Birth

Sometimes I purposely watch a movie that everyone has agreed is a stinker just to see to what degree it doth stinketh, and precisely how it doth stinketh (the cause thereof, therefore). Also, if everyone talks about a particular scandalous scene, I have to see it for myself. Now, I won't lay down money for this experience, no. It has to come from the library or Netflix (since I pay a flat fee, and turn these stinkers around quickly, it's free in my mind).

Thus, I got Birth because this kid was supposed to climb into a bathtub with a nekkid Nicole Kidman (who I consider a first degree skank, so I didn't tune in see HER*), and Hollywood has always skated the edge on what they make children do to get a shot. (For instance, everyone on the shoot knew Drew Barrymore was secretly convinced that ET was real, even though she knew he was a puppet and could see the puppeteers - who would often fire up ET and play with her between takes, further fostering her innocent delusion - so in the scene where he dies, her tears are real and it reportedly took a long time to console her after that scene. She claims she was sad for weeks afterward.)

*TLD: I've noticed that most straight men are either ambivalent about Nicole Kidman, or they think she's a skank. (Note the "most" there.) Almost universally, women and gay men think she's pretty and/or hot. How's that for an interesting demarcation line? My favorite one though is "Ginger or MaryAnn?" - with most straight guys answering without hesitation "MaryAnn."

Weeehelllll, Birth turned out to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen, in almost every aspect there is, perhaps save the cinematography. (Before I go on, let me explain the premise so you know what I'm referring to later: This 10 year old boy shows up one day and announces he's Nicole's reincarnated husband and he wants her back; hilarity ensues.)

The direction is thunderously pretentious, and it's clearly the product of a film school weenie with mediocre talent. I detected a good two filmic cliches (or "homages") for every five minutes of screen time. The simplest and avoidable amateuristic errors are abundant; for instance: When someone has to go somewhere, we see the whole voyage. In one scene, Nicole has to walk to the bridge where her husband died (during the first 5 minutes of the film, which would have been the first 30 seconds of the film under a good director), but we begin the scene with her standing blocks from there. Just standing there for a minute. Staring. Then she starts walking and we follow her the whole time - once even cutting to a posterior view, and watch her back for a while before we cut back to her front.

All patches of dialogue contain gargantuan pauses between query and response. My wife and I were concocting a drinking game (for future use at a party) around the pauses between dialogue - the intent being to get a good buzz on, but not bring about alcohol poisoning or choking on one's own vomit. We arrived at having to take a drink (one swallow) when there was over 8 second gap between dialogue lines. And there are two built-in chug-a-whole-drink events (crucial to any entertainment-based drinking game**). These are: 1) an amazingly graphic and completely gratuitous sex scene between Nicole and her fiance - you chug when you can see his butt (for women) or when you see Nicole's other nipple (for men - hint: you see one when the scene begins), and 2) at 49 minutes into the movie, Nicole's character sums up every single event that has occurred in the movie thus far to another character - so the gratuitous and redundant deja vu, plus the irony (the Alanis Morissette kind) that the movie is about reincarnation and here we are reliving it - is a splendid reason for a chug.

**TLD: A good example of an entertainment-based drinking game is "Chugboat," which is played while watching "Loveboat." Everyone picks one of the main characters, like Julie, the Doc, the bartender, or the captain (you can pick the boat, too, but only a full shot of it counts, not parts of it in the background), and you all have to pick a different one. Whenever your character appears on the screen, you take a drink. If a girl walks by in a bikini, everyone must lift their drinks as if to toast, scream "Balloon Smuggler!" and chug the remainder of whatever they're holding. Another example is a game associated to the first Bob Neuhart show. Every time someone says "Bob," which they say a LOT for some reason, you take a drink. I don't recall the chug trigger for that game. I do recall you got plenty wasted in a half hour with just the "Bob" thing, though. Bob was a boot factor of 3, and Chugboat was a boot factor of 2, unless you picked a character that was central to that week's show, and then it rocketed to boot factor 4. If I recall the boot factors, 1 was only lightweights would get a buzz, 2 was you'd get drunk, 3 was you'd get very drunk with lightweights possibly "booting" (barfing), 4 was over half the people might boot and definitely everyone would get sloppy drunk, and 5 was the boot was simply "when" and not "if."

The casting is amusing because the character description of every single character (except the kid) must've been: "Perpetually smug-looking New York type." You get to the point where you want to build a time machine and miraculously appear in the middle of a scene in hopes the actors will find another facial expression.

Inability to portray more than one facial expression is an epidemic in this film. I've never thought Nicole was much of an actress - unless she was cast as a devious bitch, which seems to be her forte - but this movie finally completely confirms my suspicions. In one scene she is (I'm guessing) supposed to be awash in emotion while she accepts the fact that this kid is in fact her reincarnated husband. We stay locked on her face for a 5-minute closeup. In the entire time, not a single muscle moves, neither eye wanders (though they redden impressively), nor is there nary a twitch of the lip. You have NO IDEA what she's supposed to be thinking or what the script called for (unless the screenwriter honestly indicated she should remain completely still and expressionless for 5 minutes, and if it did, may the ghost of Bette Davis haunt his hairy ass). Were Cate Blanchett or Kate Winslet (or, hell, Renee Zellweger or Angela Bassett if we fear being too much of an anglophile) wasted in this movie, she would've killed, and you would've known every thought crossing her mind - down to the color of the wallpaper if she were pondering the renovation of her bathroom.

Even the boy playing the reincarnated husband remains neutral in voice and carriage, which, in terms of how it sinks this movie, is the equivalent of when the Titanic broke in half and hastened its gurgly rush to the bottom of the ocean. See, he's playing someone who's so in love and so driven to get back with this woman, that he's hounding her to take him back even though he's a different person and only 10, but he does this as though he's the shrunken zombie of the dead husband, not the lovesick reincarnation. If any part should be played for the cheap seats, it's this one. But no - it's as undisturbed and clear as newly blown glass.

The soundtrack veers between this over-the-top screeching of violins as if Hitchcock's birds were attacking, and this low thrumming noise that reminds me of the odious drum solo that accompanied Grateful Dead concerts, which is in the frequency range that makes most people feel like they have to move their bowels. (Well, at least it's an appropriate sensation.)

And then we get to the big controversial scene where the kid climbs into the tub with Nicole. It's as shocking as they say. The filmmakers claim they used special effects to achieve it, but in the scene where you see the kid actually climb into the tub, it looks live, because the ripples in the water show up on Nicole's bod. Given what they can do with digital effects now, it's not outside the realm of possibility that it was faked, but realistic water ripples on someone's skin is quite the feat. But, even if it was faked, the dialogue that the boy has to say is pretty explicit in that he's acknowledging that he's in the tub, nude, with her, and for all the reasons you'd crawl into someone else's tub. In a later scene, they blatantly discuss having sex, too. Folks, the boy had to know what he was talking about, and I dunno ... I think, as a parent, it's pretty icky to put a kid into that kind of a situation. How, organically, does that differ from a molester engaging a child in sex talk? (Maybe doing all those same kinds of scenes with her diminutive, glassy-eyed ex-husband has left Nicole a little confused as to when she's talking to a grownup or not.)

Update: I've watched that scene again before I sent it winging back to Netflix, and when you see them both in the tub together, it conceivably could have been special effects, because there's a clear line presented by Nicole's body. But, given the other things they had that kid do and say, I doubt they much hesitated to really have him plop himself into the tub with her for real. And - here's the interesting thing - since special effects are so good anymore, the producers have the room to lie about whether it was a live shot or not - it's not provable either way.

Well, offended morals aside, this movie is an absolute turkey, festooned with rotten tomatoes, good for nothing but carving up and serving on a tray with some lumpy mashed potatoes, like I've done here.

Unless you're planning on playing the drinking game we invented. In that case, please be sure to sleep on your stomach, and have a garbage can nearby. Bottoms up!

Beautiful Fugly

"He's so ugly, he hurt my feelings" - Moms Mabley

The other day someone waxed rhapsodic on how ugly someone was (a guitarist in a band, to be specific), and it brought to mind my past ruminations on those who are aesthetically challenged. (For the record, I consider myself dead average in appearance, though at my age I have to be up in the morning about an hour before I get back to average anymore.)

Science has tried to examine and measure exactly what constitutes or is the basis for our judgments of beautiful and ugly, and the short version is most people judge a symmetrical face as pretty and one not as ugly. Since I read that a long time ago, I've kinda done an informal survey, and have seen plenty of people I think are pretty who would not fit that criteria and ugly folks whose faces seem pretty symmetrical - which is sad in a way because both sides are equally ugly, removing all chance for a possible "get my good side" photographic reprieve.

Now bear with me here, this is not a bash the fuglies of the world post at all. In fact, it's the opposite.

I've come to the conclusion that many ugly people are just as interesting looking as pretty people are.

But, in coming to that conclusion, I noticed there are many different kinds of ugly, and sadly, there's a kind of ugly that only rewards close examination with seemingly infinitely recessing levels of ugly, sorta reminiscent of that cosmological view that asserts: "It's turtles all the way down."

Here's what I mean: Some people are ugly because of a single, but significant flaw. Some because individual features are nice, but they don't fit together well (I knew a girl in high school like this - gorgeous brown eyes, aquiline nose, cupid lips, but together they made her look like Alice the Goon from Popeye cartoons). Some because a feature or two is bad, but still doesn't gel with the good ones, and so on. Most of those people, however, typically fit into the category I'm suggesting here of people who are so interestingly ugly that they're almost pretty again.

So, there are a few poor souls out there that are hyper-dimensionally ugly - that is, ugly any way you look at it. For instance, I once saw this guy whose eyes were so deep set that it always felt like he was looking at you from under a rock. Worse yet, he had perpetual dark circles around them - sorta like a Terry Gilliam/Monty Python cartoon character - exacerbating the deeply recessed eyes appearance. But to top it all off, when he smiled, they shockingly pulled deeper into his head! The orbits of his eyes had this bizarre dimpled area just off the temple, and those dimples pinched and his eyes literally went deeper into his head - which I verified when I got a side view as he smiled. Then, he had a nose that - well I can't really describe what was wrong with it because I spent enough time on the weird eye thing and didn't want to give the impression I was staring, so let's just throw out the descriptive "porcine" call it good. He had one of those lipless mouths that just reduces to a slit when closed. All of these swam in a roundish, jowly face, that was alternately ruddy and then yellowish in complexion. He made me think of the Moms Mabley quote at the top of this post.

But, enough about those at the far end of that particular bell curve. Let's just leave them alone and hope that their denial skills are top-notch and take comfort that everyone can find someone who loves them, if they so choose.

The foremost interesting ugly person I can think of is this girl I had a pretty bad crush on in college. When I first spotted her, whatever it was that was wrong with her was visible from a distance. She looked as though at some point in her life, she'd been left out in the sun too long, and like a wax figurine, had just melted and flowed a bit slightly everywhere, but was rescued before collapsing into a puddle, and rehardened in this melted state. She carried herself oddly, too, giving the impression she was a marionette on strings; it was graceful, but disconcerting just the same. To the point: She looked like a melted Catherine Hepburn, and had a force to her personality that furthered the comparison. Close up, the illusion of having melted was even stronger. She didn't have burn scars, but every single plane of her face was somehow off. Every one. I don't recall why I had the opportunity to study her long enough to complete such a survey without her becoming uncomfortable, but I did somehow, and recall that after reaching that conclusion, I double-checked a couple more times later to be sure. Her eyes were green with asymmetrical brown flecks in them, so no feature was without the inclusion of some slight flaw. She's the only person I've met whose appearance came so close to repulsive without actually crossing that thin scar of a border. I never got the courage to ask her out, partially because, like a lot of guys, I was a wienie in the sense that I preferred loneliness to potential rejection, but also because there was a hint in her personality that what was underneath the hard candy shell of her public personality was something that would take some managing. Like the song says, it appeared whoever did crack that shell would discover that "to love me you have to climb some fences." At that point in my life, I'd had enough fence climbing (see other posts on my dating experiences). It would be interesting to see how she aged, though. Maybe she melted back into place over the years.

A buddy of mine from college was another one of these beautiful ugly people. I remember slight shock first time I encountered him because of his smashed face, but the second he said anything his overwhelming charisma wiped out any impression triggered by his physical appearance. He had reportedly endured nearly daily beatings as a kid walking to and from school, which left his nose almost completely flattened and odd cysts on his lips caused from being punctured by his own teeth. However, even though he's striking upon first view, he's one of those whose features actually gel into something almost handsome, in a latter day Hemingway sort of fashion. This guy has always had girls literally throw themselves at him, which is a testament to his charisma and the odd way his looks work(ed) for him (though he's happily married now, not that the female self-flinging has ceased).

To give you a clearer idea of the kind of strangely attractive fugly people I'm talking about, let me chuck some celebrity examples atcha:
- John Malkovich - This guy can pull off attractive enough to be cast as Michelle Feifer's love interest, but a close look really gives one pause - and maybe a fantod or two. This guy is the classic example of someone whose features on their own are all kinda nasty, but they work together to make something greater than the sum of the parts. ...with soft focus in dim lighting, and after a couple strong drinks, after returning from half a year marooned at the South Pole...
- John Turturro - What a mess. But he's one of those who can clean up well, or be made to look so bad you expect someone to show up with a retarded guy playing a banjo announcing ya'll've got a purty mouth.
- Barbra Streisand - OK, some would say she's obviously pretty - like buttah, even. I would agree, but take a close look. We won't go within sniffing distance of the obvious, so let's look at that mouth. It can do this weird thing where it can be sensuous, but then fall apart into a Frankenstein mouth that might be constructed from the lips of deceased collagen injection victims. (Please, no hate mail from the Babs-lovers of the world; I am one of you.)
- Cynthia Nixon - From Sex in the City. At times, I wondered if they'd put her on the series just to do the terrible old coyote ugly and/or double-bag (one over her face and one over yours in case hers came off) ugly jokes. But, ain't she striking somehow?
- Sandra Bernhard - The perfect example of what I'm talking about. She's just got this thing where a casual glance lights up the ugly column on your mental list, but take a while longer to look, and somehow her looks just work for her. Were I single and she decided she dug guys - me in particular - I'd board her yacht, baby.
- Steve Buscemi - Here we have the poster child for this post. Dear lord, what a strange looking man. But, I've read that he has quite the devoted female following who think he's just the dreamiest thing since Ben and Jerry's Cookie Dough ice cream (perhaps since they're both very pale with incongruous doughy chunks throughout).
- Whoopi Goldberg - I have had a thing for Whoopi since I saw her original one-woman Broadway show (on tape). I almost didn't put her here because I think she's just cool looking, but her face fits my premise: Odd enough to be strikingly interesting. She's another one were she and I available and she gave me the nod, I'd fall.
- Lyle Lovett - The alternate poster child for this post. Clearly Julia Roberts sees some things the way I do (or at least did). I think God made Lyle like this because if he looked like Mel Gibson with his talent, he'd have been clusterfucked to death by female fans by now. It was just a safety measure, I'm sure.

But see? These are all people that more or less are kinda sorta ugly, but they're all fascinating looking at the same time, right?

Hence, I launch the meme (with apologies to the Poor Man) "Beautiful Fugly."

Spanglish

My lovely wife and I really enjoyed Spanglish, though much of what I had read set us up to think it would be very average. Even Tea Leoni's infamous role was enjoyable in an excruciating way, being one of those brave, thankless, no one with vanity need apply kinda parts that so few actors can play, and don't get any credit when they do - usually because the character is so unlikeable it's hard not to transfer those feelings to the person portraying them.

The central story of film is the mutual culture shock when a wealthy Californian family hires a Mexican single mom as their nanny/maid. Mom (Tea) is, well, a psycho because she's sorta naturally built that way, but also because she's a high-powered business woman who's recently been laid off, and she's trying to deal with the mess of that while integrating with a family that she's never been around on a daily basis. Dad (Adam Sandler, who's a good actor dammit) is an all-around nice guy who tries to do his best by his family, his restaurant (he's a top chef who would prefer less adulation), and the hired help. Eldest daughter is a sweetheart who knows who she is, and is OK with being a little overweight, but is not OK with her mom making her feel like crap about it. The new nanny/maid is a good-hearted woman who wants the best for her daughter, and is faced with the nutball Mom sorta adopting her daughter because her own daughter takes after her Dad and not her.

Or, to put it simply, it's the story of how profoundly parents are influenced by their love for - or lack of love for - their children.

In further defense of Tea's role, I think she nails the particular psychosis that ensues when you've been laid off and are used to dealing with corporate sharks and not family members (it's like shifting gears from swinging a machete in the corporate jungle to making sandwiches with a butter knife). Or, to be more accurate, the script nails the condition, and Tea portrays it perfectly. Many reviewers were unsympathetic to her character because they dismissed her as just a psychobetty, which to some extent is true, but it's really exacerbated by her situation. She's like an alcoholic who finds herself holed up in a liquor store in a zombie movie; or Yosemite Sam who lights a match only to discover Bugs has locked him in the dynamite shed. Shite's just gonna happen.

I enjoyed this movie in the same way I enjoyed Terms of Endearment because both are beautifully crafted ensemble movies that are filled with real details on how most of us live our lives. Spanglish has the advantage, though, because no one dies of cancer, thus forcing us to watch a little boy trying to be brave when saying goodbye to his mother (a wonderful scene, but just a little too painful, if you ask me).

For the record, Adam Sandler is the new Steve Martin

Alfie

I've said it before, I'll say it again: I love it when a movie just bitch-slaps me with its wonderfulness. Especially when I'm not expecting it at all.

Remakes, as a rule, are a lazy endeavor to essentially update the cultural references in a dated classic movie - or a foreign movie - and to lace it with the current trends in American film style and storytelling - essentially so younger audiences who wouldn't attempt to watch the original will slap down the cash to see this new version. After all, the story is tried and true and redoing it with the hot new stars with the hot new styles is almost always a win-win - even if the movie is a bit of a flop, because remakes tend to make their money back, at the very least.

And let me qualify what I mean by "remakes." I mean movies like The Haunting, The Thomas Crown Affair, Cape Fear, The Manchurian Candidate and Alfie, where the original concept is pretty much intact, but just redone with modern flourishes. I do not mean complete re-imaginings or attempts to hew closer to the source material, like The Thing, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Blowout (inspired by Blowup).

The best comparison I can come up with for Alfie is it's kind of a grown-up Lady and the Tramp (yes, the Disney cartoon with the famous spaghetti kiss). A lovable cad cats around to a spiffy soundtrack (I recommend it, btw), but in the end his freedom-loving ways end up being more of a vice than a virtue. Even given that, though, the plot contains a surprise or two.

However, the movie's good primarily because it stars Jude Law. Here is one of those rare actors who can rescue practically any role and make the movie transcend its original potentiality. Alfie is good primarily because Jude Law is the star. I think one of his gifts is that he plays to both men's and women's sensibilities simultaneously. Guys can imagine having a beer with him while women can imagine... Well, I'll let you finish that thought yourself.

Check it out; it's a good evening's entertainment.

Blade: Trinity (aka Blade III)

My wife loves vampire movies, so we eventually watch them all. (It dawned on me when thinking about this post that a lot of my girlfriends had a thing about vampires. I don't know if that says anything about me or not, but I think that's one avenue I'll leave unexplored.)

I settled in for Blade: Trinity expecting some stylistic hyper-gore and some good snipes from Wesley, uh, Snipes. (I hadn't put that together until just now. No kidding.) As a non-fan of swat-fu, I had also fired up the computer to rip (convert to MP3) a bunch of recent CD purchases (including the Alfie soundtrack), planning to dart away and start a new one when fists and ancient Japanese swords whose blades had been folded over 10,000 times during the smelting started flying. But, that's before I discovered that we were actually being treated to Blade: The Comedy.

I guess the presence of Parker Posey might have been a clue, but then she seems like the kind of girl that's always wanted to be in a vampire movie, regardless of what it was like. I didn't know Ryan Reynolds - the current king of wiseass asides, taking the crown from Bruce Willis - was in it, or that might have cinched it.

The reviews on Amazon fall cleanly on the two sides of the fence, dismay that it was funny and not an over-serious gore fest, and delight that it was funny and not an over-serious gore fest. (And they give out some major spoilers, so beware.) Obviously, I'm delighted.

The plot has the vampires resurrecting The Original Vampire (kinda borrowing a plot line from Anne Rice) in order to finally destroy Blade and his vampire-killer army. And ... that's about it.

The one surprise was how little Wesley, the series' star and producer, was actually on screen. Ryan Reynolds, playing Hannibal King (who's loosely patterned after Kurt Russell's great Jack Burton from Big Trouble in Little China), is actually the de facto star of the movie, along with the supporting roles, like Posey's and the guy who plays The Original Vampire, getting a lot of face time. This is almost unheard of in a major franchise with a major star. I don't know if this speaks to Wesley Snipes' lack of vanity or to his intelligence to get out of the way when they got a good thing going on, or both. Let's be generous and say both.

Those of you interested in a fang and a chuckle should pencil in Blade: The Comedy sometime soon.

Remembering Douglas Adams

Since Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has finally made it into movie form (after being in radio, TV, computer game and book form), the media is awash with stories about its originator, Douglas Adams. Friends and acquaintances hold forth with memories of him on this annoyingly designed web site, which would have given Adams a chuckle, I'm sure. (The web site design, that is, not the reminiscences.)

It reminded me of the time I got the privilege of seeing him speak in person.

My company sent me to a Microsoft conference on their initiative to finally acknowledge the popularity of the internet (their original stance was that it was merely a fad), and Douglas Adams was the keynote speaker on day three. Btw, Microsoft knows how to throw a party, and a conference for that matter, so if you ever have the opportunity to go - especially if your company is paying for it - go. One of the many fun discoveries is that Bill Gates is apparently photogenic. (...it'll come to you later.)

I can't recreate the speech Adams gave, because it was brilliant, and because something happened with the tape of the speech some of us paid for but none of us received. It centered around people's perceptions of computers and what they're useful for. It went something like this: "Well, in trying to understand what a computer is, what it does, people were puzzled until spreadsheets came out, and then they said, 'Oh! It's a calculator.' Later, when word processors came out, people said, 'Oh! It's a typewriter.' But then the internet was invented, and the people, finally understanding, said, 'Oh! It's a pamphlet!'" Of course, it was much funnier the way he put it.

Anyway, I got there early to get a good seat up front, and was disappointed that the whole first row was reserved, until I saw whom it was reserved for. All the seats in the front had a sign attached that read, "Reserved for the Visually Handicapped."

It was just too good. I even wondered if it was the setup for a joke later.

So I turned to the guy next to me and said, "What a hoot that they have the first row reserved for the visually handicapped! I mean, if you're blind, does it really help to put you closer to the stage? They should put them over by the speakers, really."

Of course I would make this remark to the ONE GUY who saw no humor in the situation - at a Douglas Adams talk, no less, which is like going to a Marcel Marceau show and sitting next to the one guy who doesn't like mimes. Perhaps it was because this was in San Francisco, the politically correct, eternally offended center of the prissyverse, or it was just God's way of ratcheting up the humor of the whole situation a couple notches for my sake. As Voltaire once famously said, "God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."

"'Visually impaired' doesn't necessarily mean they can't see at all. Perhaps they can only see certain distances, or only close up," he snipped, his face getting all blotchy.

Unable to restrain myself, I said, "But putting them up front isn't going to help for those kinds of situations, either. That stage is still a good 50 feet away!"

At which point he twisted away huffily. I turned the other direction to see if I could evoke any empathy or support and the guy over there was studiously ignoring the whole thing. As could be guessed, I was the only guy in my row who laughed during the talk.

And not one person sat in the front row.

My guess is they couldn't find the seats. After all, how useful to the visually impaired are lettered signs placed at least half an acre from the entry doors?

Here we are now, entertain us!

One of the singular joys of my life is the Classic Album series on DVD. The artists and producers of the albums sit down with the master tape at the mixing console to illustrate how they achieved a sound, or to isolate a guitar solo. It's thrilling to hear these individual components of these towering achievements in music in the same way it's thrilling to open the hood of a really fast car to look at the engine. For music geeks like myself, it just doesn't get any better. My most recent voyage through, well, nirvana was Classic Albums - Nirvana: Nevermind.

For those of you who were trapped under something heavy when Nevermind came out, it was a jet engine blast of sheer rock genius. I have a "where were you/Kennedy" moment from the first time I heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on the radio. My wife-to-be and I were headed south on Colorado Boulevard in Denver, and were just off of this triangular park, near the KFC and Target complex, when that unmistakable opening riff jangled out of the radio. By the time it roared into life, I had already said, "Holy cow" right out loud and turned it up. When it finished, I looked over at my sweetie and said, "That was amazing." She said, "Yeah!" We stopped at the next CD store and picked it up. If CDs wore out like vinyl used to, I'd be on my 7th copy of that album by now. I know the song order so well that if I hear one song off of it, I have a Pavlovian need to hear the next song, and so on.

Without a doubt, Nevermind was, is and will remain one of the classic rock albums of all time.

So watching Classic Albums - Nirvana: Nevermind for me was like peering into the mind of Melville while he wrote Moby Dick or standing behind Leonardo da Vinci whilst he worked on the elusive smile of the Mona Lisa, having him explain the trick of shading he employed to make the smile disappear when you looked directly at it, but reappear when you view it obliquely.

Of all the magic moments in program, the best was when Dave Grohl uttered the truism I have found applies to all people who enjoy music throughout their lifetimes - as opposed to those who like it intensely during their young adulthood only to drift away when life keeps happening - and those artists who have that magic touch with great, hooky melodies: "With Kurt, the music always came first, lyrics second." Yes!

Another good one is when Butch Vig, of the group Garbage (fronted by the stunning Shirley Manson), who was the producer of Nevermind, described breaking into a sweat and having to pace off nervous energy the first time Nirvana played "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for him, because it was obvious how good the song was.

Butch was instrumental to the powerhouse sound of the recording. Though still great, the albums on either side of Nevermind have a comparatively thin, inconsistent sound. Butch explains how he essentially got Kurt to do multi tracks of vocals and guitars by either saying that John Lennon did it, too, (one of Kurt's heroes), or by simply lying that he didn't get a good take and they'd have to do it again.

You'd expect that when Cobain would sing harmony with himself it'd sound good because he'd be trying to purposely get the sound right, but when he was under the impression that he was redoing a vocal because Butch said he needed a better one, you'd think it'd be all over the road - paced differently, a different emphasis, and so on. But, no, Kurt clearly had worked out exactly how he wanted the vocal to sound, and would do that take roughly the same way every time, so Butch got to double-track the vocals whenever he wanted to.

Maybe I should be ashamed of this, but once in a while I'm taken by surprise and amazed at the sheer amount talent some musicians have, particularly when the music they make sounds ragged or somehow so spontaneous that I'd assume it was a lucky take. There are enough artists like that out there. (For instance, Tom Scholz of Boston claims in liner notes that "Amanda" was once in a lifetime performance that was not recreatable, so when the master tape was discovered to have turned to glue, they had to invent a substance to allow the tape to go past the heads once to make a copy.) So I was shocked at how consistent and what a visionary Cobain was.

TLD: Another time I was completely blindsided was a one-time concert held by various groups on the Minneapolis music scene when it was the center of the hip music universe back in the 80s. I'd heard many of these bands individually, and the fashion at the time was a ragged, DIY vibe, which sometimes simply came off as though the band needed to rehearse more. Well, these guys got together to do a night of Eagles covers - yes, Eagles covers - and we went just to witness the travesty. To our surprise, all the musicians who made you doubt during their own shows if they even knew how to tune a guitar did pitch-perfect covers. It could have been the Eagles themselves up there. They even closed with the top single of the year, the Bangle's "Walk Like an Egyptian" and just nailed, down to the whistled bridge. It was hilarious.

I was also shocked and pleased to find out how much Nirvana leaned on Dave Grohl, their drummer, to fill in their sound. He was their background vocalist and second guitarist in addition to his phenomenal drumming. When he came out with his band Foo Fighters (one of my current and all-time faves), I wondered how come he sounded so accomplished already. Well, it comes to light that he was the other powerhouse within Nirvana.

So, if this is the kind of stuff that flips your skirt, do check out the Classic Album series. If you belong to Netflix, they have them all, and they're a nice change of pace to have ready and waiting on the shelf. Along with Nirvana, check out the ones on:
- Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life
- Paul Simons's Graceland
- Fleetwood Mac's Rumours
- Steely Dan's Aja
- U2's The Joshua Tree
- Phil Collins' Face Value
- The Who's Who's Next

You get to find out all sorts of neato factoids, such as: Fleetwood Mac wore out the master tape during the recording Rumours and had to start over (start over!!); Nevermind was recorded at Sound City, Van Nuys, where both Rumours and Tom Petty's Damn the Torpedoes were recorded, leaving one to wonder if that studio is somehow blessed; Stevie Wonder even plays the drums on most of Songs; and that the bass break at the end of Paul Simon's "You Can Call Me Al" was cut in half, reversed, and pasted together in the middle to create the sound they wanted - go listen, you can hear it once you know that's what they did. Nifty, huh?

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Under the Radar

There are those rock groups out there that the casual listener typically likes, but never really gloms onto who they are. These bands have reached the tipping point of fame, but they don't pass over to the tipping point of brand name recognition. A radio station (an imaginary one, of course, as no radio stations really do anything like this today) might play two or three different songs by the band in the space of a couple hours, and only the fans would know it was the same group.

Therefore, I, your humble music geek web servant, would like to imprint a trail of little glowing footprints, like those sung of in the Byrd's "Mr. Spaceman," to help the casual listener find their way to these worthy bands. I hope to invoke the response "Oh, those guys!" and to help fill out iPod playlists for maximum shuffling pleasure.

The first band may have enough brand recognition to not be included here, but just in case, I'll mention them. Collective Soul creates the exact kind of tunes that music snobs love to hate: festooned with riffage and guitar hooks, great melodies, compelling lyrics, and lush, top-shelf production values. No lone dude or dudette with a guitar and a harmonica belching and honking along nearly tunelessly, no DIY lo-fi garage punk band, no Velvet Underground wannabes, and no "street cred" whatsoever. Nope, just great, straight-ahead rock played by crack musicians who know what they're doing - eminently listenable.

Collective Soul has some sonic tics that might annoy some. Their favorite trick is to start a song with the recording compressed down so that it sounds as if it were squeaking out of a little plastic AM radio - a conceit first heard on Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here - and then blast into the full spectrum of sound after a couple bars. They usually do it well, though, so those of us who blissfully do not have the souls of music critics dig it.

The albums to check out are their hits collection and their first eponymous album, which is almost a hits compilation on its own. There's not a lot of overlap between the two, so you won't be wasting your money by buying both.

Specific songs to sample are :
Gel
Energy
When The Water Falls
December
The World I Know

I had a hard time culling that down to a small list, by the way.

Note: If the links to the samples don't work, just follow the album links and click on the song sample icons directly.


TLD: Before I go on (and on), one example of a band who I think DOESN'T fall into this "just missed" category is Everclear. They reached the tipping point when "Father of Mine" broke big. After that, they were anthologized on the American versions of the NOW CDs - CDs which combine the hits from top pop radio - in amongst Britney Spears, Rappers, and other rabble. (Full disclosure, I did like "Toxic," Lord help my immortal soul, because it reminded me of ELO on steroids - say an unreleased track from the Xanadu soundtrack.) I think Everclear is a fantastic group, and they would be included in this post as one of the many under the radar bands if not for their wide popularity.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming:
Another band that just didn't crest like it could've because the lead singer was fully invested in the rock and roll lifestyle was the Stone Temple Pilots. I hope I never bump into any of the members because of what I'm about to say, but they only created just enough good songs to have a greatest hits compilation, and maybe a couple tracks on it could qualify as filler. Yet, the songs that are good are very good.

Worth a listen:
Vaseline
Big empty
Plush
Interstate Love Song


And now the band that was the impetus of this post: Toad the Wet Sprocket. Of the many incongruities of this group, their name comes from a Monty Python skit, but their music is thoughtful, soulful rock. You'd expect all sorts of silliness, not the pretty tunes they actually offer. But then, these guys were all over the road in their sound and the hits they had, so maybe the name does fit. Their albums were kinda spotty, with one or two great tracks while the rest was forgettable, so the best thing to get is their hits compilation, named oddly so it's hard to identify it as such: P.S. (A Toad Retrospective).

Highlights include:
Walk on the Ocean
All I Want
Something's Always Wrong


This final band has no business being in this post because they are a one hit wonder, but I plug their first album whenever I can, because I think it's a minor classic. This is one of the handful of CDs I just never tire of. I laugh at the jokes every time (and there are a bunch), and I never fail to fully achieve Jimmy Buffet mode during "Mexico." Folks, if you haven't given the Refreshments and their minor classic Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy a try, why not start today?

Check out:
Banditos (the one bonafide hit)
Mexico
Down Together
Don't Wanna Know


Thanks for listening.

Computer Games

For a full goose bozo computer nerd, I have one glaring deficiency (well, I'm sure I have many, but just play along, k?): I don't like computer games really. I mean, I dug "DOOM" when it first came out, because it was fun to explore a completely made-up world, and because it was gratuitously violent (which, again, was fun at first but then became kinda gristly for my tastes). I was a big Dungeons and Dragons player as an adolescent, and that's what appeals to me: Poking around in imaginary, fictional worlds. Being able to shoot stuff was a quasi-bonus, but I wasn't so much into that aspect of it - they were just things that got in the way while I was looking around. I always played in "god mode" so I couldn't die for that reason.

"DESCENT" appealed to me even more, because you got to fly around in tunnels and look for stuff, even though you had to shoot stuff out of the way. At least it was less gory - they were just little spaceships and sparks rather than blood sprayed everywhere. And I still played in invincible mode because I just wanted to see how it ended, I didn't care to repeat each death lesson umpteen times over the course of months. "DESCENT" remains the only game that I enjoyed enough to actually see how it ended.

Even though it would seem like an obvious no-brainer, "MYST" didn't appeal to me because you didn't so much move around in a virtual world as move around in a sluggish slide show. It was like weird uncle Marv's acid trip to the 7-11 that he somehow managed to photograph and then subject the family to after a huge turkey meal and a couple glasses of wine on a sleepy holiday afternoon. "Yeah, Marv, that organ in the zeppelin is really trippy {yawn}, and there are a lot of trees, aren't there?" Oy.

I've probably played "TETRIS" five times in my life. I have never cleared my rows. I have never managed to care.

Like the rest of the planet, I've played the game of Solitaire that comes with MS Windows (when it's not been disabled by the installation guys when a company fears that hours will be wasted on it, thereby losing more money on working to disable the thing than was probably ever really wasted by bored employees playing it). Yet, the biggest bang I got out of that was the Easter egg where - in the original version anyway - one of the things in the picture on the back of the cards would move if you didn't touch anything for a while. Big happy fun time, you betcha.

I recently bought one of those $20 joysticks that contain five classic arcade games because I recall really liking "Galaga" where you shoot bugs who make a hilarious-and-pathetic-all-that-the-same-time sound when they fry (and because we have a "no video game consoles" rule in our house, so this is our tiny concession to that), but discovered that the fond memories were probably fueled more by huge slurpees and competing with the buddies rather than the joy of the game itself. (Though my pulse still elevates when the bat tries to beam me up.)

Therefore, I am mystified when I see advertisements for little packages of wonder like "Grand Theft Auto" where you get to pretend to be a car-stealing, drug-selling homie waiting for that rap record deal to come through, but in the meantime level L.A. just for grins. Even were I a teenager now, I'm not sure I would enjoy playing a game where the point was to be an evil, murdering thug. (But then I didn't like playing characters who were "chaotic evil" in D&D, either, so maybe it's just me. Some guys and gals I knew wouldn't play anything but bad guys.)

I'm even more mystified when I read that video games are a larger market than both movies and music. (Well, maybe not music so much anymore. Talk about an industry that slashed its own throat out of sheer stupidity, greed and stupidity.)

Anyway, if you're still reading, I prattled on about all of that merely to point out the ONE THING that I would find intriguing in a video game, but by circumstance will never experience...

One genre of video games is the movie tie-in, and more often than not, the stars of the movie submit to a full body scan so that their character can resemble them as much as possible. They might also provide any dialogue needed. Jada Pinkett Smith said that acting for the "Matrix" video game was much more work than doing the movie itself.

TLD: Wouldn't that be an odd career to have found oneself in? Scanning live, practically nude* major Hollywood stars covered in reflective marbles for your video game? Likely you would fit the uber-nerd profile (comme moi) and not have much experience with powerful, charismatic people, let alone having dated much, and there you are telling someone like Jada to hold still while you scan her quivering flesh. Those poor guys must practically pull it clean off when they get home. Most humble apologies to the more tender souls out there for that image.

*One aspect of the scanning process sometimes includes a nearly nude scan, according to Bruce Willis. I couldn't find examples of it on the web, natch, but do recall a few actors relating the joy of the experience.

So here's what I think would be a hoot:

If you were the child, sibling or spouse (or son/daughter-in-law! Yes!) of say, Bruce Willis, Jada Pinkett Smith, and all the other stars who've been, well, assimilated, you could buy the game they star in and make them do silly stuff, get them killed over and over again to work out that aggression, and so on and so forth. That would fun, I dare say.

Part II: Why Pope Benedict XVI is (Still) a Liberal - Guest Posting.
The continuation of Sharon's guest posting on the new Pope.

Part I is here.

---

Okay, not really. But he was and is a liberal in the old, genuinely Catholic sense, and may even surprise "liberals" in the new, ideological, scare-quotes sense.

So what is a liberal (notice no scare quotes now) in the context of Catholicism? Stepping into the wayback machine, let's go back to the bad old days of Catholic neoscholastic theology. Now I'm rapidly getting into areas too dense and foggy for me to navigate easily, so here's the back-of-the-baseball-card lowdown. Those who have more thorough knowledge of these things, please forgive the simplistic treatment. Deep breath:

In the 19th century, while casting around for ways to deal with Idealism (of the Kant and Hegel varieties), Liberalism (not of the Al Gore variety; this is a philosophical usage), Scepticism, and Empiricism, Catholic thinkers landed on good old reliable St. Thomas Aquinas, and launched neo-Thomism or neoscholasticism.

Bored yet? Just wait. By 1900, it looked like Thomism, as opposed to neo-Thomism/ neoscholasticism (don't ask what the difference was, it's not relevant to us and who remembers anyway?) seemed to be carrying the day. Yves Congar, Jacques Maritain, and Etienne Gilson were the big Thomists.

Then in 1938 a French theologian, Henri de Lubac, published a book called Catholicism. This book was revolutionary in its appeal to the Bible and patristics as the constant wellsprings of and touchstones for understanding the Catholic faith, and it was the opening salvo in a great theological revolution of modern times, one which most people haven't heard of.

Now don't get the idea that Catholic theology had ignored the Bible or the Church Fathers up until that time. But Catholic theology and philosophy had been long dependent on Thomistic thinking that began with reference to the natures of Man, God, and the universe. The new movement, called "ressourcement" ("back to the sources"), began unapologetically with Scripture and the early Christian writers. The appendix of Catholicism, which took up a good chunk of the book (find it here), is a wonderful collection of the best of patristic writings and still worth having a look through.

Now de Lubac and the other ressouccement theologians of the 1930's-1960's period weren't engaged in scholarship for the sake of scholarship, nor looking to correct or reinvent Catholic theology by a sort of primitivist privileging of an idealized uncorrupted Christian past.*

*I went to graduate school so I get to write like that occasionally.

They were interested in a revitalization of the faith which grounded the truths of sacred tradition in their genuine sources, and unified two thousand years of development of doctrine. They believed that rationalistic theology had driven out transcendent mystery, that spirituality and theology could not be separated and fragmented, and that a return to the sources was necessary to re-center the Catholic faith in the person of Christ, the source of the sources.

Hard as it is to believe today that this was revolutionary stuff, it's harder to believe that this group were considered dangerous. Dangerous liberals. The "L"-word. But their vision triumphed in the course of the Second Vatican Council. Who were they?

Hans Urs von Balthasar. Jean Daniélou. Henri de Lubac. Romano Guardini. Louis Boyer. Maurice Blondel. And Josef Ratzinger.

Not, please notice, Karol Wojtyla. And if you put his writings and Ratzinger's side-by-side, you see the difference. Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II*, grounds his thought in the experience and nature of the human person in relation to Christ; he was heir to the earlier currents of Catholic theology.

*However John Paul was a huge fan of von Balthasar, and the pope's personal patronage rehabilitated the theologian's career, which had been badly knocked out of orbit when he was conspicuously not invited to Vatican II. The pope was even going to make him a cardinal, but poor von B. died just a few days before the ceremony.

Go read Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, and you'll see how he is very much a ressourcement theologian. It's this that makes his writing, though deeply and unapologetically Catholic, easier for Protestants to read and understand. *

*And if you want to read him in English--or von Balthasar, or de Lubac, you will have to visit Ignatius Press ( http://www.ignatius.com/) and pay for it. Father Joseph Fessio, the Jesuit founder of Ignatius Press, is a fervent ressourcement fan. Fessio's tireless translating and publishing of their works over the last quarter century, combined with John Paul's strong endorsement, brought ressourcement theology to mainstream American attention.

This is a long way to go to make the point that the new pope is a liberal, and the impatient among you (if you've slogged your way this far) may be asking, irritatedly, "Fine, so there's some technical theological sense in which he's a 'liberal'. But what I mean by calling him a conservative is that he was the Enforcer, the pope's watchdog, who's spent his life opposing change in the Catholic Church."

But this is exactly wrong. Putting aside the issue that being the pope's watchdog was his job (a job that he was quite unsuited for and openly, if quietly, bitter about, and which he had several times asked to retire from), what Ratzinger and his crew were all about was a sea change at the heart of the Church; a change that, while it had no apparent effect on the doctrines that win or lost political elections, unified and grounded theology and piety in a foundation universal to all Christians.

Some early signs of liberalism, and perhaps "liberalism":

--Cardinal Ratzinger organized and choreographed the pope's funeral. And the first person to receive the Holy Eucharist, from the hand of Ratzinger himself, was Brother Roger--the cardinal's old friend, the leader of the Taize community--and a Lutheran.

--Ratzinger was acknowledged to be the mastermind behind the historic rapprochement between Catholics and Jews during the last papacy. John Paul did the legwork; Ratzinger re-cast Catholic theology regarding the Jewish people in a way that still makes the ultra-traditionalists' teeth grind. Go read Many Religions--One Covenant: Israel, the Church, and the World. See what I mean.

--Cardinal Ratzinger's job as head of the CDF is reported to already be paying off in unexpected areas. Cardinal George of Chicago reports that Pope Benedict's first words to him were a reminder of a conversation they had had regarding the sex abuse scandals in the United States--which Ratzinger's position gave him comprehensive information on--a conversation in which Ratzinger apparently made it clear that decisive action, long-awaited by American Catholics, was on its way. In this regard, it's worth observing that Cardinal Schönborn of Austria, who dealt quickly, decisively, and effectively with sexual clerical scandals in Austria, is a disciple of Ratzingers and led the pro-Ratzinger bloc during the conclave. It wouldn't be surprising to see real action take within a very short time, of a sort to please frustrated American laity of both "liberal" and "conservative" factions.

Now in the interests of total honesty and come-cleanness, there is one area of Catholic life where Cardinal Ratzinger could only be described as a capital-C Conservative. His views on the liturgy, to the horror of some and the delight of others (like me), hold to at best a minimalist reading of the Vatican II reforms. He's a fan of Latin, mass Ad Orientem (i.e. priest facing the same way as the people), and generally speaking much nicer aesthetics. And in my Rad-Trad liturgical fantasies, Pope Benedict XVI the panzer-cardinal swoops down upon Dallas, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis, dynamiting concrete-box churches, excommunicating liturgists,* and implementing an Index of Forbidden Hymnals, followed by mass burnings of the wretched Gather hymnal and any other "musical" publication to come out of Portland, Oregon. Churches will be filled with congregations singing the best of German Catholic and English Protestant foursquare hymns and simplified plainchant. Cheap decorations will be replaced by tasteful frescoes and statuary. **

*Old Catholic joke #1: Q: What's the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist? A: You can negotiate with a terrorist.

**Old Catholic joke #2: No, we don't worship statues; since the 1960's, we worship felt banners.

Ah comrades, it will be truly glorious when the revolution comes and the liturgical wreckovators are the first against the wall. Te Deum laudamus, te Dominum confitemur....

Vomit Phobia

(Most humble apologies to all and especially Sharon for inserting this between her superb guest postings on the new Pope, but she needed some time to polish part II, and the muse just struck baby!)


I have a major puke phobia, and I don't really think it's my fault.

When I was a kid, my brother and I contracted this projectile vomit stomach flu. It was so bad that my mom eventually passed us off to the grandparents in order to clean up the house and just sit and vibrate for a while. I think we ralphed every 30 minutes or so. And not just little urps, either. No, we're talking Monty Python scale, as bad as it gets stuff. I still have a vivid memory of yarking so hard it shot in solid streams from both of my nostrils.

TLD: Ever noticed how many terms there are for the big Technicolor yawn? I imagine you've heard the urban myth that you can tell what a society deems important by how many words they invent to describe something, and the example trotted out is that Eskimos have twenty seven and half words for "snow." Well, I think the plethora of terms for talking to God on the big white telephone sorta puts that theory in the commode, if you will. Long ago, back at the dawn of the public internet when vanity web sites were all the rage, this fact amused me enough that I compiled a list of all the terms I could come across for the ole heave-ho. Warning: Don't go there while eating or if you feel on the edge of an impending hurl.

Every year in school, I was in direct proximity of the kid(s) who hauled off and puked in class. The more dramatic the event, the better view I had of it.

The first monumental spray was in kindergarten during the pledge of allegiance. This little stick of a girl in front of me punctuated "and justice for alllllllllll" by projecting a column of translucent orange hurl into the back legs of the victim in from of her. The teacher (named Mrs. Rehorse which set me up for truly appreciating the Cheech and Chong skit "Sister Mary Elephant") grabbed the girl and drug her to the classroom's bathroom (most kindergarten classrooms have a bathroom directly attached for the many obvious reasons). She emerged shaking, explaining that we should sit and color until she'd taken care of the girl. She went back into the bathroom for a long time, and then reemerged with the girl in tow, a stack of those ubiquitous brown paper towels in one hand, which proved to almost be a good thing. The girl retched and Mrs. Rehorse - I'll never forget this sight - slapped the stack of towels against the girl's mouth, which made her vomit spray in a dazzling circular pattern around it, resembling a liquid orange daisy blossom at the height of its trajectory. Of course, that covered the girl, Mrs. Rehorse, her desk, and about 7 square feet in every direction. Mrs. Rehorse, who was one of the calmer teachers I ever had, just freaked. "Oh my God!" she screamed while pulling the poor retching thing out of the room, abandoning the class. About five minute later the very pale principle of the school came and ushered us to another classroom so they could begin the cleanup. I swear that girl gushed more than half her body weight during that episode.

The next gloppy memory is actually a serial memory, because this one kept reoccurring like some sort of Groundhog's Day nightmare that revolved around spewage rather than constantly waking to Sonny and Cher's "I Got You Babe." At the end of every school year we marched in single file down to the park (yes, my hometown was so small that at that time, we had only one) to have a picnic. For some reason, this was the height of nerve-wracking torture to the boy who had to sit next to me due to the unforgiving rigors of name alphabetization. Every. Single. Freakin'. Year we would be halfway through our peanut butter sandwiches, and he would barf from nerves. To boot (har har - that's another puke term), he had this technique where he would hold his hands palms up, fingers splayed as though he were going to catch a football or a baby that Michael Jackson had dropped from a window, and yarf directly into them, creating sort of a sprinkler effect, maximizing coverage of the local area and definitely kicking the visual up a notch. For the cherry on top, he also made an extravagant vocalization each time, something like "huuuuurghwaaaahkkkalk!" When, a couple seasons later, it became clear to me this would be an annual event, I begged the teachers to let me sit elsewhere, but was told, no, there were too many kids to keep track of and if we weren't in order, chaos would surely ensue. I began questioning the guy himself if he felt OK this year during our march to the park, and he always said he did, but there we'd be, him with his eyes bulging in the act of the personal protein spill, me shuddering, lip acurl, trying to avoid the chunks from the sprinkler effect. I got to the point where I didn't even take my lunch out, I just waited for the human upchuck fountain to do his thang. Then I'd use that opportunity to get up, get away, and go tell the teach that ______ was doing it again. Oh such wonderful memories.

In sixth grade, we had a guy who just puked randomly all the time. He wasn't nervous, he was a pretty mellow guy, and claimed it was a mystery to him as well. But about every week or so, he'd go up to the teacher's desk and say he'd "done a woops" (used that phrase every time) on his homework. That was the other odd thing, he consistently laid down a neat little puddle in the middle of whatever we were working on. The teacher eventually compensated by always making an extra mimeograph or photocopy so when he'd "woops" she could immediately supply another one. I remember taking particular offense one time when we were coloring ducks for a spring class decoration theme and he "woopsed" on them - sugar corn pops I think it was - so he got to color a second sheet of ducks. Outside of movies and filmstrips, coloring/art projects were my favorite school activity, so I was incensed that he got to color more only because he puked all the time. Life can be so unfair.

The best one happened in Jr. High (what we called "middle school" back then). We had this math teacher who was universally loathed because he was very strict and kind of a stick in the mud. He also had a nasty habit of picking his nose and flicking the boogers towards the unsuspecting students when we were heads down doing equations. You learned to cock an eye for any incoming crust missiles. One morning, whilst we were scribbling away, the only sound being someone dodging a looger on occasion (you think I exaggerate, but no, dear friends, I do not), a kid in the back knocked over his desk in his effort to bolt out the door. The sound of his struggle covered the sound of the reason for his speedy egress, but the unbroken trail of barf from his overturned desk all the way past the sight line of the door cleared up the mystery. As if the river of ralph wasn't impressive enough, it was dotted with brightly colored chunks representing all the colors of the rainbow. To borrow Burt Reynold's description from The End, it looked like Walt Disney had puked.

We swiveled as one back to the teacher, who was standing, mouth agape. He had a comically long face anyway, and with his jaw on the floor, it was even funnier. Well, he composed himself, straitened his jacket, smoothed his hair, cleared his throat, and said, "Um. Well. I just want to commend that young man for his forgoing the expectation that one needs to ask permission before leaving the classroom. I once had a student who experienced the same circumstance who came up to my desk to request permission to leave when it would have been best just to apologize later. Ruined a week's worth of assignments, which, of course, made both the class and myself quite unhappy. So, let me assure you that if you feel the need to ... uh ... well ... you may leave without asking first." And he sat down. The thing is, I still don't know if he was trying to be funny or not.

If it didn't happen in school, it certainly occurred at our parties. One late night, one of the guys who had a rep for having a glass leg, after lying back on the couch for a while, eyes close, suddenly jolted up, pivoted around the end of the couch towards the bathroom down the hall, and shot a stream of yack the entire length of the couch. It was big couch, too. Had I not seen it myself, I wouldn't have believed it could shoot that far. I mean, the force of velocity required would seem to be beyond the abilities of our gastric systems, but the cohesion of the substance itself so that it does stay rather nicely columnar is impressive, and I'm wouldn't be surprised if it ended up being the topic of a doctoral thesis someday. (The research would be icky, though.)

Sadly, the most comical event I witnessed was really an audio event, and can't really be recreated in prose. Out in the darkness surrounding one of our outdoor parties, one of the guys finally succumbed to overindulgence, and the sound - oh my. Imagine the loudest, deepest, most ragged belch you can imagine, followed by someone dumping an entire bucket of minnows on a rock. If only iPods had existed back then. Movie sound guys would still be paying me for that one. I could've retired before college. Alas.

The last story I relate only because I got such chuckle from the punch line. For some reason, the fad of beer bongs swept our little group one auspicious summer. A beer bong is a funnel with a large plastic tube attached to the spout that will hold one entire beer. After the beer is poured in and the foam has settled, one puts the tube into one's mouth, and a combination of gravity and stupidity cause the whole beer to shoot down one's throat in approximately 3 to 5 seconds. Yes, the point is to get very drunk. One of our crew just loved beer bongs, but apparently he just wasn't built to be able to take that much liquid that quickly at once. 3 times out of 4 it would come back up as fast as it had gone down. We eventually bought the cheapest swill for his beer bongs just to cut back on the expense (either generic "beer" or "Billy's Beer" usually). Well, one time he'd barely gotten the tube away from his mouth when it predictably gushed back out. One of the comedians of the group walked over to the puddle, bent over, examined it, then announced, "Eeewww! It's still cold and foamy!" And it was, by all appearances.

So now, unless it's my kids (somehow my concern for them overwhelms my phobia), if anyone acts like they're gonna call for dinosaurs, I instinctively go into "flee" mode. For instance, one of my peers at work had a bad reaction to some vitamins during a morning meeting, and she, out of the blue, gagged, slapped her had over her mouth, pushed back from the table, turned towards me(!), and retched a couple more times. By the time her hand began the trip to her mouth, I transitioned into "bullet time" from the "Matrix" movies and in one smooth, speed-blurred motion I leapt from my chair, opened the door behind me and was out into the hall before I called back, with all of the bravado of Deputy Barney Fife digging his bullet out of his shirt pocket during a crisis, "Are you gonna be sick?!?!?" My one-and-a-half-backwards salto mortale without a spotter so distracted and impressed everyone that we almost forgot about our poor hurl bunny, who had recovered and managed not to deface the carpet. They're mostly letting me live it down.

Yes, I have the most well developed, hair triggered flight response of anyone I know, and sometimes I choose to be proud of it.

Pope Benedict XVI - Guest Posting - Part I

So the Roman Catholic Church has a new Pope. As a Protestant, I really have no useful knowledge or history from which I could draw an accurate opinion. However, even I can tell that most of reporting by the mainstream media - right or left - has smacked of personal agendas and outright ignorance. To the faithful of any denomination, it's clear the vast majority of the press corps. has no clue on how to report religious news. Maybe journalism is one of those jobs that attract an inordinate number of agnostics just as intelligence agencies, with their bizarre purity in hiring requirements, tends to attract Mormons (you can never have done any illegal drugs, ever - which immediately disqualifies most college grads who didn't attend Brigham Young).

Anyway, it dawned on me that I know someone who is an intelligent, informed Catholic who does have the knowledge and historical perspective to have a good feel for Pope Benedict XVI and what is Papacy might mean for the church, so I asked her if she would do a guest posting. We go way back. We were on many of the same religion discussion boards together, and her posts never failed to be forthright, thoughtful, and so informed, once she chimed in the discussion was usually over, or at least shoved in a more productive direction.

So let me shut up and get the hell away from the podium here, and hand it over to Sharon:

---

Part I: The German Shepherd Attack Dog of the Vatican, and Why He Isn't a Conservative

Okay, here's your quick tutorial in Catholic liberalism, Catholic conservatism, what they aren't, what they are, and why mainstream media sources, well-meaning but clueless, are reduced to bizarre unexplained hand-waving assertions that, in his youth a liberal, something--something--(Vatican II? the European student rebellions? bad liturgy?) transmuted Joseph Ratzinger into a right-wing hard-line conservative.

Right off the bat, let me self-identify as a liberal Catholic, who is a great fan of the German Shepherd (ha ha, you heard it here first). I'll get to how that's possible later, like in Part II of this meandering post.

Let's get the red herrings out of the way first. I'm not even going to touch the current "But isn't he a **NAZI** nastiness that even the mainstream American press (take note, you who like to chant "liberal media bias!") disdained to touch, despite Ratzinger's front-runner status throughout the conclave. Go read the Jerusalem Post article debunking the accusation; go read the Anti-Defamation League's defense of the man; I'm not interested in rehashing it.

Just ask yourself this question: How heroically did a fourteen-year old boy living in Nazi Germany need to act in order to be forgiven, sixty years later, after a lifetime working to achieve a stunning pro-Jewish shift in the theology of the largest Christian body on earth? Please give a concrete answer, and then compare it to the facts of the adolescent Ratzinger's actions. Them come back to me with the "Nazi" charge.

Let's go for the second red herring, the one about whether the new pope is an ultra-conservative right-winger.

If he's a conservative Catholic, then presumably there were moderate and liberal cardinals to choose from. With all the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over the election of a "conservative" pope, who on earth were the "liberal" candidates envisioned? Ratzinger/Benedict's "ultra-conservatism" (I'll go into why the persistent scare quotes later) is often summarized as his opposition to (deep breath for litany) abortion contraception homosexuality female priests. Okay, so which of the cardinals in conclave was anyone expecting to support those things? No, seriously. Find me a name.

More fundamentally, let's look at the dull media pondering over what the new pope's "policies" were going to be. Maybe Cokie Roberts and Christiane Amanpour were just in U.S. election mode, but the pope doesn't have policies. His job description is basically "Don't change anything." The whole point of the much disputed charism of infallibility is a promise (whether you think there's really a promise or not) that the pope, no matter how much of a wretch, dullard, or personal heretic he might be, won't change anything.

Now, ask yourself: Which of the past popes had policies permitting any of the Hot Four listed above? When was it again that Catholics could, with ecclesial blessing, go on the pill, have abortions, ordain women, or have non-heterosexual sex? Wait, let me get my other hand to count.... okay, zero. So by that reckoning, they were all ultra-conservatives. Which may be the case, but it makes the sharp intake of breath at having a new pope who is going to--my stars!--keep doing what they've all been doing for two thousand years seem a little histrionic. If we're looking for a political word that means "just like the rest of the lot," I think what we're reaching for is "moderate."

The old charge by Jack Chick and Bob Jones types was always that the pope announces as binding edict whatever whims cross his mitred mind, and the romish masses fall timidly in line. It's a little weird to hear that particular canard being promoted by media commenters who really have nothing against Catholicism, they just don't know any better. Shall we, here, resolve to know better? Now you know better. If the Catholic Church were ever to become "liberal" in the way that Cardinal Ratzinger has always been described as "conservative," it would cease in a fundamental way to be the Catholic Church, inasmuch as its claim to catholicity (universality) is founded in great part of having the same teaching always and everywhere. One might argue that this is not in fact so; but if the Church itself were to renounce that claim, it would be renouncing the core of its identity.

So that's why Pope Benedict XVI is not "conservative" in the way that most people think; and why what most Americans define as "conservativism" is in fact definitive of the nature of the Catholic Church. But there are legitimate meanings to the words "liberal" and "conservative" in a Catholic context. And, pace the neo-con Catholics who increasingly would like to align those words with membership in American political parties, they have nothing to do with the hot-button issues on the political landscape. And taken in a true sense, Pope Benedict XVI is the first genuinely liberal pope the Catholic Church has had in the preceding century.

Part II: Why Pope Benedict XVI is a Liberal's Liberal.

The Time I Got a Date Because I'm Blonde

One of our upperclassmen buddies summoned us to a hotel room one Saturday evening to meet some out of town friends of his. He made it clear this was not to be a party, but just stop by to say hi to be polite, then feel free to continue cruising for chicks (which was our typical scheduled appointment throughout or driving years in high school - it even worked a couple times).

So we filed in, sodas in hand, high on the beautiful night and all the kids circling the main drag that ran through town. His girlfriend was there, a stout woman with a highlighted, inverted shelf of hair and an inordinate amount of black moles. There, too, was a cute, petite blonde girl. We said "Hi," bantered a bit, then shot off into the evening, mildly puzzled as to what the point was.

Monday rolled around and Upperclassman, who was really a friend of a friend so I didn't talk to him much, strolled up and asked me if I wanted to go to the upcoming Sadie Hawkins dance (we had another name for them that I don't recall). I stood there wondering what to do when he grasped my dilemma and said, "Not with me you idiot, with that girl you met on Saturday. That was why you came by. My girlfriend wants her friend to go, but she needs a date. That's you." Apparently I was going to the dance.

Odd, but I have absolutely no memory of the dance itself. Not a jot.

What I do recall is we went out afterward to one of the premier makeout spots available in my hometown, so the dance must've gone well. This spot was about 20-something miles out of town on a high hill above the river, with a beautiful view for miles in all directions. We called it "The Mushroom" because there were picnic benches covered by a huge cement umbrella that was visible for miles around. It was a little unnerving to sit beneath, and you could often see some dad climb up and pat around the base of it to see if it moved while the rest of the clan stayed safely at a distance.

We faced the highway, put some music on and started to neck. When she'd had enough teenage boy pawing - Lord help us because we can't help ourselves at that age - she said it was time to be getting back. I went to start the car and not a single sound emerged from the beast save the jingle of the keys in the ignition.

I had a huge Buick Electra, a yacht of a car with a massive 455 V8 engine that was so powerful that when I stomped on the gas - another thing teenage boys are incapable of resisting - the whole front end of the car would raise a bit and then tip to one side from the torque of the engine. It got something like 12 miles to the gallon, but the bench seats could easily hold 8 of us at that age. It was our chariot of choice. It just had this really bad habit of occasionally simply not starting. Mechanics said it was a common thing for that make of car and they had no idea how to fix it. Usually, just a jump-start from another car fixed the situation, and where I grew up having jumper cables was as crucial as having a spare tire and a jack.

But out under the mushroom we were on our own. On rare occasion, opening the hood and futzing with the battery cables or the solenoid cover would bring the car back to life, so I tried that, only to once again hear naught but the sound of crickets and wind.

"We're stuck," I said.

"Great," she said, probably not thrilled about the prospect of being trapped for the night, and trapped with Handy Boy no less.

To attempt to put her at ease, I compressed myself as far as I could into the door on my side, crossed my arms, and asked her if she wanted a blanket or anything. She quizzed me about possibly walking down to the highway, a half-mile walk in the dark, and flagging a car down. I suggested that we watch the traffic levels and see if the trip was worth the effort, because it would be cold both ways, and who knew how long we would wait. I don't believe a single car went by all evening. After she exhausted any ideas for rescue, she curled up into a quiet funk for a while.

Boredom eventually primed the conversation pump, and we started talking about ourselves like teenagers do. What we wanted to do when we grew up. Songs we liked. Movies we liked. How far we had ever gone, wink wink nudge nudeg. Little episodes from our life. Etc.

At one point, I asked why she had picked me for the dance, pre-wincing in the dark in case it was something random, humiliating, or silly - or all of the above.

"Because you're blonde. I like blondes," she said.

"Oh," I said.

"Well, and because you seemed nice," she added, perhaps thinking I wasn't completely happy with the selection criteria being a fine, glossy swath of hair and nothing about me, but boys don't think that way. I was just glad it was something innocuous.

During the next couple hours, she crept closer and closer to me, eventually reaching out and slapping my leg for emphasis or placing a warm hand on my arm when confiding a secret. I don't know if I become more attractive through scintillating conversation or if she just grew tired of chatting - I'll go with the prior just to flatter myself - but she finally closed the distance, hoisted a leg over, sat in my lap and said, "Kiss me."

Well yeeehaaaw friends and neighbors. There's not much to tell that you probably can't guess for yourself concerning what happened next (except that we were too young to "go all the way" as was the phrase back then). Let's just pan over to the curtains wafting in the summer breeze and leave it at that. I will say, however, that's when I learned the glorious benefits of taking your time, since we had all the time in the world. For those of you who can forgive the greasiness of this analogy, men are more like dragsters, all squealing swollen tires and quick flameout to the finish line, while women are more like diesel engines; they may take a while to warm up, but once she's ready she'll run you to the edge of wherever you want to go, and you'd better be prepared for the voyage, my friend.

Oh, and she demanded that I give her a hickey. I have never understood the appeal of a hickey. Some seem to think they are passion badges of honor. To me they resemble a sea lamprey attack. They don't feel much different than kisses on the neck, which are nice, and as such I don't see the need to damage the upholstery. Nonetheless, she pointed at her jugular below her ear, "Right here. A big one." And so I obliged. She even inspected it in the mirror before signing off on it. Whateryagonnado?

We eventually slept comfortably because the seats in a Buick Electra are bigger and cushier than most double beds. We awoke about an hour before the sun crested the hills behind us, and I got out to decide how to get us home. Off in the distance to the east was the frame of a new house with a obligatory beatup pickup out front, and it was a short jaunt from the highway so if no one was there, the trip wouldn't exactly be wasted, so off I went.

After about a mile down a dirt road, I had to strike out cross-country through some pastures and across a shallow stream. The stream conveniently had walking stones across it, but I swim like a rock, so it was still harrowing over some of the deeper places. Immediately beyond that was a wire fence. An electrical fence, I discovered the hard way. Upon touching an electrical fence, it feels as though someone has smacked your hand with a baseball bat, not viciously, but with enough of a whack that you automatically recoil; your teeth clack together; and you do a full body grunt, usually making a quiet "uhngh" vocalization as your lungs convulse. You invariably think the word "fuck." - lowercase, no exclamation point. Your fingertips buzz or tickle for a moment afterwards and then it's over. I happened to flash on the memory of an unfortunate pal who inadvertently discovered an electrical fence by peeing on it. I imagine his doobies bobbed liked yoyos during the delivery of the current.

To cross an electrical fence, you need something that doesn't conduct current like a wooden stick or plastic pipe. I found a piece of driftwood and pushed the fence down to stride over it, all the while the neon image of electrified doobies dancing in my head. I headed across the field, not really thinking along the lines of why there was an electrical fence there - this also being a symptom of teenage years, as I was never up this early in the morning on purpose and so my already compromised reasoning powers didn't fire up to provide any deeper thoughts than, "Walk in that general direction."

Lost in thought and sweet memories of the previous night, nothing short of a large explosion or a naked girl would have caught my attention. But after twenty minutes, something just seemed ... odd. Like I was being watched. Also, there was more background noise than is normal out on the vast, flat plains of the Midwest, something just beyond the noise of the wind in the wheat. Yes, there was a very low rumble behind me, so I turned around to discover a HUGE heard of cows following me. I mean, practically horizon to horizon huge, all in a nice straight line in the front, at least twenty deep, hundreds of liquid bovine eyes trained on my person. They were just strolling along behind me, not trying to catch up, so it dawned on me they probably thought (as much as cows think, that is) that I was there to feed them, so they were following me to the cattle larder, as it were. I had heard enough about this kind of thing to know not to run, because then the cows would run too, which can lead to some nasty consequences. But I gotta tell ya, it takes a pretty significant act of willpower to walk at a casual pace when thousands of tons of cow muscle balanced on hard, sharp hooves is a mere car-length behind you, staring at your back, drooling. They started to low as we went along, probably because we were getting close to where they usually got fed. When we got to the fence on the other side of the pasture, I just hauled of and jumped that sucker, not caring if my foot caught or if I got another jolt, doobie damage be damned. I didn't intend to have to tell Jesus I'd died from being tangoed on by a heard of cows. He'd make me wait in the same place with Bill Cosby had he died from drifting backwards into the San Francisco Bay because he can't work a clutch.

But the house was close now, and like a cow closing in on feed, I hurried towards it. Still shaken from the bovodinal slow-motion chase and the surprise of the fence, I was paying less attention than usual, and I thought I could see a phone mounted on one of the framing boards! What're the odds?

A flying, frothing Doberman yanked short on a chain four inches from my face, spraying it with foul dog spittle. It landed, recovered, and pulled so far out on the taught chain that it stood on its hind legs. "Hap! Hap! Hap! Hap! {gag} HACK! Hap! Hap! Hap!" it barked in full berserker mode. It wanted me so badly it was nearly comical. I had managed not to wet myself, but I stayed planted and had a full goose bozo attack of the fantods until I could regain my composure, such as it was.

There was indeed a phone in the house, but the chain of the dog was long enough that it could reach me in there. Adrenalin had finally fired up a couple brain cells, and it dawned on me that this was a dog. A dog on a chain. Tied to a tree. I walked in a circle around the tree beyond his reach, and the dog followed, eventually getting wrapped completely around the trunk, at the end of about five feet, allowing me to get to the phone. It was working and I called my grandma to rescue us (I lived with my grandma during my last couple years in high school as my mom had taken a job out of the state and I wanted to graduate with my friends).

I unwrapped the dog from the tree by walking circles the other direction, thinking it would be cruel to leave him to try to figure it out for himself. I imagined that the owner of the house would be pissed enough that there was a surprise long distance call on his phone, but he would be livid if he discovered his dog dead from dehydration or starvation.

To my surprise, the upperclassman who'd arranged this date showed up with his dad to retrieve us. My grandma had called them to let them know where the girl was, and they'd offered to retrieve us. They weren't angry after they discovered my car was truly MIA, and even they couldn't start it. We piled into their van and headed home.

She sat in the front seat, me and upperclassman in the back. She turned her head to watch the rest of the sunrise on the horizon, which exposed the massive hickey she'd demanded. Even more spectacularly, the light from the sun bounced off one of the van's mirrors just so, and it lit it up as though it were the star in a vaudeville act. The second I noticed it, I glanced over to upperclassman just in time to see his eyebrows rise in surprise. He shot a look over to me, and at first I though he was gonna get all tense in my direction like upperclassman tend to do just because they can, but instead he grinned and gave be a secretive thumbs up.

I got a lot of macho mileage with the guys from that hickey, delivered on a raft of good-natured ribbing, of course. I never saw the girl again, though. C'est la vie.

The Bankruptcy Laws

Republicans are rewriting the bankruptcy laws of our nation at the moment to make it harder for individuals - well harder for poor individuals anyway - to declare and then recover from bankruptcy. Of course, they aren't touching the laws that have to do with the kinds of bankruptcy that businesses can use. For a good rundown of what has transpired and what it might mean, go here.