhere.

Stepping off the train in Swansea I started to realize that I had no clue what I was doing there. There were no signs, no posters, no Dylan Thomas impersonators in wool jackets belting out "In The White Giant’s Thigh". So I did what any sensible person would do: I set off in a random direction, walking around Swansea late in a winter afternoon. I went by about two dozen pubs, wondering if I should go in. On his first trip to America Thomas came over on a plane. He seemed to be a friendly guy who liked talking to people, but he was scared to talk to any of his fellow passengers. As I walked down a Swansea street I tried to ignore the cold and wind and growing dark. Finally I stepped into a travel agency thinking I might ask someone where I should go, but I was scared to speak to anyone and instead looked at a wall of brochures where, of all things, one advertising the Dylan Thomas Boat House And Museum jumped out at me. I checked the map on the back, and there was Laugharne, just a short way from Carmarthen, which was just a short way from Swansea. It looked like I could almost walk the distance. Maps on the back of brochures, by the way, can be extremely misleading.

I headed back to the train station thinking the Welsh train system must go to Laugharne, and if it didn’t, well, maybe there was a bus, and if there wasn’t maybe I’d catch a lift with some complete stranger with a hook for a hand and an eyepatch and a scar. Laugharne still wasn’t on the train station map, so I decided to go for the next best thing and go to Carmarthen and maybe meet up with the hook-handed, one-eyed stranger, or possibly a bus, there. The train to Carmarthen was smaller than the other trains I’d ridden, and rickety. It was night by this time and sometime before I got to Carmarthen a heavy rain had started. I stepped out and realized it was the end of the line, and I’d just ridden the last train. There’d be no return trip that night, so whether I wanted to or not I was going to be spending the night in Carmarthen. As a young man out of school Thomas worked briefly as a reporter. His work, based on the notes he kept, mostly consisted of wandering around town and having an occasional pint. I’m pretty sure I spent at least an hour walking around Carmarthen. I passed at least a dozen very inviting pubs, but they were always either too crowded or too empty.

For a while I wondered if I should find a comfortable ditch to sleep in. Finally I got up the nerve to ask a couple of guys coming out of a pub if there was a place I could get a room. They were very friendly and tickled that an American was visiting Carmarthen and directed me to a place I never did find, mainly because I couldn’t understand half of what they were saying. I spent the night in a place called the Old Priory Guest House, in a room in the very back of the building, at the end of a dark hallway. When I woke up in the morning I was a little disturbed to look out the window and see a graveyard. The next day was Sunday. I left the Guest House early and skipped the complimentary breakfast. I’d gotten a bus schedule at the train station the night before and had confirmed absolutely that there was a bus that went to Laugharne. What the schedule didn’t tell me was that Wales completely shut down on Sunday. It listed the times for the buses, but not the days, I guess because everybody just knew the buses don’t run on Sundays. The train back to Swansea didn’t leave until after one o’clock.

So I spent a lot of time walking up and down the banks of the River Towy, and finally got back to school in Grantham very late that night, having to make the last leg from Nottingham in a taxi. I’d spent the night in the Nottingham train station once before and didn’t want to repeat the experience. In the middle of his life Thomas moved to London, and almost completely gave up writing poetry. He wrote a few film scripts, but almost nothing of any lasting value. He wouldn’t start writing poetry again seriously until he and his family moved to Laugharne, where he produced his best and his best-known works. The trip, and my one-night bout with Jack, still left me feeling unsatisfied. I felt like Dylan Thomas and I still had unresolved business, so I did what any sensible person would do: I went again. The second time I was better equipped: I had the train schedule figured out, I had the bus schedule, and I knew how to find the Old Priory Guest House, and I was going to ask for a room facing the street. I also wasn’t going to spend any time wandering around Swansea. This time I was on a mission, and headed straight to Laugharne. It was late afternoon when I stepped off the bus in Laugharne, and the first thing I saw was a sign that said, "Dylan’s Walk" Ah, I thought, they knew I was coming.

I set off down Dylan’s walk which led me around to a steep cliff, past a cemetery, past the little blue shed where he wrote "Fern Hill" and "Do No Go Gentle Into That Good Night". Thomas was known for being late for every appointment he ever made. He was never on time for anything. There’s a Broadway play based on his tours of America. In it someone asks him, "Will you be telling jokes at your own funeral? He replies, "Of course not. I’ll be late for it." I went right up to the door of the Dylan Thomas Boat House And Museum. And it was closed. For the weekend. It had closed half an hour before I arrived. I had a few hours in Laugharne before the last bus to Carmarthen, which I made sure to catch. I’d return to Carmarthen in time to attend the lighting of the city Christmas tree. Unsure where else to go or what to do in Laugharne I wandered around and stopped in at a small convenience store across from the Brown’s Hotel Pub-the place where Thomas spent a lot of his days. I bought a copy of A Child’s Christmas In Wales. The man behind the convenience store counter, somehow guessing that I was a Dylan Thomas fan, insisted that I had to have a pint in Dylan’s old pub. I told him I was scared to go in. Dylan’s wife Caitlin described Laugharne as a rough, dangerous place. "Someone was even shot here once," she said. Still the convenience store owner assured me that it would be all right. Outside the pub I could hear what sounded like a pretty raucous, Friday night crowd, which reassured me. I thought I’d slip in unnoticed, have a pint and leave. I opened the door and stepped into dead silence. I’m pretty sure every person in Laugharne except the guy who worked in the convenience store was in that pub, and since they knew I wasn’t him they knew as soon as I opened the door that there was a stranger among them.

I walked across the room to the bar with everyone staring at me, a short, long-haired guy in a hat and long coat with a backpack. Only the bartender, a bald, round-faced man who looked like he just might be old enough to have known Dylan Thomas, who probably even played cards with him back in the day, smiled at me and asked me what I wanted. I asked for a pint of Guinness. I needed the familiar, heavy stout. He poured one and I walked over to the only empty corner in the room. I sat down and pulled out my copy of Dylan Thomas’s Selected Poems. And it was as though I’d flipped a switch. Everyone in the room turned away from me and started talking again, apparently picking up their conversations right where they’d left off. I looked out the window, then looked at the wall to my right. There was a picture of Dylan and Caitlin on the wall. The wallpaper had changed, but, without realizing it I’d sat in his chair. After finishing my pint I set off for one last walk, this time with a clear destination in mind. I climbed a hill, passed through a gate, and walked in total darkness, lighting a match as I went and finding that there was nothing around me. Then I turned and came into the dim light of the town below and walked up to Dylan himself. A simple wooden cross marks the spot. I sat down in front of it. I looked out over the lights of Laugharne and then talked to Dylan for a while.

November 16, 2012

"I’ll have a half double decaffeinated half-caf, with a twist of lemon." -Steve Martin

A coffee shop in Britain has changed its menu to use simpler terms. Instead of offering latte they offer "Really really milky coffee". If you want a mocha you need to order "Chocolate flavoured coffee", and they don’t serve espresso, but you can get "A shot of strong coffee". And this inevitably raises the question: why? Yes, we’ve all stood in the line at the coffee shop trying to decide between the double chip mocha affogato and the skinny ristretto latte (over ice). And as much as it annoys us when someone else does it I’m pretty sure we’ve all held up the line still trying to make up our minds because most coffee shops have so many options you need binoculars to read the menu even up close, especially when it’s hand-written on a chalkboard in twenty-seven different colors. And even though fancy coffee drinks have been around for at least a couple of decades now I think it’s still a really good idea to add explanatory notes to coffee menus, because, in spite of having drunk enough of them to fill Lake Michigan, I’m still not entirely sure what a frappe is. But if I go up to the coffee shop counter it’s going to take me a lot longer to give the long version to the guy taking my order than it would to just say I want "a frappe", although it’s really not the time factor that concerns me. After all if they include explanations of their drinks it’s probably going to take even longer for people to decide what they want because they’ll be standing there slack-jawed and saying, "So that’s what a doppio is" before they order one and then, ten minutes after drinking it, head off to fill Lake Michigan.

Having detailed explanations would at least solve the problem I sometimes have in coffee shops of asking the guy behind the counter, "What’s the difference between the Sumatran sallow and the Belizean blonde?" and having him say, "Uh, one’s made from beans…" which makes me want to punch him in the cash register. At the other end of the spectrum, of course, is the guy who knows way too much about the coffee. As long as I’m not holding up the line I really don’t mind a long explanation, although usually somewhere between being told that the Chiapas blend has hints of cherry, chicory, and charcoal and that it’s harvested by attractive mountain people who are paid a decent wage and have a dental plan I want to say, "Okay, I’ll take a large, Captain Soulpatch, you can talk and pour at the same time." No, my real problem with the simplified coffee menu is that it’s a dumbing down of the language. Instead of asking people to learn and use new, well, relatively new, and interesting words it’s going backward. Language is supposed to evolve, and, since language shapes how we think, adding new words to our vocabulary expands our mental range. At the very least new words add subtle gradations to our speech. Think about the difference between telling someone your house is painted green and telling them it’s painted sage.

Any attempt to simplify language reminds me of no less a person than George Orwell suggesting English writers should, as much as possible, restrict themselves to Anglo-Saxon words rather than using Greek and Latin derivatives. That kind of attack makes me wonder if Orwell ever read a novel called 1984, written by an English author whose name escapes me at the moment. Although I also think that as long as we’re importing new words into our language the least we can do is get them right. Specifically I mean the Italian word "espresso". Look carefully at that word and you’ll notice there’s no X in it. It’s not an expresso. Expresso is a brand of stationary bike that you get on to burn off the calories from that large double caramel mocha you had this morning. It’s fantastic that Americans have imported espresso and rebranded it as our own so we can sell it back to Europeans at greatly inflated prices, but I think as a matter of courtesy we should at least pronounce it correctly. If you go to a coffee shop and ask for an "expresso" you should be given really really milky milk. With a shot of milk. And a twist of lemon.

November 9, 2012

Several liquor stores in my area have begun selling something they call "moonshine". I hate it when people play fast and loose with the language like that. If it’s produced, bottled, and distributed by legitimate businesses it’s not moonshine. Moonshine is made in hollers and gulleys by men missing fingers and eyes because their stills occasionally blow up. If it’s got a fancy label and is sold in broad daylight in a legitimate establishment it’s not moonshine. At best it’s a distilled alcohol product that hasn’t been subjected to a traditional aging process. If that’s too much of a mouthful then just call it really, really expensive turpentine.

Moonshine is sold in jelly jars and clay pots with XXX on the side, or at least it was before XXX was appropriated by the porn industry, but moonshine remains much more dangerous. Moonshine might make you go blind, whereas some porn will simply make you wish you were blind. Running moonshine was, supposedly, how NASCAR originated, but I find that highly questionable. I think all automobile racing originated with the invention of the automobile because even if you give two guys two completely identical cars the first thing they’re both going to think is, "Let’s find out which one is faster." And it gets worse. There are now also so-called reality shows about moonshiners. I say "so-called" not merely because, as we all know, there’s very little reality in reality television, but because shows about moonshiners must be fiction because the production of moonshine is illegal. If the reality shows are really about real moonshiners they’re making it a lot easier for ATF agents who will no longer have to wander through hollers and gullies looking for illicit stills but can just follow the film crews.

I believe these reality shows must be no more real than Otis on The Andy Griffith Show disappearing into the woods to tie one on, presumably because Mayberry was in a dry county, otherwise he would have been able to hang out in the local bar or buy a bottle of gin at the liquor store before ambling to the sheriff’s office to lock himself in his favorite jail cell. I realize the bottling and reality shows are an attempt to give moonshine a whiff of respectability, but, open-minded as I am, I don’t think moonshine should be made respectable. I’m an open-minded guy and think there are a lot of things society has kept on the fringes that should be embraced, but is moonshine one of them? Several years ago I took a friend to visit the Jack Daniel’s Distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee. I’ve toured the distillery at least a dozen times since I was very young because my parents would often take visiting guests down there-a tradition I’m proud to have continued. Most of those times that I went Moore County, where Lynchburg is located, was a completely dry county.

For the British and other aliens I’d like to take a moment here to explain that a "dry county" is one where alcohol can’t be sold. That was part of the charm of the Jack Daniel’s Distillery: they could make it there, but they couldn’t sell it. You had to drive to a neighboring county to buy it. Except the last time I was there they had a three-foot by three-foot square in the distillery itself where you could buy a special bottle. And I felt like a small part of my childhood was gone, which, in itself, isn’t an argument for keeping things the way they were, but I haven’t really got an argument, so bear with me. Recently efforts have been made to make Moore County, well, for lack of a better term, wet, allowing the sale of liquor, including Jack Daniel’s whiskey, which would deprive the distillery of that "You can look, but can’t touch" element that makes it special. One thing that hadn’t changed, though, was the distillery’s tour guides. A side effect of visiting the distillery so many times is I became a connoisseur of its tour guides, the same way some people become connoisseurs of fine scotch, although my hobby is significantly cheaper. The first time I ever visited the distillery our tour guide was funny and outgoing. He was like Willy Wonka but looked like Jim Varney. In fact he may have even been Jim Varney. The last time I went our tour guide was at the opposite end of the spectrum, but equally superb. He was approximately a hundred and three, wore overalls and a conductor’s cap, and was perpetually hunched over. The first thing he said to us was, "Y’all git on along now." His face was contorted into a perpetual snarl, although he did smile just once when someone asked him if he got free whiskey for working at the distillery. He quietly said, "No, but they pay me enough that I kin buy it."

The rest of the time, though, he was straightforward, matter-of-fact, and very thorough in explaining the process by which Jack Daniel’s is crafted. He was clearly not a man who suffered fools, particularly when a guy with a Midwestern accent asked, "So what do they do with the bad whiskey?" It was the only time the man looked at any of us directly. He fixed the questioner with a steely glare and said, "There ain’t no bad whiskey here." They do have a term for bad whiskey in Moore County, though. They call it moonshine.

November 2, 2012

Recently London’s Telegraph newspaper published a list of fifty things every dog should do in its lifetime. The first thing I thought was, wait a minute, since when did dogs start reading the Telegraph? But then I thought I was being too hasty. You know how sometimes you hear about something and you think it’s idiotic and then you look into it more deeply and it turns out to be more complicated and not nearly as stupid as you originally thought? Well, this is not one of those times. And the more I thought about it the stupider it seemed, not just because dogs can’t read the list or understand the concept behind it but because of what it says about us as humans.

To be fair I do get that the article was tongue-in-cheek, and that it’s really aimed at people who live with dogs, and that the message is, "Here are fifty things you should allow your dog to do." Such as: play in the snow, play frisbee on the beach, eat dog ice cream (yes, there is such a thing), and have a special spot on the sofa. These are things that are going to enrich the life of any dog who gets to experience them. Although in an apparently desperate attempt to pad out the list they included some things no dog is going to care about, such as: meet a famous dog, be a ring bearer at a wedding, and receive your own personal birthday card. And in an even more desperate attempt to pad out the list they included some things no dog really should do, including "Create a diversion and steal another dog’s dinner". That’s not cute or funny. That’s a recipe for a dog fight, and even if it weren’t it’s like telling a teenager, "Try heroin just once in your life."

Although the Telegraph didn’t call it a "bucket list for dogs" that’s how I originally heard it described, and that’s basically what it is. Maybe they didn’t call it that because the title of the movie with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman is proprietary, or maybe just because bucket lists have been around a long time but most people didn’t call them that before the release of The Bucket List. And I’ve gotta say I have a real problem with the bucket list concept. Don’t get me wrong. I think having plans and hopes and dreams for the future is a wonderful thing. There are a lot of things I’d like to do before I die. But assuming that I’m still conscious on my deathbed, or wherever I happen to be spending my final moments on this planet, I want to reflect on happy memories rather than sighing and saying, "I guess I’ll never see Venice", even though if I’m facing a firing squad that would be a pretty funny last line. And, like I said, I have nothing against plans, hopes, and dreams for the future, but instead of encouraging our dogs to be like us I think the Telegraph should have taken the opposite tack and encouraged us to be more like our dogs. Anyone who’s ever lived with and really loved a dog knows they take pleasure in the moment, enjoying happiness as it comes and not worrying about the future. Yes, we should worry about the future, unless some peoples’ beliefs about the Mayan calendar turn out to be right and we only have a little less than two months of the future left, but that’s another story. But anyone who really is keeping a detailed list of things they feel they must accomplish before they die needs to get over it. And possibly get a dog. My wife trains and runs our dogs in the sport of dog agility. One of them, our girl Boo, was the first female Dalmatian to ever earn three Masters Agility Championship titles. Since agility is a team sport my wife tells Boo when to go over a jump, when to go through a tunnel, and when to knock with two clubs and take the trick, but part of Boo’s success was a result of her love of running, jumping, and occasionally doing what she’s told. Even though agility is a competitive sport she wasn’t competing. There was no Cocker Spaniel Chris Everett pushing her to excel. She was just having a good time, which I’m sure made the cake and ice cream she got after winning each of her titles that much sweeter. Although on her way out of the ring after her third title I did hear her mutter something about booking a flight to Venice.

October 26, 2012

The other day I saw a trailer for a new film called Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. Have you ever had the experience of watching a thirty second film trailer and feeling like you’ve seen the entire film? That was how I felt. Maybe I’m being unfair, but I feel like I’ve been to this rodeo before: there’ll be a lot of fast-paced CGI fights where you have absolutely no clue what’s going on but everyone will still be able to walk away after what looks like the sort of pummeling that would, in the real world, reduce a person to a bloody pulp. And there’ll probably be some anachronistic jokes. Maybe Gretel can speak to the birds using a magical "twitter" ability. And in the end they’ll have to take down the biggest witch in the world, although I’ve known quite a few witches, and they’re generally nice people, so I don’t know why we’re perpetuating the idea that they need a smackdown, but that’s another story.

I do understand that it’s hip right now to draw directly on fairy tales, although, really, a lot of films-even ones you wouldn’t suspect-are intentionally or unintentionally based on fairy tales. Alien is a warped retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, When Harry Met Sally is The Frog Prince, Jerry Maguire is the Arthurian tale of The Fisher King, and Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King is the Arthurian tale of The Fisher King, just to name a few. Jung called these stories and the characters in them archetypes, and whether they appeal to us because these tales seem to be about experiences so many of us share or because they strike a deeper chord in our genes is something I don’t know-something that may even be unknowable. It would be wrong to say that fairy tales fulfill our desire for happy endings. After all not all fairy tale heroes end up living happily ever after. Quite a few tales adapted by the English author Andrew Lang end with a variation of "And if they have not died then they are still living", which may be a happy ending, but is ambiguous. Maybe they’re still living but have the flu right now. And depending on the translation many of the Tales of The Arabian Nights end with something like, "And they lived happily until Death, the devourer of worlds and destroyer of all things, came for them." Sleep well, kids! Also a lot of scholars say that fairy tales are all about teaching morality and defending the status quo, and that’s just wrong. A lot of fairy tale heroes completely upend the status quo. As for morality I’m not sure we ever really learn lessons from fairy tales, at least not simple ones.

Okay, I do think fairy tales can be instructive. Rumpelstiltskin, for instance, teaches that you shouldn’t promise to give crazy homeless people your children, although if you think they can spin straw from gold you’re probably not sane enough to be a fit parent yourself. And if there’s one thing I have learned from reading fairy tales it’s that if you’re walking through the woods and a fox asks if he can have half your lunch you should give it to him, but after you’ve changed your pants, because talking animals tend to startle most people. But if you laugh at him or tell him to get a job you’re going to end up in an ogre’s lair with no chance of getting out and chained up so you can’t change your pants. For the most part in fairy tales if you help someone, especially a talking animal or old woman, since they usually turn out to be good witches, they’ll return the favor, but if you mistreat or ignore them it’ll come back and bite you in the ass later. There are, however, some pretty obvious exceptions. The first fairy tale I ever remember hearing was Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I can’t have been more than three or four, and there was a couple my parents would play bridge with on Friday or Saturday nights. Late in the evening the man would take a break from the bridge game-maybe he’d knocked with two clubs and lost the trick or something (I really don’t know anything about bridge) and he’d come into my room and tell me the story. He did this quite a few times, and it was always the story of Goldilocks. I was too young to think to ask him if he knew any other stories. But I did always wonder why Goldilocks got away in the end. It seemed to me like the bears should have grabbed her and said, "Forget the porridge, let’s have roast leg of Goldilocks". It seemed wrong that the story’s message was "Theft, vandalism, and vagrancy are okay if you can run fast!" As much as I still love fairy tales that was the beginning of my distrust of their messages, and I’d have serious issues with other tales later on.

Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling is often held up as the original it-gets-better story, but it should be noted that being born a swan makes things considerably easier. No one who’s read Andersen’s biography thinks he was born to grow up to be a successful writer. His story should have been The Ugly Duckling Who Was A Duck, Not A Swan, And Realized That Ducks Are Groovy And Worked Hard To Became The Best Duck He Could Be. Beloved tales also, in some versions, take some pretty dark and ugly turns. Most people are familiar with Snow White through the Disney version, so they think the evil queen is driven off a cliff by the dwarves. Since all the kingdom’s cops were probably on the queen’s payroll it’s arguable whether this act of vigilantism was justified. But in the version the Brothers Grimm wrote down the queen–who’s not a stepmother but Snow White’s real mother–attends the wedding of Snow White and the prince. And at the reception the queen is forced to wear red hot iron shoes and dance in them until she dies while everyone watches. If Snow White considered torture and murder fun entertainment for her wedding reception clearly the poisoned apple didn’t fall far from the tree. And then there’s the fairy tale that, in any version, always struck me as having a terrible lesson: Jack and the Beanstalk. Sure, you can think of it as the classic tale of the little guy triumphing and achieving success, which is always the sort of story I enjoy, but I always look at this particular tale from the giant’s perspective. If the giant were stomping around the countryside flattening houses or selling magazine subscriptions I think the story would have mentioned that instead of focusing on Jack selling the family’s cow for three measly beans. So he wasn’t. He was just hanging out in his cloud not bothering anyone. Then one day this beanstalk shoots up through the giant’s yard and some kid from down below steals his gold and his harp-shaped MP3 player. Sure, he wanted to grind Jack’s bones and use them for bread, apparently because he had a gluten allergy, but think about it. If some vermin got into your house and was stealing your stuff you’d probably eat it too. Okay, maybe you wouldn’t, but you’d probably set some traps baited with gold bags or peanut butter. And when the giant went to get his stuff back the kid cut down the beanstalk and the giant fell to his death. If you’re ever taking a break from a bridge game and decide to tell your friend’s children the story of Jack And The Beanstalk be sure to end it with, "Now how would you feel if you were the giant? Sleep well, kids!"

October 19, 2012

It’s pumpkin season. Pumpkins are everywhere. I remember a time when the appearance of pumpkins meant only two things: jack-o-lanterns and pumpkin pie. Although technically they really only meant jack-o-lanterns, since I’ve never known anyone to make pumpkin pie from a real pumpkin, only the canned stuff. Anyway it now seems like pumpkin is being used for everything. There’s pumpkin bread, pumpkin baklava, pumpkin rolls, pumpkin ice cream, pumpkin tea, pumpkin tacos, pumpkin torte, pumpkin tubesteak, pumpkin teriyaki, pumpkin chips, pumpkin guacamole, fried pumpkin, broiled pumpkin, coconut pumpkin shrimp, and at this time of year every Chines restaurant has a pumpkin pupu platter. I personally have tried over three thousand different pumpkin beers ranging from a pint of a pleasant porter to a powerful pumpkin piña colada. Anyone wondering why there’s an obesity epidemic could be forgiven for thinking our fall diet is producing a population of pumpkins.

Still the pumpkin deserves props. It’s featured in numerous fairy tales and nursery rhymes from Cinderella to Peter, Peter, Pumpkin eater. Well, okay, those are the only fairy tales and nursery rhymes where the pumpkin plays a part, but it’s a poignant performance. And there are pumpkin patches, there’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and there are farmers who produce everything from petite pumpkins a mere fraction of a pound to monsters that are practically the size of pachyderms. There are pumpkin harvests and pumpkin festivals, and every year in Delaware there’s the Punkin Chunkin’, an event where pumpkins are propelled through the air. And of course there are still jack-o-lanterns everywhere. After Halloween was over I loved to take the top off my jack-o-lantern and smell the candle-roasted pumpkin flesh. And I still find the story behind them fascinating. According to various sources jack-o-lanterns originated as a Scottish tradition of children carrying candles in hollowed-out turnips. And if you’ve ever tried turnip pie you know it’s a good thing they switched to pumpkins, but that’s another story. The legend of the jack-o-lantern is that there was a man named Jack who was so evil Heaven wouldn’t take him and Hell was afraid he’d take over, so he was forced to walk alone through eternal darkness. But the Devil took pity on him and gave him a flame, which Jack carried in a turnip he had handy because, well, it’s not like he was going to make a pie with it. That’s the story, but every time I hear it I wonder what Jack could have possibly done that was so awful that neither Heaven nor Hell had a place for him. Okay, I can understand Heaven has some strict rules regarding entry, but I didn’t think Hell was that picky. Or maybe it is.

The entry to Heaven is often pictured as a large golden gate with a bunch of fog machines going full blast around it. For numerous reasons I imagine the entry to Hell as the front of the Copacabana. And Beelzebub is standing there holding the velvet rope saying, "Hitler, nice to see you, Pol Pot, come on in, guy who invented that thing that tells you how many people are ahead of you when you call customer service, so glad you could make it." And Jack gets to the front of the line and is told, "Sorry, we’re full." And so he just hangs out by the dumpster and after a while Beelzebub gives him a flame to keep him warm, and all Jack can do for eternity is wait and hope that Al Capone’s entourage will get bored and decide to go see what’s shaking over at Purgatory, which I’m pretty sure is somewhere near Rhode Island.

October 12, 2012

If you ever feel like our culture is over-saturated with sexy, tragic, goth, emo vampires I’m pretty sure you can blame Bram Stoker and his novel Dracula. I suppose it’s because he was a Victorian, a period in history that was really groovy if you overlook all that repression, child labor, prostitution, and really terrible food. Although vampires have never fascinated me as much as certain other creatures of the night (I wasn’t pissing on the fence for kicks) there’s enough overlap in the folklore that I’ve gotten pretty well acquainted with mormos, vrykolakes, loogaroos, and other assorted bloodsuckers. And I can say with pretty fair certainty that before Bram Stoker vampires weren’t that sexy. They weren’t even necessarily bloodsuckers. That’s the tricky thing about vampires. They’re hard to nail down, even if you are Hugh Jackman and wielding a stake-shooting crossbow.

If you’re an average person here’s probably what you know about vampires: you become a vampire by being bitten by a vampire, vampires rise up from their coffins at night, drink blood, hate garlic, can’t be seen in a mirror, and can be killed with a stake through the heart or a crucifix. First, if you’ve ever wondered how vampires first came to be if the only way to become a vampire is to be bitten by a vampire, it may sound like a chicken or the egg question, but in fact there are numerous ways to become a vampire. They include:

Get a vampire’s blood on you.
Eat meat from an animal that’s been attacked by a wolf.
Die of the plague.
Commit suicide.
Be a terrible person in life.
Be unpopular with your neighbors.
Be murdered.
Be excommunicated.
Be buried prematurely.
Be buried in unconsecrated ground.
Be born with teeth.
Have your corpse carried out of your house head first.
Have your corpse carried out of your house feet first.
Have any animal jump over your corpse before it’s buried.
Have a cat jump over your grave.
Have a prominent birthmark.
Have red hair.
Have red hair and blue eyes.
Live in Transylvania.

With a list like that it’s not hard to figure out where vampires come from. In fact it’s harder to understand why there aren’t more vampires, especially since being buried prematurely is one way to become a vampire, and at one time premature burials were believed to be extremely common. At one time it was even estimated that over most of the 19th century in America at least one person was buried prematurely every week. The evidence for this is usually that claw marks were found on the insides of coffins, which always makes me wonder why so many coffins were being dug up and opened. I realize in the 19th century people didn’t have computer games, but were they so hard up for entertainment that they’d go dig up Uncle Charlie to see how he was decaying?

By the way, if you’ve ever worried about being buried alive you can relax. Modern embalming techniques are not only fun at parties, they’ll guarantee you’re dead long before you get put in the ground, oven, or gross anatomy class. And the frequency of premature burials has been greatly exaggerated. Corpses move and can even claw at the insides of their coffins, and while your hair and fingernails really don’t grow after death they do get longer as the body loses water and the skin shrinks. Corpses even make noises as they decay, which may have led to the belief that you could hear a vampire chewing on his shroud, although that makes me wonder why people were hanging around graveyards with their ears to Uncle Charlie’s grave.

Also not all vampires rise up from their graves at night, although some are destroyed by sunlight. Some project a spectral version of themselves, and can even come out during the daytime. These specters don’t always drink blood, but drain it from their victims by, I don’t know, teleportation or something. They cause their victims to waste away. When people in a village began wasting away the first thing they usually did was go to the graveyard and start digging up the recent dead. Vampires could be identified by the lack of decay of their bodies, and they’d also often appear red-faced and bloated. So if you find W.C. Fields sexy you could be forgiven for thinking there were sexy vampires before Bram Stoker. Also some saints’ bodies didn’t decay, so keep this in mind: if you’re a saint and your body doesn’t rot it’s a miracle. If you’re an ordinary person and your body doesn’t rot you’re a vampire. And I’ve never found any record of anyone checking for a corpse’s reflection in a mirror. The bloating and redness are caused by natural processes, and certain soil compositions can actually inhibit decay.

And sometimes earthquakes or other disturbances will push corpses to the surface so the dead appear to be rising. It’s even been suggested that vampire myths are most common in places with loose, rocky soil where it’s hard to keep a body buried. In the old days bodies that wouldn’t stay buried led to vampire myths. Now they lead to the wacky hijinks of movies like Weekend At Bernie’s and Shallow Grave, but that’s another story. If there is one area where traditional and modern folklore agree it’s that vampires hate garlic. One traditional way of stopping a vampire was to dig up the body suspected of being the local vampire and stuffing a clove of garlic in its mouth, although in some areas a lemon works just as well. The stake through the heart worked too, but according to some it couldn’t be just any stake. Oak, beech, or t-bone wouldn’t do-it had to be a hawthorn stake. Although a knife that had never been used to cut bread could also work. Or just plain nails. And contrary to Bram Stoker crucifixes and crosses weren’t a popular prophylactic, so forget trying to make a cross with your fingers, although this is also an area where traditional and modern views overlap, since in movies from Once Bitten to Interview With The Vampire crosses and crucifixes don’t work.

Fire, on the other hand, could take care of a vampire problem. Sometimes in the old days a priest could exorcise a vampire, but usually people had to deal with it through secular means. In addition to the hawthorn stake and the old lemon in the mouth trick these included cutting off the head and putting it under the feet of the person in their coffin, so the vampire couldn’t reach it to put it back on, cutting out the heart and filling it with millet or grain, cutting out the heart and boiling it in millet or grain, cutting out the heart and boiling it in wine, or sprinkling millet, mustard, or poppy seeds around the grave, although agent Mulder found that sunflower seeds work too. Vampires will feel compelled to stop and count the seeds. Centuries before there was a Sesame Street vampires were obsessed with counting. They also have a fascination with knots. A fishing net placed over their grave or over the door of a house will stop a vampire. They have to stop and count the knots, but they’ll keep losing count and have to start over until the sun comes up and destroys them, because vampires are supernaturally stupid. In fact traditional vampires are more like contemporary zombies, especially since, prior to Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula, most vampires were common people. Bram Stoker made Dracula thin and pale, but traditionally vampires were fat and red-faced and looked like they spent all their time at Chinese buffets.

One exception was the Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who some people thought was a vampire, and who reportedly murdered over a thousand young girls. But she wasn’t really a vampire because she didn’t drink her victims’ blood-she bathed in it to stay young, making her both the most popular and controversial member of The Real Housewives Of Budapest. Vlad Dracula wasn’t a vampire either, and in fact many Romanians considered him a hero for fighting back invading hordes. Many Romanians still consider him a hero for bringing in invading hordes of tourists. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about vampires it’s that there are exceptions to every rule, and, prior to Bram Stoker, there is at least one story of a sexy vampire. In Hungary a man died unexpectedly, was buried, and a short time later came back as a vampire, wandering through the streets in a shroud. He’d go to his former home where his wife was, and, according to her, and based on the screams that people could hear, would torment her for hours then leave just before dawn. But she insisted that because he was a supernatural creature no one could help her. People got tired of this, and one night a couple of village vigilantes captured the vampire…and found he was the dead man’s brother. It turned out the wife and her brother-in-law had murdered the man and were using the belief that he was coming back as a vampire to cover up their very public, and apparently very loud, affair. With all that it’s a wonder the dead man didn’t really come back as a vampire, maybe even a sexy one.

October 6, 2012

“This reminds me of Bucket Of Blood.”

That was my mother’s response to an exhibit of sculptures by George Segal that my parents went to. Segal’s sculptures look like people roughly coated with a layer of plaster. Bucket Of Blood is a 1959 movie about a mentally disturbed man named Walter Paisley who desperately wants to be an artist but, lacking any talent, makes sculptures by killing people and covering the corpses with clay. So my mother’s comparison was somewhat accurate, although Segal’s sculptures aren’t made from corpses, and they’re in the poses of bus drivers or people waiting at crosswalks or walking, whereas Paisley’s sculptures are caught in the throes of dying.

When my parents told me about the exhibit and my mother’s reaction to it they explained that on one of their first dates, maybe even their very first date, it was the movie they went to see . My father asked, “Have you seen Bucket Of Blood?” I said, “Seen it? I’ve got it on DVD.” My mother looked unsurprised, and my father rolled his eyes and said, “I should have known.” You may be thinking that a film called Bucket Of Blood would be an odd choice for a date, especially a first date. What I thought was that the fact that my parents chose it as an evening’s entertainment more than a decade before I was a notion, even before they were married, may explain a lot about how I came to be the adult I am. It’s a Roger Corman film.

Even before I knew Roger Corman from Shinola I had a fascination with many of his films. They’re cheap and silly and often over the top, which is why when I was a young teenager they were the films broadcast on the local UHF station I looked forward to every Friday and Saturday night. Corman made me an Edgar Allan Poe fan before I read a single one of his stories, thanks to the film versions of The Masque Of The Red Death, The Pit And The Pendulum, and especially The Raven. When Vincent Price looked down at the raven and asked it, “Shall I ever hold again the radiant maiden whom the angels call Lenore?” and the raven replied, “How the hell should I know?” I said to myself, “Wherever this movie is going I want a front row seat.” And as a kid who’d grown Venus flytraps on his windowsill I was beside myself with joy when, one Saturday afternoon, Commander USA’s Groovie Movies featured the original Little Shop Of Horrors. A few years later, still not aware that many of the movies I’d enjoyed so much were all the product of one director, I saw an interview with Corman on a late night talk show. He was promoting his book How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime. The subtitle seems to me to sum up Corman’s film philosophy. Some people make films because of deep and driving artistic ambition. Corman made films to make money. There’s nothing wrong with making a profit, but filmmaking seems like an unlikely profession for someone whose primary goal is money. But Corman’s also a fiercely independent guy for whom working up the corporate ladder wasn’t an option. As director and producer he could jump straight to the top, even if his films were made on shoestring budgets, and looked like it.

He’s famous for the list of talented people who’ve worked for him who became famous in their own right-a list that includes Robert DeNiro, Jack Nicholson, and Francis Ford Coppola-but that may be luck rather than planning. Talented actors and cinematographers work for the same rate as hacks when they’re unknowns. Corman shot whole films in the time it takes some directors to shoot scenes. He famously made Little Shop Of Horrors on a bet that he couldn’t shoot a film in twenty-four hours. To keep costs down he frequently reused sets and kept the same actors around. For Little Shop Of Horrors he used sets and some of the cast from Bucket Of Blood, including Dick Miller, who’d played Walter Paisley. You may think you don’t know who Dick Miller is, but chances are you do. Look up a picture of him and you’ll probably say, “Oh yeah, he’s that guy who was in.that thing.” He’s made a career of playing bit parts-short-order cooks, pizza delivery guys, cops, holographic maîtres d’. As far as I know Bucket Of Blood was his only leading role. The film was billed as a comedy, but Miller, and the story, evoke more pathos than laughter. Paisley’s a coffee shop busboy whose ambitions are bigger than his abilities. When his “sculptures” are a success-before anyone realizes what’s underneath-he dons a beret and ebony cigarette holder, affecting an “artistic” look. The art critics and beatniks at the coffee shop, the people Walter wants desperately to imitate, give him a paper crown and a toilet plunger painted gold for a scepter. If this was meant to be funny it’s not.

Walter’s lack of awareness that he’s being mocked makes it even worse that the people mocking him see him as an idiot savant, when, tragically, he’s got a disability that makes him unable to understand the extent of his crimes. He’s not unlike Lenny from Of Mice And Men. And the film definitely has its moments, such as when Walter is running from a mob and his shadow is projected on a wall. He’s an outsider, a man without substance, and any stature he had is illusory. And that, sadly, also highlights the films weaknesses. Bucket Of Blood was hastily written and hastily shot, and all on a very low budget. Dick Miller said that it could have been so much better, and he’s right, but it’s not necessarily the low budget that hampered it. Big budgets don’t make great films, as anyone who’s seen Cleopatra, Waterworld, or Howard The Duck knows. Bucket Of Blood could be a study in the romantic idea of genius and madness, and how tempting it is to forgive the crimes of great artists. It could also be a comment on art history. It was released just as abstract expressionism was giving way to Pop Art, a movement that George Segal was part of. Bucket Of Blood could have been a criticism of the art world’s obsession with the new and its celebration of destruction as a creative process, a world of absurdly inflated prices where ideas often completely supplant aesthetics. It could have been all those things, but we have to judge a work of art by what it is, not by what it could be, so Bucket Of Blood drowns in a sea of would-be classics. Yeah, I love it. Mark Twain said, “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds,” and I think a similar principle applies to Bucket Of Blood. Maybe I love it because I see the swan that Corman’s ugly duckling didn’t grow up to be. Or maybe I only love it because it somehow touches a deep chord in my genetic unconscious, if there is such a thing, because it’s the film my parents went to see all those years ago. Or maybe that’s just a coincidence. It could be that, rather than my parents influencing me in that direction it’s really been the other way around. There’s an old saying that insanity is hereditary-parents get it from their kids. I thought about the odd history my parents and I share with the film Bucket Of Blood when they called me to say they were really looking forward to seeing a play the theater group in their area was putting on. They didn’t know very much about the story, but my father said, “It’s called The Rocky Horror Show. Isn’t that the title of that movie you and your friends used to go and see every Saturday night?” Close, but not quite. We went to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the film version of the stage play, but before I corrected my father I rolled my eyes and said, “I should have known.”