The Earth A Common Treasury
Now Playing: Arcade Fire--"In the Backseat"
I can't seem to get enough of the cinema these days. It's a chore to go to the googolplex, especially with some of the crap that's been coming out (stop with the remakes! There's no fucking excuse and you know it!!), but that's no reason to ignore the art entirely. First in reverse chronological order, three on British politics:

The Queen (2006): I actually saw this shortly after Prime Suspect 7, so it was pretty much the whole Helen Mirren experience this month (now all I have to do is see O Lucky Man! again). I'm not a big fan of royalty or this particular family, but this was a sympathetic portrayal by Stephen Frears that recounted the week after Princess Diana's death in 1997, and really belongs to the actors. I don't think I've ever seen Mirren bad in anything... seventeen film and TV productions that I've seen off the top of my head, and she was great in all, even Teaching Mrs. Tingle, which sucked--as, of course, did Caligula. The family's good for laughs--James Cromwell is somewhat out of place as uber-chode Prince Philip, but Sylvia Syms and Alex Jennings are good as the Queen Mum and a dopey Prince Charles. The most entertaining turns come from Roger Allam as the Queen's faithful secretary (the man's destiny to play the "late model" in a Christopher Hitchens biopic is hopefully not far off) and Michael Sheen, whose deadly performances in okay (but why the sequels?) stuff like Underworld and gloriously insane crap like Timeline have apparently led to his casting as Tony Blair. Nailing the man's too-eager, shit-eating grin to perfection, he's probably best in his scenes with the great Helen McCrory as Cherie, when she realizes he's just a sellout like the rest of them.

A Very British Coup (1988): Ray McAnally had a long and diverse career, but probably had his finest hour shortly before his untimely death as Harry Perkins, steelworker turned British Labour Prime Minister in this excellent miniseries whose main drawbacks are (a) its relative tameness in this Bush 'n' Blair era when elected politicians think it's barely worth trying to conceal their contempt for democracy and (b) the overbearing, tinny synthesizer music so common to British TV of this era (and that made the late classic period of Doctor Who so occasionally excruciating). Once in power, Perkins tries to phase out U.S. bases, nuclear power, and restore the power of labor, and is opposed every step of the way by his own secret service and the Americans. The generally downbeat trend to the story, which makes one think it's all been seen before, is redeemed by a gripping, inspiring, and strangely inevitable ending, one of the best I've ever seen for a TV movie.

Winstanley (1975): Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo wrote a strange chapter in movie history by producing and financing their remarkable alternate history film It Happened Here (released in 1966) which looked at the effects of a German occupation of Britain during the Second World War. Ten years later, they told the story of the Diggers, a group of dissidents who grew out of the English Civil War and established various communes throughout the countryside after the war's end in 1649. Pressures from without and within forced their collapse within a decade, but not before leaving a legacy of folk memories (described in detail in Christopher Hill's 1972 analysis The World Turned Upside Down). It's a simple story, shot in brooding black-and-white, but features a weirdly moving central performance from non-actor Miles Halliwell as the title character, as well as an impressively handled low-budget battle sequence of the beginning that looks at times like it might have come from an Eisenstein movie (and unsurprisingly uses Prokofiev's score from Alexander Nevsky). Perhaps even more interesting than the actual movie is the behind-the-scenes documentary on the DVD, which painstakingly details the directors' efforts at historical accuracy (using period armor and weapons from the Tower of London, as well as varieties of pigs and chickens kept up only by historical breeding enthusiasts).

And the others...

Batman Begins (2005): I really like Christian Bale, and find him all the more impressive for recovering from stuff like Newsies and Swing Kids (even his wasted performance in Shaft was neutralized by everyone else's wastage, with the exception of Jeffrey Wright). I also enjoyed director Christopher Nolan's Memento. I don't really have anything invested in the Batman "mythos" (at least the non-Adam West versions), but I had to admit that it was pretty good. The strong cast helped--Michael Caine as Alfred, Morgan Freeman as a reclusive weapons expert, Liam Neeson as Bruce Wayne's onetime spiritual advisor, Gary Oldman as a Serpico-style anathematized cop, even Rutger Hauer as a crooked businessman. I'm not into Katie Holmes, but was pleasantly surprised to find she became less unbelievable as the movie progressed. The Chinese scenes at the beginning were gorgeous. I'm less a fan of the Gotham stuff, as I tink the melodramatic urban hellhole-ness so beloved of these movies (no, not a Crow fan) is generally expressive of anti-urban undertones that haven't done much good for recent human settlement patterns, especially in this country. Still, for a movie so intent on wallowing in arty urban miasma, Batman Begins carries itself well.

A Very Long Engagement (2003): I never saw Amelie, and didn't know what to expect from Audrey Tautou in this post-WW1 flick based on Sebastien Japrisot's novel that I feared would turn into an English Patient lite, with Tautou as a French girl who goes looking for her fiance, the latter missing in action at the front. She was good, and the movie, though I found it a little longish, was better than I expected, with murderous hookers and lots of quirkiness (even if the latter too often veers towards the cutesy) to balance out the "our love is stronger than death" stuff that always makes me think of Daniel Day-Lewis in Last of the Mohicans. The visuals are sumptuous and filling--both the scenes in the trenches and those of civilian life--with at least one surprise cameo making me jump in my seat (as will you, probably, if you didn't know about it). My main beef is that there should have been much more Julie Depardieu. I won't go any further, but really. That aside, Engagement is one of those I probably should have seen in the theater. I hope there's no lesson there.

Novembrage
Now Playing: Guided By Voices--"Tractor Rape Chain"
1. Twelfth Night: I decided to check out this U-M "Rude Mechanicals" Shakespeare production on a whim. I'd seen them do The Merchant of Venice, and as the Royal Shakespeare Company Patrick Stewart-Harriet Walter juggernaut was (a) expensive and (b) sold out, this was a more than acceptable alternative. I'd seen a British TV version of Twelfth Night from 1970 in high school, with Alec Guinness as Malvolio and Joan Plowright as Viola (and developed a crush on the latter that probably would have mystified most of my peers had they known of it) and remembered it being rather fun. This time it was more ambiguously funny than laugh-out-loud; it's not The Merry Wives of Windsor. Most people fall in love for the wrong reasons (or at least unexpected ones) and most people are out to swindle each other in some way. Actually, that is my kind of romantic comedy. The cast was terrific, especially Lara Vanderheiden as Maria, and the set created a believable Illyria with minimal fuss.

2. Election Day: Much better than the one two years past, at the end of which I staggered out of Leopold's three sheets to the wind and half-suicidal, as did much of the country (not out of Leopold's, but still...). Fortunately, sanity seems to have caught on more generally. It got to the point of personal superstition; I voted for John Kerry and, a year later, losing 2nd Ward Democratic primary challenger Eugene Kang while being first in my precinct to vote. That didn't happen this year. I stayed at home that evening and listened to the fracas on NPR while polishing off a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Granholm was reelected governor, which was a relief, as Dick DeVos was a joke (and, as certain of my friends can testify, is exquisitely creepy in person); "intelligent design" is the least of his problems.* On learning of the circus in other parts of the country, I was disappointed for the first time in years that I didn't have cable. Whether it was reading of the hilarious mass demoralization on Fox News or of Chris Matthews' consternation that his personal friends--"good guys!"--were actually losing, it would have been fun to watch.** It was a joy to learn that the ludicrous abortion ban in South Dakota was voted down. And good for Sherrod Brown, winning the Ohio Senate seat! He became the Democratic primary winner for Congress in my district, I believe, right after I left Akron four years ago (just in time to not be able to vote for Lynn Rivers in Ann Arbor, so there were two genuine progressives I never got to support). I voted early in the morning, worked all day, and decided to celebrate Election Day after work by going to see...

3. Borat (2006): It's wildly overpraised, which isn't a surprise, as respectable critics like Rolling Stone's Peter Travers and Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum have been stopping just short of crediting it with curing scrofula. That doesn't mean it isn't funny. A lot's been made of the nasty American archetypes Borat encounters along the way, but there are fairly benign episodes as well--leaving merriment in his wake at a Jackson, MS TV newscast, bemusing an unflappable etiquette tutor, and browsing a garage sale he mistakes for a gypsy camp. It's not so much generally satirical as gross-out funny, but that's fine with me. I kept giggling at Borat memories the next day at work, but then the same thing happened with the Father Ted episodes "Flight Into Terror" and "Chirpy Burpy Cheap Sheep,"*** so I can't say I was as blown away as many others seemed to be. I was glad I went, though.

4. "Work": The same day, I had the alternately troubling and delicious realization that my boss would be nowhere near as annoying if she, say, smoked crack. "Hey, can you get me... some 'stuff'?" is something we hear too rarely around there.

5. Thanksgiving: I went home to see my family, hung out with my relatives, and had a good time, although I may have eaten too much seafood. No. No, that's ridiculous. I was reminded of how much I love airports (not kidding), rolled in Louisiana culture by drinking Abita Amber while watching the excellent LSU-Arkansas football game (as well as the insane original 1967 Casino Royale on BBC America), and found that one can never quite escape Ann Arbor music--a Canada song came on my brother's satellite radio while he drove me to the airport Saturday morning. I also read Left Behind, which was surprisingly tolerable, but still not good enough to follow through. Next up on my list of stuff I never thought I'd find myself reading: Marx's Capital (that's the plan, anyway).

6. 32nd Birthday: I can't believe it either. Actually, I can, which is "worse." I flew back to Detroit, roaming around Memphis Airport on my layover, and then Detroit, doing the same with Ann Arbor in general once I returned. Though strangely invigorated, I took things fairly easy, and was tickled pink to find a whole gaggle of birthday wishes on the net from the BHF folks (thanks, guys!).

Decent month, all told.

*Now, I am willing to support the teaching of intelligent design in biology classes under certain reciprocal conditions: alchemy should be taught in chemistry classes and necromancy and divination offered as electives.

**To paraphrase one poster on Tapped, "gee, Chris, you don't think that maybe it's because of actual positions these candidates espouse, rather than that they're your friends?" This proves that it apparently pays to watch Chris Matthews. I also missed the eight-years-in-the-making moment last month when Bill Clinton gave the towheaded blowhard the works for being a right-wing noise machine shill. It was apparently splendid; in a lot of ways, Matthews is a likable goofball and he does seem to have a knack for making an entertaining show. They should get him to host Family Feud.

***ALAN: Should I call the police, Father?

TED: No. He's lost the trust of his sheep. And that's punishment enough... for a farmer who deals primarily... with sheep.

Parallel Lines On A Slow Decline
Now Playing: Tyrannosaurus Rex--"King of the Rumbling Spires"
"Tolstoy would have us believe that every happy family is happy in the same way. I for one don't buy it. It's impossible to imagine a family happy having learned their father will be released from his ten-year imprisonment in a gulag sharing the identical emotion with the family that has just won a meal for six at Pearson's Big Steer Restaurant. Tolstoy's an idiot for even suggesting it. Does he really expect us to believe that the happiness shared by the Marx Brothers, having just pummeled Margaret Dumont with their body blows, is the same as that shared by the Howard brothers, Moe, Curly, and Shemp, having just extracted their dear friend Larry's head from a tight mine shaft? Tolstoy's starting to look like more and more of a jackass with each fresh example."

--Michael J. Nelson, in "The Baldwins" from Mike Nelson's Movie Megacheese (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).

Things are finally starting to cool up (?) in Michigan. We had (so far as I know) the year's first snow on November 2. The skies are more generally overcast and the stars seem brighter and more distant when perceived from Wurster Park on a clear night while en route to a friend's house to watch old Brian Clemens Thriller episodes from 1973.

My life's been relatively staid recently; Gloria moved back to Spain and we haven't gotten a "replacement housemate" yet. Gloria was fun, but there's a silver lining in her departure in that I won't be tempted to watch Grey's Anatomy anymore. The always excellent combo of Starling Electric and Great Lakes Myth Society gave a terrific show at the Blind Pig last weekend, after which the former gave a party at their house, one at which I promised myself not to be too outlandish. This promise worked out as well as any of them, as it did when a bunch of us met at Leopold's two nights later to celebrate Amy's birthday.

Guided By Voices are generally terrific, as I got to discover last weekend. I've somehow managed to slip out of the general American musical continuum in my love for most things local in the past year and a half, and am usually only able to keep up with new stuff through the spotty 107.1 FM. After hearing stuff from Beck's new album, The Information, I'm going to try and try and make more of an effort.

I've fallen into a writing slump, mainly due to all the reading I've been doing--Kevin Starr's Americans and the California Dream: 1850-1915, Jan Morris' Fifty Years of Europe, Eric Rauchway's excellent Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America (a splendid microhistory of the "Major's" 1901 assassination by Leon Czolgosz, and what I think would make a fantastic American Experience documentary), Neil Christopher's story "Cerberus Rising", and I'm about to start on George Packer's Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq.

"There was the Bush/Rove/DeLay revolution, a brilliant perpetual plan for winning elections, raising money and concentrating power. Even if they were never verbalized, everyone implicitly understood the revolution's prime directives: support the president blindly, demonize the opposition and never break ranks. It wasn't hard to be this kind of Republican. If you could read at a fourth-grade level, pray to Jesus and exhibit genuine terror before photos of men holding hands, you could ride the revolution all the way to Washington with a ten-point cushion."

--Matt Taibbi, in "Ohio Burning" from Rolling Stone, 16 Nov. 2006.

There's voting everywhere in the country, as far as I know, on Tuesday. Don't forget to vote!* I think there's a good chance things will go better than they did two years ago. Of course, that's also what I thought two years ago.

So... not much going on, really. Again.

*Although I don't think it's a good idea to assume a snotty know-it-all attitude towards those perceived to be relatively uninterested in voting, as some did when putting up flyers in downtown Ann Arbor reminding "those stupid kids" of the midterms in needlessly arch and condescending terms--"maybe you can 'Google' it!" I suspect their civic virtue would have had more effect had they correctly identified Election Day as November 7 instead of November 5. I usually refrain from defacing other people's flyers, but this was sort of a moral imperative.

Sir! Playing That Funky Music, Sir!
Now Playing: The Clash--"Lost in the Supermarket"
Monday's radio in Ann Arbor (for me, anyway) ran hot and cold--as anywhere, it's a mess of different stations, some good, some bad, all of which inspire me with imaginings I'm sadly impelled to share with other people.

1. Technically not radio, but my colleague Adelito's 100% Funk CD. One of the more pleasant thoughts I had Monday was that Rick James' "Super Freak" should be made into an opera. I've been getting into opera recently (a drawback of local radio is the intermittent access to CBC Radio 2; Saturday afternoon's broadcast of Mozart's La clemenza di Tito fuzzed in and out with what sounded like a mixture of Jessica Webster's jazz show on the Ypsi NPR station and Ted Nugent--way to go, Nuge! that'll show those opera-lovin' pussies!), and maybe this is the inevitable result. You could cobble a libretto out of the title character's eccentric proclivities (think Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor) and various 80s movie cliches: rugged loner from the wrong side of the tracks loves spoiled rich cutie in leg warmers with secret lunacy issues (eating live squirrels?). It's all really an excuse to see Placido Domingo in full Lohengrin getup take the stage to belt out: "Sheeeee's a veeery kinky girl, the kind you doooooon't take home to maaaaamaaaaa..."

2. I plan to brush up on my knowledge of Proposal 5 well before the election in two weeks, but I'm leaning towards "yes" by the idiotic "no" commercial being run by God knows who. A man and a woman are sitting clinking crockery and silverware together in an unexplained fashion (are they eating? is it breakfast, lunch, or dinner? are the man and woman together, just friends, or in a server-customer relationship? who's who?) and I believe the man brings up Proposal 5 (something to do with financial set-asides and the Detroit teachers' union, apparently). It is hilariously awful. The woman begins to assail him with a variety of contentions that aren't really contentions at all but simple denials with no evidence supporting or refuting them. And why did they include the crockery noises? They add no versimilitude and the thing probably would have been more effective if it had just been the two people shouting. Now, I know that practically all political commercials are artistic pollutants, but this one scratches the chalkboard mainly due to the woman's prissy, hectoring, self-righteous manner. "New classrooms?" the man asks. "Nooooothing in there!" she replies in a voice that sounds like she's being done up the rear by a satyr. The man's pretty funny towards the end when he tries to be righteously indignant: "Why, that's not what they say at all!" Once I find out what "they" say, I'll know more. I'm guessing.

3. I stopped listening to WCBN largely due to the vast stretches of ambient agony that seemed to create their own radio orthodoxy, but also because half the time one can't understand what the DJs are saying. This is particularly true of one or two of the female DJs, who sound like they're ordering the domestic affairs of a dollhouse mansion. I heard one of them Monday night, though, and found her comprehensible and even charming. Maybe I'm the problem.

I certainly have nothing at all against the female voice, but these two happened to converge that day, which was bizarre. I'd grab that for the most exciting weekly event thus far. As for the commercial, it seems intensely trivial, but this is how our political process is organized these days. I wouldn't buy a fucking thing from those people.

Dangerous Soups
Now Playing: The Go! Team--"Huddle Formation"
The curried lentil's got it in for me. But meanwhile...

Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphonies 6 and 11

I hadn't been to an orchestral performance, really, since I heard the AASO play Berlioz' shortly after I moved here. My indiscriminate, wanton listening pleasure from CBC Radio 2 having recently rekindled my love of orchestral music, I decided I should probably take the opportunity--the $10, mezzanine opportunity--to check out a world-famous orchestra when one finally hit town. As a resuly, I decided Friday to go hear Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra play Dmitri Shostakovich's Sixth and Eleventh Symphonies (the latter entitled "The Year 1905", in honor of the abortive rebellions against the czarist government) at Hill Auditorium. I've been meaning to go there again for some time, as the local University musical societies often put on shows there. After last night, I suspect I'll become something of a regular visitor.

The Kirov dates from the early 1700s, when Peter the Great put together the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra as part of his westernizing programs. It achieved great prominence in the world of European music (Verdi's La forza del destino premiered there, as did the Russian production of Wagner's Ring cycle) up to and into the Soviet era, when it was renamed the Kirov (presumably after Stalin's "mysteriously" murdered henchman-cum-rival of 1934). Valery Gergiev has been conducting there for some time, having performed some of Shostakovich's other symphonies here last year to great popular acclaim. Many of the stories concerning the maestro focus on his intense, bestubbled appearance, and I'm afraid I can't let it go without observing that he does look like he should be threatening Vin Diesel in a number of straight-to-video minor action masterpieces.

I'm not actually the world's biggest Shostakovich fan, but I was glad I went. With all the orchestral stuff I've been listening to lately, it was good to get a picture of how an orchestra actually works, although the place of the conductor therein is still a bit of a mystery to me. At the last minute, the order was reversed, with the Sixth coming first. Call me cynical, but I suspect it was done in order to prevent mass desertions in the second half, as I believe the Eleventh to be more popular and famous. The Sixth was a sprightly little number with only three movements that tended towards neoclassicism in the lack of a programmatic background or any sort of atonal muckery, and was all right, but it was good to get to the Eleventh. Held in the program and in various musical histories as a ringing condemnation of tyranny everywhere (still up in the air, I understand, whether Shostakovich included his own bosses in the statement), it began with a chilling portrayal of the square in which the "Bloody Sunday" masacre of January 1905 took place, the warm sterility of the music recalling some of the passages from Dune, in which Duke Leto muses to Paul about their new life on Arrakis. The propulsive nature of the ensuing movements (concluding with the "Tocsin," in which a bell is struck repeatedly on stage to end the thing) actually got me moving in my seat like I was dancing at a show, which didn't come as a big surprise as much of the stuff I've been hearing lately includes orchestral arrangements, usually strings. A couple of others were doing the same thing, and it all went down terribly well. There were several curtain calls after it was all over, and I managed to beat the frenzied rush for the exits and move into the increasingly cold night.

The Lost Continent (1968)

Every time I see waht I think is the craziest damn movie ever made, I have to revise my opinion a week or so later. Last time it was Zachariah (1970), which I watched to get the Eurosleaze stench of The Sinful Dwarf (1972) and Tintorera (1977) out of my nostrils, with future 80s TV stars John Rubinstein (Crazy Like A Fox)* and Don Johnson (what else?) as hippie gunfighters in the Old West, with a supporting cast including Country Joe and the Fish, Doug Kershaw, Dick Van Patten, and the James Gang. But enough.

The Lost Continent was a good Hammer movie. For someone who loves British horror movies so much, I'm not a big fan of Hammer Films (the words I suspect most aficionados hear when they think "British horror movies"), and think they were at their best when getting away from the tired old Dracula and Frankenstein formulas and coming up with stuff like Quatermass and the Pit (1968), Captain Kronos (1974), and The Lost Continent. The latter is based on the novel Uncharted Seas, by that racist old curmudgeon Dennis Wheatley. His novels are generally awful (he was sort of the fictional equivalent of Paul Johnson) but they had some good stuff made out of them, like this and The Devil Rides Out of the same year. The plot of The Lost Continent sounds like something I might have come up with when I was in my early years of high school (and one may ask why the hell I didn't): A tramp steamer escapes from Sierra Leone with a bunch of sketchy, horny, insane drunk people on board, as well as a cargo of explosives that will detonate when coming into contact with water. A hurricane and a mutiny later, the remaining crew and passangers drift into the Sargasso Sea, encountering bloodsucking vines (the second Hammer effect I've inadvertently copied in one of my short stories), a creature variously described in other synopses as a giant octopus or jellyfish (it doesn't get a lot of screen time, so the question's probably moot), giant crabs and scorpions, a lost "civilization" descended from Spanish conquistador and Inquisitor castaways, and a gutsy female freedom fighter with great Renaissance Fair fashion sense and what I can only describe as Cyclopean cleavage.

It's completely batshit but awesome, and this is all due to the cast. Eric Porter manages to be heroic, thoughtful, and gloriously crass at the same time as the captain, and, while I know he was a big television name in the UK (Soames Forsyte in the first Forsyte Saga, Moriarty in the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes, and Count Bronowsky in The Jewel in the Crown), I don't recall seeing any of his film work before (note to self: see Hands of the Ripper). Tony Beckley, as the merry drunk Tyler, gives one of his best performances (and I've seen him opposite Orson Welles' Falstaff in Chimes of Midnight as Ned Poins, Michael Caine's Charlie in The Italian Job as Camp Freddy, and Tom Baker's Doctor in the 1976 Doctor Who story "The Seeds of Doom"--see what I mean about this cast?). The movie's debatably greatest moment arrives with Porter's announcement that the ship is taking on water: Beckley grins cheekily and starts playing the "Dead March" from Saul on the piano (while I almost snorted up my beer, I think one of the characters hits him immediately afterward). Suzanna Leigh, she of the clingy dresses, entices various male crew and passengers, most of whom meet suspiciously sticky ends--the radioman in a comically gruesome termination (The Lost Continent has a fair number of these, some of which foretell Return of the Jedi and Dead Calm) and the sleazy con man Ricaldi (the hilarious--and wonderfully named--Benito Carruthers) being dragged off the screen by the aformentioned unidentified tentacled invertebrate (UTV--it just looks better than UTI--and if it's unidentified, how do we really know it's an invertebrate at all?). Her crass, possessive father, played by Nigel Stock, also gets it at some point. So stay the hell away from her, I guess. Hildegarde Knef, as the past-hampered Eva, brings most of the run-of-the-mill pathos to this movie, but apart from some good scenes with porter, and a healthy, bracing "we have to do something!" ethic throughout the movie, there's not much of that. Jimmy Hanley and a refreshingly spirited James Cossins are wonderful as crew members, and Dana Gillespie is not only gorgeous and well-endowed but also does a good job on the acting front, as she would nine years later in The People That Time Forgot. The whole thing unfolds against a backdrop of eye-catching, mildly psychedelic (alternately impressive and laughable) set design, as well as a soundtrack that oscillates between stiff-upper-lip action-adventure orchestral and organ-laden soft-porn. Great stuff.

This was my first ever Netflix movie, by the way (not counting Quatermass and the Pit, which I ordered earlier this month but which turned out to have an inexplicable gash down the middle); while I'll still probably rent from Liberty Street, I can't deny how great it is to have such a service available. The selection alone makes it worth subscribing, and at $6-10 a month, it's gloriously affordable.

*With Slavic composers still fresh in the mind, I found out that Rubinstein is the son of Arthur Rubinstein, legendary pianist and one of the most iconic interpreters of Chopin.

Marche Macabre
Now Playing: Felix Mendelssohn--Nocturne from A Midsummer Night's Dream
This past weekend I took a little stroll through the worlds of the undead. My thighs still hurt.

Friday evening, Tracy and Dan held a zombie/medical themed party for the latter's birthday, and as an early celebration for Halloween.* I decided to go along, sans costume, having made a quiche provencale for the occasion (I don't know if anyone's used that name yet, but it's a quiche with Dijon mustard, Gruyere, and herbes de provence, so I'm running with it).** Their house lies across the Huron River to the north, an area of town I've been strangely negligent in exploring. I took the bus at first, and walked some way past their house into the further reaches of Jones Drive, set on a ridge above Plymouth Road and concealed by a thick range of trees that give the impression of some far-out suburb (complete with buckyball-style residence towering over the rest), rather than in an actual city. Tracy and Dan dressed up as, respectively, a zombie nurse and a mad scientist, and their house is at once a very well-done, muted celebration of kitsch and a comfortable zone for conversation, dining, and, as I found, partying. I was the only one with no costume, but I took advantage of my Inspector Gadget-style beige overcoat (thank you, Vince) to play the role of Doug's drug dealer (he was dressed as a mental patient, complete with stylized dribble down his shirt). Sara, Amy, and Maria were there (Sara dressed as an undead clown in hospital scrubs), as were several people I'd never met before, but it was a lovely time, and I stayed far longer than I intended. The walk back was very enjoyable, as once again, I'm not too familiar with that part of town, and it's always a treat to find somewhere genuinely new to walk in Ann Arbor. Jones Drive at night, bending towards its southern extremity, has a picturesque Maurice Sendak quality, with dimly-lit houses sparsely placed behind trees, that would probably vanish in daylight.

One of the reasons I hadn't come in costume and meant to leave early was to save my energies for Saturday, when Adam and Margot put the (First Annual?) Ann Arbor Zombie Pubcrawl into action. The idea was to dress up as zombies and hit about eighteen different bars in the downtown area, staying around twenty minutes in one spot and then moving on to the next. We ended up with nine people by the end of the night (Adam, Margot, Sara, Maria, Amy, Adam's friends John and Noelle, myself, and this guy John that Margot met at Babs'), which was something of a blessing considering some of the bars we visited (only eight of those, too, as the small number of people meant that we could better adjust to our collective stamina level). I took an old chef shirt of mine, gashed it in a few places with (fittingly) a server key, employed red marker in several strategic locations about my face and torso, wrote "I'm not your fucking server" on my undershirt, donned my chef pants and doo-rag, and probably thereby anticipated my eventual destiny. Everyone else's costumes were cooler, but I'm not really good at that sort of thing.

Starting at Casey's, we gradually worked our way south until hitting Leopold's later that evening, stopping at the /aut/bar, the Heidelberg, Grizzly Peak, the Old Town, the 8-Ball, and Babs'. It was a lot of fun--great conversation, good laughs, meat-and-potatoes style alcohol, an unexpected literary commission of sorts, and the presumed amusement of onlookers. Adam had put a lot of thought into it, bless him, and almost didn't deserve our occasional giggles as he tried to keep amending the schedule as we decided to cut various bars from our itinerary. The only dodgy part occurred when we entered Grizzly Peak at a sensitive moment in the Detroit-Oakland baseball game going on and got al these gimlet stares from the massed horde of sports fans at the tables. We found a relatively secluded spot towards the back and watched the game ourselves, only to be verbally assaulted (in a well-meaning fashion, I'm convinced), by this drunk woman who demanded to know from what sort of wedding we had escaped (I think; Margot was dressed as a blood-spattered bride and Adam was working serious Mr. Peanut mojo in top and tails). Unsatisfied with our answers, she went to pee, saving us a lot of embarrassment (I think). We relaxed afterward at the Old Town with some Stroh's, tasty gossip, and the effects of a lovely sunset visible through the window, the game forming a sort of audiovisual wallpaper in the background. I chatted with Amy and Maria (zombie lumberjack and lunchlady, respectively) at the 8-Ball while Adam and Sara (God knew what, really; she bore a slight resemblance to Clara Keller in The Sinful Dwarf--and no, you don't want to know what that means--except for "Sweetums," the open-brained, undead pooch with a slight resemblance of its own, this time to "Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog") played darts, all of us witnessing the game's glorious climax as Tiger batter Magglio Ordonez hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth, sending two more of his own across the plate and stealing the game from under the As' noses. I now like Babs'--it took a while for me to get used to the loss of the old dive on Liberty Street (now the lackluster Alley Bar; the fuckers didn't even bother to give it a name)--but the new place has its own kind of faux-sophisticate charm, and the happy hour apparently lasts all week. By Leopold's, I found my stamina flagging (heaven knows what would have happened had we decided to hit all eighteen original bars), and left after a glass of IPA, taking care to snag some of the delicious smoked Gouda on my way out.

I got home to find Ted and Gloria watching The Aviator and went to bed. The next day, Lou showed Abel Gance's Le Grand Amour de Beethoven (1936) at Cinema Guild, pretty much the epitome of the silly, self-important biopic--whenever Beethoven has some grandiose turning point, the opening bars of the Fifth Symphony play with a brutal lack of subtlety that I now find funny. If you just watch it for the visuals, it's pretty good. Harry Baur is terrific in the title role ("Beethoven," not the "grand amour") although the movie's nowhere near as good as Gance's earlier Napoleon (1927).

*I'm not sure how I'll be celebrating the actual holiday. I've no idea if trick-or-treaters come around my neighborhood. They'll all probably be at parent-approved, state-licensed candy-dispensing houses in the early afternoon run by religious organizations or Amway, but I'll still put out a jack-o'lantern.

** The full name is "Provencal Tart with Gruyere and Herbes de Provence," from Frank Mentesana and Jerome Audureau's Once Upon A Tart... Soups, Salads, Muffins, and More (New York: Knopf, 2003), a cookbook the people who lived on Spring Street before I did left behind.

Bootstrap Blues
Now Playing: Margot and the Nuclear So-and-Sos--"Barfight revolution, power violence"
One of my least favorite things to do in the world is to seek employment. As the only jobs I seem to be able to find are restaurant jobs, the situation grows doubly depressing. There are, however, a number of factors that lighten my load in this instance. 1. I don't really need the job; I already have one, and I'm hardly starving or anything. 2. I'm having a fairly good life otherwise: I hang out with friends every now and again, I've been writing my ass off, I've been published, and it's relatively likely that I'll be so again either at the end of this year or the beginning of the next. 3. While filling out this particular application, I realize that all three of the places I worked previous to my present "posting" no longer exist, which I find grimly amusing. I am become death, etc. etc.

Because of point 1, I was able to relax a little while filling out the application, as it's hardly a matter of life or death. I suspect some cultural anthropologist wil one day bust a gut (if they haven't already) at our employment applications. I remember a Sunday morning conversation at the Fleetwood some time back in which Kathy and Aviva discussed the hilarious "why do you want to work here?" question (usually begging the answer "because I need a fucking job" rather than "I expect to find great spiritual and material fulfillment scrubbing pots or scraping the gum off parking lots"). Sadly, on this present specimen, it's been left off somehow. There's also the "what is your greatest strength/weakness?" question. The expected answer (and the one I suspect practically everyone else puts, as do I) is "I get along well with people and am a good worker, but I'm also kind of a perfectionist and am too hard on myself." All right, I didn't put that second part on there. Once I get another one of those, and if I don't need the job, I've composed an alternate response: "well, over the years, I've come to hate people to the point where I've grown into a borderline sociopath, but at the same time, I'm pathologically lazy, so there's not really a whole lot I can do about it--one way or the other." Not really true, but it has a certain contrapuntal charm in this case, and maybe someone'll get a good laugh out of it.

Fortunately, there's always the cinema.

Deathdream (1972): Also--blasphemously--known as Dead of Night, but only shares an alternate title with that British horror classic. I as intrigued to learn that the movie was written by Alan Ormsby, who wrote and starred in the contemporaneous Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, already discussed in this forum. Andy (Richard Backus), reported killed in Vietnam, returns home to his surprised family, who begin to fear that something is wrong once people and animals turn up horribly killed in the vicinity. Light years ahead of Children (which had its own goofy charm), Deathdream was somewhat groundbreaking, as it portrayed the effect of the Vietnam War on the homefront in a compellingly sensitive and poignant way for what's basically a combination vampire and zombie movie. Backus is excellent as the moribund Andy (he would play another returned veteran, this time of the First World War, in the PBS American Short Stories production of Hemingway's "Soldier's Home", with Nancy Marchand, four years later), and John Marley (the horse's-head guy in The Godfather) and Lynn Carlin (Cassavetes' Faces, also with Marley) play his parents in a way that suggests Andy's problems began well before he enlisted (Carlin in particular; her creepy possessive feelings for her son drive a lot of the tension). A few Children alums show up: Jane Daly (Terri) is charmingly annoying as ever as Andy's loopy girlfriend Joanne, and I was delighted to see Anya Ormsby (Anya) as Andy's sweet, knowing sister Cathy. The quality chasm between Deathdream and Children piques my curiosity to see Ormsby's Deranged, about serial killer Ed Gein. Maybe one of these days...

Soakin' It All Up For Your Blog, Dude??
Now Playing: Don McLean--"Vincent"
Hello Stranger is coming to the Blind Pig on the 19th of September, 2006. Until a few days ago, I didn't understand what exactly "that" entailed. I've now heard their eponymous debut, and can safely say that they make the Beatles look like Warrant. Brian Wilson look like Jim Stafford. Goya like Boris Vallejo. Hogarth like Bill Keane... in all seriousness, though, they're pretty damn good if I say so myself. My friend and Planned Parenthood volunteer coordinator Jessica Ross knows the guitarist, listed on the album as "Jared Nelson Smith," and enlisted me in flyering duties last weekend, so I decided to acquaint myself with their oeuvre.

The band also includes singer Juliette Commagere and drummer Joachim Cooder, both of whom split keyboard duties. Moving past the album cover, which looks like a cross between Nicolai Roerich's haunting oil landscapes of Soviet Central Asia and one of those demented dawbs found in Saddam Hussein's palace, we have a collection of songs that was actually much better than I expected. There's lots of keyboard, which comes close to making this an 80s-retro thing. Fortunately, Hello Stranger manage to combine this seeming fondness for older music with a very fresh, danceable, hook-laden sound. I hate to use the device of incorporating other bands via tortuous relationships in order to describe a group, but it really can't be helped.* They remind me a little of the Casionauts with a little more melody and a lot less thrash, with a throaty female lead vocalist. I want to say that Commagere's voice reminds me of Neko Case, but I'm not sure that's right.** It's a good'un, though, no doubt about it. The songs range from the fast-paced lure of "Robody" to the slow lament of "Kubrick Eyes" to the Spanish language nuevo-disco of "Es Tu Vida." As I said, they're playing in a week with the Great Fiction and Woodward, so it'll be interesting to find if Hello Stranger rise to the recorded level of this terrific debut.

*"Okay, so it's like Elliott Smith and Prince are getting stoned and watching Royal Tenenbaums in Rilo Kiley's apartment, and Maurice Jarrre's paying the pizza guy--and the pizza guy's Doug Kershaw!! If that happened, it'd be a lot like Hello Stranger. Or not."

**And leads to those associational atrocities again--"Flavor of Neko Case with smoky hints of Beth Orton and just a suggestion of Vashti Bunyan"--you get the idea.

Friday Night Baking
Now Playing: Black Keys--"Grown So Ugly"
Well, it might have been if I hadn't been so tired. I chose to forgo the inaugural Halfass show of the season (Dabenport, playing with the highly-regarded The Recital and the Dollfaces, the latter in their final performance) so that I could sleep early and rise likewise, in order to get the baking for work done. I'd planned on doing it Friday night but was way too exhausted to do much of anything besides sleep. The party hounds living on either side of our house woke me at about midnight. I really do not understand beer pong. I reminds me more than anything of the old "Grand Prize Game" on The Bozo Show, so I guess it's encouraging to see it continue its existence in such a sozzled form. I don't understand the obviously strong emotions of joy it apparently evokes in people when they score (however they do so), and I still can't believe I witnessed a fight break out over a game a couple of years back (from the shouts and yelling, the dispute apparently revolved around "respect" or some such). Two of my housemates were up and doing God knew what in their rooms--I think Gary was watching television while drinking (somehow I missed the beginning of college football season this year) and Roman's activities remain a total mystery. While nonplussed to find, on trying to take a shower at four in the morning, that someone else was using the bathroom, I read my way out of it.*

I like working alone. By "alone," I mean "without my boss." It helped that I walked to work at four-thirty this morning, not a soul in the streets, in possibly perfect weather. The stars were still out and the clouds on offer turned the sky into a melange of violets, a light breeze completing the ensemble. My job was to fill the quota of muffin mixes, quiche crusts, and cookie doughs for the next week; it took me about three hours, all told. I made sure to provide the soundtrack--Bowie, the Black Keys, Pretty Girls Make Graves (not really that into them, but they were somehow on the tape), Rocket From The Tombs, and Starling Electric. It always helps to give the place a psychic cleansing of sorts after so much 107.1 FM, "The Same Variety All The Time." There are few more enjoyable experiences I've found than working alone in a downtown kitchen at five-thirty on a Saturday morning (the day's important, too--I suspect it's a hangover from Saturday morning cartoons) with good music and no pressure. It actually feels like I'm working, and not just "being employed."

An outdoor breakfast at the Fleetwood afterwards finished off a perfect morning. The server saw me bring my dishes in from the outside.

"You work in a restaurant, don't you?"

"How'd you guess?"

*I realize that such tales open my blog to accusations of petty navel-gazing, of the sort that so exercises national and regional journalists as to the self-absorption and destined-for-hell status of younger people and particularly bloggers. To these I say "fuck you," especially as they should probably be more worried about the shitty state of their own media, its corporate dominance, and its repulsive subservience to the present state of things. Thank you.

In any case, I love this guy.

Dandelion Kill
Now Playing: David Bowie--"Width of a Circle"
Labor Day Weekend: Much less eventful than last, but not much less enjoyable.

After taking a break from writing for the past week (I wrote three whole stories in August--a personal record--so I was ready for one), I'm ready to go at it again. On what I'm not sure, other than my library school statement of purpose, in which I'm trying to fit career goals, social conscience, and previous experience. There's that and then there'll be a story concerning the undead. Shawn, the filmmaker contracted to capture Madisonfest on video last weekend, took leave of me by suggesting we work on a zombie flick at some point in the future. I'm going to assume, however cavalierly, that he wasn't joking and write some sort of necrophagous barnburner if at all possible. It's a good excuse, anyway, and it'll keep me going until a more serious topic crops up.

My house is now chock-full of people, every room occupied, and a more pleasant little Spanish-Peruvian-indeterminate Slavic-American place you can't imagine. Gloria's from Murcia, Virginia's from Cuzco, Ted's from... somewhere in Michigan, and I'm guessing Gary's the same. He used to live on State Street, anyway. As for Roman, the guy who lives next door to me, we see very, very little of him. Does he walk the streets at night like a lame bat, I wonder? My guess is that he's Polish, but I have very little to go on. Gloria speaks rudimentary English, and Virginia even less, so it'll be fun (for me, anyway) to navigate the linguistic minefields for a while. It's even more pleasant when I think of the yahoos who used to live with me (they thankfully lasted about four months of my moving in; the Mormon kid left for undisclosed reasons, Sed got sick of Tim, Tim was evicted, and the crackhead who worked at Gratzi--Gratzi! Maybe I should apply there!--foolishly got himself caught "feeding the beast" in the basement bathroom, an event I sadly wasn't present to witness).

Sunday, we actually had an impromptu movie night! I'd just finished watching Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) as Gloria came in to eat. Ted showed up and wanted to watch What About Bob? (1991). We had no problem with that (I hadn't seen it) and watched for about an hour until Virginia walked in. So all four of us watched What About Bob?, I reading Philip K. Dick's Our Friends From Frolix 8 (1970) in the meantime. It was a really nice, homey gathering, with some lively Spanglish conversation. I've been known to enjoy my solitude, but it's always nice to have friendly people to watch movies with you. Alice? Scorsese successfully pulls off a gentle, slice-of-life comedy-drama and inspires a beloved 70s sitcom along the way. I wasn't old enough to know if Ellen Burstyn was a genuine star back in those days, but she should have been (and I'm too big a man to care that she's playing the Christopher Lee role in that Wicker Man remake). Bob? Personally, I'm a little skeptical of the whole Bill Murray career-reinvention hype, but he's undeniably delightful as the panaphobic Bob. Dreyfuss is perfect as his tightassed psychiatrist nemesis. Frolix 8? Bemused by the Dick cult, I read his late 1950s novel The Cosmic Puppets a few months ago, and wasn't impressed; it seemed like a middling Outer Limits episode. Frolix 8 is an absolute stunner, the story of an oppressed, drug- and television-sedated America in the mid-22nd century in which apparently intelligent people are relegated to menial occupations by the more genetically advanced via standardized testing and educational placement. A resistance force builds up, but is powerless until the return of its exiled leader from space, accompanied by his new, super-advanced pal, a glop of protoplasm weighing ninety tons. Quirky, action-packed, and thought-provoking, Frolix was an instant favorite (the humor was right up my alley), and encouraged me to pursue more of Dick's work.

Monday morning, I rose bright and early and ventured into the "wilderness" (um, the parks bordering the Huron River), something I really haven't been doing very much lately. Intending to trek through Argo and Bandemer Parks, along the western Ann Arbor stretches of the river, I wound up exploring Barton Nature Area, accessible from Bandemer by walking northwest along the train tracks of the Michigan Central. It's always a treat to find part of Ann Arbor that I haven't seen yet (I've been here over four years now and there are still major blind spots). Barton's gorgeous: a mix of dark undergrowth admitting little or no sun, pleasantly wooded riverbanks, and light-drenched meadow. The weather was splendid, a perfect and paradoxical mix of spring and autumn, best enjoyed by the various path openings onto the river itself, where you can observe the steep rise of the south bank to Huron River Drive. There were a couple of transcendent moments, two of which punctuated by great music: working my way up a hill in Argo, woods all around me, the rising sun poking its way through the canopy, to Starling Electric's "She Goes Through Phases," and then amid a prairie patch of tall grass (along a twisting series of paths that reversed themselves about five times) to the Super Furry Animals' "Gathering Moss." At one point I nearly stepped on a tree frog (which didn't seem to realize how close it had approached extinction) and I believe I actually saw a cardinal (something else I haven't done in a long time), although it may have just been an unnaturally red other bird.

The best part was finding Barton Dam, possibly the most picturesque spot I've yet seen on the Huron. The Barton trail eventually brought me to the Huron's effluence from a higher elevation, managed by the dam, which I reached through a path that led past the stately old Barton Powerhouse (c. 1912). To my right lay the still-rising sun (it was only about ten-thirty) through the trees, and a green expanse of rolling pasture and farmland, with little houses along a dirt road lined with dusty mailboxes that turned into Barton Shore Drive. To my left was Barton Pond, the dam's child, its surface rippling with a faint breeze and a path continuing to lead northwest, following the river. A more compelling evocation of Americana I haven't seen in years (outside of Madison House season finales); it was almost intoxicatingly bucolic and agrarian. The path northwest along the pond, according to the phonebook map, goes much further than I had, almost to the end of Maple Road, and fairly close to the Huron River Drive bridge, which continues on into the mysteriously named village of "Delhi Mills," midway between Ann Arbor and Dexter. If I can make it to Gallup, I can make it there, without the aid of a bicycle, too. Next weekend, or the next...